(deflected?)
(… unable to properly focus…)
But… why her?
No, she’d have to play this one extremely close to home. There were too many contradictions about this guy.
She suddenly noticed him eyeing her eyeing him.
“Child molestation, huh,” she said, “how come I haven’t heard of this before — like on America’s Most Wanted?”
Black again performed a forced, pained smile.
“For other reasons I cannot disclose, we’re keeping a low profile. For now. That’s why we want you. We know of your abilities.”
Black’s gaze burned into her.
“Just what abilities do you think I have that could possibly be of benefit to the mighty and far-reaching arm of the FBI?”
“Madame Nostradameus, if I may use your professional nom de plume, please don’t make this any more difficult than it has to be—”
(“has to be”?)
“How do you know about me?” she said, jumping to her feet. She walked over to, and stood before, the picture window.
“I’m just a cheap phone psychic—‘for entertainment purposes only’—ever read those disclaimers? How in the hell could you guys possibly know anything about me? Why would you?”
“Mrs. Gordon… again, I am not at liberty to discuss this with you, only that we presently require your assistance. Your country requires your assistance. This man… has done certain crimes against national security, not to mention the heinous nature of child abuse…”
Was it getting hotter in here?
Lizzie nervously changed her stance several times, while remaining exposed before the window. This man definitely wasn’t telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, yet she did pick up that this man “they” were searching for really did pose some kind of threat to him or those he worked for. Why was it so hard for her to pick up any other specifics? She was far better than this — why wasn’t she seeing the whole picture?
And did all this mean this other man posed a threat to anyone else? Was a legitimate bureau interest?
Now, that was the question, wasn’t it?
And if this guy was FBI, why did she feel like she was being violated in her own home? He was sizing her up as they talked, just as she was doing with him — only on a psychic level. He was stronger than most she’d met — was he trying to block her?
No, “blocking” was wrong.
Misdirect.
If she’d learned anything about her ability, it was that you could pretty much pick up on anything you were sensitive to. Nothing could be blocked if you were sensitive enough… things might be misinterpreted… but never blocked. But what was it about him that she couldn’t penetrate? He didn’t seem interested in her, in that most men she met — heterosexuals, anyway — she could pick up on an unspoken sexual attraction, but she felt no such stirrings in this guy… though she did feel a powerful sexual energy about him. He had a totally different — and focused — agenda, one that seemed to pose a dire threat to his very existence.
A curious thing.
And it wasn’t just about him, which was even odder; it affected others. This man was definitely a mixed bag of impressions. And there was something odd about that left shoulder of his.
“Can we expect some form of assistance?” he asked.
“If you know me as well as you think you do, then you know I am in no way comfortable with any of this. Whatever ability you feel I have, and you feel I should use it for, I am not comfortable with you knowing whatever you think you know. I need some time to consider this — what I should or shouldn’t lend in this matter, Mr. Black.”
Lizzie stood firm, inching closer to the window (she could launch herself through it, she was certain) and staring back at Black, who didn’t bat an eye. He was good, she’d give him that. And creepy.
Black looked down to his folder and closed it; came to his feet.
Lizzie remained at the window.
“Certainly. The Bureau in no way wants you to feel coerced into this matter.”
He again reached into his jacket.
“Here’s my card. You can reach me at any time of the day. Take your time, but know that the longer you delay, the longer this man remains at large. It is a matter of national security.”
Lizzie took the card.
“Thank you for your hospitality — and iced tea.”
Lizzie couldn’t open the front door fast enough, and opened it to the sound of chirping birds, crickets, and withering heat. Suddenly, the heat didn’t seem so bad any more, as Black walked past her and onto her stoop. She looked past him to his, of course, big, black car…
“Have a good day,” Black said, without turning back. He got into his car and left.
Why did she feel as if she’d just been raped?
Chapter Six
1
Seventy-seven-year-old former president John Fitzgerald Kennedy awoke sweaty and anxious. Bolt upright in bed, hyper alert and aware, he stared out across the darkness of his Hyannis Port bedroom. Looked to the empty space in bed beside him.
Jackie.
Good Lord, he missed her.
Jackie’s long gone, a little voice inside reminded, gone of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. 1980. Gone after twenty-seven years of marriage.
Yet he was still going strong.
Fourteen years, and every so often it just hit him wrong. Usually during the wee hours of the night.
Kennedy closed his eyes, opened them, shook his head, and looked to the bedside clock.
One-seventeen a.m.
He again shook his head. Didn’t quite feel “all there.” Like he was still dreaming — in a dream.
What was his last memory?
All he remembered was an intense feeling of anxiety — nothing else, just the feeling of the dream… its intensity…
He lifted his hands in the darkness and looked to them. He felt electrified… tingling… he actually felt as if he didn’t belong here… now… in this bed — this time.
Again, looked to the clock.
One-eighteen.
Okay, Time was ticking away.
But, something was wrong, dreadfully wrong. Out of place.
Kennedy brought both hands to his face and pressed; rubbed. Tossing the blankets off, he got up and made his way along the wood floor to the bathroom to relieve himself. Upon his return, he diverted to a window and pushed aside the curtains. Looked out over the dark expanse of sea. Cracked open the window… listened to the roar of its crashing breakers.
Alone… he was alone.
No Jackie and a confused sense of identity… place.
Turning around, he wrinkled his brow as he desperately tried to sense something, anything, about this room, his place in it, his loss of Jackie… life in general.
He returned to the window… inhaled the sea air and allowed the crash of the ocean to wash over him. All anxiety slowly began to drain away, as he listened to the most comforting sound in the world… a sound that had defined his very existence… from learning to swim at thirteen in New Milford, to his time as the swim-team captain at Harvard… his Navy years… his design and creation of the Navy’s swiftest, stealthiest Littoral Combat Ship…
But it was that night in 1943 when his PT boat had been rammed by the Japanese in Blackett Straight that he thought about most (was he sure about this?).
He shuddered.
Had that really been him all those years ago?
It seemed so distant, now, and in more than just years. That twenty-six year old seemed like an entirely different person — an entirely different life.
Had he and all those other men really been dumped out into the black, open ocean, as the Amagiri plowed right on through them?
Had they really swum all those miles across open, South Pacific Ocean, or had it, too, been just another dream?
He closed his eyes and leaned into the window sill, desperately trying to discern fact from fiction.
Had tha
t really been something he — the him who now stood before this late-night window — would do? Could do?
Of course not, he was no longer that young, tough, twenty-six year old. Those had been different times and extraordinary circumstances. But still, he had done it, he couldn’t shake that memory, but he couldn’t quite believe something about it…
Wasn’t it odd — heinous even — how healthy, strong bodies changed and deteriorated over the course of a lifetime? A short lifetime, really; just how long was seventy-seven years, anyway? Seventy-seven was nothing to the entire timespan of history or geology.
And he was so safe and secure now, and, yes, still relatively healthy at his age. Excellent genes from a long-lived family, from a father who had lived to be ninety-six, to a mother who was still kicking it up at one-hundred-and-four. He swam every day, took one-to-two hour-long walks, and even worked out with weights. He remained active in the global community and world politics, had written many books, and organized many charities, his favorite being the Children Are Our World, or CHOW.
He was engaged in life.
Yes, he’d lived a full life, but still had something out there he had yet to accomplish… needed to do. There was still something he couldn’t quite put his finger on before he’d had enough and called it quits from this existence. No regrets. He believed in more than one life, and had had the dreams and psychic experiences over his lifetime to prove it enough to himself (or at least had the feeling he had, the strongest of which being dual-Civil War personalities of being a soldier in a Federal brigade and a direct connection with Lincoln himself, which totally confused him, and the other about being an impoverished kid in India or somewhere…), even if no one else believed it. He wasn’t afraid of dying. He just wanted to make sure he’d done all he was supposed to have done before moving on. Never let it be said a Kennedy never completed what he or she’d set out to do. Enough power, money, or influence, and you could do just about anything.
He didn’t ask for much.
He just wanted to change the world.
2
Shit, what the hell am I supposed to do, now?
Lizzie’d been asking herself this question all night.
Two a.m., and she’d had a busy night. The activity had helped keep her mind off her problems and on other peoples’ problems instead, but now she found dead air between phone calls, and her predicament filtered back.
Christ, show a little psychic ability, and the whole world wanted your soul.
What was she going to do?
She sure as hell didn’t want to work for that man, FBI, national security, or otherwise, but felt inexplicably tied to him, and that caused her great distress. How could she be tied to so evil an individual? It actually upset her stomach, and she felt the onset of a headache. And, in dealing with the headache, she kept losing focus and returning to that evil feeling back at the Waffle House. That feeling of deepest darkest blackness.
His name totally fit him.
She couldn’t stand it any longer. Removing her headset, she went to the bathroom, where she spilled out a couple gelcaps, and greedily gulped them down with mouthfuls of water straight from the tap. She splashed water onto her face, shut off the faucet, and grabbed a towel. As she looked in the mirror, drying off, she noticed a pimple forming on her forehead.
“No!”
Lizzie re-racked the towel and examined the pimple closer in the mirror. She always got these things whenever she worried too much about something. Of course they never formed on some hidden part of her body, like her butt. Always the face.
Grumbling, she opened a drawer to pull out some Clearasil — when she heard a light metallic tinkling sound, as something fell to the linoleum. Unscrewing the tube, she looked down.
Her engagement ring sat on the floor beside her bare feet.
Emitting a joyous shriek, she snatched it up. She looked inside the drawer, replaced the Clearasil — and found the wedding band. She again shrieked as she lifted the rings into the light for better inspection. They were, indeed, her rings. She slid them back onto her finger and examined them in their rightful place.
“That’s more like it!”
She’d searched those drawers inside and out.
They had not been there.
Lizzie caught a flash of a reflection in the mirror, and looked out the bathroom door.
Heard distant laughter.
All she’d caught was the briefest glimpse of bare feet.
Nothing like the pitter-patter of—
Her phone rang and Lizzie realized she’d all-but-forgotten she was still on duty. Rushing back into the kitchen, she kicked aside another stray toy.
* * *
It was slightly after four a.m. when Lizzie finally hung up the headset for the night, brushed her teeth, and got herself to bed, Lucy following her around the house. Lizzie fingered her wedding bands.
In sickness or in health.
Til death do us part.
Maybe that last line was good enough for most people, but what about those like her? What about those more sensitive to the afterlife?
She still felt Joe out there.
No, she wasn’t pining away for him, hoping to meet him as soon as possible in some glowing, revolving tunnel of hereafter light, but she still felt him. Aspects of him. She knew he was fine, carrying on with the rest of his soul’s journey in whatever way he was — but she also knew that he wasn’t pining away for her, either. And that didn’t bother her.
In sickness or in health…
Lizzie closed her eyes.
It had been an accident.
That was what bothered her — that she’d never seen it coming.
That she’d never seen it coming. He’d been the owner of his own construction company, and had been talking with his foremen. It had been a local job, a no-brainer he’d called it, just throw up another apartment complex, get in get out, collect a tidy sum, then move on to bigger fish: an industrial office complex on the outskirts of Parker, southeast of Denver. About halfway into the apartment project, he’d given his foremen their marching orders for the day, when, out of nowhere, it came. A one-ton I-beam soaring through the bright blue sky like a terrain-hugging cruise missile.
And Joe had just happened to be in its way.
There had been shouts, sure, even some of his foremen rushing in his direction, but with all the heavy machinery, their shouted conversation — and the use of ear protection — it was just another business day in the scheme of things. Joe’s number had simply come up, was all, and that I-beam smashed into him like no tomorrow. He’d never looked up, never heard a sound, nor spied any peripheral movement. One moment he was alive and thinking… considering plans for the day, whether or not the project would be complete within the next year, whether or not to have a child, what to bring home for her as a surprise for-no-particular-reason gift, and how life was going so great for the both of them. And behind those thoughts had been the other ones, the thoughts that always seemed to quickly drift in and out, barely making themselves known before splitting, but leaving a backburnered portion of his mind always working on them… bills, and what to do about that Jeff Skopchek, whose wife had just left him and was suing him for everything he had… or his upcoming vacation time he’d been promising Lizzie, since he’d been working like a dog the past two years without a serious — more than three days off at a time — break…
Yes, one moment he’d been alive and functioning, and the next he was crumpled up in the dirt, his head… gone.
At least he hadn’t seen it coming.
Jeff Skopchek, however, had not been so lucky. He’d been at the crane’s controls that had swiveled that I-beam into Joe’s direction; swiveled a little too fast for practice. Unfortunately for Joe, Jeff had just talked with his wife that previous night. His soon-to-be-ex-wife had told him just how much she was going to screw his ever-loving ass — and he better not have that little slut there with him now. And — by the way — did he think that little
bitch would stay with him once he was living under a bridge? She’d better love booze and the great outdoors, cause after the loss of his money, house, and that classic red-hot Vette of his, that was all they were going to have in common.
So, good old Jeff came to work late in a less-than-optimal state of mind, and when he’d been told to move that pile of steel from here to there, Jeff Skopchek was only a quarter there in the Focus Department, and said steel I-beam took up its weighty trajectory through Joe Gordon’s noggin.
What’s the last thing to go through a bug’s head when it hits a windshield?
Its asshole.
What was the last thing to go through Joe Gordon’s head one sunny workday?
A one-ton steel girder.
Needless to say, Joe, who signed Jeff’s check, didn’t sign Jeff’s — nor anyone else’s — check that day, and Jeff found himself criminally liable, and, in one respect, no longer having to worry about living under a bridge anymore.
3
Lizzie stirred, groggily. Good Lord, just fall asleep only to immediately wake back up?
She looked to the clock, but all she saw was that it read four something. The rest of the display was hidden behind a silhouette—
Of a head.
Someone tugged at Lizzie’s elbow.
“C’mon, Mommy, it’s time to go!” the little boy whispered urgently, tugging at her nightshirt sleeve. “C’mon.”
The boy darted to the doorway, where he turned back to her and waited.
Lizzie wiped her eyes and sat up. The boy stood against a nightlight-backlit doorway.
“Okay, okay… I’m coming.”
Lizzie got out of bed and went to the boy.
“C’mon… everyone’s waiting!”
Psychic Page 7
