Eyes to See

by Joseph Nassise

By throwing myself across the hood of the other man’s car, I’d inadvertently given him the time to close the distance.

  The first time I knew he was there was when he shouted at me to freeze.

  My daughter Elizabeth was in that car. There was no way in hell I was listening to anyone until she was safe in my arms.

  “Give me my daughter!” I screamed again.

  The cop, not getting the response he wanted, radioed for backup and moved in to bodily remove me from the vehicle.

  That earned him a kick in the mouth as I grabbed hold of the windshield wipers to keep from being pulled off, struggling against his efforts to dislodge me, screaming all the while.

  The next thing I knew, there were 50,000 volts of electricity surging through my body and I jerked around on the hood of that car like a fish out of water.

  Apparently the cop had decided that I was an imminent threat to those in the Mercedes and shot me with his Taser.

  When I came to, I was lying handcuffed on the pavement a few feet away from the vehicle. The officer was standing beside the driver and a teenage girl with long, dark hair. He was asking them questions and taking notes on the pad he held in one hand. When the driver noticed that I was awake, he pointed at me and the cop came over.

  “Are you okay, sir?” the cop asked politely.

  While he still held his notebook, his other hand had moved to the butt of his pistol.

  “Tell that son of a bitch to give me my daughter,” I gasped out, still recovering from the effects of having that much electricity shot through me.

  “Is that your daughter over there, sir?” he asked, watching me closely.

  My voice was coming back. “Not the teenager, you idiot. The little girl. The little girl in the back.”

  I craned my head around, looking for Elizabeth. Where had they put her?

  “Those are the only people who were in the vehicle, sir. Just that gentleman and his teenage daughter.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “NO,” I said, more forcefully this time. “I saw my daughter in the backseat. She was there.” I turned and caught the driver watching. “Give me Elizabeth!” I shouted at him.

  Several other squad cars appeared at that point, along with an ambulance. I was checked out by the paramedics and then transported to the police station to “cool off.”

  In the end, I got lucky. The driver decided against pressing charges, and the cop took pity on me and declined to charge me with assaulting an officer, so after spending the night in jail, I was released.

  To this day I’m still not convinced I didn’t see her sitting there, in the back of that car, staring out the window.

  23

  NOW

  Once I’d made up my mind that I was going to handle this without the police, it was clear that I was going to need help. Dmitri was the obvious choice. He had the connections and resources I needed to answer the questions I was suddenly asking myself, so as soon as it was reasonable to do so I headed for Murphy’s.

  Looming at the forefront of that list of questions was why Stanton was so anxious to wrap up the investigation quickly. It didn’t fit with his normally meticulous approach to a crime scene. The same was true of his recent emotional behavior. His anxiety seemed misplaced, almost as if there was something he wasn’t telling me. Which wouldn’t be a surprise, actually, as this was Stanton we were talking about.

  Still, I didn’t like being in the dark, no pun intended. And if what they said about Dmitri was true, he was the perfect person to get me the information I needed. I had two items that I was certain had been in the presence of the killer. Now I needed the right kind of person to help me track them back to their owner.

  I’d learned a lot about the world since my daughter had disappeared. One thing I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was that much of what people thought of as bullshit was anything but, when it came to the supernatural. Sure, for every legitimate precognitive there were a hundred, no a thousand, charlatans, but that didn’t take anything away from those who really could do the things they claimed to do.

  Right now, I needed to find a certain type of individual, and I hoped Dmitri could help me.

  The place was locked up tight when I arrived, but I pounded on the door anyway until Dmitri came to see who was stupid enough to be that annoying at this hour of the morning.

  “Hunt,” he said, noncommittally, when he opened the door.

  “Mind if I come in?” I asked.

  “Be my guest,” he said, and ushered me through the door.

  It was quiet inside, peaceful actually, a far cry from the way it was at night. It smelled better, too, the smell of fresh Pine-Sol and other disinfectants overlaying the usual nightly scents of beer and sawdust. Dmitri moved to turn on more lights, but I intercepted him before he could do so.

  “Mind leaving those off?” I asked.

  He hesitated, then shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  With the curtains drawn and most of the lights off, I could see fairly decently in the dim interior. I followed him across the room to the bar itself.

  “Drink?” Dmitri asked, as I climbed atop a stool and he took his usual place behind the counter.

  “Coffee, if you’ve got it,” I said, buying some time while I tried to think of how to approach the issue that I’d come here for.

  In typical fashion, Dmitri fetched me my drink and then stepped back and silently waited for me to tell him why I was pounding on his front door at what had to be, for him, an ungodly hour.

  He knew that I occasionally acted as a consultant for the police on certain unusual cases, so that seemed the safest tack to take with him now. “I need some help with a couple of things,” I said, and then explained about the two recent murders and how I’d gotten involved in them. “Detective Stanton has asked me to look into using some, well, let’s call them less conventional methods of investigation.”

  “Like you?”

  I knew from past experience that Dmitri didn’t understand just what it was a blind guy could do for the police department. He’d never come right out and ask, wasn’t his style, but occasionally he tossed out a line like that one, looking to see what I would say.

  I smiled, letting him know I knew what he was doing, and shook my head. “Much less conventional than what I do.”

  “Less conventional than bringing a blind guy to a crime scene? That’s pretty out there, I’d say.”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised that Dmitri knew I’d been physically present at both murder scenes. Like I said, he had contacts everywhere, and if it was worth knowing, Dmitri eventually heard about it. I tried to laugh it off.

  “Cops. Who can understand them?” I said.

  “Apparently you do, since you’re working for them.”

  If I’d been using Whisper’s sight, I knew I would have seen him staring hard at me in that way he does when he thinks there’s something funny going on. Sitting and listening to people all day had sharpened Dmitri’s bullshit detector and it seemed he wasn’t going to let me get by without some kind of explanation. He wanted to know what it was I did for the police. If I didn’t tell him, I risked losing his help.

  This was new. He’d never forced the issue before. Then again, I’d never come to him for help before.

  I weighed my options and decided that it might be time to come clean, given the seriousness of the issue.

  Whether he believed me or not was another story.

  “You want to know what it is I do for the cops, is that it?”

  I could almost hear his shrug. “You said it, not me. I’m just a bartender, remember?”

  That was the biggest load of bullshit I’d heard in a while, but I wasn’t going to challenge him on it. Instead, I asked, “What do you know about transference?”

  “It’s a psychoanalytical term that refers to what happens when a therapy patient places certain feelings or emotions onto the therapist. By doing so, they give the therapist the opportunity to respond in a way that is different from the r
esponse of the person on whom the feelings are based, thereby giving the patient a chance to heal,” he answered matter-of-factly.

  Color me shocked. The big bartender sounded like a college professor, for heaven’s sake.

  “Right. What I do is something similar to that. I’m a sensitive. I can pick up stray thoughts from other people, particularly when they happen during periods of high emotion.”

  “So you’ve got ESP? Cool. Tell me what I’m thinking.”

  So much for the college professor. “No, I don’t have ESP. At least not in the way you’re suggesting. I can’t read minds or anything like that. I just feel things, emotional echoes I guess you could call them, that occasionally give the police a clue that can help them find who they are looking for.”

  “And now you need something better than that?” He actually sounded disappointed that I couldn’t read his mind.

  “I have something that we think belongs to the killer. I need someone who can find the link between the object and the killer, who can follow that link back to the source and tell us where to find him.”

  Given that he was one of the Gifted, I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t even blink at my request.

  “You need to talk to Denise Clearwater,” he told me.

  “Who?”

  “The good-looking brunette from the other night.”

  I had no idea who he was talking about.

  Dmitri chuckled. “Sorry, sometimes I forget you really are blind. Just about any other warm-blooded guy who comes in here would know exactly who I was talking about with that description. She’s pretty hard to miss.”

  He still hadn’t answered the question.

  “Great, so she’s hard to miss. Who the hell is she?”

  Sometimes he can be so exasperating.

  “Oh, right. Remember the woman who asked to buy you a drink the other night?”

  Uh oh. “The one who smells like coffee and jasmine?”

  “You noticed that, did you? I’m impressed.”

  Shit! Of all people, it had to be her.

  “How can she help?” I asked, with far less enthusiasm in my voice than before.

  He grunted at the change. “Best she tell you that herself. Not my place to tell other people’s secrets.”

  “There’s no one else?” I asked.

  “You want the best, she’s the best.”

  Great. Just fucking great.

  “How do I find her?”

  “She comes in about once a week. Usually Fridays.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t wait that long, Dmitri. People’s lives are at stake. I need to talk to her as soon as possible. Preferably today.”

  He drummed his fingers on the bar for a moment, thinking. I let him take his time. Rushing him wouldn’t get me anywhere.

  “What else?” he asked, after a moment.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said you needed help with a couple of things. So far you’ve only talked about one. What’s the second?”

  I hesitated, uncertain how to proceed. Exactly how do you ask someone you don’t know very well to commit an illegal act on your behalf?

  “Something about the investigation doesn’t feel right. Stanton’s too anxious, too focused on wrapping this up quickly for it to be an average, everyday homicide. There’s something he’s not telling me.”

  “And you want me to find out what that something is?”

  “Yes.”

  There, I’d said it.

  I needn’t have worried. He took it all in stride without even a second thought.

  “I can hack the police department’s database, if that’s what you want, but it will cost you.”

  If I’d been a sighted man, I probably would have blinked at him in dumb surprise. I’d expected him to tell me he’d put some feelers out on the street, reach out to his contacts, that sort of thing. Hack the police department’s database? That was something else entirely.

  “How much?” I found myself asking.

  He named a figure I thought was reasonable, and so, before I could change my mind, I agreed. We shook on it, sealing the deal, and that was that. Dmitri explained that it might take him anywhere from several hours to several days, but that he would call when he had something.

  Business concluded, he offered to show me out.

  “Clearwater?” I prompted gently instead.

  He grumbled a bit, still not entirely convinced of the necessity of what I was after, but that didn’t stop him from taking the phone out from beneath the bar.

  “I’m gonna regret this, I just know,” he said under his breath, but the telltale sound of the rotary dial ticking back to the left let me know he was making the call.

  While I waited I mused on the fact that Dmitri must be one of the few people left on the planet who preferred a rotary-dial telephone.

  Some people are even weirder than I am.

  I heard him say something into the phone by way of greeting and then he stepped away from me, talking in a low voice. I could have listened in if I’d wanted to, my hearing vastly improved from the years of relying on it so much, but I gave him the privacy he wanted and didn’t. After a few minutes of discussion he hung up and walked back over to me.

  “She has a place in Brookline. A basement-level apartment over by Boston College. She’s there now. I’ll call you a cab.” He wrote down the address for me on a scrap of paper to give to the driver.

  I thanked him, paid for my coffee, and got up to leave.

  As I reached the door he called out to me. “Be nice, Hunt. She’s a friend of mine.” I could feel him glowering at me and it spoke volumes without saying a word.

  “Sure, Dmitri. No problem,” I told him.

  Having Stanton pissed off at me was one thing. Getting Dmitri mad was a different story entirely.

  24

  NOW

  The cab dropped me off outside her Brookline address, and I managed to negotiate the narrow stairs down to the front door of her apartment without tripping and killing myself. It helped that her outside light was off and the illumination from the streetlamps didn’t penetrate down this far thanks to the angles involved. I knocked sharply several times.

  It took a few minutes but eventually the exterior light went on, blinding me. I heard the door in front of me open.

  “I thought you wanted me to leave you alone?” she said, when she saw that it was me.

  “Yeah, well …” I let the statement trail off, uncomfortable with saying more.

  She wasn’t going to be satisfied with that, however.

  “Yeah, well, what?” she said, her tone sharper this time.

  “I … uh … um … I need your, uh, help.”

  “You what? Sorry, can’t hear you, Hunt.”

  I sighed. Why’d she have to make this so difficult? I stood up straighter and said clearly, “I need your help.”

  “You need my help?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “No? No, I don’t need your help?” What the hell?

  “Yes, you need my help. No, I won’t give it to you. G’night, Hunt.”

  The door closed in front of me with a sharp click. It wasn’t quite a slam, but it was close. The light went off.

  “Shit.”

  I stood there for a moment, at a complete loss. It had been years since I’d asked anyone for help and the fact that she just up and turned me down suddenly pissed me off. I wanted to pound on her door, tell her exactly what I thought of her, rant and rave and generally make a scene. Trouble was, I couldn’t afford to antagonize her any further. I didn’t know anyone else who could do what I needed to have done. I couldn’t go to the police, and Dmitri had been clear that she was my best bet. Clearwater was it, my only hope.

  Restraining my baser impulses, I knocked a second time.

  When there was no answer, I did it again, a little harder this time, in case she hadn’t heard me from the other side of the apartment.

  My anger flared further
when she still refused to answer. After all, I knew she was in there. She was doing this just to stick it to me.

  Fine. Two could play at that game.

  I turned around, made my way back up a couple of steps that led to the street above, and sat down, determined to wait her out.

  Ten minutes went by.

  Fifteen.

  I was just about to say “fuck it” and give up when I heard the door unlatch and open.

  “You still here?”

  I swallowed my annoyance. “Yes, I’m still here.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “I need your help. And I’m sorry about what happened earlier.” Then, after another moment of silence. “Please.”

  At last she relented. “Maybe you’d better come in.” She turned away and disappeared inside, leaving the door open behind her.

  Breathing a sigh of relief, I got to my feet, negotiated the steps in front of me, and entered her apartment.

  The moment I crossed her threshold, I went blind.

  Totally, truly blind. Not the blindness I get when I’m around too much light, that sense of being caught in a whiteout. No, this was more like having an iron box dropped over my head and sealed up tight, cutting off not just my sight but also my senses of hearing and smell. It was so unexpected that I literally staggered, crashing sideways into what I think was a coatrack and sending it and me tumbling to the floor in a jumbled mass of limbs and loose coats.

  “I knew it!” Clearwater crowed in triumph, her voice coming to me from far away, as if I was hearing it through deep water.

  Extracting myself from the tangle, I got slowly to my feet, groping for the support of the wall beside me. I reached out with my mind, trying to get my bearings, searching for anything that could help me orient myself, a hint of light, a snatch of sound, the slight trace of Clearwater’s unique scent.

  Nothing.

  I suddenly felt very vulnerable.

  “What the hell just happened?” I asked, not surprised to hear the little shakiness in my voice. I wasn’t used to being at someone else’s mercy and didn’t like the feeling in the least.

  “You stepped across my threshold.”

  “So?”