“Ms. Cherabino, you are in possession of records you are not authorized to have, on property you are no longer authorized to inhabit.”
“Quick with the vocabulary there, skipper.” I knew it was the wrong thing to say as soon as I’d said it, especially with the sarcastic bite.
I gave the man credit, though; he didn’t pull the gun, even though he probably wanted to, and I didn’t get slapped across the mouth like both of us thought I deserved. Instead, he just grabbed my arm—on the side that put me farthest from his gun, and pulled me in the direction of the elevator. “You’ll come with me, then.”
I pulled my arm back, carafe following, but he had quite a grip and it was follow or knock him on his ass. A dozen moves flashed through my head, one after the other, all ending with him on the floor bruised, and me having made my point in the most visceral way possible—but he was wise to me, had his hand on the gun, looking for an excuse, and from the tension in his body was no stranger to physical confrontation. So, out of self-preservation, I let it go for now.
For a second, in front of the elevator doors, I stopped cold, resisting; six separate officers I knew were in front of that elevator, and I was furious and humiliated to be seen like this.
“Aren’t you worried about the files I took?” I asked the IA stooge in a low voice. I was surprised they hadn’t taken away the coffee pot full of water at this point.
“We’ll send another officer to recover them. They won’t get far in the department headquarters,” he said evenly. “Are you going to come with me now or are you going to resist arrest?”
I hadn’t strictly done anything to be arrested for since I’d kept the files on campus—more an administrative error than a crime. But I as sure as hell wasn’t going to give him an excuse to throw punches. Either I’d have to take the beating—which I didn’t know if I could do—or I’d fight back, give as good as I got, and end up in real jail for assaulting an officer. Self-defense did not exist against police, not if you were a citizen. My anger burned like a live wire, but I needed prison like I needed glass shards to the eyes.
“I’ll cooperate for now,” I said, not looking at the officers clustered around me. I could almost feel the weight of their gaze, curious, judging. By tomorrow, the rumor mill would be all over this, and I’d never live it down. One more humiliation on top of all the others. I found his name badge on his shirt and made a mental note. “You keep your hands to yourself, Marcins, and we won’t have any issues.” There, he could have his own set of rumors against him.
Then I turned and met the eyes of everybody around the elevator. “You gonna give us extra room now, or just stand there and be useless?” I felt my temper in my chest, rising and falling with my breath, begging to be let out.
The elevator arrived with a ding, and the officers parted to let us get through. Nobody said anything. Nobody had to.
I shook off Marcins’ arm and handed the carafe to the closest detective, who took it with a strange look. Then I walked onto the elevator myself.
It wasn’t surprising, maybe, that Marcins took me down to the holding cells. It wasn’t surprising that he patted me down and checked my pockets for papers, despite every line of my fury.
What was surprising, was that he let the boobs go without more than a cursory check. A woman officer would have found the paper in the bra. I smiled as he shut the door of the holding cell in my face.
Approximately three lifetimes later, after I had tired of pacing the tiny cell and tired of hearing the other prisoners in the block of cells complain, the elevator arrived on the floor with a small and tidy ding.
I looked up from where I’d settled onto the small cot against the wall. I couldn’t see him, but somehow, I knew who it was. Adam. The telepath. It felt like him, somehow, like smoke and silk and lichen-covered granite trails in the woods, like standing in the middle of a mountain forest after a fire, the rain coming down all around you. It was like coming home for just one second, and then I heard him and another set of footsteps on the concrete outside the cage and I tensed.
He’d set up this mental link I’d neither wanted nor accepted, for all he’d saved my life once with it. He claimed he couldn’t help it. But I wasn’t supposed to feel these things in my head. I wasn’t supposed to feel him, not like this. Not even Tyler and the others, not even sex felt like this. Not even Peter. And the more I thought about it, the more a sense of wrongness crawled up my back, and I was pissed all over again. Scared all over again. And a thousand times angry to be so.
I pulled my feelings in, picturing that mental wall Adam had taught me to use. And when he got close enough that I could see him through the bars—with Marcins, of course, the other set of footsteps—I was pulled into myself and mostly couldn’t feel him anymore. That felt wrong, too, and I was suddenly confused, defeated, and angry all over again.
I stood up.
“Can I go?” I asked Marcins. I meant, were they pressing charges?
“You’ve been in here long enough. You’re free to go. Give me a moment.” Marcins went back to get the keyring from the wall near the elevator.
I stood, behind bars, looking at Adam. He didn’t say anything, looked concerned more than anything.
He was a handsome man, Adam. He wore it lightly, like he hadn’t realized it in years, if he ever had. His shoulders slumped, his chin had a thick five o’clock shadow, and his eyes were deep and haunted. But he was present in a way that few men ever were, nearly always present, listening, trying to understand. He wasn’t very tall, not compared to my brothers, and not very muscled, not compared to Tyler and the rest of the guys who made their living through fighting and the physical. His nose had been broken slightly sometime in the past, but it was the only physical scar on him—Adam’s scars were deeper, all of the mind, all hidden. But he never gave up, never, and he might fall off the wagon, but he’d walk over glass to do the right thing when he had a reason.
Maybe Tyler is right, I thought, dimly, and then got angry at myself for thinking it.
“What took you so long?” I asked, bitterly. Anything to distract myself.
“This is the first they told me you were here,” he said, and a frown came over his face. He was thinking that he should have noticed me in the building, probably; some things you didn’t need telepathy to read.
“I’ve been locked in this damn cage for hours,” I said.
Marcins was back, inserting the key in the lock—I stepped back. The door opened with a heavy screech. “You’re free to go now,” he said, giving me the kind of cop-to-cop look that let me know that he and the rest of IA would be watching for any excuse to take me down later.
“Thank you,” I said, meaning anything but. I walked through, putting my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t reach out to Adam. I couldn’t reach out to Adam, no matter how much I wanted to. He was a telepath, and anyway, I needed to keep space between us.
We were silent the whole walk to the car, me holding all the emotions in, all the emotions I couldn’t express, huddling into myself and Adam’s scarf instead of the coat I hadn’t brought. It was cold out here. Too cold. Finally I said, “You were supposed to check in today with the PI firm.”
He blinked at me, hands in his pockets, hands covered in the gloves I’d given him for his birthday. “I called and left a message on the line. I figured you would call me back if you needed to.”
“Oh,” I said and took a breath.
“Was that the wrong thing to do?”
“No, that was fine,” I said and kept walking. It wasn’t, but I didn’t know what would have been.
It was chilly outside, real February cold that was sinking through my too-thin shirt. Three days ago had been Valentine’s Day, and there was a discarded paper heart torn and dirty on the sidewalk outside the parking garage. Somebody had spent a lot of time on that, I thought, just for it to be tossed aside.
Adam shivered a bit, despite his leather jacket. “I’d love to tell you about the case, but I don’t
think I’m supposed to.”
That was like a knife to the gut. It was true, but it underlined all the things that he could do right now that I could not. It underlined my failure, my total and complete failure. I blinked back tears all of a sudden and increased the walking speed to the car.
We got there, finally, still in silence, and I unlocked the driver’s side and slid in. My chest was still too tight—too tight—and I gripped the wheel with white knuckles as he slid in on his side.
He’d hurt me. A lot. He’d hurt me, and he would continue to hurt me, just by being, just by having the work that I’d loved and going after it and not me. He’d hurt me, because of who he was and what he was, and I’d had to break up with him. But that hurt, too.
“Are you sure you’re safe to drive?” he asked me, probably feeling the emotions. He wouldn’t ask that shit if he were reading my thoughts, I didn’t think, but I was mortified and panicked that he might have.
I focused on the question, breathing. Was I safe to drive? Realistically? “Yes. No.” I took a breath, a second, forced my hands to relax and my emotions to let go. I was being a drama queen. I was being unrealistic. “I’ll be okay in a minute,” I said.
“What happened back there?” he asked into the silence. “You know—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I spat in the ugliest tone I could possibly produce, to make him stop. To make this stop. To go back to the quiet that we’d had yesterday morning, the quiet I’d finally earned in the PI office from sheer cussed stubbornness. I needed that now, and I needed him to support that, not make it harder.
“If it was for a client for the agency, you’re going to have to talk about it eventually,” he said in an overly reasonable tone of voice. He was handling me. I hated it when he handled me.
I stared straight ahead. If he wasn’t going to tell me about the case for the police, then I wasn’t going to tell him about Collins. “No, I really don’t. I’m not going—it won’t happen again. Okay? It won’t happen again.”
I cranked the car up, calm enough, walled off enough to drive. The small fusion engine whined as it warmed, and I put the car in gear at the first possible moment it would fly. It complained, but it did it, the anti-grav generators lurching on and taking us vertical.
The car, at least, would do what I told it to.
I’d thought about doing dinner, as much as we couldn’t afford it. I’d thought about maybe even taking him to that Mexican restaurant he liked. But he wouldn’t shut up.
“Are you okay?
“Why were you in the Records office anyway? How would a traffic record help with a PI case?
“You going to tell me about the client you took on?
“You’re not hormonal today, are you?”
That last question made up my mind for sure, and I changed routes then to take him home. He kept talking, talking, talking.
I stopped in front of the ancient apartment building where he lived and hit the button to open the passenger side door. Then I took a breath. “Thank you for bailing me out today.”
He looked over at me, forehead creased, almost looking hurt. Worse, I could feel the hurt and anger from my side of the car, which wasn’t acceptable, no matter how he looked in the shadow of the streetlight.
I looked down at my hands on the steering wheel. “Get out, Adam. I’ll see you tomorrow. If you’re done with your case.”
He got out, then, and I couldn’t stand to see his body language. I drove off with a peel of tires and went to a bar and had at least one too many beers. But I called a taxi, a cheap self-driving one that wouldn’t judge me, and had it take me home.
I cried that night, for the first time in a long, long time. I cried long, body-wracking tears that nearly crushed me in two. I cried, and I pretended that Peter was there to comfort me. I pretended that Tyler or someone like him would be there when I woke up.
And in the end, in my drunkest, sappiest moment of all, I pretended that Adam was there to stroke my hair and tell me that he loved me.
I woke up with a nasty hangover, head splitting in two, with nausea twisting my gut until I darted out of bed and into the bathroom barely in time. Then I knelt, over the newly flushed toilet that still smelled of vomit, my forehead pressed into the cold porcelain, and felt deeply, deeply ashamed.
The phone in the other room started ringing then. I looked up. It was six a.m., and I didn’t have a shift today at the department. I wasn’t a cop anymore. I wouldn’t ever have a shift again. That hurt almost as bad as the hangover.
I stood up, flushed the toilet again just in case, and went to answer the phone. It stopped ringing as soon as I arrived, of course. I sighed, went to get cereal, and turned back—it had begun ringing again.
“Hello?” I said, tired, head still threatening to split open.
“You can’t just use my ID,” a man’s voice came out over the line, spitting mad.
“What?” I said.
“It’s Tyler. Like you don’t know. I don’t know, maybe you don’t know. Maybe you go around and fucking use every guy’s ID you’re screwing, all over the place. I tried to help you, Isabella! I brought you things off the books. I would have helped you! They sent IA goons to my house last night. I had a woman here. They sent IA goons to my house and dragged me into the station and interrogated me to within an inch of my life. And after all of that, they wanted to know how I knew you!”
I winced. “I’m so sorry, Tyler. I really didn’t think they’d connect that back to you.”
“You sure as hell should have thought again. The union lawyer thinks I avoided a suspension by a song. Some friend you are. I can’t even tell yet what this is going to do to my career.”
“I’m sorry, Tyler. I really wasn’t thinking. You’ve been really good to me, I get that, and—”
“The good’s over, Isa. You call me again and I’ll report it right to IA. I hope you’re happy with how this turned out.”
Before I could get another word out, he hung up. The dial tone echoed into my hangover, nausea all over again, and I dropped the phone to head back to the toilet.
Afterwards, I cried. Again.
I mopped myself up, forced fluids and electrolytes, took a shower, and refused to accept weakness again. I missed my job, I missed being a cop with every fiber of my soul, and I regretted that I’d gotten Tyler in trouble, but honestly, all of this blubbering had gone on way too long.
I had a job to do, and if there was anything I’d learned in a decade as a cop, the job didn’t wait while you fell apart. The job went on, and you had to, too.
So I got myself together, and I packed up my supplies, and I called my grandmother, who was ninety-five if she was a day and liked to be called on occasion. Then I got in the car. I was supposed to take Jacob, my sister’s youngest, to his telepathy training appointment this morning and then out for ice cream. After a glance in the rearview mirror, I decided the circles under my eyes were not kid-friendly and detoured back for makeup, or at least concealer.
After I’d finished my family stuff, I called Collins and told him to meet me back at the PI office that afternoon. He was waiting there for me when I walked in.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” he scowled. He was wrapped up in a heavy coat and scarf, the tips of his ears red from the cold. He’d obviously been waiting outside the locked door for a non-trivial amount of time. For all it was one o’clock, today’s forecast had the temperature high at forty-three degrees Fahrenheit. Chilly. Bone-cold for Atlanta.
“Thanks for waiting,” I said with an almost gleeful smile and unlocked the door to let us both in. I closed it behind us, hung up our coats on the hooks, and led him down to the desk area. I should probably have made coffee—who didn’t like coffee?—but was too impatient to get this over with. It wasn’t really all that much warmer here inside than outside; damn picture windows.
“Ms. Cherabino,” Collins said as he followed me. His tone was irritated. “I don’t have time to be c
oming here willy-nilly or to wait on you to rattle the cages of my associates.”
“I know who your blackmailer is,” I said.
“Oh.”
I gestured to the guest chair in front of my still-messy desk, and he sat.
“Who is it?” he asked, but the shock had given way to calculation.
I sat down, folding my hands in front of me on the desk. “I’m about eighty percent certain that your blackmail letters were prepared by your ex-girlfriend. There wasn’t any DNA left on the letters other than your lawyer’s, but I’ve got an expert in bacterial printing who swears they were prepared by a woman matching Abby’s description. If you have anything of hers at this point, we can confirm it—I haven’t seen any other women smokers who live in the radiation plume involved in this case, but it doesn’t hurt to have a solid match.”
“That bitch,” he said with feeling.
“She feels justified, considering your romantic behavior in the past. You might want to take a look at that in the future.”
He drew himself up. “I didn’t hire you to have opinions on my romantic behavior.”
“Be that as it may, as I see it, we have two options. We can turn in all of my evidence—along with a corroborating bacterial sample—to the local police. Blackmail is a felony in the state of Georgia, and she’s been escalating her demands. She’ll almost certainly get prison time. But it won’t be a fast process.”
“And in the meantime, she’ll call every news station in the state with what she has,” Collins said, genuinely angry now, an anger I could almost feel come off him in waves.
I nodded, once, twice, slowly. “Possibly so. She’s impulsive, but there’s no guarantee she’s acting alone. Which is why I’d recommend our second option.”
“Which is?” Collins said, dropping all pretense. This was a man used to getting what he wanted, and a man used to throwing around power. For all of his attractive exterior, that character trait made him ugly.
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