Karma Patrol (5 page)

Jade made it home around eight thirty, leaving her plenty of time to finish her laundry before bed. She’d only run across a couple of minor plan interruptions, and they had been easily solved with a minimum of intervention. A glance at the Karma Division app on her phone showed her catchment area’s current karmic balance as an absolute value of 0.14, well under the two-tenths deviation that was the cutoff for the ‘excellent’ rating blinking on the screen below the number. Her personal goal was to get it down to a one-tenth deviation, which would earn her a ‘superlative’ rating. She’d only attained that rating a couple of times since she’d been posted in Manhattan, and it had never lasted for more than a day or two before something happened to bump it up again. Still, if there were ever a time for her to prove she could earn a ‘superlative’ rating, this was it.

Her tiny studio apartment was on the sixth floor of her building. It was a five-hundred-square-foot shoebox made bright by the tens of thousands of tiny icicle lights she’d strung painstakingly along the ceiling during her first month there. It gave the apartment the ambiance of a theater marquee with a sparkling canopy that transformed the space from boring to breathtaking. She took a moment to appreciate the effect as she dropped her keys in their designated basket by the front door and dumped her bag next to the couch, and then headed into the bathroom to collect the laundry hamper.

Shannon hadn’t been exaggerating about the amount of clothing Jade owned. She was a southern belle with a proper appreciation for elegant outfits and breezy sundresses, and she’d actually had so much trouble storing her clothes in her little apartment that she’d ended up putting her favorite dresses on hangers and hooking them over nails in the walls. It was an unorthodox decorating scheme, but she liked seeing her favorite outfits displayed all over her living room. She didn’t do as much laundry as Shannon probably thought she did, though. She suspected everything in Shannon’s bohemian-chic wardrobe could be tossed into the washer and dryer without any concern, but the vast majority of Jade’s clothing required dry cleaning, so she only did laundry when she was running out of the essentials.

She took her basket of laundry, a roll of quarters, and her purse, and headed downstairs to the laundry room. She didn’t run into anyone on her way down, but when she got there, Danielle Lawrence was sitting on top of a dryer with a book.

“Hey, Dani,” Jade greeted her, picking out two empty washing machines near the door and sorting her clothes into them by color. “How’s it going?”

“If it isn’t the woman of the hour,” Danielle teased. “I saw your picture in the
Bulletin
this morning. You do great work.”

“Thank you,” Jade replied, touched. Freelance photography was just her cover job, a way to excuse her presence at crime scenes when she needed to be there for karmic reasons. She also used it as a source of supplemental income, though, and she did put a fair amount of effort into doing it well. It was nice to have that effort recognized. “Not many people notice the bylines on the pictures.”

“I watch for yours,” Danielle confided. “It’s cool knowing someone whose name shows up in the paper sometimes. I’ve never had my name in the paper for anything in my entire life.”

“Maybe someday you’ll make it big on Broadway and I’ll be seeing your name up in lights.” It was unlikely, since Danielle’s karmic aura didn’t indicate the sort of vast positive balance that would pay off with a big break, but there was more to life than just karma. The guys over in Destiny Division would have more to do with any big break of Danielle’s than Jade would.

“God, I hope so.” Danielle sounded wistful. “I had another audition for a commercial today, but I haven’t heard anything back yet. I really hope I get it. I’m tired of waiting tables.”

Jade opened her mouth to offer reassurance, although she had no idea whether Danielle would actually end up getting the job, when she was interrupted by an angry, low-pitched tone from her phone.

“Is that your ringtone?” Danielle asked, wrinkling her nose. “It’s obnoxious.”

“It’s a game app notification,” she lied, groping around in her bag for the phone as her heart leapt into her throat. That was the imminent danger alert on her Karma Division app. “Time for me to check on my farm animals.”

Danielle laughed. “I didn’t picture you as the farm game type. I guess everyone needs a hobby, though.”

She unlocked the phone to find the notification blinking insistently:
Imminent Danger. Midtown East/151 E Fifty-Eighth Street. Penzler, Brad: Account Specialization, Karma Division. Same Department Assistance Requested. All Others Stand By.

Not for her, then. If she ended up getting her long-awaited promotion, she would become part of Account Specialization, but until then she was insignificant to people like Brad Penzler. She spared a brief moment of jealousy for the exciting lives they led, being in imminent danger at Le Cirque instead of doing laundry in their apartment building’s basement. Hopefully, her time would come.

She changed screens on the phone, switching from the Karma Division app to her e-mail account. She had a handful of unread junk e-mails, three notifications about sales at her favorite online shops, and a new message from her little sister that turned out to be a forwarded list of medieval fairy tales and how they might have originated from the ungifted Normals’ efforts to interpret the forces of Karma and Destiny in ways they could understand. Talli was obsessed with urban legends and karmic history, and she’d forwarded Jade enough information over the years to fill a textbook.

Jade’s phone let out a happy chirp, a little green flag popping up at the top of the screen, and she knew without having to read the notification that it was the all-clear signal. Whatever trouble Penzler had gotten into, he’d managed to get out of it. That was the way things usually went; Fate Divisions employees got into work-related trouble occasionally, but Fate itself went out of its way to make sure they survived the experience. Jade had never been the subject of an imminent danger alert, but Account Enforcement wasn’t exactly a dangerous department to work for. She would be in far more danger when she was promoted to specialist, no longer restricted to her safe little catchment area.

She had to admit she was looking forward to the excitement.

t took all four detectives most of the night, but they managed to tie Bridget Hanlon to Shane Darrow, one of the Westies’ hitmen. Luke, playing his usual role of ‘bad cop’ in both interrogations, managed to get Hanlon to flip on Darrow for the murder about an hour into questioning her. After that, all that was left to do was the paperwork, and Luke was halfway through Hanlon’s arrest report at 7:00 a.m. when his cell phone rang. His caller ID told him it was the captain.

“Good morning, sir. We solved the case.”

“Forget the dead blackmailer. You and Sanford need to get down to Forty-Eighth and Ninth.”

“We have a new case?” he guessed, suspecting it had to be something serious for Captain Hawkes to call his detectives before he’d even made it into the office. The captain’s grim response confirmed it.

“We have a mass shooting.”

Jade’s alarm went off at eight in the morning. She swatted blindly at the snooze button, struggling to open her eyes. She’d stayed up late the night before, working on her game plan for getting her territory’s karmic balance under 0.1 in the next week. She was pretty sure she could do it, although it would take a lot of extra effort and maybe even some assistance from Shannon.

Squinting against the bright light coming from the window, she picked up her phone and activated the Karma Division app, waiting for it to load today’s catchment area balance. After a moment’s delay, the number for Midtown West came up as 0.21, and she stared blankly at it.

“What?”
she breathed finally, bewildered as she swiped at the ‘display changes’ option to figure out what could have shifted her area’s karmic balance so drastically overnight. Her heart sank when she saw the words on the screen.

Sentinel Event
, the app announced in unapologetic black lettering.
6:48 a.m. Forty-Eighth Street/Ninth Avenue. Significant karmic consequences. Multiple path disruptions.

“What sentinel event?” she demanded, hitting the ‘more information’ button, and was greeted with an unwelcome response.

Additional clearance required.

“It’s my catchment area!” she snapped at the phone, infuriated. Additional clearance meant another department was involved, and the most likely candidate was Account Specialization. Whatever nonsense Brad Penzler had gotten up to last night at Le Cirque must have carried over from Midtown East into Midtown West, and now it was playing merry hell with her rating. She was angry enough that they hadn’t notified her immediately when something catastrophic happened in her territory, but blocking her access to the data on top of it was unconscionable.

A call to Celia yielded no answer, and she wasn’t comfortable going over Celia’s head to the New York Bookkeeper, both because it might have negative consequences for Celia and because bookkeepers made her nervous. Instead, she got out of bed and dressed, determined to investigate for herself. No sentinel event was going to keep her from her dream job.