Vacant

by Alex Hughes

  Tommy glanced back at me, I nodded, and he threw himself at his dad, who caught him up in a bone-crushing hug.

  “Excellent to see you, boy,” Quentin said. “You been doing your homework?”

  “Yeah,” Tommy said, and pulled away.

  “You realize you just walked into a building full of lawyers and cops,” I said to Quentin. “And then into a judge’s private chambers without so much as a by-your-leave.”

  “Oh, they know me here,” Quentin said.

  “You’re a con man and you’re showing up to a courthouse, where they know you,” I said, slowly, trying to get my head around the concept.

  “And why shouldn’t they?” he asked me. “I’m not guilty of anything at the moment.”

  I paused. Really?

  “Tanya died,” Tommy put in, and then I noticed that low-level sense of grief that had just intensified. “And Adam saw the bad man across the street.”

  Both my and Quentin’s attention immediately turned to Tommy.

  “Who is the bad man?” Quentin asked me then.

  I debated how much to tell him.

  After I said nothing, he turned back to Tommy. “Tanya was the woman taking care of you?” Quentin asked.

  Tommy nodded. “The guard. She was nice.”

  “I see.” He dropped his bag on the floor and took his son in his arms. His mind was moving with questions, but he didn’t ask them. Instead he said, “We’re going to figure this out, nugget. You stay close to the new guards, okay?”

  Tommy broke down then and cried for a moment before just holding on. After his tears slowed to sniffs, Quentin looked back at me.

  Complications from the attack, I mouthed.

  He nodded and pulled Tommy over to the oversized chair. He knelt down on the floor next to it, leaning toward his son. He seemed . . . more present today. Less here for a show.

  Tommy sniffed again and rubbed at his face. I gave him a handful of tissues, which he took with a little bit of irritation, but he blew his nose.

  “Now. You going to tell me what happened yesterday morning?” Quentin asked the kid gently. “The only thing I know is what I heard on the news.” And from the questions he’d asked his criminal contacts, his mind supplied. But nothing near enough to understand fully what had happened. And he didn’t like that I was spotting somebody close by. If something was going down, he should have heard about it.

  “Mom says talking about bad things doesn’t make it better,” Tommy said reluctantly.

  “Your mother thinks things will go away if she ignores them. It doesn’t work like that. Why don’t you tell us what happened? I’ll pinkie-swear not to tell your mother you told me.”

  Tommy stopped, thoughts dripping across his mind like a faucet turned far too low. He was tired, and I felt like I could say something, but from what I could tell Quentin was plenty strong enough to tell this himself.

  He started, “They pulled over the car and Tanya pushed me to the floor like we practiced. There were a lot of loud bangs, and Jason got hurt—like really bad. It was—a lot of things happened really fast, and it was a lot in my head.” His thoughts replayed the day, a more jumbled and colorful version of what I’d heard from the bodyguard earlier, with the intense sensory overload of intense emotions to a telepath. “The bad guys . . . they got closer and there were these bangs on the car. I got burned on the floor, but Tanya was so worried I didn’t say anything and then she wanted us to run. We almost got hit by a train.” His memories spiraled backward, to the beginning, through the picture he’d gotten of the criminals behind him in the brief moment before they ran, a guilt-anger thing from the criminal, and a panic feeling when they crossed the train tracks. He hadn’t liked leaving the other bodyguard behind in the front of the car. He’d lost a shoe on the walk afterward, and Tanya was hurt too. The sole of his foot had gotten a piece of glass in it and she’d taken it out for him. How could she be . . . dead? How could she not be okay?

  And Tommy descended back into grief.

  I realized that Tommy was more mentally open around his father, and his father around him, than either was on his own. Whatever Quentin had done or not done, it was a hell of a lot more warmth than I’d seen from the judge.

  Quentin patted his shoulder. “That’s a hard thing, nugget. Thanks for telling me.”

  He turned to me and very, very quietly and awkwardly asked me mind-to-mind, Did you get that?

  What? I asked, confused. Also, how in the hell had the Guild missed Quentin? This was not one but two strong telepaths who’d apparently escaped being recruited. It made me nervous.

  A pause, like he had to remember how to speak mind-to-mind all over again. You’re a hell of a lot stronger than anyone I’ve seen in this mind thing. I assume you got a picture of his memories? See if there’s anything we can use. Right now I’m hearing only rumors on the street, and none of them agree. His mental tone was flat, intentional, with none of the bravado I associated with his outside presence. This internal feeling was actually similar to the judge’s.

  Tommy sniffed, and Quentin pulled him back up for a hug. The tears intensified, but they seemed healing. Having his father here was making a difference, which I hadn’t expected.

  I backed up, taking a seat in the chair behind the desk and thinking. Quentin was a con man, sure, but he might have a point. And telepathy. And he was clearly willing to use his own connections to track down what was going on. That guilt-anger feeling from the criminal . . . it was the guy who’d approached the car. Perhaps a low-level telepath himself, as their brains tended to leak a louder signal in Mindspace for Tommy’s prototelepath brain to pick up under pressure. The odd thing was, the guilt-anger wasn’t directed at anyone in Tommy’s vicinity; it was a reaction to something related to someone behind him, one of the other bad guys.

  I wished I could go back to the scene and see the residue from the guy’s mind directly, maybe get a feel for who he was in Mindspace. Jarrod had said that he’d take me there later, but thus far nothing had seemed to go as planned.

  I was trying to figure out how to make that trip happen when the door opened again, and Marissa, the judge, came through the door.

  I blinked, and suppressed a too-extreme reaction. I was going to have to get a lot better at reaction times and monitoring if this Minding thing was going to work.

  Loyola, now standing, lowered his gun. “Once again,” he said in a too-controlled voice. “People need to knock.”

  “It’s my chambers. I’ll walk into my own chambers without knocking. Thank you,” Parson said. I felt more than saw the second when she saw her ex-husband. “Quentin,” she said. “What in hell are you doing here?”

  He got to his feet. “Darling. So good to see you. As you can observe with your own eyes, I’m spending time with my son. He’s had a wretched day. Several of them, in fact.”

  “Our son,” she said in a biting tone.

  “Certainly. He is your son too.”

  Tommy stood up on shaking feet, squared his chin, and said, “Mom, don’t fight. Dad will leave in just a minute.” He looked at his dad, who sighed and nodded.

  “Of course, nugget. You call me if you need anything. I’ll check the answering service several times a day. Don’t hesitate to call, all right?”

  “Could I have a copy of that number?” I asked, not sure why I asked but figuring it wouldn’t hurt.

  He looked at me, surprised. Behind him, Parson tapped her foot impatiently. Like, literally tapped her foot. I hadn’t seen anyone actually tap their foot in impatience in years.

  Quentin wrote down the number for me.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Don’t mention it.” And then Quentin got his hat. His charming exterior broke, and I saw clearly the irritated, worried guy underneath. I watched him carefully as he left.

  “I suppose if you people are going
to overreact every time I walk in the door I’ll stay in another set of chambers this afternoon—Judge Darwin is off today, I believe.” Parson looked at me in particular there. Again, I got the distinct impression she was avoiding me. The question was whether she hated telepaths, or just me. I might never get the answer to that one.

  “There’s room here,” I said. I had questions I wanted to ask her anyway.

  “I have twenty minutes to eat lunch and gather my thoughts before the case continues. I’ll go elsewhere. Thank you.”

  “It’s no trouble for us to move, ma’am,” Loyola said, but I could feel his disquiet too.

  “No,” she said. “No, thank you.”

  She turned and left, and I worried again. I wanted my poison, my drug, at least until Tommy looked at me. Then I made myself go back to the FBI procedures manual. It was boring, but it was something that wouldn’t hurt him to overhear.

  Despite this, I spent most of my mental energy monitoring for danger.

  CHAPTER 12

  An hour later, Loyola had gone out to coordinate with Jarrod, and I was reluctantly chewing on a meal bar: one of my least favorite things in the world. I much preferred rehydrated dehydrated vegetable noodles to this crap; at least the noodle stuff was warm, and you could add red pepper things for taste. The bar was just a heavy block of might-be food. But I was hungry, and I’d need fuel to be able to stay at a high alert. I also wanted Satin, and a cigarette, and not to be here, but I’d have to settle for the food.

  I worried about Cherabino again, and Sibley. I worried about a lot of things as I finished the meal bar.

  The sound of the old doorknob came then, a click from across the room. I looked up. Tommy had just left.

  I cursed. I yelled at him mentally to come back here, but it was like yelling at the wind.

  I dropped the wrapper in the trash can and took off after him, huffing and puffing after just a few steps (cigarettes are not good for the lungs), and finally caught up to him in the hallway. He hadn’t even been moving that fast.

  I caught his shoulder. “Hold up. Where are you going?”

  “I’m bored,” Tommy said. “I want to see the murder trial. We’re surrounded by the good guys. I won’t be in any trouble.” He turned around, shrugged off the hand casually as Mendez behind me stopped just in the hallway, mind alert. “Look, you can come with me.”

  And he started walking.

  I followed him, uncertain. Relieved, though, that he was intending to stay in the building. Not sure what to do. “It’s a murder trial,” I told him. “It’s likely to be pretty violent.” I’d dealt with enough dead bodies in the course of the job that I wasn’t likely to throw up anymore, but that didn’t mean I liked it. Even pictures weren’t very appropriate for a kid.

  “Oh, Mom lets me look at crime scene pictures all the time,” Tommy said, deadpan, and oddly I couldn’t tell if he was lying or telling the truth. I wasn’t used to an out-loud conversation that skipped ahead either. “I’m bored,” he said. “And if that trial is what everyone’s worried about, I want to see it.”

  To be honest, I wanted to see it too.

  He smiled. “Let’s get a good seat in the back.”

  I didn’t fight as much as I should have. Mendez followed us.

  “You know this isn’t a good idea,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.” Court security was everywhere, I told myself. I couldn’t stay in that small room and not think about certain things for much longer. The courtroom might be safer, or not safer, but at least it would be different. I needed different right now.

  * * *

  The courtroom was smaller than I expected, the judge’s raised seat and witness stand looking out onto the jury box to the right, currently filled with twelve serious-looking citizens whose major emotion was boredom and overwhelming responsibility, like a set of cops doing critical paperwork.

  The back of the room, where we sat, had three ancient wooden pews that reminded me of Cherabino’s family’s church. The darkly stained wood was worn blond in the centers of the benches with the pressure of a thousand seated butts, the backs rubbed lighter from a thousand nervous hands.

  A row of media sat impatiently in the second row, pads of paper and pens out, not a camera in sight. Immediately in front of the front bench was a low wall and then two tables for defendant and lawyer and assistant district attorney and her police detective helper. All in all, a quiet, cramped day in mayhem with Judge Parson sitting over all of it like a forbidding crow.

  I noticed that Pappadakis sat back, body language relaxed like he hadn’t a care in the world. His lawyer was back as if I’d never seen him outside, but the man was both nervous and resolute. They were planning something.

  Parson said, “Court is now in session,” and hit her desk with the little judge mallet thing. The crack of it echoed through the courtroom as all assembled went quiet. The jury’s attention focused like a light on a lens.

  The DA stood. “Your Honor, thank you for the recess. We’d like to call our next witness, Mrs. Marcia Josepha Garces, domestic employee for the defendant.”

  The judge nodded, and a small woman in a long coat stood up from the front row of benches, a woman whose nerves were getting ever larger as she made the few steps up to the witness stand. She was pretty at first glance, in that classic Hollywood Cuban way, with just enough wrinkles and silver hairs to make her seem authentic at mid-fifties without taking away from the prettiness. But on second glance you could see her life hadn’t been easy. She stooped, moving slowly from too many heavy loads, and her hands were rough and older than the rest of her. She’d still styled her hair, though, and worn pearls to the courtroom along with practical shoes.

  Garces was sworn in, hand on a battered Bible, and took her seat carefully. She clasped her purse in her lap, knuckles going white from their pressure around the purse’s straps.

  “Mrs. Garces,” the DA said.

  “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Garces, explain your relationship to the defendant.”

  “Mr. Pappadakis? I am his housekeeper. I clean and cook simple things and manage the other employees. There’s a part-time fancy cook and a landscaper and other people sometimes when he throws parties. Mr. Pappadakis likes the house perfect so that his guests will be impressed.” She looked down, as if ashamed of something, and her nerves increased.

  The DA went back over to his table and brought up a large picture that he placed on an easel, a picture of a thirtysomething woman with a face beautiful enough for sculpture and a smile that spoke of sex. “You knew this woman, Lolly Gilman?”

  Mrs. Garces nodded. “She and Mr. Pappadakis . . . they are lovers. She is often at the house when his wife is gone.”

  I looked around the courtroom, but I didn’t see a wife here. I could be missing her in the crowd, I supposed, but if she really wasn’t here, that didn’t spell good things for whatever relationship they had left after all of the cheating.

  “You okay?” I asked Tommy.

  “Yep.” He leaned forward, apparently fascinated by the trial so far. I sat back and got comfortable.

  The assistant district attorney had left the picture up, as if by accident, but I’d been to enough of my father’s trials as a teenager that I knew very little in a courtroom was truly by accident. He was paused, halfway back to the witness stand, at the angle best suited to show his handsome profile to the jury. He had the kind of physique that lifters worked hard on but never looked right in a suit—except, of course, that he’d spent the money to have his suits custom-tailored to show the bulk of his shoulders to best advantage.

  After a moment to let his reluctance to ask the question fully sink into the jury, the ADA said, “But she was not the only woman Mr. Pappadakis had at the house when his wife is gone, was that correct?”

  Mrs. Garces nodded, still looking down. “He has paid to put my
children through college,” she said finally. “It is not right to say bad things about a man who does such things.”

  The ADA paused. “You’ve sworn to tell the whole truth, Mrs. Garces. How often did your employer have women other than his mistress and his wife over to the house?”

  “I try not to see,” Mrs. Garces said. “I go to the little house he gives me and I try not to come out. But there is always a mess in the morning, and I must clean. Often they are still there. There are many.”

  “How many, would you say, over the last year?”

  “Many,” she said, her quiet voice seeming to echo through the whole courtyard. “Many, many. They are prostitutes, many of them. Some show me their license so I will help them get the payment they were promised. Some just want to leave. Lolly, she is there most often, but never when one of the others is there.”

  “Were there any unlicensed prostitutes?” the ADA asked.

  Next to me, Tommy squirmed a bit and I wondered if the content was going to get too intense for him. I was hooked into the interrogation, wanting to see where this was going, but I also knew I had a responsibility to make sure he was okay. I had no idea what was appropriate or inappropriate for his age when it came to court cases.

  “We need to leave?” I whispered to him quietly.

  “Nope,” he said.

  “It’s no big deal if you want to go back to the chambers.”

  “No way. I want to see what happens.” He was thinking that if Pappadakis was really the guy who’d sent the bad men, he wanted to know why.

  In a way I thought he had a right to know, so we stayed.

  Up at the front of the room, the lawyer asked again, “Any unlicensed prostitutes?”

  She nodded, still looking down as if ashamed. “These try to leave before I am up, but sometimes they do not. They . . .” She trailed off and shook her head again.

  “What were you going to say?” the ADA prompted.

  “They most often have bruises on their skin. Sometimes a black eye. They have no agency to call and complain.”