Payoff

by Alex Hughes

  “What about privacy laws?” I asked.

  Andrew tilted his head. “Those only matter as much as the individual institution wants to push them. There’s precedence in the courts for financials; it’s something that can go either way depending on interpretation. And historically, college students don’t end up with as much privacy support as you’d expect, especially if they’re taking state funds and not paying independent taxes.”

  My head was spinning from the new information, but Andrew would know; he was the money guy in the department. But he really did need to get back to work. “Thanks,” I said, and left the donuts there.

  I went over to Cherabino’s cubicle, still empty, and borrowed her phone book and phone. I was not too proud to make phone calls if that’s what this took, and it was still early enough that I had the energy to process whatever new information I had. This hunch of mine . . . well, I was going to follow it all the way through before I screwed up Kubrick’s case. I owed him that much at least, but I also owed the judge an answer.

  The phone rang on the other end of the line. Maybe if Raymond wasn’t dead, I could find him and pay back the judge that way. Good news was good for me, and good for my old convictions. Maybe I’d get away from this with no jail time after all.

  “Hello, can I speak to the registrar?” I asked, and waited while they got the person, for the first time in a long time actually singing a little tune under my breath.

  “Hello?” a man’s voice came over the phone. “Who is this?”

  I introduced myself and said I was with the DeKalb County Police Department, which wasn’t technically a lie. “Would you be able to fax me over your records on George Babel?”

  “Do you have a warrant?” the man asked, cautiously.

  “He’s been connected with an open murder case,” I said, also not technically a lie. “And my colleagues tell me that if the student receives financial support from the state, privacy laws do not normally apply.”

  The man sighed. “Let me go look this up.”

  Happy little hold music came over the line, and I hummed along.

  With a heavy click, the guy came back on. “George doesn’t receive financial backing,” he said.

  My face fell.

  “But he’s also a month late on his rent to the college, and your number matches the police directory I have. So, what do you need to know?”

  “Late? Why doesn’t he get financial help?” I asked.

  “His roommate is two months late. The crazy thing is George’s father is the CEO at Coca-Cola. He’s loaded. There’s no reason to be late on payments, and when we called the father, he said he’d put plenty of money in George’s account. Irresponsible, if you ask me, for the student not to be paying, but we can’t kick him out mid-semester either. This is why I’ve been pushing to go back to the semester payment system. Teaching responsibility is not our job and the college has bills to pay too. Why—”

  “Thank you,” I interrupted. “Could you fax over the record? Raymond Datini’s as well?” I wanted to see how long they’d been rooming together, if George had been lying about that, or if there was anything else about the records that stood out. I had a suspicion George was covering for Raymond; he’d been way too nervous over the questions, and I wanted to have information in hand to confront him with.

  I finished up with the registrar—who actually agreed to send the records, no further proof required, as Andrew had said, and hung up the phone. Then I wandered over to stand in front of the public fax machine and waited. And waited.

  And waited.

  Just when I was about to go for a chair to sit down on, the fax machine warmed up and started printing, all too slowly.

  When the first page—a summary page, with a black and white picture—dropped into the tray, I picked it up. And stared. George looked . . . like he had more weight on him in this picture, and the acne scarring was on his left side. Left.

  The acne had been on the right when I’d interviewed him.

  I left the rest of the record where it sat and went to find Paulsen. I needed backup and a driver, and I needed them now.

  * * *

  I knocked on the dorm room door, Bellury and another beat cop—Phillips—behind me with guns at the ready.

  “Just a second!” came a muffled call. The sounds of rustling clothes and a few clanks came through the door.

  I knocked again.

  “Just a—”

  I gestured at the beat cop to open the door. He tried the knob—it was locked—so he kicked it open.

  I poked my head through the doorway, saw a thin college student with a dark complexion and a shaved head, and smeared stage makeup on the right side of his face. He was standing next to the open window currently throwing a draft throughout the room, the half-packed suitcase on the bed in front of him filled with clothes and at least two large wads of ROCs, the shimmering rectangles of paper money rustling in the breeze.

  “Hello, Raymond,” I said.

  He stared, his expression like a deer in headlights as his mind caught up with reality. Next to me, Bellury and Phillips tensed, ready for a rush.

  With a push, Raymond overturned the suitcase at us, money flying in a huge cloud. He threw himself through the open window—and hit the bushes three feet below with a curse. He was down and sprinting away within a few seconds, pace smooth and fast like he’d done this a hundred times before.

  Phillips had dashed after—but he slipped on an old pizza box, landing firmly on his butt. Bellury, more cautiously, lowered himself through the window.

  I turned around and hustled back through the front door of the building. With as much as I smoked, there was no way I’d catch up to a runner before the other guys anyway. As I trotted down the front steps, I panted.

  * * *

  I finally caught up with them in the construction site from earlier, at the foot of the huge orange crane. They were standing at its concrete base, necks cricked up, looking up the side of the towering monolith.

  Raymond was climbing the crane, the metal bars making up its side close enough together to provide him with good hand and footholds. He was two stories up and moving fast, clearly heading for the operator’s box halfway up.

  “What are we waiting for?” I asked.

  “I don’t do heights,” Phillips said.

  “I’m sixty-five years and four months old,” Bellury said. “If you think I’m climbing a crane straight up you’ve got another think coming.”

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re going to make the consultant climb up three stories while you guys watch?”

  “That’s about it,” Bellury said. He was already covered in sweat and looked tired.

  Phillips looked very embarrassed, an embarrassment I wished I could feel firsthand. He took his gun out and pointed it at the ground. “I’ll cover you. If he comes back down, I’ve got him. I have no problem running as long as it takes. I do half-marathons.”

  “And I’ll go find a phone and get the campus PD here,” Bellury said. “Just hold him long enough for us to handle it.”

  “Okay.” I took a breath, looked up, and told myself it wouldn’t be that bad. Why had I been lifting all those weights, after all? My lungs might be shot from the cigarettes and my mind crazy tired, but I hadn’t run into a doorframe in awhile. It was just after noon. I wasn’t afraid of heights, not really. I should have it in me to do this.

  I reached out, got a good grip on a bar over my head, and pulled up, finding that first, critical foothold. Then I did it again, and again. Raymond overhead was almost to the box, so I had to speed up. The huge anti-gravity accelerator in the base of the tower was making me nervous; the long line upwards for anti-gravitons had to mess with the gravity around here if the crane wasn’t completely powered down. If Raymond turned it on too soon—well, I’d either be crushed up against the bars I was climbing, or forced off and end up a smear on the rapidly-shrinking ground below.

  It doesn’t matter, I told m
yself. Nothing you can do about it now. Keep climbing. So I pulled and placed the foot, pushed and grabbed the bar, over and over again. The orange-painted metal felt cold and rough in my hands, and the wind was already picking up.

  My foot slipped—

  And I caught myself with my left hand, my right gripping hard, splitting the weight. My heart beat a hundred miles an hour. I tensed my core and found the bar again with my foot.

  Again and again. Don’t look down, don’t think, I told myself. Especially don’t think. I was panting again, panting hard, in real pain as my body struggled to get enough oxygen. I wouldn’t be able to keep this up forever; I took a breath, panting, and looked up again.

  Raymond had made it to the box.

  My heart beat a hundred miles an hour and I stopped to take three deep breaths. Time to climb. I pushed up to the next bar, climbing. The wind pushed hard at me, threatening to push me off the bars. Was it really just the wind?

  * * *

  “It needs a key,” Raymond said, in the hurt-and-disappointed tone of a much younger guy.

  Finally at the operator’s box, I grabbed the handhold and placed my feet down, ducking in. The box was only four feet deep and four wide, a very large walk-in closet with one side currently open to the elements—with a safety rail I’d just climbed over—and the other with a mostly-shut door and safety rail beyond.

  Ahead was Raymond, poking at the instrument panel, buttons and knobs galore set into a long gray countertop thing in front of a small built-in chair. A dial that read “ANTI-GRAV” was still safely off, I was glad to see. Raymond slumped in the operator’s chair, his body language dejected.

  “They all need keys,” I said, gently, not because I had any clue in hell what to do with an oversized construction crane, but because interrogations were all about building rapport with the suspect, and that meant knowing things. Knowing things and being nice. “What did you expect would happen?” I asked. No matter how much relief I felt, I had to work. I had to make this work.

  “I have a gun,” he said.

  I stood up straighter and went for the telepathy—which wasn’t there. The world threw itself sideways as I pushed at it too hard, too fast, and lights exploded in my vision. I breathed, and breathed, and when my vision returned, Raymond was pointing a revolver at me—a .38 revolver, and I was betting it was the gun that killed his roommate.

  My heart beat, really, really fast, but I was very tired and it was hard to get excited about it. “If you kill me, there’s nowhere to go,” I said, as calmly as possible. “Every cop in the area is convening on our location as we speak.”

  “I don’t hear any sirens,” he said, eyes frustrated and angry. He pulled back the lever on the gun, which made an ominous click. Then he paused, as if waiting.

  “I asked them to turn off the sirens,” I lied smoothly. “We didn’t want to startle you. Killing me is not good for your exit strategy here. And there’s no way we can get down the crane again with you holding me hostage.”

  “There’s a small elevator higher up,” Raymond said, but then let the muzzle of the gun lower a bit. “It’s locked too, it’s all locked. I didn’t think anybody would bother with it being so high up.”

  I looked through the front window and saw the tall flyer deck for the college, all those cars with powerful anti-grav engines, several brightly-colored sports vehicles on the top floor, the fourth floor. “You have George’s flyer keys,” I guessed. “That’s where you were going next. It’s strong enough to get you halfway to the west coast before we could begin to follow. But the crane is locked and you can’t get there. It won’t extend that far without the anti-grav, and you can’t make it move without the key.”

  The muzzle of the gun raised back up again, square to my face. My brain informed me that most people were accurate with a revolver even without training. Especially at a three-foot distance, just far enough for me not to think I could get the gun before he fired. It was a .38. Of course.

  “Why not just run to the deck directly?” I asked.

  “There’s a guard on the ground floor.”

  I held my hands up, slowly. “I’m not hurting you. I’m not doing anything to you. I just want to understand.”

  He glanced away for only a split second, but I missed it.

  “You killed George for the money in his account,” I guessed. “To pay back the dealers you owed. You knew with a little effort you could look enough like him to fool the cashiers at the credit union. The blackmail money—”

  “It wasn’t enough,” he spat. “They said it wasn’t freaking enough! I had to do something, I had to pay them the rest of it by tomorrow. And then I had to go away. They weren’t going to stop. They never were going to stop.” He let the gun drop and turned away.

  “Your grandfather would have helped you,” I said.

  “The old man only cares about himself, or what I do that he can talk about to his little cronies. I’ve asked him for money four times, and he keeps saying no. Then he calls and yells at me about my grades. No, the judge isn’t going to help me.”

  Raymond grabbed the side door and rolled it open with a bang. “Nobody’s going to help me.”

  I realized all at once he was going to jump.

  “Hold on,” I said. “You can testify against the dealers.”

  He turned. “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ve got inside knowledge on the drug dealers,” I said, spinning out as many words as my brain could think of, as quickly as I possibly could. I couldn’t let the judge’s grandson jump. I had to say something—anything—to keep that from happening. “They’re in the middle of building a major case against them. If you testify, I bet you the DA will give you a reduced sentence for the murder charge. You’ll be in prison for a few years. Give you a chance to dry out, and you can take a correspondence course to finish up your degree. There’s even a law school that does that kind of course for prisoners. You keep your nose clean, you argue it the right way, maybe you can even sit for the bar. Worse case, you’re a high paid paralegal with your hands in cases and not nearly the hours of a big attorney. Your experience on the inside could be a plus. It could be your calling card. This is not a dead end, Raymond. Your life is not over. You have options. You have lots of options.”

  He thought about that for a good long time. “I do know some stuff about them.”

  “Please, Raymond,” I said. “Hand me the gun. Come back down the side of this thing with me and give yourself up. I’ll talk to the drug detective myself about you testifying. He’ll go with me to the DA. We can figure this out.”

  I waited a long, long moment, while he thought, gun in hand. Finally, he held it out.

  I took it, like I was taking a live rattlesnake that would bite me at any moment. “Thanks,” I said.

  “I guess I should go down first?” he asked.

  “That would be great,” I told him, still gently, still in tones that said I cared. “Just give me a second to yell down and let them know what’s going on, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  * * *

  I watched through the glass as they brought Raymond into the interview room. Judge Datini stood up from his seat all at once and ran—literally ran—to Raymond, embracing him.

  Raymond, who’d been rubbing his wrists from the cuffs, tensed up, and pushed his grandfather away.

  The judge let him go, a look of overwhelming relief on his face—and real tears.

  Thank you, he mouthed in my direction.

  Then he sat down with the lawyer he’d hired for Raymond, and they started talking to the DA.

  * * *

  That weekend, Cherabino took me to her grandmother’s house for a “small lunch” with her grandmother and two brothers.

  “It’s not the whole family,” she told me. “You treat Nonna well,” she told me. She was nervous; I could feel the nerves across the Link clearly, but I didn’t say anything, and I tried to give her her space. She’d been pulling back lately.
>
  “Thank you for inviting me,” I said. Why did I feel like she was already regretting it?

  We pulled up to a tiny brick house in a large old neighborhood near Briarcliff. I was nervous too; I’d brought a bouquet of daisies, which Cherabino had taken me to the florist to buy, but it didn’t seem enough.

  “Don’t screw this up,” Cherabino said, and pasted on a smile before ringing the doorbell.

  The smell of Italian tomato sauce, thick cream, and browning meat curled around me as I walked in the door. A small overweight woman in her nineties greeted me, a frilly apron around her middle, a slight hunch to her back. I could see the resemblance as Cherabino leaned over to kiss her on the cheek.

  Nonna took the flowers with a small smile and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Then I met Cherabino’s brothers, burly guys who attempted to clap me on the back—and had to be warned off, reminded I was a telepath. I started a discussion about their jobs—water treatment plants and flyer engineering, respectively—and listened appropriately.

  I helped set the old scratched table with a cloth and antique dishes, wineglasses all around. I stuck to water, which no one gave me an issue about. Then the food came out of the kitchen—minestrone and pasta with bacterial-protein meatballs and rich overstuffed soy cannolis and things I couldn’t even put names to but desperately wanted to eat.

  Halfway through one of the biggest meals of my life, with everyone smiling and eating and me answering polite questions, suddenly, I got a flash from across the table.

  Nonna was wondering if Cherabino and I had slept together. She knew she had with a lot of the other partners, since Peter had died. Unimaginable thing, your husband dying like that. But she was worried about Cherabino, and convinced I was unsuitable.

  “I agree with you,” I told her without thinking. “But, no, we haven’t. We’re just friends.”

  And then my mind caught up with what I’d said. Holy crap! I’d just read her. The telepathy had worked—had worked!—for the first time since the injury.

  Relief and pure, unadulterated joy swept over me like a tide. The odds of my mind healing completely on its own had just gone way, way up. My telepathy . . . I was a telepath again! A little hard work, a little patience, and I could build back to full strength. I could be me again.