Vacant Read Online Free PDF Page A

loosely, not sipping, like it was more for the warmth than anything else. “Stay humble. Work the problem. You have a PI license now,” he observed.
    â€œI guess I could try to freelance some with that,” I said cautiously. “I wouldn’t know how to start, and anyway, you said the structure of a real job was good for me.”
    â€œSometimes a man needs to make his own way. Seems like this is a chance for you to prove you can,” Swartz said. “It’s good for a man to test his mettle.”
    â€œI may not have a choice. I need to do something,” I said cautiously. “My savings is okay for another month or two—maybe three if I’m careful and they give me more hours—but it won’t last forever. I’ve been working for the police department for years. I don’t know how to do anything else. And if my hours are down . . .”
    â€œDidn’t you work for the social work office for a while?”
    â€œCherabino got me the job after I helped her with the case, after I got out of that rehab she recommended me to.I can’t say I loved the job, but I did okay there until she came looking for me again.”
    â€œYou’ve known Cherabino a long time,” Swartz said.
    I nodded, then sipped the licorice coffee again. “We’re still together.” It still seemed surreal that we were dating. I kept expecting her to end it. She had a long-standing fear of people getting too close, and while I understood it—her husband had died in her arms at a particularly bad time—I kept expecting it to come bite me in the butt.
    â€œDon’t borrow trouble. Enjoy what you have now.”
    â€œYeah.” For a man who couldn’t read minds, Swartz had a nasty habit of reading mine. He knew me too well.
    â€œWhat’s wrong, kid?”
    I found it hilarious these days that Swartz called me kid. I’d turned forty recently. I suppose to Swartz I was a kid, though. He’d been born old, and oddly, that was comforting.
    â€œIsabella . . . well, she’s getting blamed for a murder she had nothing to do with. And since we—” I stopped. Took a breath. “Remember how I told you we dropped in on Fiske’s house after I had that vision a few months ago? Well, it was kinda worse than I told you.”
    â€œWorse?”
    â€œWell. Um, we shouldn’t have done it, but Cherabino thought he was threatening Jacob or something and she didn’t stop to ask questions. So she rides in like a cowboy with nonlethal guns blazing, and I follow her in, because as dumb as this is I’m not going to leave her to get injured. I knocked out, like, six, eight people with telepathy and one of them ends up hitting her head. I . . . I might have killed her, maybe. Maybe just a concussion. Either way, by the time we get to Fiske and Cherabino threatens him, I know it’s going very bad. I mean, Fiske is the organized crimeboss of half the Southeast, and there we are in his living room. Cherabino’s on the task force. She knows how bad this guy is—there’s a literal file six inches thick of crimes she’s sure he’s masterminded. Violent stuff.”
    Swartz glanced around the room carefully, then back to me. “Should you be talking about this kind of case information in a public place?”
    â€œProbably not,” I said, and sighed.
    â€œYou appear to be alive. Why did he let you go?”
    â€œI don’t know. That’s the thing. We pissed him off, royally. He did manage to set up a situation that invalidated most of her evidence against him, but there’s still the task force. Which Cherabino isn’t on anymore. She was supposed to have a hearing to discuss the stupidity of it all, but now . . . well, they’re grouping those actions with the murder we found. I get why we’re suspects, or at least she is. I mean we found the body, but