Rob Thurman - All Seeing Eye

Power and competence. It made me think of Cane Lake and cops. I’d had my fill of cops when I was fourteen, including the sympathetic ones. None of it made for good memories.

“Are you the…” He closed the door behind him and waited for the tinkling bells to quiet before he finished the question. “Are you the resident psychic?”

I’d long slipped my glove back on. Resting the broom against Abby’s desk, I folded my arms to regard him suspiciously. The disquiet I kept to myself. He wasn’t the past, but this guy was someone, all right. Someone who wanted something from me, and it was more than where Auntie Liz had hidden the family silver before she died. He wasn’t a cop. He didn’t quite have the tinfoil bite to him, but he was something. And whatever that might be was pinging hard on my radar.

“That depends on your definition of psychic,” I drawled. It was my show, but there were times the trappings of it grated. “Walk-ins are twenty-five bucks extra. Rates are posted in plain sight per Chamber of Commerce rules.” I jerked my chin in the direction of the black-and-gilt cursive, Abby’s doing, on the wall.

He wasn’t put out by my rudeness. “I’m not here for a reading,” he said politely with a vaguely Northern flavor to his voice. “Not yet, at any rate. I would just like to talk.”

“I charge by thirty-minute increments,” I droned on as if he hadn’t spoken. If he wasn’t here for the talent, I wasn’t going to waste the usual routine on him. “I have an hour window in my schedule. You want the whole thing or not?” I didn’t care either way. On one hand, I wasn’t one to turn away money. On the other, well, I wasn’t one to turn away money. I suppose that meant there was only one hand, a moneygrubbing paw blithely unaware of my caution. Or simply resistant to it.

“You’d charge to talk?” He blinked, torn between a tightly drawn amusement and mildly righteous outrage. “I’m not sure my expense account will cover that.”

“I’d charge to flip you off in traffic if I could work out the logistics.” I straightened. “My time is valuable. You can pay or you can walk. It’s your choice.”

He reached for his wallet without further argument, only saying, “There goes my dinner money.”

Yeah, cry me a river. I accepted the hundred dollars he forked over and repeated, “Twenty-five extra for walk-ins.”

He raised an eyebrow but passed more bills over. “Could we sit down?”

“Sure,” I said as I counted the money in a fast riffle. “Knock yourself out. You’ve got thirty minutes on the meter.”

Making his way past me into my office, he sat in the client chair and looked around. The doorstop immediately caught his eye. “Do you have an interest in phrenology, then?”

Wasn’t he up on the whole ball of wax? “Nope.” I sat back in my chair, slouching a bit and linking fingers across my stomach. “Bought it at a yard sale. A buck fifty. Good for propping the door open.” And it made me laugh at people’s gullibility.

“You don’t put stock in reading a person’s character by the bumps on their head, I’m guessing?” He was serious, even with the faintly dry flavor to the question. It only made him seem more out of place. In this business, you usually have two categories: slobbering believers or foaming-at-the-mouth skeptics. This guy didn’t come across like either one. He didn’t have the fire of a zealot or the cynicism of the doubting Thomas. In another lifetime, I might have been curious. In this one, I only wanted to see the door hitting his ass. Curiosity killed more than cats, I’d learned that the hard way. And if that made me the only closed-minded psychic in the Western Hemisphere, I’d learn to live with the title.

“Only if I put them there.” I opened the top drawer, pulled out a deck of cards, and started to deal them out. “So talk, already. I’m on a schedule, pal, even if you’re not.”

His eyes followed the cards as he said firmly, “I did say no reading.”

“It’s solitaire.” I lifted eyebrows at his insistence. “The only thing I’ll pick up from this is paper cuts.” If I weren’t wearing my gloves. The deck was clean and new. I was the only one who’d touched it, but I wasn’t taking a chance around this one.

He gave a rueful smile and apologized smoothly. “Sorry. I’m a little sensitive to maintaining the integrity of the experiment.”

Great. He was one of those. Now it made sense, although he still didn’t quite fit the profile. For all that they tried to be unbiased, most researchers, to use the word loosely, were either skeptics or believers. Trying to prove or disprove, one or the other. This guy, however, was so buttoned down that where he fell I simply couldn’t tell.

I flipped over three cards and said matter-of-factly, “I’m not one for poking and prodding, Mr…?”

“Dr. John Chang.” He offered his hand and said, “I apologize again for the rudeness.” It came out so easily, so naturally, that I was almost tempted to believe it. Almost. This wasn’t a man who spent a lot of his life apologizing.

“Yeah, you’re all about the rudeness,” I said sarcastically. The guy was doing an imitation of upstanding that was so stalwart and upright that it made my teeth hurt. I nodded my head at his hand. “I thought you didn’t want to compromise whatever project you’ve got going on.”

“I was guessing you wear those gloves for a reason.” And a good guess it was. He pulled his hand back when it was obvious I wasn’t going to shake it. Money bought my time; it didn’t buy any manners to go along with it. Especially not for someone who was very probably lying to me. “And you are?”

I was positive he already knew who I was long before he stepped foot across my threshold, but I shrugged mentally and went along with it. My name certainly wasn’t private information around the neighborhood. “Jackson Lee Eye.” Corny, eh? I was an extra from every Southern-fried, squeal-like-a-pig movie ever made. Despite my urban appearance, I still had the good-old-boy drawl… only I wasn’t particularly good, and I had learned to speak “purty” enough to flirt with the older clients. But they liked the drawl, and I kept it. Smooth as molasses.

He glanced over his shoulder to look at the painted letters on the tiny lobby’s picture window. “Ah, the All Seeing Eye.” The corner of his mouth quirked up. “Clever.”

“It pays to play to your audience,” I replied with an edge of mockery. I had no interest in proving myself to a possible academic who had nothing better to do with his time or to someone even more annoying like a flat-out liar, and it was pretty evident in my voice. If he thought I was a fake, my feelings wouldn’t exactly be hurt. He’d certainly spend less time sniffing around. “Time’s ticking away, Doc. Do you actually have anything to discuss besides my window treatment?”

“Sorry again.” Yeah, right. He turned back to face me with a rub of his finger across his upper lip. “I have to admit that I’ve researched you somewhat, Mr. Eye. Were you aware that you have a completely clean slate with the Better Business Bureau? Not one complaint. That’s unheard of in your profession. None of the others could make that claim.”

“Others?” I felt like groaning. This guy wasn’t messing around. Not content to focus on one fish, he was throwing a wide net out to catch whatever he could. It did, however, reinforce the conclusion that he was an academic, if a slightly shady one. The doctor probably came from a PhD rather than a medical degree. “You’ve visited a few of my esteemed colleagues?”

His smile transmuted to one more wry, mocking, and slightly predatory. If I had to put a label on it, I’d say it was that of a lion counting antelopes. When was enough enough? When was that belly full? Decisions, decisions. “A few,” he affirmed, noncommittally.