“Your turn.”
I looked up at Hector and pasted a grin on my aching face. “Ready to be dazzled?” I hoped it would be by my amazing talent for utter and complete bullshit. Lying to prove I wasn’t psychic—it had to be a first in this group.
Raising eyebrows, he gave the deadpan answer, “Always.” When I was up and moving, he added, “Third cubicle, take a seat.”
As I walked, I pictured how it would go in my head, how I hoped it would. I wasn’t smug or stupid enough to think it was going to be a piece of cake. Allgood was many things, a son of a bitch chief among them, but gullible he was not. I had one chance, and it was a damn slim one. Then I saw what waited for me in the cubicle, and that chance instantly evaporated. The equipment that had looked so familiar … up close, it clicked. I recognized it from countless TV shows and movies. It was a lie detector. A damn lie detector. I froze with one hand resting on the back of the cheap plastic chair. Was I screwed? Let us count the ways.
“Sit down, Mr. Eye. I’ll hook you up personally.” At my elbow, my own private shark watched with an inscrutable gaze.
Outmaneuvered, I wasn’t used to it, and I didn’t like it. Then again, I doubted Hector much cared what I did or did not like. I felt my eyes go flat and distant, and then … I sat. What else was left to me? I was painted into a corner there was no getting out of. At his order, I took my gloves off while he pulled on his own pair, latex surgical ones. My movement revealed the tattoo on my palm. Allgood noticed it instantly. “Unusual.” He leaned in for a closer look. “Appropriate, though, for the All Seeing Eye.”
It was a tattoo of a wide-open eye taking up nearly the entire surface of the palm. I flexed my hand and said mockingly, “It’s cheaper than a billboard.”
“There’s no denying that. You seem to have advertising down to an art.” He shook his head and Velcroed a probe to my index finger. “Is there a reason it’s blue?”
Yeah, there was a reason. And that very reason meant the question wasn’t my favorite one. It was the kind that Abby had long learned to avoid and that Glory had already lived through the answer to. Tess was gone, but I carried her with me every day, etched on my skin. But I wasn’t hooked up to the polygraph yet, was I? Charlie’s brother could choke on his idle curiosity.
“No. No reason. And also, Hector, none of your goddamn business.”
“Fair enough,” he said, without offense. He looped a blood-pressure cuff around my upper arm and finally finished up with a strap around my chest. Pulse, blood pressure, and respiration, pinned down six ways from Sunday. It was common knowledge that this type of thing wasn’t foolproof, and an amoral bastard like me had no qualms about lying, but I’d seen enough of Allgood already to know he’d make the damn machine all but sit up and sing. Thanks, Glory, I thought with resignation. Now both of us are out of luck.
When Allgood finished with me, he said aloud, “Begin.”
From the other side, my unseen questioner started. He went through a list of basic questions, the usual drill for setting up a baseline of responses, I was guessing. Is your name blah blah? Do you have a sister named … on and on. At least they weren’t too personal. They could’ve been much worse. Hector was bound to know my past. He was a man who did his homework, and it was all in the public domain. Certainly it was to someone as connected as he seemed to be, and maybe to just about anyone else. After all, the shooting had been declared self-defense. It was part of my Child Protective Services record, not a criminal one that would’ve been sealed when I turned eighteen.
And then there were the newspapers. They’d had a field day. It was front-page news: White Trash Massacre! That’d been the local down-home paper. They didn’t hold much to journalistic ethics.
They even took pictures of the bloody porch of the house after the bodies were removed.
Bastards.
When my base reactions were captured, the real questions began. “I’m holding up a card,” came the first. “Is it blue?”
Je-sus. Trapped and subjected to this deadly dull crap. Not a fate worse than death but close. Damn close. “I don’t know,” I said flatly.
“Yes-or-no answers, Mr. Eye,” Allgood corrected firmly at my shoulder.
“It’s not a yes-or-no question,” I shot back, irritated. Too bad it wouldn’t keep on in this vein, but Hector knew about my gloves. Knew about me. He wouldn’t be fooled.
“Then how about we rephrase,” he said, taking over for the moment. “Do you know the color of the card?”
“No.” Smooth and unbroken, the line recorded my truth.
“Would you know the color of any of the cards your tester held up?”
As it stood now? “No.” Indifferently, I ran a short thumbnail along the fake wood beneath my hands.
“Then let’s try something different.” Allgood moved around to the other side of the testing area. When he returned, he had a watch in his hand. It was older, the metal worn and brimming with all sorts of goodies. Fatalistically, I watched as Hector let it fall into the palm of my hand. There was no way out of it now.
“Let’s start with his name.” Folding his arms, he put a foot on the metal frame of my chair and moved it and me a few inches so he could see my face … my eyes. I had the feeling Allgood’s instincts were as reliable as any lie detector. “Is it Marcus?”
And here we were.
“You know what? You have me.” Now, there was a truth you didn’t need a machine to register. He did have me, and I might as well face up to it. Between Glory, the machine, and Hector’s innate savvy, I didn’t have any recourse. No fucking recourse at all. “You own my balls, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it, so why don’t we speed this up.” I tossed the watch up, caught it, then slapped it down. “His name is Thomas Jerome Hickman. He went to Columbia University. He has a master’s in psychology, a wife named Beverly, a leaky toilet, an overweight cat called Alexander the Great with a leaky bladder to match, a mortgage that is eating him alive, and, oh …” I smiled, a dark and curdled motion. “He’s wearing a pair of women’s underwear. Yellow panties with pink rosebuds. Big-girl undies, size fourteen. Too much sitting behind a desk, eh, Tommy?”
Hearing the faint sound of choking from behind the partition, it was almost worth it. Yeah, almost.
“Sir.” The voice wasn’t so blandly vanilla now. “That is absolutely not true, I swear. I can show you.” There was more choking, this time more pronounced. “I mean … no. Let me …”
I took pity, more on myself than on the invisible jackass. “Tighty whiteys,” I admitted with a snort. “But the rest is true.”
“It looks like Charlie was right about you.” Hector shook his head ruefully. There was still a healthy dose of skepticism in his eyes, but it was colored by a reluctant amazement. It was one thing to be open-minded, more for your brother than for yourself, but it was another altogether to actually see proof before your eyes. “I should’ve known. Charlie was right about everything.” The cautious wonder disappeared so quickly it should’ve qualified as a magic trick. “Ordinarily.”
And just like that, the almost-human Hector was gone, replaced once again by the embodiment of a true military man. Stiff upper lip, an even stiffer spine, and eyes empty and neutral. “Make yourself comfortable, Mr. Eye. You have a long day ahead of you.”
He wasn’t lying. For hours, I read person after person, all in lab coats and all with the most boring personal objects money could buy. Watches or wedding rings were the usual currency passed my way. Not one yo-yo or good-luck charm or whimsical key chain. Nope, it was a singularly mundane crowd here at Alcatraz. No flash, no pizzazz, no sense of personal style, not an ounce of showmanship. Abby would’ve been appalled and certain it was nothing a few sequins and rhinestones couldn’t have fixed. Sparkling lab coats for one and all. Step right up.
Hopelessly bland my testers may have been, but to give credit where it’s due, they were fairly quick-witted … once they finally got in gear. Almost immediately, they wanted to kn
ow why I couldn’t simply read people instead of their belongings. And thanks to the polygraph and the silently looming presence of Allgood, I was forced to admit that I could. Hell, it wouldn’t have made any sense if I couldn’t have. But the difference between reading a person and reading something that belonged to him was the difference between IMAX and a nineteen-inch television. It was simply too much. Coming at you from all sides with a voice louder than an arsonist God at the burning bush. It soaked every molecule, pounded every neuron in your brain. There was no distance, no taking a breather. Every time I took someone’s hand, it was a guaranteed skull-crushing headache and the taste of blood and tin in my mouth. Believe it or not, that wasn’t my idea of a good time.
Not that my new pals would’ve given a shit. So why bother to tell them? Like a trained monkey, I did what I was told. Read objects, read people, and finally laughed grimly when they wanted to know if I could “see” the future, move things with my mind, or, even better, start fires.
“Jesus,” I said with some disdain. “You guys watched too much X-Files in your day. Read too many trashy books. Even I don’t believe in that crap.”
“What about life after death?”
With head resting in my hands and a death grip on my skull, I looked up at Hector’s studiously blank face. Charlie was gone, and I knew what he wanted to hear. Maybe I would’ve been kinder if I weren’t being blackmailed. Maybe I wouldn’t, as I’d faced the truth about Tess long ago. I didn’t know for sure. But I did know that at this moment, I didn’t feel kind. My head hurt, my jaw hurt, I was tired and hungry, and I was mad. Yeah, I was pissed as hell, and that did not lead to the path of gentle kindness.
“Grow up, Hector,” I drawled. “There’s no great beyond. No fluffy clouds and halos. No tunnel with a big family reunion at the end. Not once have I ever picked up anything beyond the death of someone when touching an object. Gone is gone. Dead is dead.” I closed my eyes as the headache swelled, and as I so often did, I saw a lonely pink shoe. The clearest memory of my life, so bright and diamond-sharp that I almost believed I could put out a hand and pick it up. I never tried. I’d already done that once, and from that moment, nothing had ever been completely right or good in my life again.
“Dead is dead,” I repeated with a tightness that thrummed behind my voice like an overly taut guitar string.
I wouldn’t have been too surprised if Allgood had hauled off and popped me one or at the very least walked away. It was his brother I was talking about. Then again, he’d already locked up the one guy who’d beat him to the punch, so to speak. It was my second guess that hit the jackpot. He did walk away, but not before startling me with a hand that rested for the briefest of moments on my shoulder. He knew about Tess and the others. He could guess I’d give anything to believe different … but it wasn’t different. I was literal proof of that.
“Not always,” he countered with a trace of bleakness he either couldn’t hide or didn’t try to. Then he did walk away to herd the last of the “psychics” out. Hours had passed, although it seemed like days, and it didn’t look like anyone else had made the cut. Didn’t I feel special? Shit.
I dropped my gaze back to the desk surface and tried to ignore Hickman’s endless chatter at my elbow. Good old TJ Hickman had finally come from around the partition. And as always, I was dead on the money. If he had worn women’s panties, they would’ve been big-girl for sure. Pear-shaped, stammering, and cheerfully harmless as a puppy, he regarded me with moon-pie eyes. Round and wide, they had the recaptured belief in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Merlin’s magic all swimming around in there. I’d seen it before. Show people something slightly askew from their normal world, and they’d use it as an excuse to put a bright and shiny glow on their whole damn life. It turned them into kids again. Why, I didn’t know. What kind of miracle was it that I knew his wife made a buckwheat and soy casserole that kept him constipated for days and that he had a box of Twinkies hidden in his garage? Or that his ever-loving mama had sent him to a fat camp every summer he was in high school? Dull, boring, and kind of pitiful, yes. Miracle? No.
“Tylenol,” I muttered between clenched teeth, ruthlessly interrupting his words raining like bright coins.
“Oh. You have a headache?” The stuttering kid on Christmas morning disappeared under the thirty-five-year-old professional. “Is that often a side effect of what you do? How intense a headache do you get? Do you have visual disturbances with them?”
I ignored the questions and repeated with a limp snarl, “Tylenol. I could spell it, but I’d think a guy with a master’s could figure it out on his own.”
The wide mouth snapped shut, and hazel eyes blinked. Nodding, he disappeared in search of the almighty painkiller. Hickman had about as much spine as your average garden slug. Pleasant, good-hearted, but he was there for reasons that trumped his academic background. It was a trait similar in all the lab coats I’d read today. Placid, fearful of authority, and unlikely to stick their noses where they might be chopped off.
In other words, like me, they didn’t know shit.
Division of labor, they called it. I’d picked that out of one of the many brains I’d stirred through. There was an operation already running, Project Summerland. They were to screen for any possible psychic talent for the project, and that was all they knew. Sum total of their nonknowledge. And while some were more curious than others, no one had poked around to see what they could find out. They accepted the sketchy information they were given and did what they were told. Not a single troublemaker in the lot. I’d bet my ass Hector had handpicked every last damn one of them. Of course, this would be the same Hector who hadn’t let me read him as the day had dragged on. Everyone else had been fair game but not Allgood. Not the only person in the room who actually seemed to know what was going on. Wouldn’t want to throw me a crumb, now, would he?
By the time Allgood returned, I was in the process of popping three more painkillers. He glanced at my still-unopened bottle of water. “You are a glutton for punishment, aren’t you?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” I put the heels of my hands over my eyes and rubbed.
“Yes, and I realize exactly how much choice you’ve had in that.” He looked as tired as I felt. “Come on, Eye. I’ll take you to medical, then to get something to eat.”
I dropped my hands and shook my head. “No. I already said I don’t need a doctor.” And neither did I need to end the day by being poked and prodded by some sadist with icy hands.
“Hickman said you have a headache.” He picked up the bottle of water and rolled it between his hands. “It’s obvious that it’s from what you’ve been doing today.”
“Yeah, couldn’t have been that punch to the jaw,” I said with an antagonistic grunt.
“Very well.” He sighed as he tossed the bottle to a lab coat walking by. “Then you’ll have the EEG and a CAT scan tomorrow. Now, let’s see what fine cuisine they’re serving in the mess.”
I’d imagined the tests would come headache or no. Map the brain, map the ability. Map me. I rubbed my eyes again and rose to my feet. “As long as you don’t make me read the pork and beans,” I grunted as I slipped my gloves back on.
The cafeteria, luckily enough, was in the same building. No slogging through mud was required, which was good, considering I’d long lost track of my shoes. The place was empty except for a few chattering whitecoats and two soldiers off in a corner. It was stuffed cabbage roll night, apparently, and I passed over it in favor of sticky macaroni and cheese, greens, runny instant mashed potatoes, and a glass of chocolate milk. Unfortunately, there was no beer on tap. Just my luck. I was hungry enough that I could actually eat the swill, and I did, shoveling it down with need if not enthusiasm.
“Not a big cabbage roll fan?” Allgood sat down opposite me as the table rocked on one uneven leg from the added weight of his tray.
“Vegetarian,” I said succinctly. The piece of white bread I’d been given on the side was rock-hard, but I slath
ered it with butter and ate it anyway. It wasn’t any worse than Cane Lake food. Wasn’t any better, either, but it wasn’t worse.
“Does that have anything to do with your …” He fished a small bottle from his pocket, poured a shot of foamy white liquid, and chugged it before finishing. “Talent?”
Quick. Always so quick. Like his brother had been. With the edge of my appetite less sharp, I began to shove piles of food back and forth with my fork. It was an old habit, one that had gotten my ears boxed but good in the Boyd days. After all, one shouldn’t waste the precious food that his lazy ass had nothing to do with putting on the table.
“It’s not like people,” I offered absently. “I don’t get clear memories, just fuzzy flashes. Nuzzling for milk, the falling rain on your back, the smell of wet hay.” I looked away from the ground beef on his plate. “The feel of a steel bolt punching through your skull.”
There was silence, then the sound of porcelain scraping the surface of the table as Allgood pushed his plate away. “What do you sense when you drink that?”
I looked up to see him indicate my glass of milk and almost smiled despite myself. “Warm sun and sweet grass.”
If I had a bad day, which, now that I ran my own life, was a helluva lot less than the old days, I sat on the floor with Houdini, placed a hand on his broad head, and soaked up endless doggy wonder. A full stomach, a well-chewed toy, a soft couch—through a dog’s eyes, that was a true glory that couldn’t be matched, the only heaven in existence. I missed the furball, missed him like crazy. I turned my attention back to my food and quickly cleaned the plate. I didn’t waste any more words on Allgood. He was the reason I was missing my dog, my carefully constructed life.