Rob Thurman - All Seeing Eye

Raising eyebrows, he gave the deadpan answer, “Always.” When I was up and moving, he added, “Third cubicle, take a seat.”

As I walked, I pictured how it would go in my head, how I hoped it would. I wasn’t smug or stupid enough to think it was going to be a piece of cake. Allgood was many things, a son of a bitch chief among them, but gullible he was not. I had one chance, and it was a damn slim one. Then I saw what waited for me in the cubicle, and that chance instantly evaporated. The equipment that had looked so familiar

… up close, it clicked. I recognized it from countless TV shows and movies. It was a lie detector. A damn lie detector. I froze with one hand resting on the back of the cheap plastic chair. Was I screwed? Let us count the ways.

“Sit down, Mr. Eye. I’ll hook you up personally.” At my elbow, my own private shark watched with an inscrutable gaze.

Outmaneuvered, I wasn’t used to it, and I didn’t like it. Then again, I doubted Hector much cared what I did or did not like. I felt my eyes go flat and distant, and then… I sat. What else was left to me? I was painted into a corner there was no getting out of. At his order, I took my gloves off while he pulled on his own pair, latex surgical ones. My movement revealed the tattoo on my palm. Allgood noticed it instantly. “Unusual.” He leaned in for a closer look. “Appropriate, though, for the All Seeing Eye.”

It was a tattoo of a wide-open eye taking up nearly the entire surface of the palm. I flexed my hand and said mockingly, “It’s cheaper than a billboard.”

“There’s no denying that. You seem to have advertising down to an art.” He shook his head and Velcroed a probe to my index finger. “Is there a reason it’s blue?”

Yeah, there was a reason. And that very reason meant the question wasn’t my favorite one. It was the kind that Abby had long learned to avoid and that Glory had already lived through the answer to. Tess was gone, but I carried her with me every day, etched on my skin. But I wasn’t hooked up to the polygraph yet, was I? Charlie’s brother could choke on his idle curiosity.

“No. No reason. And also, Hector, none of your goddamn business.”

“Fair enough,” he said, without offense. He looped a blood-pressure cuff around my upper arm and finally finished up with a strap around my chest. Pulse, blood pressure, and respiration, pinned down six ways from Sunday. It was common knowledge that this type of thing wasn’t foolproof, and an amoral bastard like me had no qualms about lying, but I’d seen enough of Allgood already to know he’d make the damn machine all but sit up and sing. Thanks, Glory, I thought with resignation. Now both of us are out of luck.

When Allgood finished with me, he said aloud, “Begin.”

From the other side, my unseen questioner started. He went through a list of basic questions, the usual drill for setting up a baseline of responses, I was guessing. Is your name blah blah? Do you have a sister named… on and on. At least they weren’t too personal. They could’ve been much worse. Hector was bound to know my past. He was a man who did his homework, and it was all in the public domain. Certainly it was to someone as connected as he seemed to be, and maybe to just about anyone else. After all, the shooting had been declared self-defense. It was part of my Child Protective Services record, not a criminal one that would’ve been sealed when I turned eighteen.

And then there were the newspapers. They’d had a field day. It was front-page news: White Trash Massacre! That’d been the local down-home paper. They didn’t hold much to journalistic ethics.

They even took pictures of the bloody porch of the house after the bodies were removed.

Bastards.

When my base reactions were captured, the real questions began. “I’m holding up a card,” came the first. “Is it blue?”

Je-sus. Trapped and subjected to this deadly dull crap. Not a fate worse than death but close. Damn close. “I don’t know,” I said flatly.

“Yes-or-no answers, Mr. Eye,” Allgood corrected firmly at my shoulder.

“It’s not a yes-or-no question,” I shot back, irritated. Too bad it wouldn’t keep on in this vein, but Hector knew about my gloves. Knew about me. He wouldn’t be fooled.

“Then how about we rephrase,” he said, taking over for the moment. “Do you know the color of the card?”

“No.” Smooth and unbroken, the line recorded my truth.

“Would you know the color of any of the cards your tester held up?”

As it stood now? “No.” Indifferently, I ran a short thumbnail along the fake wood beneath my hands.

“Then let’s try something different.” Allgood moved around to the other side of the testing area. When he returned, he had a watch in his hand. It was older, the metal worn and brimming with all sorts of goodies. Fatalistically, I watched as Hector let it fall into the palm of my hand. There was no way out of it now.

“Let’s start with his name.” Folding his arms, he put a foot on the metal frame of my chair and moved it and me a few inches so he could see my face… my eyes. I had the feeling Allgood’s instincts were as reliable as any lie detector. “Is it Marcus?”

And here we were.

“You know what? You have me.” Now, there was a truth you didn’t need a machine to register. He did have me, and I might as well face up to it. Between Glory, the machine, and Hector’s innate savvy, I didn’t have any recourse. No fucking recourse at all. “You own my balls, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it, so why don’t we speed this up.” I tossed the watch up, caught it, then slapped it down. “His name is Thomas Jerome Hickman. He went to Columbia University. He has a master’s in psychology, a wife named Beverly, a leaky toilet, an overweight cat called Alexander the Great with a leaky bladder to match, a mortgage that is eating him alive, and, oh

…” I smiled, a dark and curdled motion. “He’s wearing a pair of women’s underwear. Yellow panties with pink rosebuds. Big-girl undies, size fourteen. Too much sitting behind a desk, eh, Tommy?”

Hearing the faint sound of choking from behind the partition, it was almost worth it. Yeah, almost.

“Sir.” The voice wasn’t so blandly vanilla now. “That is absolutely not true, I swear. I can show you.” There was more choking, this time more pronounced. “I mean… no. Let me…”

I took pity, more on myself than on the invisible jackass. “Tighty whiteys,” I admitted with a snort. “But the rest is true.”

“It looks like Charlie was right about you.” Hector shook his head ruefully. There was still a healthy dose of skepticism in his eyes, but it was colored by a reluctant amazement. It was one thing to be open-minded, more for your brother than for yourself, but it was another altogether to actually see proof before your eyes. “I should’ve known. Charlie was right about everything.” The cautious wonder disappeared so quickly it should’ve qualified as a magic trick. “Ordinarily.”

And just like that, the almost-human Hector was gone, replaced once again by the embodiment of a true military man. Stiff upper lip, an even stiffer spine, and eyes empty and neutral. “Make yourself comfortable, Mr. Eye. You have a long day ahead of you.”

He wasn’t lying. For hours, I read person after person, all in lab coats and all with the most boring personal objects money could buy. Watches or wedding rings were the usual currency passed my way. Not one yo-yo or good-luck charm or whimsical key chain. Nope, it was a singularly mundane crowd here at Alcatraz. No flash, no pizzazz, no sense of personal style, not an ounce of showmanship. Abby would’ve been appalled and certain it was nothing a few sequins and rhinestones couldn’t have fixed. Sparkling lab coats for one and all. Step right up.