Karma Patrol (20 page)

“The closer together we are, the less opportunity people will have to eavesdrop on us,” he murmured in her ear, smiling with satisfaction when he felt her shiver at his breath on her skin.

“No objections here,” she replied, tilting her head up to meet his gaze. They shared a long look, and eventually she shook her head. “Sorry. What was the question?”

He chuckled, resisting the urge to throw caution to the wind and kiss her right then.

“I asked what the teenage boys were headed for that got them into trouble with you,” he replied, and she shrugged.

“No idea. I can’t always see what the end result of a pattern is going to be, especially when it’s in danger of being disrupted. All I really need to see is the blinking blue line that tells me something is about to go wrong, and then I stop them and keep them in front of me until the color changes back to green or red. Or white, although that’s less common.”

“What if the color doesn’t change back?” he asked, intrigued. “How long do you have to keep someone distracted before you decide that something is wrong and delaying them isn’t going to work?”

She laughed. “I once ended up walking a family of tourists all the way from Hudson River Park to Times Square while I tried to get the father’s path to change to something other than blue. Eventually I had to just let them go.”

“I don’t picture you doing that very often.”

Jade’s dedication to her work was palpable. He suspected that when she failed at her job, she beat herself up over it for days. It was something else they had in common.

“They crossed Fifth Avenue. My territory ends in the middle of the street on Fifth Avenue, so there was nothing else I could do.”

“You don’t have some kind of reciprocity agreement with whoever covers Midtown East?”

“There’s no formal agreement like the cops have. I know that when you guys are chasing a suspect, you don’t have to stop at your own boundaries. As a general rule, most account enforcers don’t care either way. I don’t like it when people work in my territory without permission, but as long as they’re helping instead of hurting my overall balance, I let it go. Unfortunately, the guy in charge of enforcement for Midtown East is a jackass.”

Luke choked on a laugh to hear the word come out of her mouth. Jade just didn’t look like the kind of woman who used foul language. “He won’t let you go over there?”

“Oh, I’m sure he’d be thrilled if I went over there,” she said, her expression sour. “But he’s a lazy bastard and I’m not going to do his job for him. I’ve actually suspected him of diverting his hardest cases across Fifth Avenue so I’ll have to handle them instead. If he wanted to fix whatever situation that tourist was in the middle of blocking, he was going to have to do it himself.”

“Good for you,” he told her, giving her a light squeeze. “I’m glad you don’t let people like that push you around.”

“After my showing in the interrogation room, I can’t imagine you thought I was the kind of woman who lets anyone push her around,” she replied, and he snorted.

“You sure weren’t taking any of my bullshit. I won’t apologize for questioning you, because you have to admit that it looked suspicious and your alibi was weak as hell, but I am sorry I’ve been such a jerk to you.”

“Then I’m sorry I said you had PMS,” she replied, and he grinned.

“The guys at the station have been ripping on me for that one since it happened,” he informed her. “Aaron told one of the guys from Vice about it, and he told the rest of the precinct. When I came in yesterday afternoon, there were six boxes of Tampax on my desk.”

She had a nice laugh, he reflected as she tossed her head back and laughed in earnest. If the whole soulmate thing turned out to be real and he ended up spending the rest of his life with her, he thought he could get used to hearing that laugh.

“Now I’m not sure if I’m sorry or not,” she said, once she managed to get herself under control again. “Do you think they’re going to give you a hard time about it for long?”

“Until someone else does something embarrassing,” he replied. “Don’t worry about it. If it goes on too long, I’ll just set someone else up for public humiliation. Aaron and I do it when things are slow around the station just to entertain ourselves, but it would put an end to this nonsense too.”

“You realize practical jokes are terrible for your karmic balance,” she admonished him, and he chuckled.

“Until yesterday, I didn’t know there was such a thing as karmic balance,” he pointed out. “What does mine look like, by the way? I didn’t ask you that.”

“It’s pretty neutral, which is rare. Most people run pale to moderate green or red, but yours is mostly white with just a little bit of a green overtone. There’s only one other guy I can think of off the top of my head who runs at a neutral balance most of the time, and I think he does it on purpose.”

“Does what on purpose? Balances his karma?”

“He can’t see karmic auras, and I’m not sure he’d believe in karma even if he could, but he balances his choices. He’ll do something nice for someone, and within five or ten minutes he’ll do something mean of about the same caliber just for the hell of it.”

“Does that make your job easier or harder?”

“Oh, easier. If everyone in New York did that for a week, I could finally take a vacation. It’s not the individual acts that matter to my division, it’s the overall balance of the area.”

“So if everyone ran at a neutral balance—”

“Then my net would be zero and I’d finally get the promotion I’ve been bucking for since I started working here,” she finished for him.

“Promotion? There are ranks for you guys?”

“Sort of. I hadn’t thought about in the context of the police department until we were talking earlier, but it seems pretty similar to me. I’m the equivalent of a traffic cop, I guess, or a regular uniformed officer who patrols around looking for trouble. If I manage to make the promotion list, there are a couple different places I could be promoted to, but there’s only one job I really want: Account Specialist. Instead of having an area to patrol, I’d have a list of the worst karmic offenders in all of Manhattan, and I’d be responsible for making sure their accounts got paid off.”

“More like a detective than a beat cop,” he agreed. “Is the offender list full of people with a big negative balance, or are there saints on there waiting for a giant reward?”

“It’s mostly negatives. There is occasionally a big positive balancer on there, though. I hear those are the most fun to work. Imagine handing a winning lottery ticket to a teacher who’s spent the last twenty years going above and beyond to help children.”

“Sounds nice,” he agreed with a nod. “You know, you said that if everyone did as many good deeds as they did bad ones, your area would be perfect. What would happen if it was half and half, if you had the twenty worst people in Manhattan and the twenty best ones in the same area at the same time? Wouldn’t they cancel each other out?”

Jade sighed. “The short answer is yes, and there are account enforcers who use that to improve their numbers.
Someone
I could name makes sure not to enforce interrupted negative consequences on the gangs and the politicians in his territory because he has so many churches and volunteer organizations doing charitable works that, if he did, he’d end up with a positive overall balance. By not doing his job at all, he actually comes closer to a neutral balance than he would if he enforced either negatives or positives correctly.”

“I get the feeling you aren’t real impressed with that,” he observed. “That wouldn’t happen to be the same guy who runs Midtown East, would it?”

“Why, as a matter of fact, it is.” Her saccharine sweet tone belied the killing look in her eyes, and he grinned.

“I pity that guy when you end up getting promoted over him,” he told her, and she relaxed enough to smile a little.

“One of the nice things about this job is that I don’t have to sit around resenting him and hoping that someday he gets what he deserves,” she replied, a wicked glint in her eye. “Making sure people get what they deserve is what we do. Sooner or later, I know he’ll get what’s coming to him.”

uke and Jade patrolled Midtown West together for the remainder of the afternoon. As the day wore on, it seemed like there were less karmic situations that needed Jade’s attention, and as a result they spent more time talking and less time working. He learned that she went to a yoga class in Clinton Park on Sunday mornings, and that she’d been a dancer as a little girl but an ankle injury had sidelined her in her sophomore year of high school. He also discovered that she was fiercely dedicated to her family. She went on and on about her sister, who’d taken a temporary position as a karmic account enforcer in Paris and immediately fallen in love with all things French.

“So you and your sister both have karmic abilities?”

“It runs in families,” Jade pointed out. “My father has it, so we both had a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting it.”

“What about your mother?”

“She’s normal, like you.” She hesitated, then added, “It was tough, not being able to tell her what we could do.”

“You weren’t allowed to tell your own mother?”

“She didn’t have the ability, and my parents weren’t soulmates. The only Normals we’re allowed to tell are our soulmates.”

“Your mother never caught you or your sister enforcing karma on the neighborhood kids?” he asked, and she shook her head.

“My parents separated when I was pretty young. We were raised by my father.”

“Can I ask what happened?” he asked, not sure if he was pushing too hard, and she shrugged, biting her lip.

“It’s complicated,” she said finally. “It had a lot to do with my dad working for Karma Division. They weren’t soulmates, so he wasn’t allowed to tell her what he did, but she’s pretty observant and not nearly as skeptical as you are. Eventually, she put most of the pieces together on her own. She’s a surgeon, and every time she would lose a patient, she would get angrier and angrier with him. It was like she thought it was his fault that those people died.”

“How does that work?” he asked, momentarily sidetracked. “I mean, you see all of these little kids with cancer on the news. I doubt it has anything to do with them accumulating negative karma.”

“Most illnesses don’t have much to do with our division,” she agreed, glad for the change in topic. “Except for the ones that are actually linked to making negative choices, like liver failure from drinking or lung cancer from smoking. Even then, destiny has a lot more to do with why one person can smoke for fifty years and be healthy and another person can develop lung cancer from secondhand smoke alone. Destiny Division covers pretty much all of the terminal illnesses. They have an entire department for it.”

“So there wasn’t anything your dad could do about her patients dying.”

“No, but that didn’t stop my mom from blaming him.” She shrugged again. “It’s over and done with now. What about your parents?”

He should’ve expected the question, since they’d been talking about Jade’s family, but it still stung. After a moment’s thought, he decided the best way to respond was with the truth.

“My father was an alcoholic. He beat my mom and me all the time when I was a kid. She killed herself when I was twelve, and then it was just him and me. It sucked for a few years, and then I joined the Army to get away from him.”