CHAPTER TWO
I asked the cab driver to drop me off four blocks away from my hotel, then reached for my wallet to pay the fare. It wasn’t there. My driver’s license. My wallet. LeBlanc still had my wallet. I focused on the wallet in my mind, and I saw it lying atop a mahogany desk in a large office, next to a matte black revolver. The office décor must have been considered opulent in the late 1970’s. Three of the walls were paneled in walnut, and the plush Harvest Gold shag carpeting was still mostly in good condition. A large, heavy antique globe sat next to the fourth wall, which was made of glass, and overlooked twisting rows of slot machines. So, the wallet was still there. I considered if it was worth going back for it. Credit cards could be cancelled, and the driver’s license could be replaced. However, there was a picture of my real mother in there, the only one I had. That could not be replaced. Going back would be dangerous, if the gun on the desk was any indication, but I had to get that picture back. Just not today. I needed to rest and give my headache time to go away.
When the taxi stopped I shamefully willed him to think that I had already paid him, and got out. I stood and took a deep breath, reaching out to detect anyone who might be following me. No one seemed to be taking any notice of me other than a homeless person down the street planning to ask me for money. I walked past him, feeling guilty that I had nothing to give at the moment. His muddled thoughts reached me briefly. Apparently I reminded him of a former supervisor of his at the GM factory where he used to work, many years ago. Someone he didn’t like. I closed my mind to him and passed by.
Seated at the bus stop was a young woman who radiated love, happiness and hopeful anticipation. As the bus arrived she stood, but did not approach. When the door opened a nice young man stepped out giving off the same kind of nauseating feelings. Her boyfriend apparently. When she saw him her eyes lit up and she smiled. It was all too much to bear. I shut out their feelings as best I could manage and continued homeward.
When I left my last job at the car dealership, I left a lot of friends as well. Actually, they left me, but that is another story. When I moved downtown last winter it was supposed to be a new start, and I had every intention of meeting new, exciting people. It’s true that in the last eight months I have hung out with movie stars and partied with visiting hockey teams two or three times. But once the filming was done or the series was over, they moved on. You would think that with the ability to read minds and control thoughts I could have as many friends as I wanted. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work like that. In the long term people always figure out that they are being manipulated, and wow, do they resent it. My ex-girlfriend once said that being around me left her feeling dirty and violated, although she could not explain why. You would think that knowing every thought in a woman’s head would help my relationships, but the opposite is true. I often respond to what they think, not what they say, and things get so complicated that it hardly seems worth it. Most nights I go out, meet people, sometimes enjoy their company and never see them again. At the mental hospital where I misspent my youth, I lived like a king. All the staff and patients other than Gus were completely under my control. None of the rules applied to me. Other kids had to participate in a study program since they didn’t go to school, but I didn’t feel like doing the work so I didn’t do any. On my eighteenth birthday I checked myself out, and the wave of relief felt by almost everyone there wounded me deeply. I deserved it, though.
I was so deep in thought that I almost passed my building. The Book Cadillac Hotel was the tallest and proudest building in Detroit when it was built in 1924. It had a long, distinguished history, but as Detroit’s economy and population began to decline, so did the Book Cadillac. It sat vacant for decades. Recently it was bought by a luxury hotel chain and restored to its former glory. It’s by far the best hotel in Detroit that is not attached to a casino, and as a result any number of sports teams, famous actors and traveling celebrities can be found there at any given time. It’s my home as well. The building is evenly divided between hotel rooms and condominiums. I rode the elevator up to the 27th floor, where my lovely pre-furnished condo awaited. It was furnished during a rare housing bubble when deluxe features were high in demand, and it showed. In the kitchen the speckled pink granite countertops complemented the reddish tones of the dark cherry cabinets. My comfy leather sofa faced a huge flat panel TV mounted over a gas fireplace, neither of which were fired up very often.
I grabbed the phone, flopped down on the sofa and began the tedious process of canceling my missing credit cards. Once that chore was done I reluctantly got up and appraised myself in the bathroom mirror. Terrible. Running the water until steam rose from the clear glass sink, I soaked a washcloth and pressed it to my face. The penetrating heat soothed my aches and pains. I took my time washing the blood off my face and tried to make myself look somewhat presentable. One of the consequences of hearing people’s thoughts is that I always hear the brutally honest opinion of every woman I meet on how I look. The daily stream of mental critiques on my appearance have driven me to be more than a little fanatical about working out and dressing well. I do not watch what I eat as much as I probably should, but for some reason my brain burns a lot of calories when I use my abilities. Also, at 6’5”, I’m blessed to be somewhat tall and well proportioned. The thick muscles of my chest and shoulders contrast with my proportionally narrow waist, so all of my blazers need to be tailored to fit. Like most days I wore a blazer over a t-shirt and jeans with loafers. It has become a look for me. I have an almost disturbing number of different sport coats and blazers, a dresser filled with jeans, and countless t-shirts.
The swelling of my lower lip was beginning to fade, and my almost-black curls sported a fashionably mussed look, not much more than usual. The dried blood in my hair was not very noticeable. My pale green eyes looked tired, though. I’m closing in on 25 years old and while my body looks young and fit, something about my eyes gives the impression of someone much older, especially today. After drying my face I picked up my spare debit card and went out. I was not quite ready to call it a night just yet. It was time for a drink, maybe catch some dinner afterwards. Alone, of course.
Although it was late, the hotel bar was still open and surprisingly busy. I ordered a local oatmeal stout that tasted just about perfect and sat at the bar, letting my mind rest. For some reason the time I spent with John LeBlanc still bothered me. He really, really didn’t like me. That intense feeling stuck with me like a bad aftertaste in my mouth. To him I was nothing more than a thief. I never really thought of myself that way. Doesn’t everyone use their skills to the best of their ability when gambling? Isn’t the goal to win? Casinos make money hand over fist, pitting the odds way in their favor. Ultimately, the house always wins. Well, except for when I’m in the house.
I still felt a lot better about my gambling than I did when I was working in auto sales. That was unfair as well, and the customers were regular people, not the greedy millionaires who own the casinos. I sold a lot of cars to people who didn’t need them, and I never felt quite right about it. But hey, what’s a guy with a 3rd grade education to do? I need to eat. Maybe I’ll look into another line of work, something honest. Maybe tomorrow.
“A penny for your thoughts?”
I turned to my right to find a stunning beauty seated beside me. She had long, perfectly straight dark red hair, and sultry, expressive green eyes. She wore an expensive silk evening gown that matched her eyes, revealing the curves of her almost too thin body. Her bare shoulders and crossed legs were subtly defined with muscle, and her designer heels cost more than my entire outfit. She must be older than me, yet I was hard pressed to find any signs of aging.
I looked back up to her amused eyes, which showed that she clearly noticed me checking her out, and my cheeks felt warm with embarrassment. Something was off, though, and I almost dropped my beer when I realized that I was not picking up anything from her: no thoughts, no feelings, no images. That has rarely happened to
me. I can read the final thoughts off a corpse, can feel the emotions of a termite, yet this woman was completely inaccessible. I could not help but push and probe a little, and as I did, she subtly grimaced, put down her glass of wine and said, “Stop that. Where I come from that’s considered incredibly rude.”
I blinked. “You…know?”
She smiled and replied, “How could I not? Just being in the same room with you makes it difficult to concentrate. It’s alarming to find so much power in someone so young and apparently untrained. I hope you know how to handle it.”
Trying to suppress my excitement over meeting someone who might know more about what I am and why, I offered my hand and said, “Adam Sharpe.”
She returned with a firm but gentle handshake, “Kate Scott”.
What do I say now? I was not accustomed to just talking and listening without the added benefit of knowing the thoughts and feelings behind it.
Kate rescued me. “I think I like you Adam, and my first impressions are never wrong.”
“It must be the split lip,” I replied, “It gives me a pouty look that drives the girls wild. Either that or the terrific bump on my head. That’s another one of my irresistible features.”
“No, I don’t think that’s the reason,” Kate smiled back at me, “but now that you mention it, how did that happen?”
“It happened at work,” I answered, technically telling the truth. Sort of. “Occupational hazard.”
“Ooooh,” she purred, “and what is this dangerous, exciting job of yours?”
She was flirting with me, that I knew even without my abilities, and a small part of me wondered about her motives while the rest of me was getting lost in her smile. I felt my pulse begin to quicken, and for a moment I felt a flutter in my stomach. Oh my God, I thought, she was using the power of her mind to seduce me. So this is what it felt like to be on the receiving end. It felt really good on the surface, but underneath I was uncomfortable, and I knew I had to stop it. Having no experience at defending against attacks from others, I followed some advice that Gus once gave me. In my mind I conjured up an image of a huge, heavy vault door closing, pouring all of my focus into it. As it slammed shut I heard a sharp clang in my head, and immediately Kate gasped and pressed her fingertips to her temples. Then her eyes rolled back as she started to fall from the stool. I quickly wrapped my arm around her, holding her up.
Ken, the young bartender with the sandy blonde hair, looked up at us and frowned. I bent his thoughts, making him believe that she had too much to drink and that I was helping her. I used my left hand to pull out my debit card and pay for our drinks, then slowly stood, supporting her weight with my right arm, and pulled her up to a standing position. She had begun to regain consciousness, if barely, and was able to walk with my assistance. It was then that I saw some drops of blood on her dress, and looked up to see her nose bleeding. Now I was really scared that I had hurt her badly, and thought of Gus unmoving in his hospital bed. As we made our way to the elevators I willed everyone around to avoid us and not notice or remember our passing.
Once we got to the door of my condo, I fumbled my keys with my left hand, dropping them once before succeeding in opening the door. Shutting the door with my mind I laid her down on my leather sofa, then dampened a washcloth with warm water and began to clean the blood off her face. It appeared that the nosebleed had stopped on its own, and I had her cleaned up shortly, apart from her dress which I’m sure was ruined. I sat down at the sofa and rested her head on my lap with my left hand gently stroking her hair. I have always had large, strong hands and her head looked so small next to my hand.
When I first met Gus he was already comatose, but was quite lucent in his thoughts, and that’s how we got to know each other. He knew so much about the use of mind powers and convinced me that I was not crazy, that the voices in my head are real, and that I had a great gift. For a few years his focus was teaching me to reach into the minds of others with the intent to heal them. I had no shortage of mental patients to practice on, but it was difficult, delicate work. It was one of the great disappointments of my young life when I failed to heal Gus. He was too far gone.
Turning my attention to Kate, with her mental barrier temporarily down, I gently probed her mind for damage. Her psyche was like nothing I had ever felt before, so complex and strong, almost beautiful. It was like a masterfully played symphony, compared to normal minds, which were like so much noise. It was not damaged, just strained. I allowed my power to flow over her psyche, healing it and lending it strength. Then I gently withdrew. I watched her sleep for a minute and almost fell asleep myself, so I got up and took a long, hot shower. In the shower I thought about the woman in the other room. Why was she trying to seduce me? Was it simply that she found me attractive or did she have an ulterior motive?
After drying off, I threw on a cotton t-shirt and boxers and stepped back into the living room to check on Kate. She was awake and sitting up, pointing a shiny and absurdly small gun at me. Her mental barrier was back up, stronger than before, but I didn’t need to read her mind to recognize the look of hostility and resolve on her face. I immediately willed my thought processes to accelerate exponentially, and as I did my perception of time around me slowed almost to a stop. This was a trick I had learned in the mental hospital to give me peace when the other patients became too noisy and erratic for me to bear. It also helps me with bullets, sometimes.
The hammer of the small pistol finally fell and I saw a slow eruption flash soundlessly from the barrel, followed by the dull bullet, which glided toward my head. While it does improve my speed and reflexes, the main problem with being in this state is that my muscles, bones and tendons can only move so fast without suffering major tears or breaks. To my perception, I move almost as slow as everything else, and slower than the bullet, so dodging at this range is not very practical. Instead I grabbed the bullet with my mind and held it fast, stopping it about 10 inches from my face, disbursing its kinetic energy. Then I saw the flash of the second bullet, and I stopped it right next to the first. Then I did the third, fourth and fifth until the pain in my head started up again and I knew that I could not keep this up forever. I let the bullets begin to drop to the floor and mentally wrenched the gun from her, careful not to break her finger with the trigger guard. I then eased my perceptions back to the normal flow of time. My fear gave way to anger, which was the only thing keeping me from giving in to exhaustion.
Kate stood there motionless, looking at the bullets on the carpet and back up at me. Despair began to leak through her barrier, and her eyes grew shiny with angry tears. She scowled at me bitterly and with a rough voice said “Go ahead, get it over with. I’m not afraid to die. What are you waiting for?”
Not knowing how to respond to that, I paused, my voice a bit shaky from adrenaline when I spat out, “What the hell are you talking about? You just tried to kill me, remember, not the other way around. I don’t even know you. What did I ever do to you?” Then a thought came to me. “Did someone send you? Was it Usher?” I can’t believe this. I finally meet someone who is like me, who maybe even has some answers, and she is a murderer. “So tell me, how does someone like you hear the thoughts and feelings of others, see the world through their eyes, then gun them down in cold blood? How is that possible?”
Kate narrowed her eyes and said, evenly, “You want to play it that way? That’s your story? Fine, just open your mind to me and prove that you’re telling the truth. Of course, you won’t, because you aren’t.”
The wiser part of me knew that it was a bad idea, that I could not trust her inside my head. My ability was much stronger than hers, that was clear, but she seemed to know a lot about how to use it. Still, she seemed genuine, and I become an idiot around beautiful women. Even now, after everything, I noticed how good she looked in that dress, one strap now fallen down past her perfect shoulder along her delicately sculpted upper arm.
“Fine,” I said, “I’ll open up to you. But if you try to ha
rm or influence me I’ll retaliate and won’t hold back. Do you understand?”
Her eyebrows raised in cautious surprise, “Okay. Go for it.”
I brought forth the vault door image in my mind and opened the door slightly, just enough to allow her in. At first I felt her in my most outer thoughts tentatively probing, then she flooded in, throwing the door open wide. I gasped as all of me was laid bare before her, my fears, my dreams, my memories and my fantasies. She probed everything that I felt from the moment I saw her, saw herself through my eyes as I brought her up to my place and healed her mind. Kate felt the power I wielded in stopping the bullets, and most importantly, she knew that I had never killed another living thing in my life, and even now had no intention of killing her. It was embarrassing when she explored my attraction to her, loitering there for more than a few moments. Panic ran through me because I was helpless before her and was not able to regain control. She lingered for a moment, feeling over my psyche with a sensual, satisfied look on her face, and withdrew. It felt as if my legs turned to water from under me as the world turned black for the second time in one day.
CHAPTER THREE
I woke up on the floor in the same spot where I fell. At least Kate had covered me with a blanket. My feet protruded out from under it and felt like ice. My senses were immediately assaulted with the mouth-watering smell of hickory-smoked bacon and fresh, hot coffee. Hunger gripped my stomach as I realized I had not eaten since lunch the previous day. I scraped myself off the floor and drifted into the kitchen to find Kate pouring herself a fresh cup of coffee wearing nothing but one of my favorite long t-shirts. The gray cotton fabric was thin but very soft. When she turned and saw me she smiled knowingly and said, “Good morning.”
“Morning.” I pointed at the breakfast feast on the table, so hungry I could hardly think of anything else. ”I see you ordered breakfast.”
The Talented Page 2