“Harry?”
Though he needed to tell her his theory, he was reluctant to begin. What he had to say would no doubt forever blow his image as Mr. Equanimity.
He took a pull on his beer, followed it with a deep breath, and plunged: “Suppose you had to deal with a sociopath… a psychotic with paranormal powers that made going up against him like duk-ing it out with an apprentice God. Psychic powers.”
She was gaping at him. The ring-pull on the beer can encircled her index finger, but she wasn’t popping it open. She appeared to be holding a pose for a painter.
Before she could interrupt, he said, “I don’t mean he can just predict the suit of a playing card chosen randomly from a deck, tell you who’s going to win the next World Series, or levitate a pencil. Nothing as small-time as that. Maybe this guy has the power to manifest himself out of thin air — and vanish into it. The power to’ start fires, to burn without being consumed, to take bullets without really being killed. Maybe he can pin a psychic tag on you the way a game warden might tag a deer with an electronic transmitter, then keep track of you when you’re out of his sight, no matter where you go or how far you run. I know, I know, it’s absurd, it’s crazy, it’s like stumbling into a Spielberg movie, only darker, something by James Cameron out of David Lynch, but maybe it’s true.”
Connie shook her head, incredulous. Opening the refrigerator door and putting the unpopped beer can back on the shelf, she said, “Maybe two should be my limit tonight.”
He urgently needed to convince her. He was aware of how quickly the night was slipping away, how fast dawn was coming.
Turning from the refrigerator, she said, ” Where’d he get these amazing powers?”
“Who knows? Maybe he lived too long under high-power electric lines, the magnetic fields caused changes in his brain. Maybe there was too much dioxin in his milk when he was a baby, or he ate too many apples contaminated with some bizarre toxic chemical, his house is right under a hole in the ozone layer, aliens are experimenting on him to give the National Enquirer a good story, he ate too damn many Twinkies, he listened to way too much rap music! How the fuck do I know?”
She stared at him. At least she was no longer gaping. “You’re serious about this.”
“Yeah.”
“I know, because in the six months we’ve worked together, that’s the first time you’ve ever used the F word.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Of course you are,” she said, managing a trace of sarcasm even under these circumstances. “But this guy… he’s just a bum.”
“I don’t think that’s his real appearance. I think he can be anything he wants to be, manifest himself in any form he chooses, because the manifestation isn’t really him… it’s a projection, a thing he wants us to see.”
“Isn’t this the next thing to a ghost?” she asked. “And didn’t we agree that neither of us believes in ghosts?”
He snatched the ten-dollar bill off the table. “If I’m so completely wrong, then how do you explain this?”
“Even if you’re right… how do you explain it?”
“Telekinesis.”
“What’s that?”
“The power to move an object through time and space with only the power of the mind.”
“Then why didn’t I see the bill floating through the air into my hand?” she asked.
“That’s not how it works. More like teleportation. It goes from one place to another, poof, without physically traveling the distance in between.”
She threw her hands up in exasperation. “Beam me up, Scotty!”
He glanced at his wristwatch. 8:38. Ticktock… ticktock…
He knew he sounded like a lunatic, better suited to the afternoon television talkshow circuit or late-night radio call-in programs than to police work. But he also knew he was right, or at least that he was circling the periphery of the truth if not yet at the heart of it.
“Look,” he said, picking up the fire-browned newspaper and shaking it at her, “I haven’t read it yet, but if you comb through this paper, I know you’ll find a few stories to add to that damn collection of yours, evidence of the new Dark Ages.” He dropped the paper, and the odor of smoke puffed from it. “Let me see, what are some of the stories you’ve told me lately, things you picked up from other papers, television? I’m sure I can remember some of them.”
“Harry—”
“Not that I want to remember. I’d rather forget, God knows.” He started to pace more or less in a circle. “Wasn’t there one about a judge in Texas sentencing a guy to thirty-five years in jail for stealing a twelve-ounce can of Spam? And at the same time, up in Los Angeles, some rioters beat a guy to death in the street, all of it recorded by newsmen on videotape, but no one really wants to further disturb the community by tracking down the killers, not when the beating was a protest against injustice?”
She went to the table, pulled out a chair, turned it backward, and’ sat down. She stared at the burnt newspaper and other objects.
He kept pacing, speaking with increasing urgency: “And wasn’t there one about a woman who got her boyfriend to rape her eleven-year-old daughter, because she wanted a fourth child but wasn’t able to have any more, so she figured she could be a mother to her little girl’s bastard? Where was that? Wisconsin, was it? Ohio?”
“Michigan,” Connie said somberly.
“And wasn’t there one about a guy beheading his six-year-old stepson with a machete—”
“Five. He was five.”
“—and a bunch of teenage boys somewhere stabbed a woman a hundred and thirty times to steal a lousy dollar—”
“Boston,” she whispered.
“—oh, yes, and there was that little jewel about the father who beat his preschooler to death because the boy couldn’t remember the alphabet past G. And some woman in Arkansas or Louisiana or Oklahoma laced her baby’s cereal with crushed glass, hoping to make her sick enough so the father would get a leave from the Navy and be able to spend some time at home.”
“Not Arkansas,” Connie said. “Mississippi.”
Harry stopped pacing, crouched beside her chair, face to face with her.
“See, you accept all these incredible things, incredible as they are. You know they happened. These are the nineties, Connie. The pre-millennium cotillion, the new Dark Ages, when anything can happen and usually does, when the unthinkable isn’t only thinkable but accepted, when every miracle of science is matched by an act of human barbarity that hardly raises anyone’s eyebrow. Every brilliant technological achievement is countered by a thousand atrocities of human hatred and stupidity. For every scientist seeking a cure for cancer there are five thousand thugs willing to hammer an old lady’s skull to applesauce just for the change in her purse.”
Troubled, Connie looked away from him. She picked up one of the misshapen slugs. Frowning, she turned it over and over between her thumb and forefinger.
Spooked by the uncanny speed with which the minutes changed on the liquid-crystal display of his wristwatch, Harry would not relent.
“So who’s to say there couldn’t be some guy in a lab somewhere who discovered something to enhance the power of the human brain, to magnify and tap the powers we’ve always suspected are within us but could never use? Maybe this guy injected himself with this stuff. Or maybe the guy we’re after, he’s the subject of the experiment, and when he realized what he’d become, he killed everyone at the lab, everyone who knew. Maybe he walks the world among us now, the scariest damn pod person of them all.”
She put down the deformed slug. She turned to him again. She had beautiful eyes. “The experiment thing makes sense to me.”