Then I went into the mill to look for geek number one. I found him in seconds. The blood on Jacob’s mouth hadn’t been from the screaming after all.
Christ.
It took several minutes for us to get the geek and the goon off the roof, our feet slipping and sliding on dangerously decayed wood. As we grunted and yanked at the limp bodies, Hector said, “Charlie?”
“Jesus, I’ve been busy, okay?” I muttered, but I dug my still-naked hand in my pocket and closed them around metal. Dogs, Elvis, rain …
Nothing else.
“He’s gone,” I answered. “Sorry.” And I was.
Although, truthfully, the rest of us seemed to do much better when Charlie wasn’t around.
11
“Do you drink?”
Hector stood in the doorway of my “room” with a six-pack in his hand. “I wasn’t sure if it would affect your …” He circled a finger to finish the sentence.
“My mojo? My happy hoodoo?” I indicated the desk chair. “Screw it, and bring it on. Tonight I’d drink paint thinner if it was in a nice enough bottle.” I did have the occasional beer while Houdini snuffled around my feet for a sip. It didn’t affect my abilities. I could drink myself deaf, dumb, and blind, and it still wouldn’t have mattered. I’d done it once or twice before, when I was young, stupid, and a little less able to deal. All it did was make the psychic movie a little fuzzy around the edges. It didn’t dull it enough to make drinking a hobby or a necessity. And I wasn’t going to be like those drunken losers who’d hung around the house when I was a kid. The old man included. Mom had tried, but if there was an asshole in the tristate area, she’d fall head over heels for the bastard.
But there are always exceptions, and with what I’d seen today, I was all about exceptions. I accepted an already opened beer from Hector as he twisted off the cap to his own. “Isn’t drinking on duty against the rules?” I took a cool swallow.
“That’s the advantage of being ex-military. If I get caught, the worse they can do is fire me.” He took a long swallow of his own before rubbing his forehead with the heel of his hand. “So … what did we learn today?”
“That reruns are for shit.” And that I missed my dog, my home, my nonhomicidal secretary. Abby had never once tried to throw anyone off a roof for God. Okay, there was the Bible-thumper or two who regularly vandalized my poster. Jacob gave me bad ideas. It would be ironic, considering this situation: toss a man of God off a roof because absolutely no one told you to. I was sure God’s hand would ease him to the ground as gently as a feather.
“And that Charlie isn’t necessarily going to be drawn to the places with the most violence. Maybe he can sense things only so far, geographically speaking. Maybe he’s just drifting here and there, and wherever he happens to pass …” I shrugged and took another drink.
“Does he know?” The question was as abrupt as Hector’s thumb was methodical in peeling off his bottle label. “Does Charlie know what he’s doing? Does he know what’s happening?”
I could finish the rest of that without his words. Because he couldn’t. Charlie couldn’t know, because Charlie wouldn’t cause death and terror. His brother wouldn’t believe that of him. Couldn’t. And Hector was right.
“No.” I shook my head. “He doesn’t know. I’m not sure he even knows he’s Charlie anymore. All he knows is being lost. He’s lost, and he can’t find his way, but I’m not sure there’s any reason behind what he does. Where he goes. What spot he chooses. There’s just lost and a sense of banging futilely at a closed door.” I rested the bottle against my knee. “I’m sure you see the downside to that.”
“We can’t predict where he’ll go. We can’t have the equipment waiting. If … when we finally catch him, it will be a matter of sheer luck.” Hector leaned back in his chair. It wasn’t relaxation, which I wasn’t sure the man was capable of, it was exhaustion. “But the timing is still within parameters. We can’t predict where, but we can predict when. And now we know: evacuate all possible locations for the ETE except one. Eventually we’ll catch him.”
“And the people who live there or are plodding through their favorite cannibal vacation spot?” I raised eyebrows in question.
“Chlorine leak. Anthrax scare. Terrorists.” He shifted his shoulders and gave a humorless smile. “We have a thousand of them.”
“I thought I was supposed to be the con man.” My lips twitched despite myself. Maybe I was getting Stockholm syndrome or maybe just a good buzz. Either way, I felt for Hector. Every which way you looked at it, his pooch was screwed but good. It wasn’t only Charlie’s memories that had me seeing that. For the first time, I let myself see it, too. I let myself feel an empathy that I didn’t try to shove down. I was getting soft in my old age.
“Actually, Eye, you’re one of the more honest men I’ve met.”
A compliment. If this was a made-for-TV movie, I would’ve been touched … right up to the moment he added, “You’re too much of a lazy son of a bitch to bother to lie.”
I actually grinned this time. I wholeheartedly blamed the alcohol for that. Or it could’ve been the relief that I hadn’t been thrown off a roof. Take your pick.
“Who’s the psychic around here, anyway?” I finished off the beer. “And I’m not that lazy. You saw my house. Neat enough. God knows I don’t have a housekeeper touching my things”—contaminating my things—“and Houdini still can’t figure out how to use a mop.”
“You’re right. And from the intel I gathered on you, you work seven days a week. That’s not the sign of a lazy man.” He opened another beer. “So then you’re simply a son of a bitch. A hardworking bastard of the highest order.”
“I’d argue, but I worked too hard to be a bastard to give up the title now.” I held out a hand for the next Bud. It went down as smoothly as the first. “Since I’m obviously in this for the goddamn long haul, why don’t you tell me about Thackery? He doesn’t seem to be in this for the betterment of humanity. Flying around the universe seeing pretty lights sounds enlightening and all, but where’s the money in it? Where’s the glory? Thackery seems the type to want both of those things.”
“Therein lies the military involvement.” Hector’s pale eyes were tired. I wasn’t sure if it was that or the alcohol that made him more forthcoming. Or maybe he thought I deserved to know. Having observed him for the past few days, I was thinking it was the latter. He was very much like his brother. “Imagine the benefit if you could go anywhere, see anything, but no one could see or detect you. In the seventies, the CIA had remote viewers working for them with some success. Imagine what they could do if astral projection was available. An operative could travel along the ether, like a skater on a sheet of ice. There would be no secrets any longer … not to our side, anyway.”
I’d suspected that was what was going on, but it didn’t stop the sour curdle of my stomach. “Yeah, funny how I’m never on ‘our’ side. In school or now, I’m an outsider, always will be.” That was the thing about sides. The one in the know, the one with power, it tended to get smaller and smaller, and more and more of us got tossed over the line to the unpopular side. The loser side. The side that ended up looking up at the bottom of a boot on its way down.
“He made a mistake.” Hector looked blindly at his empty bottle. “Charlie always trusted people. He brought me into the project halfway through, and by then …” He exhaled. “It was too late. The money was spent. The deal was done.”
“Signed in blood on the dotted line.” I shook my head. “Charlie was always too good for his own good.”
“I know.” He sat still for another moment, then carefully set his bottle on the desk. “But he took care of me, and now it’s time for me to do the same for him.”
Even if the only thing left of Charlie was a feeling of being lost. One emotion out of hundreds, an unconscious trace of a human being, but it didn’t matter to Hector. He wasn’t letting down Charlie, or even a piece of Charlie—he was that kind of brother. I knew, because I
tried to be that kind of brother. Which was why I was there to begin with.
Glory. The baby. Shit. I sighed, and the strong consideration of one more beer became a done deal. You could bet my sister wouldn’t be the slightest bit grateful for what I was doing for her, only take it as her due. But Charlie … Charlie would be proud as hell of his little brother, Hector, although it was hard to imagine Hector as anyone’s little anything.
“When’s the next ETE?”
“Two days.”
“We checking out any more locations before then?” I took another glum swallow at the thought of how festive that would be.
“You’d be amazed at the number of massacres, spree murders, and serial killings that have taken place or are rumored to have taken place in Georgia.” He opened another beer for himself.
“Not so much, no.” After what I’d seen peering into people’s heads throughout my illustrious career, surprise wasn’t something I had left in me. The sweetest little grandma you could imagine had secrets. They never thought about that when they came to see me. It was as if they thought I was a guided missile. They pointed, and I went. They didn’t consider that I saw it all. I saw where they lost their keys, ring, necklace, wallet, where Aunt Susie’s junior-high baby had ended up after adoption, that Mama was in the freezer while her Social Security checks kept coming. They thought I saw what they wanted me to see, but they were wrong. If they knew, safe to say I wouldn’t have any customers. Not a one.
And then there was my own personal massacre.
Hector, again, didn’t have to be psychic to know what I was thinking. “Charlie knew,” he said with cautious sympathy. You couldn’t be sure how killers would take to talking about the blood on their hands. “He didn’t have your records like I do, but he didn’t need them. Charlie had his heart and his faith in people, in you. All the rumors he heard at that state-run piece-of-shit hellhole, he knew better.” Apparently, Charlie had talked his brother’s damn ear off about me back then and not just about the psychic stuff. But Charlie had thought we were friends.
Hell, I was an idiot for taking this long to figure out that he’d been right.
“He knew you did the only thing you could, even if he didn’t know the details.” The details that Hector, courtesy of my files, did know.
I looked into the mellow gold of the beer held fast in the bottle. It was better than thinking of the color of well water. Well water isn’t that nice to look at, not the kind that came out of abandoned wells. That water is dark and full of things you don’t want to know about. Bones and the sludge that once made up the mice and rabbits that accidentally fell in and began to decompose. Tess hadn’t accidentally fallen in. She’d been put there, and there she had drowned. I had never stopped wondering about that. How it had felt when she’d screamed and flailed, sinking and popping up, over and over, because even at five, Tess could swim like a fish. But with the well opening fifteen feet above and no way out, no one can tread water forever—not even a little girl who couldn’t fathom that her mommy or her big brother wouldn’t come save her. That they couldn’t somehow know when she needed them the most.
In her last, lost, drowned breath, she’d thought we’d come. That we’d know to come save her.
But I hadn’t known, not until I picked up her shoe, not until it was too late. I thought that was probably the only thing that kept me sane, that my first psychic connection started with Tess’s last breath, Tess’s death—not during it. If I’d had to feel every second of my little sister’s terror and suffocation, I doubted there’d be a Jackson Lee around anymore, unless he was in a mental institute with dead eyes and drool on his chin.
I’d looked down into the well, still holding that pink shoe, and seen the back of Tess’s head, her strawberry blond hair drifting, her hands riding pale on top of the water. I couldn’t reach her. The water was too far down, and I knew she was gone. That didn’t matter, though. If there’d been any way physically that I could’ve touched her, I would’ve pulled her out. I never would’ve left her like that. I would’ve held her, cradled her in the grass, and let the hot sun warm her. I would’ve told her I was there. Repeated it endlessly. I was there for her now. I’d always be there for her. That’s what I would’ve said, stupidly, pointlessly. Sometimes there’s nothing else to do except the stupid and pointless, because it’s for you. Only you. The dead can’t feel you hold them, and they can’t hear your lies.
But I didn’t have that option. I couldn’t reach Tess, so I ran home, frantic to beat my other sister there. Glory would be getting off the bus from school soon, and Boyd would do to her what he’d done to Tess. I’d thought he wouldn’t touch them. He hit me time and time again, but they were girls, fragile and breakable. I thought he would never touch them, but look how wrong I’d been. I beat Glory home; she’d dawdled at a friend’s house. Lucky, that. So goddamn lucky. I didn’t beat my mom. I wasn’t sure she’d understood anything I’d said. I didn’t remember saying anything, but I must have, as my throat was sore for days. I’d screamed with enough rage and pain that it should’ve brought down the fucking sky.
My mom, meek and ground down from years of that pig’s abuse, hadn’t once lifted a finger to stop Boyd from what he did to me. I’d tried not to hate her for it, but deep down, I did. I shouldn’t have, she was a victim like me, but it’s hard to argue with hate. I forgave her that day—that’s what I told myself, the day she finally found her line in the sand. Whatever I’d told her about Tess was enough to carve a line as deep as the Grand Canyon.
She went after Boyd with a butcher knife.
He’d called me a liar, her a crazy bitch, then he’d taken the knife away from her and killed her with it. He’d put it through her throat, and she’d bled to death in less than three minutes. Which I knew because it had taken me less than a minute to get Boyd’s shotgun from his bedroom closet and blow his brains out. I’d felt his hot breath panting on my neck, heard him stumble, fall, and then stagger back up as he tried to beat me there to do the same to me. Too late. Sitting in a recliner all day wasn’t good practice for killing an agile teenager. It was only good enough for dying.
With Boyd’s bone, blood, and gray matter splattered on the wall, I held my mom’s hand. She tried to say something, but with that much metal through your throat, no matter how much you want to, you won’t get a word out. I told her it was okay. That we’d all be okay now. Of course, it was a lie, the same one I would’ve told Tess’s body. Nothing was okay. Nothing would be okay again, but you don’t tell dying people the truth. Even at fourteen, I knew that. In my mom’s last moment of existence, I gave her the only thing I could: peace.
A priest and a psychic will tell you the same on your deathbed, but only the psychic will know it’s a lie.
I didn’t want the beer anymore. I handed it to Hector. “Then Charlie and my file would’ve told you why I’m the only psychic who’ll tell you there’s no life after death. Because if there was, that would mean there was a God, and trust me, there’s no God, no matter what your nurse Eden thinks.” No God would’ve stood aside and let Tess and my mom die that way. Car wrecks, cancer, heart attacks, those things I could reconcile with a God, but what had taken place on that blood-soaked screaming night-terror of a day? Never. That couldn’t be justified or explained. It simply couldn’t.
There was no God, no heaven, but hell could be found on your doorstep when you least expected it. I’d lied all those years ago to my mom as she slipped away, and I hoped I’d done it well, but I’d never learned how to lie to myself. It would’ve made life easier if I had.
Hector dropped the beer into the garbage can before sweeping the other empties in. “I hope you’re wrong, and not just for Charlie’s sake. I’d like to think your stepfather has an eternity of hellfire to burn in and a devil inserting a pitchfork up his ass for every second of it.”
The comment actually had the corners of my mouth curling. “Hector Allgood, the man with the unexpected silver lining.”
Hec
tor, who thought I was an honest man. Hector, who I saw as Charlie had seen him … and as I’d seen him over the past two days. Hector, a man in a corner but trying to do the right thing: save what was left of his brother and save innocent lives. Hector, a man who despite a near lifetime of caution had earned my trust when I thought I had none left to give.
A man who deserved the truth.
I said it abruptly, without softening the blow. I knew from personal experience that there was nothing that would make it easier to hear. Easier to live with.
“Charlie was murdered.”
12
As bombshells went, it wasn’t what I expected. Hector didn’t move other than his eyes narrowing. There was rage there, searing and hot, but pain, too. The kick-in-the-gut kind, an agony that sucked the oxygen from your lungs and the hope from your soul. Then he blinked, and it faded.
“I know.”
It was my turn to blink. “You know?”
“I helped Charlie build the transplanar interface.” At my blank look, he elaborated. “That machine that looks like a giant CAT scanner. It, linked to the cuff, is what initiates the OOB. Bottom line, I’m not the engineer Charlie was, but I was still there every step of the way. I couldn’t make the leaps of intuition a brilliant engineer like him could, but I could follow the basics, and I know the machine didn’t malfunction. It wasn’t Charlie’s mistake. Charlie didn’t make mistakes, not when it came to science.” His hand balled into a fist—unconsciously, I thought. “Someone killed him, either to stop the project or to steal it.”
In his mind, that could be the only reason. His brother wouldn’t have had any enemies—none that didn’t covet his work. And hell, as cynical as I was about the human race in general, I wasn’t sure Hector was wrong about this or about Charlie.
“And you didn’t think dropping a psychic into the aftermath would be like tossing me into a shark tank with a hungry great white or onto the front yard of a Colombian drug lord with ‘snitch’ written on my forehead?” I demanded. “Line up the personnel in the project, and in a half hour I can tell you who the murderer is—and the murderer knows it. That’s why I didn’t say anything until now. Christ, I’m surprised there wasn’t cyanide in the crappy cafeteria food you served me. My life isn’t worth a dime now. What the hell, Hector?”