Mind's Eye (2 page)

Only he wasn’t looking into the mirror now. He sensed that he must
be
this Hall. But the name didn’t trigger a
this-feels-right
emotion, or a cascade of memories.

“Let the others know they can pack it in,” the voice continued. “My post was the lucky winner.”

Once again, the man in the bathroom, the man who decided to temporarily adopt the name Hall until he learned otherwise, knew that he had not
heard
any of these words. At least not with his ears. But they had registered with utter clarity, nonetheless.

He was reading these people’s minds
.

It was impossible, yes. But it was also becoming undeniable. He might not remember anything about himself, but he was quite sure he believed in science. And that he
didn’t
believe in conspiracy theories, or ghosts, or aliens, or ESP.

But ESP was the only explanation. What was crazier, hearing voices in your head, or thinking you could read minds?

Probably a toss-up, he decided.

You gave us quite a chase
,
Hall
, he picked up with perfect clarity, and he realized this last had been an internal thought of the man he was monitoring, and had not been spoken aloud. Exactly
how
he knew this wasn’t clear.
But you’re done running now, you little prick
.

 A moment later, the man spoke aloud into his phone once again. “I have no idea,” he said, no doubt in answer to a question. “He holed up like we thought. Who gives a shit where?  The prick must have thought he lost us, too. He was on foot, not seeming to care he could be seen for miles. He’s at a gas station with nothing but scrub brush surrounding it.” The man paused. “And just when I was beginning to think this guy was clever.”

He lowered the phone and prepared to end the connection. “I’ll call you back when he’s a corpse,” he finished calmly.   

2

Hall decided instantly that he had to proceed as if he wasn’t delusional, and the voices in his head were completely accurate. Given that the man outside the door wanted him dead, he had no other choice.

He could clearly read the growing impatience in the man’s mind. His quarry had been in the bathroom a long time, the man was thinking. And while he had originally planned to follow him from there, waiting to shoot him until he was isolated, the assassin had noticed that no one was around now, and was coming to the conclusion that a silenced shot to the head as Hall began to emerge from the bathroom, or even two or three shots at chest height through the closed door, would do the trick nicely.

Hall guessed he had forty-five seconds at most to come up with a way out of this. His mind raced, despite the continued presence of the myriad of voices in his head. If his ESP
was
real, the second he opened the door he was dead—and possibly even before. There was nothing in the bathroom or in his possession he could use as a weapon. No tire irons or lighters or knives. Nothing but water, a small plastic wastebasket, a towel dispenser, and bargain brand toilet paper.

He could try to kick through the wall of the small bathroom opposite the door, hoping that it shared a wall with the main station, where he suddenly realized he could easily read the thoughts of the attendant, somehow isolating them from the rest of the babble. Even if he was unable to crash through, the attempt should cause enough noise that the attendant would come to investigate.

But just as he tightened his leg muscles to make the attempt, he realized he was too late. He caught the decision and resolve in his stalker’s mind and knew the man was even now crossing the ten yards between his position and the door, holding a silenced gun under his gray windbreaker.

A desperate plan materialized in Hall’s mind. He quietly disengaged the small silver button in the middle of the door handle, unlocking it.

The man continued approaching, with practiced quiet. Hall’s five senses couldn’t have possibly detected that he was outside and approaching, let alone his precise position, but the sixth sense Hall now possessed could see from his attacker’s eyes, so he could judge with uncanny accuracy when to launch his attack.

He whipped open the door with all of the speed and strength at his command, just as the man in his mind’s eye began to raise his gun, and was rewarded when the door handle slammed into the man’s outstretched hand, sending his gun flying.

The assassin stifled a scream, and reflexively brought his now bloodied paw to eye level to assess the damage, discovering that at least two of his fingers were now broken. Hall dived for the man’s gun, having no time to ponder this verification that his ESP was real, after all, and highly accurate.

Hall snatched the gun from the pavement and rolled to one knee, extending it in front of him. “Freeze!” he said, his voice guttural and commanding, but low enough not to be heard by the attendant. He knew without looking that the hundreds of voices inside his head were still coming from the strip mall across the way, and he and his attacker were out of sight of the attendant and the two customers currently filling their tanks.

“Hands behind your head!” ordered Hall, rising from the pavement and taking a few steps backwards.

Shit!
raged the would-be-assassin, a single, visceral thought emerging from a sea of pain and shock that Hall picked up as though it had been screamed aloud.
What the fuck?
the man demanded of the universe.
There’s no way this little prick could have heard me coming.

“Turn around!” said Hall.

The man turned, and his mind sorted through possible counterattacks. He considered the backup gun holstered to his ankle, calculating if he could pretend to double over and reach it in time. He decided against it. Not only was it risky, his draw would be slowed by his broken fingers.

“Who
are
you?” demanded Hall.  

“
Fuck you
,” spat the man bitterly, but in the time he uttered these words, a flood of impressions and information entered Hall’s mind from his. The man was Frank Baldino. He had been a mob enforcer, but he’d had a falling out with the boss. So given that he had a talent for killing, and enjoyed it, he had undergone cosmetic surgery to disguise himself and had taken up a career as a high-priced mercenary.

When Baldino had delivered this two-word response, Hall had heard it with a subtle but unmistakable vibrato. He wondered if it was an echo caused by a timing difference between receiving the
thought
of the words, and hearing the actual words with his ears. An offset of mere milliseconds. This might be due to telepathy traveling faster than sound—which would make sense if it was an electromagnetic or other exotic phenomenon—or it could all be due to a slight delay between thinking a word and vocalizing it. Hall decided that for this analysis to have spontaneously sprung to his mind, he must be fairly well-educated.

“Who are you working for?” asked Hall, and when it was clear he wouldn’t be getting an answer, he drove deeper into Baldino’s mind and fished out the answer for himself.

Frank Baldino didn’t
know
who he was working for. There was a middleman who set up his jobs and took a percentage. Baldino had been sent a photo of Hall, and given his name and last location, and that had been about all. The mercenary had no idea why someone wanted Nick Hall dead, and couldn’t have cared any less.

Hall absorbed the fact that his first name must be Nick, which he decided he didn’t particularly care for.

What fascinated Hall was his growing realization that he could access Baldino’s thoughts and memories as easily as Baldino could. He couldn’t help but appreciate the ultimate irony of being able to instantly recall every aspect of Baldino’s past he cared to know, but none of his own.

Once again, out of the endless swirl of thoughts flooding his mind, one rose up and pierced through the rest. One of the customers had finished pumping gas and would be driving away in less than a minute. And Hall would then be in full view, wearing filthy jeans, no shirt, and training a gun on Baldino.

His time was up.

“March into the bathroom,” ordered Hall, continuing to monitor Baldino’s every thought. Frank Baldino did as he was told, at least outwardly. But Hall read that he had reached a decision. Once he entered the bathroom, he would launch a counterattack, regardless of the risk. Hall looked clumsy and unsure of himself.

Baldino never got the chance. Just as he crossed the threshold of the door, Hall slammed the hard butt of the gun into the back of Baldino’s skull with all the adrenaline-boosted strength he could muster.

Baldino fell forward into the small bathroom like a puppet whose strings had been cut, and Hall had no doubt he was no longer conscious. He bent Baldino’s legs at the knee, joined him inside the bathroom, and then closed and locked the door.

He reached down and pressed his fingers into Baldino’s neck, feeling for his carotid artery and a pulse. Nothing. He tried Baldino’s wrist and put his ear to his mouth. No pulse. No breathing.

Shit!
he thought, almost hysterically.
He was dead!

Hall clutched at the small sink for support, reeling.
He had killed a man
. Hall didn’t remember who he was, but he was certain he had never killed before. Bile rose in his throat as he pondered taking a life. Even though the man had been intent on taking
his
, Hall suspected he would have puked if his stomach wasn’t totally empty.

How many movies and TV shows had he seen where a man was knocked out by getting hit by the butt of a gun? Dozens? Hundreds?

But never in any of them that he could remember—he was long past considering the frustrating irony that he could remember everything about the world except when it pertained to himself—had such a blow been fatal. But then again, he knew that a single hard, bare-fisted strike to the face would knock out just about anyone—cold—but Hollywood often showed fights in which the combatants barely slowed down after trading dozens of insanely forceful blows.

Hall blew out a long breath. He knew what he had to do next. As distasteful as it was, he had to become a grave robber. Baldino was slightly taller and thicker than he was, but any clothing that hadn’t spent the night in a dumpster was a
godsend
.  Hall stripped him with great difficulty, given the confines of the bathroom, but was soon wearing tan khaki slacks and a light-green polo shirt, both of them a size too large, leaving the gray windbreaker behind.

Baldino’s wallet contained no identification or credit cards, but Hall confiscated the thick sheaf of twenties he found inside. He pocketed Baldino’s gun and silencer and took the smaller gun from the man’s ankle holster as well. Not that he had any idea how to use either one of them.

He removed the keys to Baldino’s silver Acura parked outside, and took an extra minute to apply a soapy paper towel to his sneakers, since he had worn them in the dumpster.

Finally, sensing no one was within eyeshot, he locked the door from the inside and stepped out of the bathroom, hoping the locked door would prevent Baldino’s body from being discovered for at least an hour or two.

Nick Hall took a deep breath and walked calmly toward Baldino’s Acura. Nearby was a wire rack with several stacks of free publications, one selling used cars and one entitled, “Homes for sale in Bakersfield, California. Your free guide.”

So he was in Bakersfield, California. Good to know. But this knowledge didn’t evoke an avalanche of memories, just as his own name had failed to do. A long list of California cities came to mind: LA, San Diego, Palm Springs, San Francisco, Oakland, and others, but as far as he could tell, he had never even known Bakersfield existed.

Hall started the car, and despite his blood being so alive with adrenaline he felt as if a marauding colony of ants were marching under his skin, he forced himself to pull calmly out onto the street and away from the station.

3

Nick Hall drove for several miles as voices continued to ricochet around his head. Knowing that he had somehow acquired ESP didn’t make the voices any less grating or less capable of eroding his sanity. He was shocked to read the time on the car’s digital clock. For some reason he had assumed it was morning, but he had regained consciousness in mid-afternoon.

The air was still cool, probably in the high sixties, so it must be fall or winter in Bakersfield. Good thing. Had it been summer, he would have been roasted alive in a steel barbecue pit of garbage—not exactly the way he hoped to die, which he decided should involve the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders and his heart giving out from exhaustion.

Hall had no choice but to assume he wasn’t stark raving mad. His senses told him he could now read minds and that the world around him was behaving consistently with this new world order. But this was the age-old conundrum of the philosophers. What was reality? Was
anything
real? Didn’t every schizophrenic convince themselves that their reality was self-consistent and rational?