Mind's Eye (8 page)

Enter Nick Hall. Center stage. Unshaven. Hair in disarray. Wearing baggy clothes and a blood-stained shirt.

Who could have known he’d be so intriguing? And alluring.

When it came to hitting her buttons, he had achieved a perfect score. Injured and capable of bringing out her Florence Nightingale instincts. Check. Bright and obviously well-educated. Check. Often looking like a lost little boy because he had no idea who he was. Check. International man of mystery. Check. And fricking capable of reading minds and surfing the fricking web in his fricking head. Check. And mate.

Megan had wanted with every ounce of her soul to run off with him on a great adventure. But he had made a good point, and she wasn’t suicidal. Too bad, because unlike marriage, this was an adventure she was certain she wanted to undertake.

Her parents had gone through a messy divorce, so she was jaded about people and relationships. She had often wondered if humans were even psychologically built for marriage. Yes, it was probably genetically ingrained in the species for people to mate up to help raise children, like those tuxedo-wearing Emperor penguins that were always the subject of documentaries.

And maybe mating for life made sense in prehistoric times when many died before their kids were through puberty. She had never forgotten what she had learned in a history class at UCLA: that the average life expectancy in the Roman empire had been in the twenties, below the age at which the vast majority of people even married in today’s world. It was true that many Roman’s died during childhood, skewing the average lower, but still . . .
Till death do us part
seemed far more achievable when your death came in your twenties or thirties rather than at eighty.

She was still young, but she was getting to the point at which she had to think about what course she wanted her life to take. She had become as morose as she could ever remember. Maybe the move to Bakersfield at this time in her life had affected her more than she thought. She hadn’t lost her memory like Hall, but she had severed a large part of her past life just as well.

She had always been outgoing, but without question the move had dampened this personality trait. She knew she didn’t need a man for happiness, but she did need
something
. She lived alone. Yes, she had made a few friends in her apartment complex and had gone out dancing and to a few bars, but while she had been hit on a number of times, she hadn’t found anyone she really liked. She was about to start online dating. Why not? Everyone was doing it these days, and if you went to bars, you couldn’t exactly complain about the quality, and motives, of the men you met there.

In fact, she needed to stop going to bars for a more important reason: she had started drinking more than she should, probably to fill a void within. She had to get this under control. She had always been the kind of person that the expression, “high on life” was made for, stupid as it was. So why did she seem to need alcohol lately for this purpose?

She frowned as she thought about it. Maybe she should have insisted on helping Nick Hall anyway. You only go around once in life. In addition to the mystery of the man and the many silly romantic buttons he had pushed, there was something about his personality, beyond all of these other factors, that she had liked. A shyness. A vulnerability. An intelligence.

On the other hand, who knew what amnesia did to a personality? Hard to be overbearing when you were so confused. Maybe he was a total jackass when he remembered who he was. Maybe he was in a hot-and-heavy relationship. But even if he did turn out to be taken, or a total jerk, it didn’t matter. Even if she had no interest in him, it didn’t matter. Because telepathy was
awesome
. Beyond awesome. Talk about adding spice to your perspective. She would kill to be a part of whatever he was involved in.

She just wasn’t quite ready to die for it.

He had agreed to come back for her when he learned more about who he was, and what he was up against. Even so, she knew the chances she would ever see him again were small. The e-mail message he would be sending soon, telling her where to retrieve her car, would most likely be the last she would ever hear from him.

Megan leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, replaying her encounter with the homeless-looking man who had burst into her office. Replaying their telepathic communications with each other.

Her eyes shot open as the door to her office bolted inward once again.

Two men entered and closed the door behind them. Both were fit and intense, one bald as a billiard ball and the other blond.

“
What is this about?
” she demanded. “You can’t just barge—”

“Shut up!” said the blond, removing a gun with a long, thin barrel attached, which Megan recognized immediately as a silencer.

She felt queasy and suddenly found it hard to breathe. She had no doubt why these men were here, but they had missed Nick Hall by eight or nine minutes. He was even now on the road, driving away from them as quickly as he could in a yellow Ford Taurus.

The bald intruder held a small electronic cube in one hand and a cell phone in the other. He walked the few steps to the chair in front of her desk and set the cube-shaped device down on it. He glanced at the screen and then nodded at his partner, a grim look on his pock-marked face.

He removed a business card from the card holder on her desk. “Her name is Megan Emerson,” he said into the phone. “Works at the address we’re at now. I’d advise you to find where she lives and send someone to stake it out, just in case.” With that, he ended the connection.

The blond turned toward Megan, the gun in his hand never wavering. “So tell us about your visitor,” he said.

She shook her head in pretend confusion. “What visitor?”

He removed the cube-shaped device from the chair and lifted it into the air, gesturing to its digital readout. “Have you ever seen one of these?” he asked

She shook her head.

“It’s a very expensive piece of equipment. It’s basically a bloodhound in a box. And right now this one has been keyed to the scent of a man named Nick Hall. I have no idea how it works, but I’m told it can detect a smell at one part per hundred billion—which even an actual bloodhound can’t match. And do you know what it’s telling us? It’s telling us that the guy we’re looking for, Nick Hall, came into this office.” He nodded at the chair in front of her desk. “And sat in this chair.”

Megan swallowed hard.

“So last time I’m going to ask nicely,” said the blond ominously. “Tell me about this visit. And more importantly, tell me where he is now.”

Megan’s breath caught in her throat. “Your device must be wrong,” she croaked, intending to say this with confidence and defiance, but barely rasping it out. “Or maybe he broke in when I wasn’t here.”

In a blur the blond was behind her, gluing a huge palm over her mouth and pressing her body back against his. He lowered his other hand, still holding the silenced gun, and pulled the trigger without hesitation. Megan felt a blinding pain in her upper thigh the same instant she heard a spit sound issuing from the barrel of the silencer.

She screamed into the man’s hand, which was now pressed into her mouth so hard she thought her teeth might cave in.

“I’m going to release you,” he whispered into her ear. “Scream and I’ll take out your knee. Do we understand each other?”

She nodded.

The man removed his hand as tears of pain and fear began to slide down her cheeks. He had shot her! Without blinking. Just to prove to her that he was utterly ruthless. The man was a
monster
, and a fear and hopelessness greater than any she had ever known seeped into her soul.

“Last chance,” he said calmly as blood poured from her leg and soaked her pants. “Where is he?”

Megan fought to ignore the barrage of nerve signals hammering into the pain centers of her brain. Tears continued to roll down her face, almost of their own volition. She had to tell this savage what he wanted. Nick Hall had abilities that should allow him to protect himself, as he had done before. But even if not, she didn’t have a choice. “He left about ten minutes ago. In my car. It’s a Ford Taurus.”

“Give me the license plate number.”

She unconsciously shifted weight and the daggers of pain intensified. She grimaced and shifted her weight back the other way. “Okay,” she said, calming herself enough to dredge this information from a suddenly uncooperative memory. She opened her mouth to recite the number when a powerful thought exploded into her head. A
telepathic
thought.

“Megan, stop! Find a way to stall! I’ve read his mind, and he’ll kill you the second you give him your plate!”

“License plate!” the man hissed, moving in front of her and pressing the barrel of the gun into her knee.

“I’ll be there in just a minute
,
”
broadcast Nick Hall.
“Hang on!”

“I’ll give it to you,” said Megan to the blond killer. “But I can do better than that. I know exactly where this Hall is going. Exactly.”

The man smiled. “Where?”

Megan raised a hand and pretended a wave of dizziness was coming over her. Every second counted. But she also couldn’t risk getting
too
cute. These were not patient men. “You have to. . . promise . . . not to kill me,” she said as slowly as she thought she could get away with, pretending her injury had sapped most of her strength.

“Of course. Tell me what I want and we’ll leave. Simple as that.”

“How close are you, Nick?”
she broadcast hastily, with as much force as she knew how to use.

“Maybe thirty seconds. I’m sprinting as fast as I can. Keep stalling. You’re doing great.”

“How do I . . . know. . . I can trust you?” she said weakly.

The blond shook his head in annoyance and glanced at his bald partner. “Look. There’s only one thing you can be sure of,” he said, returning the gun to her kneecap. “If you don’t tell me where he is in
three seconds
, you’ll never walk again.”

“
Okay
,” she said frantically, and realized that her tears had stopped and she was thinking as clearly as she ever had. Knowing Nick was on his way had given her hope, and the adrenaline in her system was doing its job, allowing her to temporarily function at a high level despite her injury and circumstances. “There’s an old. . . abandoned warehouse. . . about twenty miles . . . from here.  On a road . . . called Franklin. He’ll be . . . hiding. . . there. But he’s planning to. . . to booby-trap the place. In case he gets company.”

“Brilliant!”
came an encouraging voice in her head.
“Just a few more seconds.”

“But I know how . . . I know how to . . . bypass his trap. He’s placing explosives . . . at the main door. But there is a loading dock. On the northeast side. You just have to—”

“Hit the floor! Now!”

Megan froze.

“NOW!”
broadcast Hall so powerfully that if the word had been spoken it might have burst her eardrums. She dropped to the ground.

And less than a second later, so did the two men near her.

Both of their backs had been only a foot or two from the outer wall of her office, and Hall sent multiple silenced slugs through the flimsy wall material and into their bodies. They were dead before they could come close to comprehending what had hit them.

Megan realized vaguely that Hall must have read their precise position from their minds. They hadn’t even known he was there, yet he had been able to shoot them at point blank range; so close that even a novice shooter couldn’t miss.

Hall entered a second after the two men had fallen, probably having been able to detect the cessation of their thoughts immediately. He closed the door and rushed over to Megan on the floor, whose leg was continuing to seep bright red blood.

Hall glanced at the two men he had killed, and an anguished expression came over his face. He then turned to Megan, and his eyes moistened at the sight of her injury. “I am
so
sorry,” he whispered. “This is all my fault.”

He pulled a pair of shears from a black metal canister on Megan’s desk and cut strips of cloth from one of the attacker’s shirts. He folded one of the pieces several times to form a thick bandage and tied it down tightly with the other strips of material. He accessed the web to learn the best way to deal with a gunshot wound, but he didn’t find anything magical, just to staunch the flow of blood as best he could—pressure was key—get her to emergency personnel immediately, and be on the lookout for signs of shock, which would cause her to pass out if she had lost too much blood.

“I left your car a few feet from the back exit,” he explained while he was tending to her injury. “I’ll drive you to a hospital as soon as I’m done. I’m afraid we can’t risk an ambulance. They called in your name. Whoever they’re working for knows you spoke with me. And I read from their minds that they’d been ordered to be sure there are no loose ends. The people after me won’t let you live no matter what now. But these two never got to tell anyone that I took your car.”