The Talented

by Steve Delaney

  THE TALENTED

  by

  Steven Delaney

  CHAPTER ONE

  The pain woke up just before I did. It pulsed in dull waves flowing from the base of my skull to behind my eyes. I didn’t dare open them. I didn’t need them to know I was already having a bad day. I couldn’t move freely. My body was slouched in a cold metal folding chair, my hands secured behind my back with thick plastic zip-ties. My bottom lip felt swollen and tasted like blood. I kept my eyes shut. There was a man standing a few feet in front of me radiating equal parts hostility and anxiety. He was nervous because his boss was coming to talk to me…someone named Mr. Usher. And on top of it all, he really had to pee. The combination of all those factors made him a very excitable guy. Did I tell you that he enjoyed anchovies on his pizza and that his favorite ice cream flavor was spumoni? Or that he hoped that his oldest son might go to Harvard yet feared his youngest would go to prison. Or that he dreamed that one day he would run his own beachfront bar in South Carolina?

  Are you wondering how I knew all this about someone whom I’ve never met? Do you suspect that I’m about to claim psychic powers? You should. I’m connected to everything around me as if it was all part of my own body, controlling people and objects with the same ease with which you control your hands. It’s as if I’m surrounded by an invisible bubble, and everything within it is under my complete control. I can expand the bubble around other people, giving me unfettered access to their thoughts and feelings, perhaps to nudge them to another direction. It’s best not to force it too much, though. The human psyche can be very delicate, and once broken it’s hard to repair, even for me.

  I can also play around with anything inside the imaginary bubble, move it around, change its temperature, that sort of thing. Last year a young woman was crossing Woodward Avenue while texting her girlfriend about the crazy date she had the night before. I just happened to be walking by when a taxi skidded around the corner like a bat out of hell, heading right for the woman. Without even realizing what I was doing I had reached out with my mind and pushed her out of the path of the wild cab. That was a rare moment of altruism. It doesn’t happen often.

  I spent ten long years in a mental hospital with nothing to do but practice on my fellow patients and have become very good at what I do. Maybe I’m not so proud of some of the side effects (collateral damage?) that happened during the learning process, but rarely was any permanent harm done. A lot of the time I worked on cures. It was like a game, and I sent many of my friends home happy. I couldn’t fix everyone. My mentor and friend, Gus, is still in a coma, but that wasn’t my doing. He has abilities like mine, so we speak mind-to-mind.

  So I can do all this crazy stuff like some kind of comic book hero (villain?), but don’t ask me to explain how, because I simply don’t understand it. Gus once explained to me his theory that the powers come from subatomic particles and quantum physics, but he didn’t like to talk about it, so I didn’t push the issue. His explanations of things are impossible to understand, anyway. Besides, the science doesn’t interest me. I just want to know why. Why do I have these abilities? What am I supposed to do with them besides get myself into trouble?

  My latest troubles started earlier in the evening when I’d stopped by the Olympus Casino. It’s located in the heart of the tiny Greektown neighborhood near downtown Detroit. It’s called a neighborhood but it’s not much more than a few blocks worth of tasty eateries and charming little shops. Any visitor to Detroit should take at least one meal there, and it’s a surprisingly safe area by our standards, unless you cheat the local casino out of thousands of dollars on a regular basis, you know, like I do. What can I say? It pays the bills. I never claimed to be a saint. I’m just a guy trying to make a living like everyone else.

  The Athenian restaurant next to the casino captures the feeling of Greektown perfectly— every table alight with tiny candles set in faceted amber glass. In the dim atmosphere, the candlelight reflects playfully off the many wineglasses, which are kept full by mustachioed waiters wearing gleaming white aprons over their shirts and narrow black ties. Bacchus himself would be proud. Yes, Greektown is one of the few areas in the city worth visiting, and the wine-warmed mood of the Athenian can be found throughout the district. Anywhere, that is, except for the Olympus Casino next-door.

  The designer of the casino must have found inspiration in the labyrinth of King Minos, just before going completely insane. Instead of separating the slots into their own area, the entire casino floor was awash in a sea of flashing slot machines arranged in a maze of diagonals and dead ends. The slots were raised on platforms of varying heights, so if you happened to look up from one of the long, narrow craps tables after rolling the dice, you would see no way out from your tiny gambling oasis. If you continued to look up, you would see a magnificent crystal chandelier suspended from the ceiling four stories above. The glass walls of the second, third and fourth floors overlooked the busy gaming floor below.

  As I emerged between two rows of chrome video poker machines and stepped down to approach my favorite blackjack table, a nagging feeling in my gut bloomed. Bad vibrations. These gut instincts are my brain’s way of warning me to take a step back and look deeper. I expanded my consciousness and let the thoughts and feelings wash over me. In a casino, that can be an unpleasant experience. Greed, excitement and desperation blended with frantic srategizing, and not a few of the patrons lusted after the attractive young cocktail waitresses. Yet I felt a kinship with my fellow gamblers. An undercurrent of loneliness and isolation ran under their thoughts, even for the laughing ones accompanied by friends. Lonely in a crowded room. My kind of people.

  Alarm flashed through someone’s thoughts…a security guard of some kind. I could “see” a clear image of a small Asian man pointing at a fuzzy image of me on a video monitor. That was my cue to flee the scene. I used to ignore these visions and dismissed them as hallucinations. Now I know that they are images from the real world, and may depict scenes from the past, present or even the future. I learned the hard way that I could ignore them only at my own peril, so I calmly turned around and stepped back into the glittering maze of slots. Three hard men in cheap suits entered the labyrinth and spread out, hunting me. They radiated aggression like skunks emit stink, so keeping my distance was not difficult. I zigged right and zagged left, then doubled back until the way out revealed itself.

  At the front exit, an absurdly large and muscular man loomed in a black suit and sunglasses, looking like one of the Blues Brothers on steroids. He listened to his earpiece, and under the cheap black sunglasses his eyes focused on me. As I approached I projected a thought to him: Gun! Behind you! He whirled away, his fear rolling over me like sprinkles of ice water as I walked out the door. I smiled softly and looked back at the casino thinking that sometimes it’s just too easy being me. This was just before my right foot missed the first stair and sent me tumbling down six marble steps. The back of my head thudded against the sidewalk, driving my front teeth into my bottom lip. Darkness played at the edge of my vision, then all went black.

  This brings us back to me waking up bound to a metal chair with the King Kong of headaches pounding in my head. Still keeping my eyes closed, I opened my mind’s eye and observed my surroundings. We were in a storage closet filled with cases of hard liquor and assorted bar supplies. The nervous man who stood before me turned his focus for a moment to the Jack Daniels, tempted, wanting just a small sip to take the edge off. That gave me an idea, but for the moment I took a deep breath and focused on him. Into him. His name was John LeBlanc, and he was the director of security at the casino. He was worried about being fired, and about how he would support his wife and sons if he were let go. John had known about me for weeks, but could not figure out ho
w I kept beating the odds. Finally, he called his boss, Mr. Usher, who replied only with, “The next time he comes in, grab him. Hold him there until I arrive.” Usher made his disappointment in John’s failure to catch me in the act very clear.

  One of the main drawbacks to my abilities is that they give me way too much empathy for people who have little to give in return. I didn’t want John to go back to his family unemployed, drunk, carrying a banker’s box full of his personal effects. That being said, I was not looking forward to meeting the fear-invoking Mr. Usher, either. I pulled back out of John’s head and opened my eyes.

  He lifted up a card, apparently my driver’s license. “It’s about time you woke up, Mr. Adam Sharpe. I have some questions for you, and it’s in your best interests to answer with complete openness and honesty. Am I clear?”

  “Not really,” I said, trying to appear disoriented. “Who are you and what’s going on here? Am I still at the casino?”

  He squatted down so that our eyes were at the same level, and his narrowed. “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you? Do you think I don’t know what you’ve been doing? You’ve been scamming my blackjack tables for weeks, and I need to know how. How have you been cheating my casino? Those dealers were using more decks than is standard, with random, mixed-up cards added. I designed the system myself. There’s no way you could’ve counted those cards. But you were cheating somehow, no doubt about that.” For another moment he considered opening the bourbon. “No one is that lucky.”

  Not feeling very lucky, I flashed my most innocent smile and said, “Look, I just have really good instincts about blackjack, that is all. What possible evidence could you have that I was cheating?”

  “No one’s that good. It’s statistically impossible to win as much as you have consistently. If you were smarter you’d lose more on purpose, make it less obvious. So, I ask you again, how have you been doing it?”

  I sensed that someone was approaching the closet and I extended my thoughts to…her. There was a bartender named Julie hesitating at the “Do Not Disturb” sign hanging on the closet door, needing a bottle of Absolut Vodka. I threw my will into that need, enflaming the urgency to the point of panic. Julie pushed open the door and stormed in, eyes wild, looking for the vodka. As John turned to face her, I pulled at the zip ties, augmenting my physical strength with my gift, and the ties snapped painfully. Then I shifted all my focus to the light in the room, feeling it reflecting off my body. This is one of my more difficult tricks. I willed that light to gently bend around my form, to flow around me without touching. I’ve spent endless hours practicing this in front of a mirror, and when I get it right, I become completely invisible. The problem is that it takes all my concentration to do it right, and if I try to move or walk around, I become partially visible, like a translucent ghost image of myself.

  Julie spotted the bottle she was looking for, snatched it up and fled the room. At the sound of the snapping zip ties John turned back to face me, and when he didn’t see me his intense shock hit me in a wave that almost ruined my concentration. He reached under his jacket, pulled out a gun, and ran from the room.

  I steadied my breathing and slowly began to walk to the door. I opened it gently, then stepped into the service hallway. The area could not have been more different from the rest of the casino. The industrial white paint on the walls was so dull it looked like primer, and it was marred in numerous places with small gouges in the drywall and greasy black streaks. The long tubes of ancient fluorescent lighting cast their greenish glow over everything, save for the sputtering, dying tube at the end of the hall. The unpainted concrete floor was pitted and spider-webbed with tiny cracks. A concrete floor meant that this must be the ground floor, maybe even a basement. There was a distinct limestone smell in the damp air. Definitely the basement. I was alone for the moment amid the hum of the fluorescents, and dropped the invisibility so I could extend my consciousness back into the mind of Julie the bartender. I gently prodded her to think about the layout of the building and the location of all the exits. In her memory I saw her struggle to open the dented metal door at the end of the hallway and climb the stairs, but then her mind wandered. I pulled away from her, not willing to risk hurting her by forcing her mind open again. The stairs were a good enough start, I hoped.

  Once I knew where to begin, all I had to worry about was being seen, so I tried to bend the light again, but a sharp pain flashed through my already aching head, so I stopped. That kind of pain is a warning, and if you ignore it and try to push through it, permanent brain damage can occur. My best friend and mentor, Gus, has the only mind I have ever encountered with abilities that rival my own. He pushed himself too hard about 25 years ago and has been in a coma ever since.

  So I gave my brain a rest and calmly walked toward the stairs, trying to look like I belonged there. The door to the stairwell was painted with the same flat whitewash as the hall, covering the hinges, the spherical doorknob… everything. The knob didn’t turn, but as I pulled, the door opened a crack, and as I continued it scraped loudly against the cement floor. So much for stealth. The stairwell was windowless and dimly lit. It smelled like stale cigarette smoke. Each step I took was easily heard, and as I began up the stairs, hushed voices echoed down from above. While the words were too quiet to discern, the fear of being caught was clear. Smokers. Must be. A door opened above me, and I saw it almost shut as I rounded the corner. The lock didn’t catch. Bonus for me. I stepped over the cigarette butts that littered the stairs, and stopped with my hand on the doorknob.

  I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Expanding my mind beyond the door I could “see” the small room beyond. The only notable feature of the room was the presence of a small freight elevator with only one button marked “Up”. Dirty grooves worn into the gray linoleum marked a path from the elevator out into a hallway that circled around the perimeter of the building, ending in double doors hinged on the outside like on a saloon from the Wild West. Those grooves were my ticket out of here.

  I pulled open the door and briskly followed the grooves down the hall. A pair of casino employees approached. Their crisp, red polyester jackets with gold nametags meant that these were front-of-the-house employees. All of a sudden I realized that they were looking right at me so I quickly influenced their thoughts as best I could to ignore me. They walked right by, a small wave of suspicion in their way, but kept walking. Then one stopped.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he called out. This area is for employees only. You shouldn’t be back here.” I froze, then casually turned to face him. My accuser looked familiar. He wore a bushy mustache and round silver spectacles that made him look a bit like Teddy Roosevelt, and surprisingly his nametag read “Ted”. Maybe he was a history buff. Time to improvise.

  “Good work, Ted!” I replied with a proud smile. “I’ll make sure that John knows you’re watching out for intruders. Security is everyone’s responsibility, not just something for John and I to worry about.”

  Doubt played across Teddy’s face and thoughts. “John?” he asked uncertainly.

  I raised my eyebrows to express my disbelief. “John LeBlanc the security chief? My boss?”

  Ted thought about the secretive security people at the casino. Nobody really knew them. They were on the staff, but at the same time they stood apart. To those guys, everyone on the staff was potentially stealing from the company. And then there was the issue of dress code. The lower level security folks wore dark suits and patrolled the casino floor, but the big shots in security sat in the back of the house, analyzing video for signs of cheating. What a life. It’s like money for nothing. And this hip-looking young man with the split lip wore expensive-looking jeans and a blazer. He might just be some smart-mouthed kid, but if he were actually telling the truth here, he could make life very difficult. Not worth the trouble.

  “Oh, right,” Ted replied amiably, “Of course. Sorry for bothering you. You really should wear a badge like the rest of us, though.”

&nbs
p; My smile melted into a frown. My voice dropped down a register, I responded, “We are not like the rest of you, Ted. Remember that.”

  Poor Ted turned white and squeaked out, “Of course,” before scampering off feeling lucky to still have a job. I felt bad for scaring the guy. Well, not too bad. He will get over it.

  The groove in the floor continued just as I had envisioned it, ending at a thick set of double doors with dirty steel kick plates at the bottom and cloudy fiberglass windows at the top. Pressing my face against the window, I could see an empty loading dock big enough to accommodate three trucks. The garage doors were closed, probably locked, but next to them was a regular door with a bright exit sign suspended above it.

  By some miracle I got all the way to the fire exit unmolested. The push-bar door handle was labeled with a red sign saying EMERGENCY EXIT – ALARM WILL SOUND. I paused for a moment, took a breath, and pushed my way through, bracing myself for a blaring alarm. It never came. The door opened up into a wide alleyway facing the dock of the building next door. The sour but familiar smell of old urine hung in the air of the calm September night. Although nobody was in sight it was clear to me that there were other minds in the shadows of this alley and not all of them were sane. I rushed past the dumpster toward the street. The line of taxis that waited along the street seemed fortuitous enough. I stepped out of the alley and turned right, only to see the bottom of the marble steps leading up to the front entrance. Standing six feet in front of me was none other than John LeBlanc, turning his head in my direction. With as much haste as I dared, I drew back into the shadows and kept still in the fetid air. The sound of footsteps approached the entrance to the alley, then stopped. LeBlanc wasn’t sure of what he saw, but had no desire to enter that alley on no more than a hunch. The steps receded back toward the casino entrance.

  I stealthily made my way to the street at the far end of the alley, then walked away. After what seemed like an eternity a cab approached, so I hailed it and headed for home.