Литагент HarperCollins - Thriller - Stories To Keep You Up All Night

“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.

I couldn’t move.

He stepped up behind the boy and began conversing with him. I didn’t have to see the boy’s face to know what it looked like. The man reached out and grabbed the boy by the arm and I still sat there in the front seat of my car.

It was only when the boy broke away, when he turned and ran, when the man took a few halting steps toward him and then slumped, gave up—that I actually moved.

Anger was my enemy. Anger was my long-lost friend. It came in one red-hot surge, sending the sickness scurrying away in terror, propelling me out of the car, ready to finally protect him.

Joseph, I whispered.

My brother’s name.

The man slipped back into his car and drove away. I stood there with my heart colliding against my ribs.

That night, I told Kelly what I was going to do.

We lay in bed covered in sweat, and I told her that I needed to do this. The anger had come back and claimed me, wrapped me in its comforting bosom and said, You’re home.

I waited at the school the next afternoon, and the one after that. I waited all week.

He came the next Monday—parking his Volvo directly across from the playground.

When he got out, I was standing there to ask him if he could point me toward Fourth Street. When he turned and motioned over there, I placed the gun up against his back.

“If you make a sound, you’re dead.”

He promptly wilted. He mumbled something about just taking his money, and I told him to shut up.

He entered my car as docile as a lamb.

A mother stared at us as we drove away.

I went to a place in the valley that I’d used before, when the redness came and made me do certain things to suspects with big mouths and awful résumés. Things that got me tossed off the force and into mandated anger management where the class applauded when I said I’d learned to count to ten and avoid my triggers. Triggers were the things that set me off—there was an entire canon of them.

Men in collar and vestment. That was trigger number one.

We had to walk over a quarter of a mile to the sandpit. They’d turned it into a dumping ground filled with water the color of mud.

“Why?” he said to me when I made him stand there at the lip of the pit.

Because when I was eight years old, I was turned inside out. Because I killed my brother as surely as if I’d tied that belt around his neck and kicked away the chair. That’s why.

His body flew into the subterranean tangle of junk and disappeared.

Because you deserve it.

When I showed up at work the next day, she wasn’t there. I wanted to let her know; I wanted to ease her burden. When I called her cell—she didn’t answer.