All Together Dead

he said briefly “And yet that piece of filth, Glassport, has only bruises.”
    “I’m sorry for both things,” I said.
    Barry seemed numb. All traces of his flippant mood had vanished. He looked smaller, sitting on the edge of the bed. The cocky sharp dresser I’d met in the lobby of the Pyramid had gone underground, at least for a while.
    “I told you about Gervaise,” Mr. Cataliades said. “I identified his woman’s body this morning. What was her name?”
    “Carla. I can’t remember her last name. It’ll come to me.”
    “The first name will probably be enough for them to identify her. One of the corpses in hotel uniform had a computer list in his pocket.”
    “They weren’t all in on it,” I said with some certainty.
    “No, of course not,” Barry said. “Only a few.”
    We looked at him.
    “How do you know?” I asked.
    “I overheard them.”
    “When?”
    “The night before.”
    I bit the inside of my mouth, hard.
    “What did you hear?” Mr. Cataliades asked in a level voice.
    “I was with Stan in the, you know, the buy-and-sell thing. I had noticed the waiters and so on were dodging me, and then I watched to see if they were avoiding Sookie as well. So I thought, ‘They know what you are, Barry, and there’s something they don’t want you to know. You better check it out.’ I found a good place to sort of skulk behind some of those fake palm trees, close by the service door, and I could get a reading on what they were thinking inside. They didn’t spell it out or anything, okay?” He had gotten an accurate reading on our thoughts, too. “It was just, like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna get those vamps, damn them, and if we take some of their human slaves, well, that’s just too bad, we’ll live with it. Damned by association.’”
    I could only sit there and look at him.
    “No, I didn’t know when or what they were going to do! I went to bed finally kind of worrying about them, what the plan was, and when I couldn’t settle into a good sleep, I finally quit trying and called you. And we tried to get everyone out,” he said, and began crying.
    I sat beside him and put my arm around him. I didn’t know what to say. Of course, he could tell what I was thinking.
    “Yes, I wish I’d said something before I did,” he said in a choked voice. “Yes, I did the wrong thing. But I thought if I spoke up before I knew something for sure, the vamps would fall on them and drain them. Or they’d want me to point out who knew and who didn’t. And I couldn’t do that.”
    There was a long silence.
    “Mr. Cataliades, have you seen Quinn?” I asked to break the silence.
    “He’s at the human hospital. He couldn’t stop them from taking him.”
    “I have to go see him.”
    “How serious is your fear that the authorities will try to coerce you into doing their bidding?”
    Barry raised his head and looked at me. “Pretty serious,” we said simultaneously.
    “It’s the first time I’ve ever shown anyone, aside from local people, what I can do,” I said.
    “Me, too.” Barry wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “You should have seen that guy’s face when he finally believed that we could find people. He thought we were psychics or something, and he couldn’t understand that what we were doing was registering a live brain signature. Nothing mystical about it.”
    “He was all over the idea once he believed us,” I said. “You could hear in his head that he was thinking of the hundred different ways we could be of use to rescue operations, to the government at conferences, police interrogations.”
    Mr. Cataliades looked at us. I couldn’t pick out all his snarly demon thoughts, but he was having a lot of them.
    “We’d lose control over our lives,” Barry said. “I like my life.”
    “I guess I could be saving a lot of people,” I said. I’d just never thought about it before. I’d never been faced with a situation like the one we’d faced the previous day. I hoped I never was again. How likely was it I would ever be on-site again at a disaster? Was I obligated to give up a job I liked, among people I cared about, to work for strangers in far away places? I shivered when I thought of it. I felt something harden within me when I realized that the advantage Andre had taken of me would only be the beginning, in situations like that. Like Andre, everyone would want to own me.
    “No,” I said. “I won’t do it. Maybe I’m just being selfish and I’m damning