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“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.
I asked hotel personnel for her address—we’d always slept at my place because she had a roommate. Two days later I went to her second-floor flat in Ventura and knocked on the door.
No answer.
I found the landlord puttering around the backyard, mostly crabgrass, dandelions and dirt.
“Have you seen Kelly?” I asked him.
“She’s gone,” he said without really looking up.
“Gone? Gone where? Gone to the store?”
“No. Gone. Not here anymore.”
“What are you talking about? Where’d she go?”
He shrugged. “She didn’t leave an address. Her and the kid just left.”
“What kid?”
He finally looked up.
“Her kid. Her son. Who are you, exactly?”
“A friend.”
“Okay, Kelly’s friend. She took the kid and left. That lowlife of a boyfriend picked them up. End of story.”
I will tell you that I still did not understand what happened.
I will tell you that I went back to the hotel and calmly contemplated the situation. That when another masseuse walked out of her room—Trudy, one of the girls Kelly used to talk to—I said tell me about Kelly. She’s an empath, I said.
“A what?”
“An empath. She touches people and knows things about them.”
“Yeah. That they’re horny and out of shape.”
“She knows what they’re feeling—what kind of people they are.”
“Ha. Who told you that? Kelly?”
I still didn’t understand.
Even with Trudy staring at me as if I’d arrived from a distant galaxy. Even then, I refused to grasp what was right there.
“Kelly has a son,” I said.
“Uh-huh. Nice kid, too. No thanks to her. Okay, that’s not fair. She just needs to develop better taste in men.”
“You mean the father?”
“No. I mean the boyfriend. She’s got a dope problem—she’s always doing it, and she’s always doing them. Dopes.”
“What about the father?”
“Nah, he’s kind of nice actually. A real job and everything. She dumped him naturally. He’s fighting her for custody.”
“Why?”
“Maybe he doesn’t think junkies are the best company for an eight-year-old. And she’s always trying to poison the kid against him. It’s a fucking shame. You should’ve heard them going at it in the Tranquillity Room last week.”
“Last week…when? What day?”
“I don’t know. He comes by to drop off money for the kid. Tuesday, I think.”
Now it was coming. And it wouldn’t stop coming.
“What time Tuesday?”
“I don’t know. After lunch. Why?”
Look at it. It wants you to look at it.
Tuesday, I think. After lunch.
“What does he look like, Trudy?”
“Geez…I don’t know. About your height, I guess. Glasses. He didn’t look too fucking terrific after seeing her. She told him she was going to take the kid and disappear if he didn’t drop the whole custody thing. You know what I think? Her boyfriend wants that child support.”
About your height. Glasses.
Don’t look. Do not look.
Tuesday. After lunch.
When he argued with her in the meditation room, and then walked out looking anxious and upset.
Tuesday.
When he drove to his son’s school.
Tuesday.
When he tried to tell him that he was fighting for him and to please not believe the things his mother said about him. When he reached out to make the boy listen, but his son pulled away because all that poison had done its work.
“The boy,” I said. “He has brown hair. Cut real short—like a crew. He’s sweet looking.”
“Yeah. That’s him.”
I’m an empath, she said. I’m touching this bad man, this sexual predator, and what can I do about it—nothing, because the police won’t believe an empath like me. He’s coming Tuesday at two, but what can I do? Nothing.
How?
How did she pick me?
How?
Because.
Because she’d made me open that secret pocket.
Because one day they’d pointed me out to her—one of the masseuses—oh him, stay away, an ex-cop who used to beat people half to death.
