"Look, I'm not getting paid to be here yet. If you need anything, ask in a hurry and let me go."
This guy was some piece of work. First, he acted as if setting up his psych file was an annoying chore, and then he acted as if someone pushing around inside his head was an everyday event.
"Do you want to get a beer?" Wade asked suddenly, surprising himself as much as Dominick.
"What?"
"I've been here since six this morning. There's a little sports bar down the street… good nachos. Why don't we finish up down there?"
The unshaven New Yorker stared at him for a few seconds and then shrugged. "Yeah, sure. Why not? I'm not trying to be a pain. People have just been jacking me around since noon. I thought I'd be out of here a couple hours ago."
Three beers later, they were sitting in Spankey T's Sports Bar watching the Seattle Seahawks get killed by the Chicago Bears on a large-screen TV. Wade sat there struggling for a way to broach the subject of how Dominick had known about blocking a psychic entry. The problem solved itself when his companion turned to him during a time-out and asked, "Hey, where'd you learn telepathy?"
For a moment the question threw him. "I didn't learn it anywhere…"
Wade had never considered himself bigoted or socially biased. But hearing a word like «telepathy» come out of Dominick's mouth surprised him. He usually imagined overmuscled guys with Bronx accents who wore torn-up sweatshirts would speak in one- or two-syllable words.
"I learned to focus it," he went on, "at the Psychic Research Institute in Colorado."
"Really? Did your folks sell you?"
"What? No… I wanted to go. My folks were ready to burn me at the stake. How'd you know to block me?"
Dominick put his beer down. "Spent a couple years with kids like you in high school. Some old guys, doctors, paid my folks a lot of money to borrow me for a while."
The tiny hairs on Wade's arms began to prickle. "Why?"
"I can touch things-almost anything-and tell you where they've been and who else has touched them."
"Psychometry?"
"Yeah."
"Were you involved with a research center?"
"A what? No, it wasn't like that. These guys worked for NYU, in this little building off campus. They had about six of us. They made us do a lot of stupid things. Pretty useless. One guy a little younger than me had what you have-telepathy. He and I used to practice on each other."
Wade sat there, fascinated. Even at the institute, psychometry was an unusual ability. Dominick spoke of it in the same tone he might use to say he was good at calculus.
"So what made you join the police force?" Wade asked.
His companion's forehead wrinkled slightly, as though he wasn't sure how to answer. "I couldn't always, you know, do it… when they gave me things to examine. Sometimes I could see dozens of pictures about an object, who it belonged to, where it'd been. But sometimes I didn't see anything."
Wade didn't follow him. "So that made you want to be a cop?"
"No. One day Dr. Morris-he worked with me the most-shows up with this guy in a suit. I was about fifteen then. Anyway, they take me into a back room and hand me a ripped-up white sweater with dried blood all over it."
Wade went cold. "What happened?"
"I threw up." Dominick's voice dropped, and he seemed to slide uncomfortably back into the past.
"I'm sorry," Wade whispered. The description was too close to home.
"It wouldn't have been so bad," Dominick went on, "but they didn't believe everything I told them."
"What did you see?"
"A dark-haired guy with green eyes, wearing a black tux. He tore this girl's throat open with his teeth and started drinking her blood. Since she was wearing the sweater, I saw it all through her eyes. I gave a full description of the guy. Three witnesses, including an informant bartender, claimed to see someone who exactly matched the description leave the Garden Lounge with her less than an hour before she died."
"Did they ever arrest anyone?"
"No, I don't think so. I was just a kid."
"So you joined up to help?"
"Yeah, something like that."
Wade looked into his glass at the foaming beer. This man sitting next to him certainly wasn't someone he'd actively seek out as a friend. But he felt a strange companionship, an understanding.
"I forgot you're the staff shrink," Dominick said. "You think I'm cracked, don't you?"
"No, I was just thinking about how you got involved with the force. We have a lot in common. Maybe I'll tell you sometime."
Dominick looked away. "I gotta go. It's getting late, and I just flew in this morning."
"Where're you staying?"
"I'm going to find a hotel. Someone told me apartments are pretty cheap. I'll start looking tomorrow."
"Compared to New York? Hell, yes. Hey, my couch folds out into a bed. You could crash there tonight. We can pick up a newspaper on the way home. You could go through the classifieds and call on apartments from my place tomorrow. I'll be at work all day."
"You married?"
"Me? No, if I was, she'd divorce me for criminal negligence. Job keeps me hopping." He jumped off the barstool. "Come on."
Dominick looked too tired to argue. They picked up a pizza and a newspaper on the way home. That was the beginning.
Dominick found a one-bedroom apartment only a mile from Wade's place. It often struck Wade as odd that the two of them had little in common and never discussed personal matters, but they spent four or five evenings a week together, just watching movies or going out for beer. Some nights, Wade would sit at his desk in the living room and work while Dominick just hung around entertaining himself. They seemed comfortable without having to talk.
Instead of sticking out like a sore thumb, Dominick fit in well at the Portland precinct. He was fair, hard, tough, never late for work, and wrote up reports with remarkable clarity and accuracy. He displayed a few eccentricities. For one, he carried a.357 revolver instead of a more standard-issue automatic pistol. He said he'd learned to shoot with this gun and refused to replace it. And two, he seemed to possess no sense of humor-none. But these things were minor in the grand scheme.
"I wish we could clone him," Captain McNickel said.
The one problem Wade had with his friend was an unfamiliar feeling of blindness. He hadn't realized how heavily he relied upon telepathy in his job. With Dominick, he had to actually judge facial expressions and reactions. Making a correct analysis seemed impossible.
"Why don't you let me in?" he asked one day while riding to lunch in Dominick's police car. "I'm trained at this, you know. I could make a decent evaluation if you'd just stop blocking me."
"No. How'd you like it if I picked up a pair of your underwear and told you who you screwed last week?"
Wade winced. "It wouldn't be like that. Most people think about sex forty times a day. I'm used to that."
"Just drop it."
Wade became so concerned that he suggested to Captain McNickel they assign Dominick's evaluations to another psychologist.
"I can't do it," Wade said. "I'm used to knowing exactly what they're thinking. A normal psychologist would be accustomed to relying on instinct, on judgment calls. I'm not."
"I hear you two have been hanging out together a lot."
"Yes, we have… we have some things in common."
"You two? Like what?"
"I don't know. We both like football."
"Yeah, right."
"Just think about what I said, Cap, okay?"
McNickel took the advice under consideration, but Dominick always played the role of the perfect cop, so nothing came of it.
Years passed and little changed. On the morning of March 2, 2008, Wade and Dominick were riding around at the end of a night shift with a rookie trainee. The shift had been boring and uneventful. They were almost ready to call it a night and get some breakfast when a female voice on the radio asked them to check out a noise disturbance. The rookie acknowledged the call, and Dominick rolled his eyes.