Blood Memories

"We don't have any more time. Unless you tell me he's going to piss on the street and then shoot a couple of old ladies, I need him back out tomorrow."

"What about his partner? Is it fair to send someone else out with a panicked rookie cop?"

"He needs to get back on the horse, Sheffield."

McNickel was the only person who refused to call him Dr. Sheffield.

But Wade found that understandable. After all, he was barely twenty-seven and looked even younger. It would be hard for a crotchety old geezer like McNickel to refer to him by a title like "doctor."

What Wade didn't like or understand was McNickel's constant refusal to accept sound diagnoses. But the Joe Tashet case ended some of those problems.

Less than a month after Joe's psych evaluation, his partner was shot and killed by a drunken husband as the two officers were investigating a domestic battle. At the first sign of a gun, Joe bolted, leaving his partner with no backup.

McNickel listened to Wade more often after that.

Some of Wade's fantasies and expectations never came to pass. He didn't work under cover. He was occasionally asked to evaluate suspects and appear in court, but McNickel ordered him to "play down the psychic bit and just do your job."

Wade was often tempted to look inside McNickel's head and find out what made the old man so bad-tempered. Maybe his sex life was lousy… though Wade's own hadn't exactly been fireworks either. His job kept him hopping. Most of his duties consisted of helping exhausted, bored, and/or disillusioned cops whose work lives were drastically invading their home lives. Time passed quickly.

On November 7, 2005, at 5:32 P.M., Wade met Detective Dominick Vasundara, a transfer from New York. Wade was finishing up some paperwork in his office late that afternoon when a deep voice sounded from the open doorway.

"Captain told me to see you."

Looking up, Wade saw a man of medium height and stocky build, with stubble covering his wide jaw, and short black hair. He was dressed in faded jeans and a sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped off. The man wasn't large, but somehow he seemed to block the entire doorway.

"Can I help you?" Wade asked.

"Yeah, I'm Dominick. I don't know what you can do. The captain told me to see you on my way out. Something about starting a file."

Wade was tired. He'd had a long day, and the last thing he wanted to do was start a new file. He should already have this guy's records anyway.

"Are you a transfer?"

"Yeah, New York."

"Really? Did you request to come here?"

"All that stuff's on my application."

At that, Wade instantly entered Dominick's mind. He was too beat to play verbal volleyball.

Expecting the new arrival to simply sit there for a few seconds dripping in attitude, Wade read a few normal, sexually motivated images before he saw surprise flicker across Dominick's face.

"What the…?" He blocked Wade. "Stay out of my head."

"Did you feel that?" Wade sat up, startled. "Could you feel me focusing in on your thoughts?"

"What do you think I am, stupid?"

"No, but you shouldn't have been able to-"

"Look, I'm not getting paid to be here yet. If you need anything, ask in a hurry and let me go."

This guy was some piece of work. First, he acted as if setting up his psych file was an annoying chore, and then he acted as if someone pushing around inside his head was an everyday event.

"Do you want to get a beer?" Wade asked suddenly, surprising himself as much as Dominick.

"What?"

"I've been here since six this morning. There's a little sports bar down the street… good nachos. Why don't we finish up down there?"

The unshaven New Yorker stared at him for a few seconds and then shrugged. "Yeah, sure. Why not? I'm not trying to be a pain. People have just been jacking me around since noon. I thought I'd be out of here a couple hours ago."

Three beers later, they were sitting in Spankey T's Sports Bar watching the Seattle Seahawks get killed by the Chicago Bears on a large-screen TV. Wade sat there struggling for a way to broach the subject of how Dominick had known about blocking a psychic entry. The problem solved itself when his companion turned to him during a time-out and asked, "Hey, where'd you learn telepathy?"

For a moment the question threw him. "I didn't learn it anywhere…"

Wade had never considered himself bigoted or socially biased. But hearing a word like «telepathy» come out of Dominick's mouth surprised him. He usually imagined overmuscled guys with Bronx accents who wore torn-up sweatshirts would speak in one- or two-syllable words.

"I learned to focus it," he went on, "at the Psychic Research Institute in Colorado."

"Really? Did your folks sell you?"

"What? No… I wanted to go. My folks were ready to burn me at the stake. How'd you know to block me?"

Dominick put his beer down. "Spent a couple years with kids like you in high school. Some old guys, doctors, paid my folks a lot of money to borrow me for a while."

The tiny hairs on Wade's arms began to prickle. "Why?"