Rob Thurman - All Seeing Eye

Not one time… until the very first and last time.

“What’s happening? What is so wrong with this place?” Meleah was confused as she pulled the chain over her neck and tried to press the ring into my hand. I jerked my hand back and let the ring fall to the ground.

“It’s home,” I said bleakly. Hector had told Meleah about my file, my past, because she knew-I saw it in her eyes.

Stricken, then determined, she looked from me to the house and back. “No. It can’t be here. You can’t do it here.” She crouched and reclaimed the ring. “Jackson is right, Hector. We can’t ask him to do this. No one can ask him to do this.”

“How did Fujiwara know?” I demanded, as Hector and the others-Thackery, who had a career on the line if not a soul, joining in, too-struggled and sweated in the god-awful heat with a machine that had to weigh more than six hundred unwieldy pounds. “About this place? Is it on your list? In your Big Book of Bloody Massacres?” I’d trusted him, not once but twice, and how stupid had I been to go down this treacherous and broken road again?

“Jackson, God, no.” Hector’s hair was soaked, his breath heavy with exertion. But that’s all it was heavy with. I didn’t hear any guilt. Although I’d not looked at Fujiwara twice, had I? When it came to industrial espionage and a rampant run of sociopaths, ex-con man or not, I was out of my depth. In all of this, I doubted once that I’d actually grasped what was happening around me. “All the places on the list are at least fifty years old. The more time that has passed, the more time the ether has to fray. But it doesn’t matter. Even if it didn’t work that way, I wouldn’t have let them put your house on the list. I wouldn’t do that to Charlie’s friend, and I sure as hell wouldn’t do that to my friend.”

That word, that goddamn word that came so fucking easily to him.

I looked back at the house where Boyd had taken it all from me: my mother, my sister, my innocence, an innocence I hadn’t then realized I had. He had taken my whole life, past, present, and future. He’d taken it all, every breath, every step, every decision, until my dying day. I was who I was, every cell in me, because of him. He had made me more than my mother’s womb ever had.

Because I had let him.

But now, maybe I could unmake some of that. I couldn’t change the past he had gobbled up, but there was a chance I could rip the present and the future out of his long-dead hands. I couldn’t do it for myself, and I was an unparalleled expert at doing things for me and only me, yet I could do it for Charlie. I could do it for that homely kid who’d refused to take no for an answer and helped me when I’d needed help the most. I’d thought I’d been surviving Cane Lake no problem. I’d been wrong. I hadn’t been surviving it; I’d been becoming numb. If Charlie hadn’t been there, poking and prodding, waking me up, showing me there was a life outside the fence, I’d have stayed. Boyd had made me, all right, but add two more years of Cane Lake on top of that, and I wouldn’t have an Abby hovering around the edges of my life. I wouldn’t have Houdini. I wouldn’t have enough to offer even a dog, and they only gave-they didn’t take.

One person I hadn’t managed to push away and a dog. Some people wouldn’t consider that much of a life, but compared with what it would’ve been without Charlie’s influence on me, it was a miracle of one. Whether he knew it or not, Charlie was giving me a chance at another miracle, if I would take it. I could pay him back and put this all behind me in one fell swoop.

I closed my eyes. The heat from above became somehow hotter. I was an ant, and someone had shoved a magnifying glass between the sun and me. Is that you up there playing around, Boyd? No. There’s no up there. If there was, there’d be a down there, and that’s where your wide ass would be burning for eternity.

There was no hell for Boyd, I knew that. It was all right. There was another way to banish him from existence… by banishing him from my life.

I opened my eyes, took off my glove, and held my hand out to Meleah. “Give me the ring. Give me Charlie.”

“Jackson,” she started, already shaking her head.

“It’s all right. Just… don’t let me trip over my own two feet and touch anything else.” I tried for a smile. It didn’t feel particularly encouraging. She must have seen something, however, as she carefully placed the ring and chain on my palm. It was cool, a circle of relief on hot skin.

“Four minutes.” Hector’s countdown was followed by the thud of six hundred pounds hitting the ground. A few seconds later, there was a hum that vibrated up and down my spine as heavy and pulsating as a hive of enraged hornets. “Machine is up and good to go.”

He hoped. I wasn’t as sure. Fujiwara hadn’t needed to bluff before. He’d been what I didn’t believe existed: a ghost. We hadn’t suspected him, seen him, or found any evidence at all that it had been him. I’d felt sorry for the son of a bitch, having to endure Thackery’s rages. He’d fooled us all, seemingly without effort. I had the feeling he was somehow doing the same now.

I closed my hand around the ring. It wasn’t as if I opened myself up to Charlie. It wasn’t as if I’d opened myself up to anyone since this had first begun sixteen years ago, when I’d picked up Tessa’s pink shoe. What I had didn’t come with an off switch, or hell, I’d have taken a simple mute. But right now, there was only the taste of old memories, nothing new.

My eyes drifted to Fujiwara. Flat on his stomach with his hands cuffed at the small of his back, he had his head turned to one side, and although the blood remained a steady run from his nose, he was still grinning. His teeth were red, but the smile was as happy as they came. For a man in a shitload of trouble, he didn’t seem to feel that he’d done anything but come out on top.

“Why’d he let himself get caught?” I asked abruptly, turning to Hector. “You said it before: we never caught a glimpse of him. Now he just gives himself away. Why? There has to be a reason.”

“Three minutes,” Thackery snapped before Hector could reply. “We don’t have time to delve into the mind of this insane piece of garbage now.”

All of the things Fujiwara had managed to accomplish without detection before, that didn’t say insanity to me. It said he was smart, smarter than all of us standing there. He’d let us know who he really was for a purpose, and it wasn’t aimed at simply throwing me off. If that’s all he wanted, he would’ve made another try at killing me-fourth time’s the charm.

Something was off. I’d known with the car bomb at the restaurant that he was as good as the best of con men when it came to distraction. That, though… that had been nothing.

This… this was a true marvel of distraction.

But what was it misdirecting us from? Where was the hand in the pocket, lifting the wallet? What was the trick?

“Jackson, two minutes. I hate saying it, but Thackery’s right. We’re out of time.”

I focused on Hector. He stared back, unhappy but resolute. Thackery and he were both right, but not in the way they thought they were.

“I think we are. In more ways than one,” I said. It was too late. Whatever Fujiwara was doing in addition to stopping the project from cleaning up the mess, the mess being Charlie, there was nothing we could do about it now. He’d either failed and we were about to save Charlie, or he’d succeeded and I was about to relive a waking nightmare.

Without the shotgun, without the knife, how bad could it actually be? I closed my eyes and tightened the fist I’d made around the ring, the metal digging into my flesh.

Bad enough.