Double Cross [2] Read Online Free PDF Page B

to be feared?”
    “No way. How many times have you said the citizens aren’t ready for highcaps to be officially acknowledged?”
    “Will they ever be ready?” Otto says. “And this ignorance of highcaps prevents the police from investigating the Dorks properly.”
    “Packard has people on it.”
    “Packard has
highcaps
on it—the very people who can’t touch the Dorks. Did you hear about that part?”
    “Yeah,” I say, rubbing a circle on his back.
    “They’re shielding themselves somehow.” Weariness has robbed his voice of its usual richness. Here he is, a new mayor, and his beloved city is being terrorized, his secret identity threatened, and all the while he’s mentally maintaining countless prison force fields. He’s seemed gloomier lately, too, but who can blame him?
    I say, “I’m sure he’s got nonhighcap thieves and thugs all over the case, too.” Packard commanded Midcity’s underworld before Otto sealed him up eight years ago. “Send a thug to catch a thug,” I add, trying for levity.
    Otto stares sullenly toward the front window.
    “It’s okay,” I whisper, continuing the steady circles, palm warming. “I wish I could do something more to help.”
    “You are helping,” he says. “Right here, right now. You have no idea.”
    I decide it’s a bad time to question him on Ez’s innocence, and it’s definitely the wrong time to tell him aboutPackard and me conferenced together in dreams. Otto can’t take much more.
    The waitress makes it back to take our order. Otto has some questions about the new tamales.
    Will Ez really try to go into our minds tonight? And what if she does stir up memories about my time with Packard at Mongolian Delites? I don’t want Packard to have access to my side of that memory. I barely want it myself. God, am I charging it up even now?
    Otto opens his napkin. “Who are you working on this week?”
    “Ezmerelda. Dream invader.”
    “Very dangerous.”
    “We’ll handle her,” I say, and with that I allow another opportunity to tell him about my screwup to slip away. Am I a coward?
Yes
, I think bitterly.
    But from Otto’s point of view there’s nobody worse I could be connected to than Packard. Something horrible happened between them, something that made them hate each other. All I know is that it stretches back two decades, back to when Packard and Otto were boys, living with a gang of kids down by the river in an abandoned school, discarded for being devil-children like so many highcap kids are. Otto was known as Henji back then, but he hates it when the name is uttered. According to rumors, there was an epic battle between them. The school was reduced to rubble. Packard and Otto clearly have a pact of secrecy about it.
    I’ve come to hate the secret. I feel like it’s huge and formative, and my ignorance of it prevents me from truly knowing Otto—or Packard, for that matter.
    “I saw Simon and Helmut today,” I offer. “Helmut wants to put bodyguards on Packard.”
    “I bet he does,” Otto says. “That’s a good idea.”
    “And Simon said disillusioning your prisoners is like shooting fish in a barrel.”
    Otto harrumphs. “Yes, it would be exactly like that if we were killing the people, but we’re not. We’re doing them a favor. We’re inducing them to turn over a new leaf and setting them free.”
    “What if they don’t
want
to turn over a new leaf?”
    The corners of Otto’s generous lips turn up. “Oh, Justine.”
    “Seriously. What if a target would prefer to stay the way she is, and stay imprisoned for life, instead of being law-abiding and free?”
    Otto gives me a thoughtful look. “I think most targets
would
choose to stay what they are, but it doesn’t matter what they want. When you take people’s lives and terrify the citizenry, you give up certain rights. We’ve got to look at this from the point of view of what’s best for Midcity, not what’s best for the criminal. But yes, they probably don’t want to