Empathy Read online

  “That you’re empathic? Why not? One would think having your power would be thrilling, like being a superhero.” He sipped his tea and squinted over the rim through the rising steam. “Like The Shadow seeing into the hearts of men.”

  “The Shadow?”

  “Oh, come now! You’re not too young to remember… Perhaps you are.” He sighed. “Ah, me. Ah, life.”

  “I always liked Wonder Woman.”

  “And who wouldn’t with that outfit and those wonderful boots?”

  Emily cocked an eyebrow, the emerald beneath glinting. “Like boots, huh?”

  Samuels bowed his head. “Immensely.” He turned his teacup a quarter clockwise, then back widdershins. After a quiet moment, he asked, “You can really do what you say?” He fixed her in her seat. “Tell me once more and I’ll never ask you again.”

  “Yeah. I can.”

  He nodded. “Fine. I once saw a wharf rat sit up and have a conversation with a big black crow. Not in the same language mind you, but they were talking. I believe that. I can believe you.” He closed one eye like a pirate. “Sure you won’t show me something, though? I’ll believe you anyway, but I’d love to see it done.”

  Emily clenched her hands, her knuckles went white. “I’d rather not, if that’s okay with you, Mr. Samuels.”

  He flashed his lined palms. “Of course, of course. As I said, I believe you anyway. I worked as an accountant for many years for a rather successful private investigator. He taught me the trick of accounting truth from other people.”

  “What’s that mean?” Emily was thinking of her father again. “Accounting truth?”

  “Well, like a bean counter lines up the rows of information that lead to an answer in numbers, an accountant of truth tallies up the signs of truth and falsehood. If the red column has more in it, you be a liar. If it’s the black, you tell the God’s honest.”

  “What counts as something that would go into the red column?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Samuels said, leaning back. “Maybe you play with your hair when you lie. Something like a poker tell. Something to let me know that you’re distracted by a thought that’s different from the sentiment you’ve just expressed. Kind of like now.” His expression softened. “Can you talk about why you won’t show me your ability?”

  Emily looked around the coffee shop. It had the feel of a dive bar: sticky surfaces and walls as pigmented with nicotine as they were with paint. Smoking ban or not, it still reeked. There was even a small platform that probably served as a stage for poetry slams and live music—empty at this late hour. A skinny kid, a few years younger than Emily, sat by himself, reading a weather-beaten copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. His head was completely shaved except for two blue-dyed spikes that jutted from the front of his crown like a pair of four-inch horns. His combat-booted foot jigged like a jack-hammer and every so often he would jab a finger into the book and mutter, “Yes!”

  Everything around Emily was strange. Not because it was different and new, but because she was. She could do more than edit her life, she could re-write it. If anyone—including Mr. Samuels—couldn’t deal with her than to hell with them. Fuck hiding.

  “I can’t stand to feel other people anymore. It’s driving me crazy a little, I think. I came to New York because I figured it was the biggest city in America and that maybe all those people would just sort of overload me and blur together.”

  “Like one of those sound machines that people run at night so they don’t have to endure their neighbors?”

  “Like that, yeah,” she said. “So far, it’s working pretty okay.”

  “And if it stops working?” Samuels asked, his voice low.

  Her eyes flared. “I’ll kill myself.”

  Samuels reached out to take her hand. Emily recoiled an inch and stopped, allowed him to envelop her ivory fist in his grandpa’s glove. His skin was rough but the muscle beneath soft and warm. She got an initial swell of emotion but not enough to feel anything definite, not enough to lose herself.

  “Is it so bad, dear?”

  Emily answered by opening the cage in her chest and letting the tears roll without sob or hitch of breath; just pain running down her cheeks. Pity moved over Samuels’s face like cloud shadow.

  The over-caffeinated punk bolted to his feet. He threw his copy of the Little Red Book down on the table with a disgusted, “Ah man, it can’t fuckin’ end like that.”

  Samuels turned his attention back to Emily and raised his thunder-cloud eyebrow. She took her hand back and drank the rest of her latte.

  ~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 4

  CHARLIE DUNBAR YAWNED like a lion. In another four hours, he would be finished with a grueling ER double shift, and that seemed like a very long time off. They hadn’t had a fresh customer in the last few minutes and he was taking advantage of the reprieve to gather his strength.

  In a kitchenette just off the admitting desk, he leaned his five foot six frame in a molded plastic chair and tilted his bald head against the wall. Charlie was only twenty-five but his follicles had started spitting out hair when he was still in high school. He had active patches toward the back and sides, but preferred to shave it all off in favor of the Special-Forces look. Male pattern baldness was supposed to be caused by high testosterone levels. Maybe that would balance out his choice of career. Registered Nurses are badasses, but funny how people didn’t get that. Another yawn claimed his body and he loosed another big cat roar. He shook it off and rubbed his face with his hands.

  “’S'cuse me?” The voice was rounded on the edges. “Charlie?”

  He knew that name. That was his name.

  He opened his eyes and blinked in the sterile fluorescent light. A young Latino man in blue scrubs resolved into focus. This wasn’t his shift and he didn’t know everyone yet. Charlie squinted at the orderly’s ID tag “Carlos,” he said. “Good handle.”

  “Huh? Oh, like Charles. Yeah. Listen,” he jerked a thumb over his shoulder, “we got a customer and could use a little help. Julie at the desk said to come get you.”

  “Pysch?” Charlie asked. Whenever they needed extra help it was for admins to psychiatric.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hokaaaay,” Charlie sighed and threw a smile as he pushed up from the chair. “Let’s go.”

  Carlos took in Charlie’s height. “Oh, hey man,” he said. “I wanna’ warn you, this is a big guy.” He shaped the air with his hands. “I mean like tremendous, football big.” He thought for a moment. “Bigger than that.”

  Charlie reached up and put a hand on Carlos’s shoulder. “Wow, thanks, dude.” He crinkled his brow. “You better stand behind me, then.” Charlie winked and walked around the corner into a tableau frozen between calm and chaos.

  The uniformed off-duty police officer who served as security lay sprawled in front of the ER desk. His eyes were open but rolled up toward the ceiling. An orderly stood off to one side with his hands up, the fingers splayed. The dark seams of his life and love lines wired his lighter palms. The admitting nurse, Julie, was crouched low behind the desk, gripping a stapler in one hand and the handset of the phone with the other. Her skin was bloodless. In front of the sliding glass entrance of the ER stood a giant with a tangled beard and long hair the color of rusting steel. A soiled t-shirt spread across the field of his chest. It was the classic I ♥ New York with a crude skull inked over the heart in black magic marker. Charlie blinked and everything jerked into motion.

  The giant clenched and unclenched his ham fists, his shoulders moved up and down with his breathing. His nostrils flared like a bull about to charge.

  “I want,” he growled through teeth like yellowing ivory dominos, “MY MOTHER!”

  “Oh, shit,” Charlie giggled. He inclined his head toward the desk. “Julie? Y’okay?”

  She waved the stapler. “I hate this job.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said, keeping his eyes on the giant and a smile on his face. “Just stay put for a minute.”
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  “Not a problem.”

  “Where’s. My. MOTHER?!”

  Charlie didn’t engage, just nodded and continued to smile. He wasn’t ready to be drawn in just yet. Nice and easy, he leaned down and pressed a couple of fingers against the off-duty cop’s throat. The cop moaned, vibrating under Charlie’s finger tips. Pulse was good, and moaning meant breathing which was also pretty good. He risked a quick glance at the cop’s rolling eyes. His pupils were the same size, looked like he’d just taken a knock-out blow, but nothing immediately dangerous. Charlie checked his hip and exhaled—gun was where it was supposed to be.

  Charlie looked back at the giant, smile never wavering. The giant was crying now, but his fists were still pulsing meat hammers.

  “Hey, orderly,” Charlie said in a low voice. “What’s your name, man?”

  The orderly turned wide eyes on Charlie, his fingers still splayed. Made Charlie think of a couple of tiny cats that someone had sneaked up on and scared the shit out of. “James Leeson,” he whispered.

  “Okay, James Leeson?”

  “Dude knocked the cop out.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much clear, James, thank you.” Okay, James was in a little place Charlie liked to think of as “Scared Out of His Fucking Mind”. Charlie whispered, “Stay cool, okay, James?”

  “Okay.”

  Charlie heard the squeak of a tennis shoe behind him and the giant shifted the bloodshot stars in his face over Charlie’s shoulder.

  “Carlos, you ready to help me out here, man?”

  “I told you he was huge,” Carlos said, a hint of triumph beneath the quaver. “Wha’d we do?”

  The giant swiped an arm that was two-thirds the thickness of Charlie’s mid-section over his leaky eyes and howled, “MUTHERRRR!”

  Charlie turned his face halfway over his shoulder to Carlos and dropped his voice. “I’m going to count to three, okay?”

  “Okayyyy…”

  “Then you rush ‘im.”

  “What?”

  “Just kidding, man.” Charlie shook his head and smiled. “Just hang out and get ready to play catch if jolly green throws me across the room.”

  Before Carlos could answer, Charlie started walking toward the ER’s latest and greatest customer. He raised one small hand in an amiable wave, one neighbor greeting another over the fence. “Hiya, chief,” he said and stopped about five feet away, just out of range of one of those massive paws.

  The giant eyed him like he was a snack with feet.

  “Lookin’ for your ma’, huh?”

  “Mother!” he shouted. “I want her,” he rolled his shoulders forward, flaring like a cobra, “RIGHT. NOW.”

  Charlie looked at his feet and stuck his hands in his pockets. He rocked back on his heels and said, “Well, I can dig that, my friend. I too,” he threw a look that was all about understanding what it meant to have a mother, “have a mother. And sometimes I feel like I need her. Less than I used to,” he shrugged, “but from time to time, a guy just wants his—“

  “MOTHER!”

  “Exactly.” Charlie nodded.

  The giant squinted one eye shut; the other glared, a searchlight out of the abyss. “You know where she is?” he rumbled.

  Charlie closed one eye and squinted back. “And if I did?”

  The giant showed his teeth in what might have been a grin or a promise to bite Charlie’s head off. He growled. Possibly both. “Okay,” Charlie said. “This is what I’d like to do.” He looked back down at his feet and kept his hands in his pockets. Using the floor tiles to measure the distance, Charlie took a step forward, then another, until the giant’s bare feet came into his field of vision. They were the size of cinder blocks, the nails had thickened into fungus infected chits. Charlie locked his eyes on the big toe of the man’s right foot and without looking up said, “I’d like you to let me give you something that will make you calm down. If you do that—”

  The giant’s big toe flexed.

  Charlie dropped his center of gravity and fell into a backward somersault. He slicked like a drop of mercury out of the giant’s range and straightened. Mama’s Boy punched his fingers into the air where Charlie had been standing and gripped nothing. He frowned down at the smaller man and mumbled, “Fast.”

  A smile quirked the side of Charlie’s mouth. “Have to be.” He took a breath and another step forward.

  Julie’s voice squirted over his shoulder. “Charlie, don’t!”

  Charlie rolled his eyes so the giant could see. Women, what can you do? Something light rippled through the man’s face then. Charlie went after it.

  “Like I said before, man. You let me give you something just to chill down with and we can go try to find your ma’. What do you say? It’ll be like the pharmaceutical equivalent of a lite beer.”

  The giant turned his head half to the side. “And when we find her…?”

  Charlie nodded. “When we find her, yeah…?”

  The giant smashed his fists together like two opposing weather fronts and whispered, “We eat her.”

  Charlie sighed. “No, man. We can’t do that.” A wave of weariness crashed over his frame and yanked his shoulders down. He brought a hand up to rub some of the exhaustion from his face, covering his eyes for just a second. It was all the giant needed. He rushed across the two or three paces separating them, his footfalls shuddering through the floor tiles, and seized Charlie under the arms. Charlie yelped in pain as thick fingernails bit into his ribs just under the arms. The giant hauled him off his feet as if he were playing with a doll and began to shake. Charlie’s world was transformed into a field of jutting, blurring images and shear force.

  Okay, enough nice. He was too tired for this shit.

  Charlie stiffened his arms and clapped his hands with maximum force over the giant’s ears. The giant howled in pain and surprise. He dropped Charlie and staggered backward, his hands pressed against his head. His voice ripped out, high pitched and indignant. “Owwwwrrr! Mother, the little man hurt meeeee.”

  Charlie shook his head once to clear it. “Don’t whine, big boy. That’s obnoxious.”

  The giant dropped his hands. A line of blood trickled from each swelling ear. “Like bees in my head. Like bee-eeze.”

  Charlie took a deep breath and slowed his heart. “Okay, fella. Let’s try this again. Just calm dow—Oh, shit!” The giant raced across the room with incredible speed for such a huge body, but Charlie wasn’t about to let him have another shot at shaking his fillings loose. He broke the tension in his own left leg and slipped into a directed side-ways fall then rolled again and came up behind a plastic waiting room bench.

  Mama’s Boy stopped short in front of the bench. His own momentum bent him over at the waist, increasing the blood pressure to his head. The bees that mean little man put in his poor ol’ head got louder and he cried out again. He looked for the little man to hurt him (Mother would be okay with that) but he wasn’t behind the chairs anymore. Where was the little man? Did he— PAIN! A bolt of white flared behind his eyes.

  In the instant the giant was bent over, Charlie sprang over the seats and vaulted over the man’s lowered head. On the way past, he pistoned down with his left fist into the back of the giant’s skull. Charlie landed a pace behind the giant, grounded his balance, and struck out backward with a mule kick right about where he guessed the big guy’s knee would be. The strike glanced off the side of the giant’s leg, but it had the intended effect: the man pitched forward and crashed into the bench. Charlie whipped around, ready to dodge or attack, but paused and dropped his hands. He counted to ten, slowing his breathing and pulse as a matter of will. Mama’s boy was sprawled on the bench, eyes half-lidded. His chest moved up and down like a great bellows, the heart and skull on his t-shirt swelled and contracted, swelled and contracted.

  Charlie pursed his lips and blew a long breath. The orderly with the freaked-out cat hands stared, still as a wax statue of himself. Carlos was grinning and shaking his head, hands on his h
ips. The off-duty cop hauled himself into a sitting position, his back against the admitting desk. From behind the desk, Julie threw a stage whisper. “Did he kill ‘im?”

  Carlos barked a laugh. “Which one?”

  “Julie,” Charlie said, “Get out here and take care of officer Bob’s noggin.” He pointed at James Leeson and snapped his fingers once. Leeson blinked. “James, go get the duty doc. Check the nap room.” He waited a second, and when Leeson didn’t move, Charlie threw some metal into his voice, “Now, James, or I’ll make you put on a dress and pretend to be Norman Bates’s mommy when he comes to.”

  “Shit, right. Okay.” Leeson took off down the hall.

  Charlie turned to Carlos. “Charles, my friend, would you be so kind as to drag out a gurney?”

  Carlos nodded. “On it.”

  Charlie caught him as he turned. “One with restraints, right?”

  “Hell yes.”

  Charlie walked over to admin desk. He caught the cop under one arm and helped Julie maneuver him into a chair. Julie asked him his name, the date, the president, to which he responded correctly, then offered, “Didn’t vote for that asshole, though.”

  Julie shot a look at Charlie. “You okay, hot shot?”

  Charlie lifted a hand; adrenaline shook it like a wolf with a rabbit. “In a few minutes.” He made eye contact with Julie. “You?”

  “Scared me bad,” she sighed, gripped the cop’s wrist and checked her watch. Memory glossed her eyes. “Way he just tossed this one across the room like he was a sack of potatoes.” She shook her head then checked her watch again and dropped the cop’s wrist. “You’re fine, but I still want the doctor to check you when he’s done making sure Charlie didn’t paralyze our customer.” Julie stood up and brushed her pants. The cop grunted and made to get up as well, but Charlie and Julie both put gentle hands on each of his shoulders. “Not yet,” Julie said. “Don’t worry, Chop Suey Charlie’ll protect us, right Charlie?”

  “Chop suey’s Chinese. I used Karate.”

  He got a pair of blank faces.

  “Karate was invented in Japan?”