Don't Fret the Timing Page 2

  "But you think otherwise," she said.

  He swiveled his chair to look at her. "This is more of profiling thought actually. Women as a whole tend to be less confrontational and more devious, no offense."

  She smiled. "None taken."

  "So even though this is a nonviolent crime to start with, it makes a sort of sense for the suspect to be someone who doesn't want to interact with, say, a clerk at a store, who might potentially pick up on the fact the paper feels odd."

  "So do you have any favorites among the women you saw on the film?" she asked.

  "Maybe, just maybe, the one who reached directly into her backpack and pulled out her wallet with no hunting whatsoever. That's prejudiced isn't it?"

  "Because the average woman can hardly ever find her wallet on the first try." Sumiko struggled not to laugh.

  "Um yeah, just thinking statistics again."

  ***

  These slacks used to fit better, lamented Sumiko as she stood beside the hotel bed zipping them. Of course that was back in the day when she actually had some muscle tone and a workout involved a good thirty minutes on the stair climber. These days she swam when she could and endured physical therapy sessions most weeks.

  Currently she stood only inches from the edge of the mattress since her balance still absolutely sucked and there was always the chance she would fall. She shuffled painfully and carefully to the bathroom to fix her makeup. The day had been long, starting in the wee hours before her flight to Boston and it was now past seven in the evening. She should have ordered room service instead of accepting Agent Breckenridge's offer to take her to a good Indian restaurant. She suspected that she was going to regret this -- not the hopefully good food and some conversation part but the part where the physical pain from all the things she'd done today caught up to her.

  ***

  Vaughn sat across from Sumiko in the restaurant. This one was entirely different from the coffee shop where they'd had lunch. It was quiet and more upscale. Sumiko had ordered a chicken tikka masala dish. He watched her eating for a moment. She seemed more distracted and tense than she had earlier in the day, and he wondered if somehow this had been a bad suggestion.

  "Indian not quite your thing?" he asked.

  "No, the food's great. I'm... just running out of spoons." He blinked and looked at the table for extra utensils. Had he missed something? What she said made no sense. She must've have noticed his confusion. "Sorry, that's a metaphorical thing, not a literal one. People who are disabled or suffer from chronic illness often refer to their spoons." She pulled a handful of sugar packets from the dish on the table, and lined them up on the table cloth. "These are my metaphoric spoons. They essentially equal the number of things that I can do in one day before the pain really starts to get to me. One for getting out of bed. One for showering, one for dressing, one for making breakfast for myself." She picked up one packet for each item she listed off. "These are things you probably don't really even think about, do you?"

  "No," he admitted.

  "Today I spent spoons on getting through an airport, a flight, getting through a second airport, getting to the Secret Service office and meeting with you. Then there's lunch and getting to my hotel and checking in..." She pointed to the two remaining packets. "Those represent changing clothes and coming to dinner."

  Vaughn suddenly felt guilty. "I'm sorry. I didn't get it. I thought taking you to dinner was a helpful thing. You said you weren't familiar with the city and everybody's gotta eat..." He stopped.

  She had reached out and touched her fingers to his hand. "It's okay. I just want you to understand. If I seem to be totally running out of steam, it has nothing to do with you. It's me. I have limitations and they're frustrating as all hell."

  He looked down at her fingers. It was a bridge of sorts. It felt like they were more than just two colleagues having dinner because she was here on a business trip. He was attracted to her. That wasn't very professional was it? Especially since she held the power of the decision whether Division P really wanted to offer him a job or not. He felt conflicted.

  ***

  If Vaughn Breckenridge thought any harder, he was going to give himself an aneurysm, decided Sumiko. She hadn't meant to make him feel guilty. She'd only meant to explain. Touching him was a reflex. It was specifically a psi reflex. In the weeks of training followed by months and months of working for Division P, she'd had it almost beaten into her head that touch was key. In a world where they often felt isolated and agonizingly different, it gave psi a connection

  "Vaughn," she said softly, specifically using his first name. "You had kind intentions and that's what counts."

  After they finished dinner, Sumiko twisted around to pull her jacket off the back of the wheelchair.

  "Would you...Would it be easier if I helped?" Vaughn asked.

  Sumiko could sense he was unsure if offering to help would be offensive. "Yeah, that would be good," she replied and smiled at him. She leaned forward a little and shrugged her way into the coat as he held it for her. Outside he stopped on the sidewalk.

  "It's three blocks back to your hotel... Do you want me to come with you, umm... or push?" She was amused by his awkward offer, and yet deeply touched too. She'd run into her fair share of people who basically bailed as soon as they felt they could possibly get away with it. Her mobility issues were a seriously uncomfortable issue for most, especially when she needed help.

  "It's been a really long day, if you could push me, that would be great," she said.

  ***

  Vaughn watched as Ms. Pierce inserted her room key in the slot and waited for the little LED to turn green. She twisted the handle and pushed the door open, and turned her wheelchair to face him.

  "Thank you for dinner, and for helping to get me back here to the hotel," she said. There was something soft and open about her smile and this felt like it had been a date. The thought of kissing her flitted through his head, but there didn't seem to be an easy way to reconcile that idea with the concept of maintaining any sort of professional relationship. And then there was the whole problem of trying to bend down to the level where she sat without straddling her feet or tipping too far sideways.

  "You're welcome. It's the least I could do after dragging you out again at the end of a rough day, Ms. Pierce."

  "Please, call me Sumiko or just Miko. I'll meet you at the office around ten tomorrow. Bear in mind, there are some tests headed your way."

  The wording struck him funny. "Do I need to study?" he asked and gave her a grin.

  She laughed. "No, they're not that kind of tests."

  ***

  The door closed with a click behind her and Sumiko sighed. She'd read the thought about the kiss. Even if she hadn't been a telepath, there had been that tentative head tilt that hinted at what he was contemplating. There was chemistry between them. If it would actually lead anywhere was the question. The chair got in the way. People tended to see the wheelchair first and the woman in it second.

  She locked the wheels and hoisted herself unsteadily into a standing position, gripping the edge of the desk in the room to make sure she was stable before attempting any steps. Her hip and leg ached, her back muscles were tight. Even her arms hurt from the amount of distance she'd covered in two separate airports. Division P would have been willing to send a second person with her to lend a hand. She'd refused. She was disabled, not helpless; it was a matter of proving her independence, repeatedly.

  She left her clothes in an untidy pile on the floor. Her room was a suite with a separate bedroom and living room. Easing carefully into bed, she wondered what the odds were that she would spend the rest of her life sleeping alone.

  Chapter 3

  In the office, Sumiko laid the cards out on the desk in front of him -- circle, plus sign, wavy lines, square, star. Vaughn blinked in shock. The infamous Division P couldn't possibly use something that hokey for their testing, could they? He let his mouth get away from him.

  "Zener c
ards? You're kidding..." he said. "This is how you're going to test me?"

  She gave him a smile. "No not really. This is more along the lines of a warm up. In fact, even relatively talented telepaths often score pretty badly at this. There's no emotional tie to these images for most people, so there's no hook to make them stand out in your mind... So it undoubtedly feels like a stupid game or some kind of parlor trick."

  Vaughn thought about the idea for a moment and asked, "Then why use them at all?"

  "I use it kind of like licking my finger and holding it up to see which way the wind is blowing."

  They ran through the cards three times. Vaughn scored a hair over statistical chance. The whole thing took about twenty minutes. Next, Sumiko handed him several sheets of blank white paper.

  "Number them one through six," she instructed. He raised an eyebrow. Was this supposed to be some sort of guessing the number game? He drew large digits in the center of each sheet. He noticed that Sumiko pressed her lips together like she was trying not to laugh. "Now flip number one over so you see the blank side." He complied. "Draw," she said.

  "Draw what?"

  "Whatever you think I'm thinking about."

  "That's awfully darn open ended and my art skills are pretty much limited to geometric shapes and stick people."

  "That's fine. This has nothing to do with artistic talent. If you think you've drawn something so badly that I won't possibly be able to recognize it, you can label it if you like," she commented.

  He was stumped. This seemed even crazier than he thought. On sheet one he drew a little stick figure jumping over a box. On number two he drew a graveyard full of headstones and crosses. For three, there was a cartoony little bomb exploding with a label that said "Bang" written below it. Four was a stick man with a parachute and crocodiles below him. Five was a bit different, no people, just a bed and window with a moon in it and the very last one was a handful of little happy faces.

  "Done?" she asked.

  "Yeah I guess so. Did I pass?"

  "That would be telling. We're done for now. You can get back to your case stuff, I'll catch up to you after lunch and then we'll move on to the next phase."

  He took that as a dismissal and went back to his own cubicle out in the main office. What exactly had been the point of all that?

  ***

  With Vaughn's sketches spread out across the desk top, Sumiko leaned back and studied them for several minutes before beginning notes on a legal pad. She had deliberately misled him. The drawing exercise had absolutely nothing to do with reading the image in her mind. In reality there were no images or at least nothing specific. It was an empathy exercise. If she focused on a certain strong emotion, would he pick up anything? The sequence had been happiness, grief, anger, fear, lust and number six was nothing. Gazing at number one, the correlation there was rather vague. Number two through five, however, he had definitely been picking up some emotional nuances. She was curious about the bed, the moon and the window. Was he so conservative that he equated lust or sex with the semi-literal concept of "sleeping together"? Sumiko had had one reasonably good male empath who she'd tested who had drawn several female figures with enormous breasts.

  The problem with empathy alone was that its uses were somewhat limited. Empathy alone, she reasoned, couldn't be the sole reason behind the facets of Vaughn's personnel file either. There was something else at play. Nailing it down might be difficult. She also suspected that he wasn't going to like the next phase.

  ***

  "Have you ever had a migraine?" Sumiko asked him.

  "No, I don't think so."

  "Ever been hung over?"

  That one made him snicker a little. "Yeah, been there, done that," he said. They were back in the room that she was using at the Secret Service office.

  "I have notified your boss that you may be unavailable tomorrow," she said.

  "Are we going out drinking?"

  "You're probably going to wish you had. Take a deep breath and try to relax." He looked at her. She was sitting casually in her wheelchair at an angle to the desk between them. Was she going to lunge across the desk and smack him with something? Oh yeah, like that was going to happen. She actually appeared to be simply staring at the floor. He sat still, waiting.

  She wasn't doing anything, just sitting there looking at nothing. And then he noticed the pressure. It reminded him of being in an airplane on descent before landing, that feeling like he should swallow and make his ears pop. He tried. It didn't help. He opened his mouth and flexed his jaw. The pressure was increasing. What the fuck? It changed. It was like someone was driving a railroad spike from the base of his skull up through the center of his brain out through one eye socket. He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his temples with his fingers. There was no relief and his hands reflexively clutched at the side of his head. Some remnant of coherent thought told him he should fight back, defend himself... do something.

  It felt like one of those "defend your vital organs positions, a last ditch curl in a ball and maybe I'll survive" maneuver. And the dagger of agony was gone. Vaughn felt like he could actually draw a breath again. His head pounded brutally in time with his pulse and his stomach did flip-flops threatening to empty itself. He finally opened his eyes and looked at her.

  Sumiko wore an expression of anguish. A tear slipped down her cheek and she swallowed hard.

  "I'm sorry," she whispered. "There isn't any other way." Vaughn wanted to be righteously pissed, but he was too busy wondering if he was going to puke in the trash can sitting beside the desk. "Close your eyes, lay your head down, breathe slowly, it'll help," Sumiko said softly.

  Vaughn scooted forward in the chair and folded his arms on the desk top like a little kid. He rested his forehead on his arms and closed his eyes. It did help a little. The lights in the room went out and he lifted his face and squinted at Sumiko. She had gone to the light switch and turned it off. Gray afternoon light from the cloudy day still came through the narrow window of the office but it was far less bright than it had been.

  "Bright light tends to make it hurt worse," she said.

  He laid his head back down against his arms and tried to concentrate on something other than the god-awful thud of his headache behind his eyes. "What the hell did you do to me?" he demanded, except it didn't sound like a demand. His voice was rough and breathy and bordered on pathetic.

  "Made you raise your shields. A psi without training generally has no idea how to defend against other minds. So I push until self preservation triggers them. I'm sorry. Really I am. I've been on the receiving end, it sucks big time. But I have to find out if you have the capability of learning to protect yourself. If you didn't, then that plays into my decisions."

  "Did I pass?"

  "Yeah, you passed."

  "Good... Fuck." Vaughn grabbed for the trashcan and lost the fight with his stomach. When he was done, he sat hunched over with his head leaning on the edge of the desk and one arm hugging against his stomach. He probably ought to be embarrassed but he felt so miserable he was tempted to lie down on the carpet. The nausea was mostly gone now but the headache was pretty damn close to blinding.

  Gentle hands put a water bottle into his own and he gulped down a little to get the dreadful taste out of his mouth.

  "Lying down would probably be a good idea. Can you take Excedrin? I have some in my purse. It might take the edge off the headache."

  "Unh, yeah. Excedrin's fine." He was still finding that opening his eyes made the pain worse. A minute or two later she placed the tablets in his hand and he took them.

  "Lie down on the floor, facing away from the window. I'll deal with the trashcan," she said. He pushed the chair back and eased himself to the floor. This undoubtedly looked stupid as hell, but his head hurt so badly, he wasn't sure if he cared.

  He heard her open the door and the little plastic "tink" of the wastebasket hitting the edge of her wheelchair as she picked it up. The wheels made a soft sound as she left. He
lay on the carpet in front of the desk, head resting on his arm. Fucking hell, this was as bad as any hangover he'd ever had, maybe worse. He had thought the comment about telling his boss that he might not be available for work tomorrow had been some sort of a joke. Now he thought it might be far too close to the truth.

  ***

  Sumiko felt sorry for Vaughn, and guilty. She didn't enjoy hurting him. If he'd ever had any psychic training, he might have raised his shielding after the first mental poke. However, like a number of people she had tested over the past couple of years, he was basically clueless on that front. She'd had every response in the spectrum, from those who did have a clue and responded defensively in less than a minute, all the way to one who had passed out. Vaughn's response was regrettably, fairly typical.

  He was hurting pretty badly, and it was likely to take at least several hours for the pain to dissipate. She rolled out into the hallway and set the trashcan on the floor. Her intention was to give him a moment to collect himself and feel less embarrassed by his reaction. She'd call somebody later from maintenance to come collect the trashcan. She estimated that she'd given him enough time to collect himself and she went back into the office.

  He was still stretched out on the floor. She lightly brushed her awareness across his mind. He was still awake, but the texture of his consciousness struck her as a little shocky. Not good. She grabbed her coat from the place where she had left it behind the desk, went back and locked the door and then rolled closer to where he lay. Locking the wheels of her chair, she pushed herself up to standing position, took a couple of shuffling steps and lowered herself to the floor beside him.

  His face was pale. She spread her jacket over his upper body and brushed her fingers lightly across his hand. She let a little telepathic tendril explore. Oh shit. He was one of those.