“ Call me selfish. I wanted to get back to work too. They've had me caged up at Quantico. The bastard's out there free to kill and kill again, and I'm the prisoner now. Well, to hell with that.”
Kim admired her fire, the spirit that inflamed her soul, so visible in Jessica's terrific aura.
Jessica almost shouted, “I'm not going to play the part of some rabbit in a warren, waiting for that son of a bitch to snare me. I won't do that; I can't, at least not anymore.”
Kim said nothing, her face stern and emotionless, but her eyes fastened to Jessica's. Jessica feared how much of herself she'd already given away. “That sounds like a healthy attitude to me,” Kim finally replied. “Look, Jess, if you want to start chasing this monster immediately, why wait until we're in New Orleans with all the complications there. Let me have your ankles.”
Jessica breathed in deeply, and she slowly nodded while kicking off her second heel at the same time. “You really mean it? I mean… here, now… in the air?”
“ I can't think of a more peaceful environment in which a psychic might work, can you? Close as we're likely to come to the stars, the planets, God…”
“ Well… yes… I mean, if you're sure it's all right.”
“ It's actually very freeing, being among the clouds like this. So then, why not get started?”
“ Those scars are pretty well healed,” Jessica said as she placed her stocking ankles across Kim's lap.
And what about those of your heart?
“ All right… whatever you think best…” Jessica kept talking as Kim's eyes closed, her hands going over the nyloned ankles until she abruptly stopped.
11
Now that my ladder's gone. I must lie down where all the ladders start. In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
Kim asked that the cabin lights be shut off and all the window portholes be closed against the sun. She then told Jessica to go to the rear of the plane and remove her panty hose before returning her ankles to Kim's touch.
This done, Jessica returned, her natural skepticism returning too, for now she sat across from Kim and placed her bare legs across the coffee table between them, atop the file folders there. Kim then placed her hands around the old scars inflicted by Matisak some three and a half years before when, after sedating her, he'd cut her Achilles tendons and hung her up like a side of beef to be bled from the throat until dead.
No one before now, not even her lover in Hawaii, James Parry, had ever caressed the scar tissue about her Achilles tendons, not since “Teach” Matisak.
Kim's tender touch alone brought memories welling up inside Jessica, memories of a horrid night in Chicago when she first encountered and was snared by the maniac who signed his notes to her as Teach. He had fixated on her blood that night, and every night since his incarceration. She wished now she had killed him when she'd had the chance.
Kim Desinor got immediate psychic impulses, her jaw tightening and her face contorting with what she saw behind her closed eyelids. After almost five minutes of eerie silence in the plane, Jessica's mind pleaded to know if Kim could help her.
She had tried hypnosis without effect. She had tried medication and shrinks. Nothing. She had tried drink, and that had failed miserably.
“ He will come… he is driven to come for you. His only comfort now is in you…”
Jessica's mind screamed through her mental hallway. Tell me something I don 7 already know!
“ When the sky falls… he will come…when the sky falls.”
“ What?” Jessica was confused, wondering if the other woman might possibly be joking. “Isn't that a bit extreme, like Chicken Little0”
“ All I see is debris from a falling, black sky. Glass shards, water, lightning, the falling of planets…”
“ Planets?”
“ Stars and moon will fall… When the sky falls, he will attack.”
“ Beware the falling sky…” Jessica's lingering skepticism got the best of her. “Really?”
“ He plans to die with you; a suicide pact. Wants you to want him; wants you to end it with him…”
He was saying as much in his fucking blood poetics. “Is there any indication where he is now… at this moment?”
“ A dark, large area, perhaps a warehouse? Barn like… yes, light unable to penetrate. Others… other eyes looking on… perhaps animal eyes, lurid eyes all around… Large-eyed demons, cat's eyes, blackbirds or crows descending and rising and descending again…”
“ What, now we're talking about an aviary or a zoo?” Jessica's cynicism broke harshly into Kim's decidedly foggy vision. She'd not gotten much, only bits and pieces sluicing by like krill in the sea of her soul.
“ Matisak's a careful SOB; he's not going to try anything in a public place,” Jessica stated.
“ I'm sorry… that's all I'm getting. Perhaps later, I can do a psychometric reading on the items you brought along.”
“ So watch for falling skies, huh? Cats and crows with big eyes. That kind of thing…” Jessica's look was verging on disdain. She'd hoped for and expected far more; she'd offered up her own body as catalyst for the reading, and what she'd gotten was hardly worth it.
Kim cautioned her. “Often what I see, Jess, is merely a symbolic representation. The black crow, for instance, could be in reality an undertaker or a booze label, in which case this information must be taken with great care. A cat's eye could be a child's marble, a face mask, a brand of cereal or a logo for a paper mill. On that level, the image, say, of the falling planets, well, it could mean any number of things.”
“ Such as the end of the universe? The Big Bang returned?” Jessica pulled back her legs and located her high heels.
“ Anything,” continued Kim, “in an allegorical fashion.”
“ Oh, then we are talking Chicken Little.”
“ No, we're talking about a falling billboard sign with a sky backdrop, say, or a theater backdrop coming down, a ceiling, a roof caving in…or-'' She abruptly stopped short of what she'd failed to plan not to say.
“ Go on. What?” Jessica pressed, seeing Kim's fine features ravaged by concern. “If I see the roof caving in and I'm under it, he's got me?”
“ For all I know, you are the roof, Jessica.”
Jessica's face blanched white. The fear of a complete breakdown hadn't been totally ruled out by Dr. Lemonte either. She wondered just how much Lemonte had confided in Kim Desinor, psychic and shrink, just how much doctor-patient privilege meant to her so-called friend when confiding in another doctor about an interesting case involving a homicidal maniac recently escaped and seeking revenge and a release of his perverted lust against the doctor's patient-whose own fixation on and fear of this unholy human had led Jessica to a near-collapse of personality.
She stared at Kim Desinor, her mind turning to granite over the thought, the single question she feared asking the other woman: Am I an interesting guinea pig for you two shrinks to ponder over? Is that what I've become?
Jessica snatched up her panty hose and returned to the cockpit, where Ed Sand, a person she could talk to without any fear of psychoanalysis, might keep her laughing, at least until they landed in New Orleans.
New Orleans
If they were expecting a quiet reception on the ground, Kim knew the instant the plane landed that such an idea was literally gone-out the window, so to speak-when a motorcade of police vehicles careened up to the plane, causing her to wonder and stare.
Once the plane had safely landed and was taxiing for the hangar. Kim tore open the cockpit door to find Jessica and the pilot embracing. Kim had two sweeping sensations at once: a feeling of chagrin and a certainty that Jessica was behaving irrationally and out of character, not simply for Kim's benefit but because she could not help herself. Kim covered by shouting, “What the hell's going on outside the plane, Dr. Coran? I thought we were going to be 'secreted' in, remember?”