James Patterson - Thriller - Stories to Keep You Up All Night

James Siegel says the most common question he's asked by readers is, Where do you get your ideas? His standard answer is, I don't know-do you have any? The real answer, of course, is, Everywhere. Siegel tends to write about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. Being a self-described "ordinary person," Siegel doesn't find it hard to place himself in the protagonist's shoes. Riding the Long Island railroad for instance-where attractive women would sometimes occupy the seat beside him-sent Siegel into reveries of what if? That ended up as Derailed-the story of an ordinary ad guy whose life goes awry when he meets a woman on the train. Adopting kids in Colombia gave him the notion for Detour, where an adoption goes terribly, murderously wrong. And then there was the day he was lying in a massage room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. The masseuse touched his neck and said, What's bothering you? Siegel's response: How do you know something's bothering me? And she said, Because I'm an empath.

Siegel was puzzled.

An empath? What's that?

I sit in a dark motel room.

It's pitch-black outside, but I've pulled the shades down tight anyway, so she won't see me when she walks in. So she'll be sure to turn away from me to switch on the light.

I don't like the dark.

I live on Scotch and Ambien so I never have to stare at it, because sooner or later it becomes the dark of the confessional and I'm eight years old again. I can smell the garlic on his breath and hear the rustle of his clothing. For a moment, I'm a shy, sweet-natured, baseball-crazy boy again, and I physically shrink away from what's coming.

Then everything turns red and the world's on fire.

I look back in anger, because anger is what I've become-a fist of a man.

Anger is what cost me my home, and anger is what put me into court-ordered therapy, and anger is what finally kicked me off the LAPD and into hotel security, where I can be angry without killing anyone.

Not yet.

You've heard of the hotel I work in. It's considered top-shelf and is patronized by various Hollywood wannabes and occasional bona fide celebrities. As downward spirals go, mine hasn't sucked me to the bottom yet, only to Beverly and Doheny.

I get to wear a suit and earpiece, something like a Secret Service man. I get to stand around and look semi-important and even give orders to the hotel employees who don't get to wear suits.

She was a masseuse in the hotel spa.

Kelly.

She was known for her deep-tissue and hot stone. I first talked to her in the basement alcove where I went to be alone-but I'd noticed her before that. I'd heard the music seeping out of her room on my way to the back elevators, and when she entered the basement to grab a smoke, I complimented her on her taste. Most of the hotel masseuses were partial to Enya, to Eastern sitar or the monotonous sound of waves lapping sand. Not her. She played the Joneses-Rickie Lee and Nora and Quincy, too, on occasion.

"Do your customers like it?" I asked her. She shrugged. "I don't know. Most of them are just trying to not get a hard-on."

"Occupational hazard, I guess?"

"Oh, yeah."

She was pretty, certainly. But there was something else, a palpable aura that made it feel humid even in full-blast air-conditioning.

I believe she noticed the ugly swelling on the knuckles of my right hand, and the place in the wall where I'd dented it.

"Bad day?"

"No. Pretty ordinary."

She reached out and touched my face, fanning her fingers across my right cheek. Which is more or less when she told me she was an empath.

I won't lie and tell you that I knew what an empath was.

A look had come over her when she touched my face-as if she'd felt that part of me which I rarely touch myself, and then only in the dark before the Johnny Walker has worked its magic.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"For what?"

"For whatever did this to you."

This is what an empath can do-their special gift. Or curse, depending on the day.

I learned all about empaths from her over the next few weeks. As we talked in the basement, or bumped into each other on the way into the hotel, or grabbed smokes outside on the corner.

Empaths touch and know. They feel skin and bone but they touch soul. They see through their hands. Everything-the good, the bad and the truly ugly.

She saw more ugly than she wanted to.

The ugliness had begun to get to her, to send her into a very dark place.

It was one of her customers, she explained.

"Mostly I just see emotions," she confided, "you know, happiness, sadness, fear-longing-all that. But sometimes…sometimes I see more…I know who they are, understand?"

"No. Not really."

"This guy-he's a regular. The first time I touched him, I had to pull my hands away. It was that strong." "What?"

"The sense of evil. Like touching-I don't know…a black hole." "What kind of evil are we talking about?" "The worst."

Later, she told me more. We were sitting in a bar on Sunset having drinks. Our first date, I guess. "He hurts kids," she said.

I felt that special nausea. The kind that used to subsume me back in the confessional, when he would come for me, that dark wraith of hurt. The nausea that came when my little brother dutifully followed me into altar-boyhood and I kept my mouth zipped tight like a secret pocket. Don't tell…don't tell. There's a price for not telling. It was paid years later, on the afternoon I found my sweet, sad brother hanging from a belt in our childhood bedroom. Over his teenage years, he'd furiously sought solace in various narcotics, but they could only do so much.

"How do you know?" I asked Kelly.

"I know. He's going to do something. He's done it before."

When I told her she might want to report him to the police, she shot me the look you give to intellectually challenged children.

"Tell them I'm an empath? That I feel one of my clients is a pedophile? That'll go over well."

She was right, of course. They'd laugh her out of the station.

It was maybe a week later, after this customer had come and gone from his regular appointment and Kelly was looking particularly miserable, that I volunteered to keep an eye on him.

"How?"

We were lying in my bed, having taken our relationship to the next level as they say, both of us using sex as a kind of opiate, I think-a way to forget things.

"His next appointment?" I asked her. "When is it?"

"Tuesday at two."

"Okay, then."

I waited outside the pool area where the clients saunter out looking sleepy and satiated. He looked frazzled and anxious. She'd slipped out of the room while he undressed to tell me what he was wearing that day. She needn't have bothered-I would've known him anyway.

He carried his burden like a heavy bag.

When he got into the Volvo brought out from the hotel-parking garage, I was already waiting in my car.

I followed him onto the 101, then into the valley. We exited onto a wide boulevard and stayed on it for about five miles, finally making a turn at the School Crossing sign.

He parked by the playground and sat there in his car. It came back.

The paralytic sickness that made me want to crawl into a ball.

I stayed in the front seat and watched as he exited the car and sidled up to the fence. As he took his glasses off and wiped them on the pocket of his pants. As he scoped out the crowd of elementary-school kids flowing out the front gate. As his attention seemed to fixate on one particular boy-a fourth-grader maybe, a sweet-looking kid who reminded me of someone. As he began to follow this boy down the street, edging closer and closer the way lions separate calves from the herd. I watched and felt every bit as powerless and inert as I did back when my brother bounded down the steps of our house on the way to his first communion.