“Charlie?”
He stood up, his knees cracking like extra-large bubble wrap. He took her hand and they stood over Harlan like a couple of kids lost in the woods.
“Is there something you could do for him,” she asked. “Like what you did for me?”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t know?” She stood back from him; checked his face. “You don’t know. Charlie, you brought me back. I was dead. You fixed me. You healed me.” In spite of everything she smiled under the tears and some of them fell in joy as well as pain.
It was so obvious. When she and Fine had both touched Samuels in the park, something in the old accountant-turned-doorman’s head had switched on like a dormant circuit pre-wired for a specific psychic power. In Samuel’s case, his specialty had been an intimate understanding of chance. All he’d needed was some juice to come on-line.
“What are you talking about, Em?”
She grinned at him now and grabbed his upper arms hard. “It was all you, babe! It’s your goddamn specialty.” She explained about Samuels in a breathless rapid fire, but caught herself short. “Oh, shit. He knew. Samuels knew how everything had to play out. That’s why he walked right up to Fine like that when we got here.” Emily bowed her head. Tears again. Dammit, this was getting to be much, much too much. “He knew and he didn’t tell me because he knew I would have tried to stop him.”
“And everyone would have died,” Charlie said.
Emily’s eyes flashed and for a second she hated Charlie. It was gone as fast as it came. This wasn’t his fault. It was Fine’s. She turned on her heel and stared back into the dark. She could see the arc-sodium playing off the late Phobia Killer’s glasses and Samuels remains a little further on. She wanted to scream. Her hands were shaking. Hell, it felt like her entire vascular system was filled with skittering light. Emily sat down hard on the concrete. Her face waxy-pale except for coins of deep red on her cheekbones.
Charlie recognized the signs of emotional shock and sat down “indian style” across from her. He took her hands, gently rubbing his thumbs into her palms. He could feel her electric stress and thought about cool, slow water. Emily’s color normalized almost immediately and she took a long slow breath. “You just did it again, I think.”
Charlie dropped her hands. “You really believe…” He couldn’t finish it. She’d essentially just told him that he had the power to do, well, miracles. He thought about how he’d done more than just visualize her heart when she was… C’mon, man, what, dead? Had she really been dead? Yeah, her heart had been a piece of squashed origami. And what about that lesion he’d imagined in her delicate, beautiful gray matter? Charlie had done a lot more than just imagine those injuries. He’d held them in mental hands and breathed life back into them.
“No,” he whispered, “not life.”
“What’d you say?”
He stared at his hands and then looked at Emily. “It wasn’t life. It was health. I can’t do life. If I did anything, I just fixed the machine. The spark came from you. You brought you back, Em. I just made it so there was something to come back to.”
Emily tried to remember her time…elsewhere, but it was already as faded as a hangover dream. She remembered the tick-tock of Charlie’s alarm clock and the choice. Yes, he was right. His—what would you call it?—representative had given her permission to be done. Instead, she had chosen to come back so she could be with him for real and not in the candy-illusion of the after-life.
She lunged forward and flung her arms around his shoulders. A staccato of emotion choked through her diaphragm. It all came out in a roaring gush: the loss of her mother, her father, Harlan, and dear Aaron Samuels. For the first time in her life, Emily Burton had found a home within. A gale of pain howled through her ribcage and shook her to the foundations. For a long time, Charlie held her and rocked a little in the dark as she wept and beat against his back—fists limp with exhaustion, pounding out the cruelty and the pulse of release. He never told her to shush. He just rocked her.
~~~~~~~~
Chapter 29
WINTER HIT MANHATTAN like a fistful of roofing nails that year, but Janesville’s own Emily Burton wasn’t impressed. She walked slow and easy over the academy quad on her way to the firing range, digging the way the gun belt threw a little ‘tude into her gait. Daddy had walked with that swagger even when his Glock was in the lockbox under his bed, and now she was developing one (Daddy’s Glock, sadly, was now buried in two feet of sediment at the bottom of the East River). Charlie would think her new walk was just too hot. Maybe she’d wear her gunbelt for him later. Maybe the belt and nothing else. A gaggle of cadets shivered past and in spite of the frigid air, a couple of heartier souls managed to give her a good visual profiling. Emily had been worth a second look before, but now she radiated something more than simple good looks. She burned clear.
The day was bright, the sky a high-pressure cobalt. A knife-edge of wind sliced over the quad but she’d felt worse. During the winter of 94’ an arctic air mass had descended upon southern Wisconsin and they’d gone from winter to the dark side of the moon. Temperatures plummeted to a hundred below zero at night with the wind-chill. A cup of hot coffee tossed into the air would vaporize. A glass of warm water flung the same way would freeze so quickly the droplets would implode then explode. This was a spring day by comparison. Another pod of cadets jogged by in heavily padded sweatsuits. She could actually hear the chattering teeth of more than one mouth, breath smoked like engine exhaust, red skin shown through tight crew cuts. She shook her head and rolled along. Pussies.
They’d toughen up soon enough. Hell, even Daddy had been a baby face when he went to the State Police Academy. He’d be so proud of her now. Probably a little disappointed that she wasn’t going for the Staties, but the Metro Cops needed good people more than ever. She had taken out Drummond Fine before he’d had a chance to realize his Great and Nasty Plan, but Sharon Dimke had been able to set off her crude chlorine gas bomb.
Best the cops could figure, Dimke overrode the pressure controls on the hospital’s ancient boiler and when it blew it vaporized and mixed several gallons of ammonia and chlorine. The cloud slithered through the HVAC system and dispersed throughout the hospital. The bang in combination with the gas and the previous bomb Fine had set off himself was enough to cause a stampede. The panic spread throughout the city. It had taken months to establish relative normalcy again, but something was still off. It was as if Fine’s exploits were somehow viral and had infected at least a small portion of the city’s collective subconscious. Crime had spiked across the board. Everything from graffiti and auto-theft to sexual assaults and murders were up by at least five percent. He’d have been in socio-empath heaven if she hadn’t blown his fucking head off.
The good news was that after September 11th the fine city of New York got a hell of a lot more national attention when a bunch of bombs started going off. The good people in Syracuse made with the money in the fabled New York Minute and the five boroughs finally got a much needed infusion of new police. Emily Burton (with a sterling letter of recommendation from one Detective Bilko) applied to the academy that fall.
Now, she was running late for range practice. That cowboy stroll was fun n’ all, but she’d better shag her rookie ass if she wanted to get some trigger time.
* * *
RECRUIT BURTON LINED up the sights on her police-issue Glock-19 and took a deep breath of gun oil. Daddy had been religious about cleaning his gun and so was she. Another breath and she forgot that she was holding the pistol at all. Calm descended on her. She was going to bulls-eye the shit out of the target. For just a moment, the tiny black circle in the middle of the larger white circle looked like the pupil of a single staring eye. A silver one.
There were four other recruits on the firing line. Emily reached out and wrapped her mind around Romero, a semi-cute cadet from Brooklyn. (She liked Romero. There had been women cops for, like, a million years, but there wa
s still a lot of sexism. Romero, however, could keep his eyes on hers when he asked her opinion on a case.) She could feel him stiffening up and for a fraction of a second, his tension began to stain her calm. Emily breathed (gun oil) and reinforced her barriers. Romero’s tension receded. It was there, she could still feel him, but she no longer allowed the feelings of others to yank away her own. Now, she tried her latest and greatest trick. Emily pushed her calm through Romero’s boundaries. He relaxed and fired. Emily squinted and fired. The rest of the line opened up with a hail of lead.
“Cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fire!” came the call over their headphones.
The recruits holstered their Glocks and pushed the button to reel in the paper targets. Emily plucked hers off the runner and tempered the urge to look at the others and say something snarky—maybe about her long lost Aunt Oakley. She had grouped three slugs perfectly in the head area and another sixteen in the center of the chest. Next to her, Romero said under his breath, “Oh, I rock!”
Emily checked out his target, nearly as impressive as her own, and elbowed him in the arm. “Nice shootin’, Tex.”
“Finally,” he said. “I been missin’ like a blind man for the past three days. I was starting to worry they was gonna throw me out. I just been so freakin’ nervous, but today it was like this warm blanket feeling over my head.”
“More like a wet blanket, you fucker,” the recruit on Romero’s left offered. He’d only scored ten chest hits and no head shots.
“You just jealous cuz’ I’m so pretty,” Romero said.
“Shut-up!” came their instructor over the head phones. “Re-load. Do better!”
They all snapped to, slapped in fresh clips and raised the Glocks to firing position. Emily had been a natural from day one, but even she had missed a lot at first. For a while she’d considered using the telekinesis to nudge the slugs in the right direction, but when Charlie healed the lesion in her brain the telekinesis had gone with it. Her relief had surprised her. At the end of it, having The Force or whatever had been too great a temptation. It was the wisest part of Emily Burton that knew she was not wise enough to handle that much power. Besides, it had been giving her little paper cuts in the soft jelly of her brain. Maybe Charlie was right and it would eventually have killed her. Or maybe one day they would have had a really bad fight and she would have thrown a refrigerator at him. Or, got cut off in traffic and lost her temper, flinging a taxi through the air like a poker chip. Besides, you couldn’t fire a gun very well when your hand was shaking all to hell and back. Recruit Burton, soon to be Officer Burton, sighted down the back of her weapon. She felt her confidence rise and the gun roared.
* * *
ACROSS TOWN, CHARLIE signed his name in blocky, half-cursive, half print letters on the visitor’s ledger for the Behavioral Unit at St. Joseph’s. He slid the ledger back under the glass and wire mesh window. The unit nurse, a tiny woman in her mid-fifties with ecstatically orange hair and matching lipstick, checked his name and scowled. Deep lines fissured the perimeter of her mouth.
“You know who I am, Eileen,” Charlie said. “I’ve posted here a million times.”
“S’right,” she nodded. Her voice was an anti-smoking commercial. “I recognize you.”
But she was still going to make him dance a little before she let him in—if she let him in. Some of it was because Charlie was what full-time nurses called a “floater”: a nurse who worked for a placement agency and jumped from facility to facility. You made twice as much money, but not many friends. Some of her attitude was due to the violent nature of the patient he wanted to visit. Most of it was the note from the resident physician in that patient’s file, specifying Charles Dunbar as persona non-grata on the psych ward.
“File says not to let you in, Charlie.”
“Oh, c’mon, Eileen. They were able to sew it back on.” He held up his hand and wiggled his index finger. “Did he mention in his little note that I was the one who got the patient to cough it back up? That I was the one who cleaned the stomach acid off the end and packed it in ice so the nerve endings wouldn’t degrade?” He put his hand down. “You know that wasn’t my fault.” And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about her prejudice regarding his career choices.
“I’m not sure…”
Charlie put a palm on the glass separating them. “I can help this guy, Eileen.”
The “guy” in question—the giant Charlie thought of as Mama’s Boy (Mother! I want her)—was Walter Sloan, age 43. Charlie had done some homework in the months since his one and only meeting with Mr. Sloan and found that poor Walter had been a victim himself for most of his life. His mother had kept him in a cage in the basement since he was three and his father had abandoned them. Forty years later, his mother had expired and Walter had extricated himself from his prison. As it turned out, the padlock had rusted through years before. Walter had simply never attempted to escape. His fear of his mother’s rage had proved a sturdier trap than the ancient Ultra-Lock she had bought at Woolworth’s the day after her Norman left.
According to the police report (thank you, Detective Bilko) and Walter’s own fractured narrative, he had gone for three days without being fed before breaking out. He’d found his mother sprawled on the kitchen floor. The rest was blurry, but it seemed that Walter had blundered out into the world for the first time. He knew enough from the TV his mother left for him—mostly the 700 Club on taped loop—that when someone was sick, you went to the hospital. And thus, Charlie Dunbar had met Walter Sloan that strange summer night.
“Let me help him, Eileen.” Charlie said. “I can do it.”
Eileen MacGruder had been a nurse since she was twenty-three years old. She’d served in the ER, ICU, NICU and was finishing the final stretch of burn-out on the 8th Floor West of St. Joe’s Hospital. She’d watched and subtly guided scores of doctors and nurses in her time, and helped to heal thousands. She’d stopped counting the lives she’d saved on her own decades ago. The first night Walter Sloan—a giant slab of thorazine-marinated meat—was rolled through her magnetically locking doors, she’d read his file and burst into tears. Now, she looked at the young (probably gay, she’d never understood how a man could be a nurse) hotshot in front of her with the dirty hand on her glass and sighed. He was telling the truth. Shit.
The door buzzer sounded and Charlie jumped.
* * *
THE DOOR CLOSED behind Charlie with a soft click. The room doors on 8 West had no locks and could swing in or out so they could not be barricaded. Normally, the rooms held two occupants, but Walter got one to himself. The top half of the bed was elevated at about 45 degrees, not straight enough to really read comfortably, not far enough back for sleeping. Walter’s rusty hair was washed and gleamed on the pillow around his head. His beard was trimmed and combed but still long. Charlie thought he looked like a Norse God, but couldn’t remember which one. Harlan would’ve known. He’d have had some book on it somewhere. Charlie smiled and shook his head. Walter stared straight into the air.
Charlie walked over to the foot of the bed. Walter sighed and continued to stare. Charlie picked up his chart and let a little whistle out from between his teeth. Jesus, that was a lot of thorazine. Walter was a big guy and everything, but man. An image of Walter’s teeth crunching down on the second knuckle of the resident’s finger asserted itself, and Charlie understood the high dose. He wondered what other mischief Walter had been up to since. Didn’t matter. He was maybe here to fix all that anyway.
Charlie moved to the side of the bed and looked into Walter’s eyes. He’d never done this before and was worried it wouldn’t work. Physical stuff was easy. He could see what was wrong and just change the picture to a better one. Mental stuff, well, he didn’t know. And his power had been fading ever since that night in the warehouse. The overlapping fields between two natural, powerful psychics like Emily and Drummond Fine had activated his specialty, as Emily called it, but without that overlap it had dwindled. In the six months sinc
e, he’d gone from Jesus-level miracle man to maybe a really gifted chiropractor. He’d cured seventeen people in the ER during that brief period, saving his ability for the worse cases as soon as he realized it was leaving him with every use. Charlie had an idea this was going to be his last one.
“Walter,” he whispered. “You there, big guy?”
Walter said nothing. A gas bubble shifted and his stomach rumbled. They’d essentially lobotomized him with chemicals.
Charlie took a deep breath and planted his feet just as he had the night he met Walter. Then it was to gather and marshal his physical strength for the oncoming attack. This time it was so he could gather his will. Charlie imagined power streaming up his legs from the core of the earth. The energy first touched, then ignited his spinal column like a neon tube. When it reached the top of his head he reached forward and lay his hand on Walter’s brow.
At first, there was nothing, just the empty black behind his eyelids. Charlie started to think that he was wrong, that Mrs. Abramson’s stroke from two nights ago had been the last one and now he was empty. Just one more, he thought. Just the one and he would be done. Charlie squeezed his eyes shut tight and imagined his consciousness flowing down his arm and into Walter’s head. He felt a moment’s resistance at the point where their skin touched, like pushing through a wet paper towel, and then another kind of blackness swirled behind his eyes.
A great storm cloud shot through with threads of crimson lightning roiled and shouted in his mind. Charlie barked a single harsh cry and bore down on it. He was aware enough to know that if he made too much fuss, Eileen and her line-backer orderlies would be on him stat. This was awful though, and not what he had expected. He’d imagined that decades of fear would have compacted into pure rage—and it was there on the surface of the cloud—but the main mass was terror. Charlie should have known better. Walter had been trained to be fearful his entire sorry life. Drummond Fine could have lived off a man like Walter Sloan and never left the house.