Out Of Touch

Out of Touch

A Novel

Rusty Coats

SMASHWORDS EDITIONS

Copyright 2011 Rusty Coats / Inknbeans Press

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For Janet, my Sundance Kid.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Though several locations and historical events are indeed real, all the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. Deacon Earl’s Scriptural misquotes are intentional. Other mistakes are not.

Chapter 1

Jonah warms the oil in his palms and lets it drip onto Marijka’s back, watching it pool in the two dimples above her hips. A wave of gooseflesh marches up her spine.

Sorry. Too cold?

His wife hums against the pillow. I shiver every time you touch me.

He rubs oil into her skin, feeling the knots loosen. Marijka earned her degree in criminal justice on a volleyball scholarship and still has cords of muscle in her tall body.

How does it feel to be famous?

She giggles. Delicious. And you?

One hand still on her back to maintain the psychic connection, he takes a sip of red wine, smudging the glass. He puts it back on their coaster – today’s Sunday State Journal. Their faces smile back from the front page under the headline: ‘Angel’ of Madison’s kidnapped kids takes wing to FBI. He says, I could get used to it.

Jonah kneels over her buttocks and pushes down on her shoulders. Sunlight throws prisms off the Waterford crystal angel Chief Rogers gave Marijka at the going-away party, staining the photos of kidnapped children Marijka and Jonah found in the past year, their names as familiar as nursery rhymes. Brittany Boswitch. Joni McKibben. Robbie Deitrich. Alonso Teppen. Miles Carter. Elaine Pan. Six cases now closed.

The article muffed your new title at the Smithsonian.

That’s OK. He feels heat pulsing from her inner thighs, mingling with the memories and futures coursing through her. We’re still trying to figure that one out.

They must really want you, Jonah.

Not as much as the Bureau wants you.

I hope the Smithsonian knows you’ll be traveling a lot. She winces. Lower.

Jonah spreads the oil lower. Does that mean the Bureau’s paying my salary?

You bet, she says. As much as Chief Rogers paid.

What I thought.

Jonah was a Madison P.D. secret before a serial killer named Mr. Goodwrench cracked Jonah’s knee and a State Journal cop reporter photographed him limping out of the warehouse. Chief Rogers finally had to admit that Jonah was doing more with the Missing Persons unit than visiting Marijka, and gave him the title Forensic Consultant – but paid him on the sly. Although the media refers to Jonah and Marijka as a team, he has no interest in leaving museums for police work, preferring to use his gift discovering the lost narratives of history than reliving the grim realities of modern crime. For Marijka, finding kidnapped children is deeply personal – ambitious and childless, she’s the youngest detective to head up the Unit, and she’s attacked the job as if each missing child is her own. An FBI position is her reward, though the move seems fogged and uncertain in Jonah’s visions; he never has flashed on the two of them in D.C., just as he has never flashed on Marijka bearing children. One of prophecy’s blind spots.

Mmmm. Yeah. Deep in there. I feel that all the way to my skull.

Sundays are for lovemaking, a newlywed tradition that now spans two years. Jonah loves the buttery feel of her skin and the familiar flashes that trickle up through his palms. Sometimes he narrates them to Marijka. Others he keeps to himself.

This one he shares: You never told me about Denny the Hickie Machine.

Her face comes away from the pillow, creased by the case. She sips her wine. Why else do you think I wore a turtle neck in all those school pictures?

It’s not the hickies on your neck I was referring to.

She shrugs. I don’t suppose I was the only sophomore who wore Clinique on her thigh. She finishes her wine and grins. All right, lover. You know the drill. Ante up.

He pushes her back to the pillow. In college, when Marijka learned that holding Jonah’s hand meant opening a random and unfiltered window to her life, she’d suggested a leveling mechanism: Any time he pulled a flash from her, he had to share a moment equally personal, equally embarrassing. Her sheer matter-of-factness about it was so endearing that he’d proposed to her within a week.

He thinks for a moment and says, After a swimming meet, our team captain gave me a joint. I thought it was pot. Turned out to be paprika. I acted stoned for two hours before I realized why they were laughing so hard.

Buzz, she says. Incomplete pass. I’ve heard that one.

OK, OK, he says, walking his knuckles down her spine. Give me a minute.

She groans with pleasure. Make sure it involves hickies.

He pours more oil on his hand. OK. Hickies. Darlene du Lac. Eighth grade.

Darlene du Lac, she says. Now that sounds like a girl who can give a hickie.

He grins. Hickies with texture. She had braces. At the homecoming dance –

His voice cuts out. The tendons in Marijka’s neck suddenly feel hard and cold. He has a moment to wonder why before a flash hits him so hard his head jerks back, his eyes full of chrome and broken glass. In an instant he is Marijka, punching through a Honda windshield, soaring over the hood, tumbling toward an empty merry-go-round, and Jonah screams, powerless to prevent his wife from dying all over again.

A jet roared, jerking Jonah Morgan awake in the back of a pale limousine as they steered toward the Indianapolis Airport. He glanced around. His heart galloped against his sport coat, just as it had six years ago when he’d first had the vision, days before he lost Marijka forever. Perry Jahn sat far away on the faux leather seat, sneering at the crowd on the sidewalk as he sipped brandy from a plastic tumbler. A small TV tuned to CNN showed the release of hand-fed eagles in the Hoosier State Forestry, riding updrafts. Six years. Jonah balled his gloved hands into impotent fists, feeling sweat trickle over the escarpments of his scarred palms, and he blinked until the image of Marijka striking the playground rides blurred and faded. After six years of wearing gloves to shield his ability under soft lambskin, Jonah had hoped the memories would fade, too.

It was all memory. Past and future – it didn’t matter. It ran through people like lightning, and it threw sparks on everything they touched. Car keys, wallets, CDs, pens, shoelaces, light switches, doorknobs, coins – all of them full of memory. Jonah’s hands could catch that lightning. What they couldn’t do was change it. Not even for Marijka.

"I abhor public airports, Perry growled as the limo stopped at the curb. The driver opened the door and Perry stepped out, keeping his back to the crowd at the skycap station. Some of them recognized the infamous Perry Jahn from his book jackets and ill-fated TV appearances and started to whisper. And now we have – he made a show of checking his watch – an hour to spend. In Indiana, of all places."

We’re ahead of schedule, Jonah said, biting off the urge to say, Again.

Perry’s interview on the morning-zoo radio show had ended abruptly – a final fiasco on a book-promotion tour that would surely be Perry’s last. It didn’t take a psychic to predict that the Perry Jahn Prophecies: Volume VIII was destined for the remainder shelves and Jonah was destined for reassignment with another author at SkyDance.

Perry’s monogrammed leather suitcases were so new they looked like wet seals. The driver was about to close the trunk on a tattered carry-on when Jonah grabbed it and hauled it to the curb. The zipper had let go again, and Jonah’s plastic water bottle rolled on the limousine trunk floor, its contents – Bakelite buttons, keys, earring clutches, chipped marbles, a swatch of Chantilly, the shard of a broken Waterford crystal angel – tumbling inside. Jonah quickly shoved it into the bag and hauled it to the curb.

One hour, Perry said. Jonah noticed streaks on Perry’s face where the self-tanning cream had turned to bronze Nazca lines. A complete waste of my time.

It’ll go quickly. Jonah fumbled with the pen to sign the bill on a credit-card palette. The driver gave Jonah’s gloves a curious stare. We’ll have breakfast.

At some dreadful T.G.I. Friday’s? I’d rather starve.

Jonah shrugged at the driver, who returned a blank stare. He stood six-five and his biceps stretched the seams of his A-1 Limousine Service tuxedo jacket. The coils of a neck tattoo poked over his starched collar. He said, Wrong date.

Sorry?

The driver nodded at the palette. You wrote the twelfth. Today’s the eleventh.

Sorry. Jonah smudged the 2 into a deformed 1. I always think it’s tomorrow.

Whatever.

The moment reminded Jonah of his grandfather. Your life is like this oak, Malachi Morgan once said, the old arborist’s hands caressing a blister in the bark where the oak had grown around a tine of barbed wire, so that it looked as if the fence went right through the core of the tree. You absorb what you can’t change.

A woman waiting in the skycap line whispered to her husband and pointed at Perry. The man shrugged: So what? A young Hispanic couple stared, too, urging their doe-eyed children to be quiet. Perry kept his back to them. His celebrity star burned dimmer than it had at the turn of the millennium, but he maintained a healthy disdain for people less famous than himself – and a blazing hatred of those more famous.

You can bet your ass, Perry said, Kami Cirrus doesn’t fly commercial.

Kami Cirrus wouldn’t have blown that radio show this morning, Jonah said, just loud enough for the driver to hear. But the driver wasn’t even looking at Jonah. He was looking at Perry. He said, Yo.

Perry turned, lips pursed. I beg your pardon?

I got this uncle, see? the driver said. And, you know, he’s, ah, you know.

Perry rolled his eyes and exhaled through his teeth. He’s passed?

The crowd inched closer, smelling free entertainment. Jonah’s stomach lurched; after this morning’s on-air catastrophe, Jonah was surprised anyone in Indianapolis believed Perry possessed even a glimmer of psychic ability. He tried to shoo Perry inside as the driver said, Yeah. I saw you on a show. I was wondering –

You were close to this uncle, yes? Perry said, waving off the driver’s last words. He stepped closer, eyes closed in a trance. I’m getting a closeness.

The driver’s eyes widened. "Dude, how did you know that?"

The crowd clotted behind him. He’s showing me something, Perry said. It’s heavy. Hard to lift. He says this means something to you.

My first weight set.

A collective sigh passed through the men and women waiting on the curb. A skycap removed his hat as if suddenly realizing he was in church.

Jonah pocketed the receipt and closed the trunk without anyone noticing. It was like that sometimes, when Perry started working the crowd. Everyone froze, even traffic seemed to stop, and Jonah could walk through the crowd like he was walking through a silent forest, totally unseen, which gave him a deep feeling of comfort. Perry thrived on the spotlight, and while Jonah had never been as famous as Perry – or courted that fame as doggedly – he remembered its allure. After Mr. Goodwrench, the paramedics had wheeled Jonah to the ambulance, his kneecap shattered and swollen to the size of a gourd, but the pain felt distant in the glare of the TV cameras. The cameras caught it all as his wife leaned over the gurney and kissed him and whispered hotly, How’s it feel to be famous, angel? He’d clutched Marijka’s hair with his bare hands, wicking the lightning that ran through her veins, and said, It beats trimming trees.

Jonah’s hands tingled in his gloves. It was the last case they’d worked together.

Uncle Winton, he bought me weights after I got cut from the football team.

Of course, Perry said. Your uncle would not lie to me, young man.

Most times, whether Perry got things right or wrong was immaterial; the psychic fairs and bookstores he worked were forgiving places. In Perry’s shrinking circle of fans, there was an unspoken agreement between him and his audience: They didn’t call him a fraud and, in exchange, he didn’t call them gullible.

But this wasn’t a New Age bookstore. Neither was the radio studio this morning, where Perry had helped the zoo jocks serve him up for breakfast, raw. Jonah just wanted to get inside the terminal before Perry’s ability went into action.

He’s telling me about a time with the weights. Something about spotting you.

Nah. He didn’t spot me. He had a bad back.

Too late.

Another dismissive wave. Yes. But there’s something about this particular time. He was out of the room and you’d added too many weights to the bench.

The driver’s entire face twisted, trying to force something into the slot. First time I put two-fifty on the bar, I had some trouble. But his back –

I’m getting a tightness in my chest now. Like I can’t breathe.

The bar was on my chest. The driver was nodding now. I couldn’t lift it.

Your uncle is showing me something distressing. Embarrassing, even.

Perry paused. The crowd drew closer. Jonah could almost feel them as Perry must have felt them, all of them in the palm of his hand, waiting to be squeezed. As his de-facto publicist, Jonah knew most of Perry’s faults. He also knew one of the man’s almost supernatural strengths: Perry Jahn had great timing.

He’s showing me, another pause, colors.

The driver blinked. Colors?

Perry stepped closer. That’s what he’s showing me.

I got scared, under the weight. Maybe I turned red or something.

And you urinated.

The sidewalk crowd gasped. Jonah’s stomach turned to ice. Here we go again.

Fire came up in the driver’s brown eyes. No such thing.

I’m getting the color yellow. Spreading across your lap.

The driver’s fist clenched. He articulated the words very precisely through his teeth. You best tell these people I did not piss my pants.

Rushing now, Jonah signed them through the check-in and handed a tip to the skycap, who stuffed it into his pocket while staring at Perry Jahn.

And that’s how your Uncle Winton found you. He’s showing me his hands on the bar. He says he told you to lift. And he helped you lift the bar.

The driver shook his head. "Ain’t no such thing. I told you. He had a bad back. He only stood there and watched me squirm. Eventually, I rolled it off."

Yes, but with his help. He saved you.

"Dude, you are not listening. My uncle had no back, get it?"

The crowd buzzed. Joke and sham were favorite words. Familiar ones.

Yes, but I’m seeing very strong legs. Your Uncle William had muscular legs.

The driver stared at him. Then he burst out laughing. "Winton, fool, not William. And he was in a wheelchair, man. Had polio as a kid. His legs were noodles. He shook his head. Maybe you’re talking to some other dude’s uncle."

The crowd laughed and Perry’s copper face darkened. Surrounded by laughing travelers and blinking taillights, Perry was getting eaten alive. Again.

Jonah went to retrieve Perry, to save the man from himself – perhaps the largest part of Jonah’s job since being reassigned from working on SkyDance’s website to handling press junkets for the publisher’s dimming clairvoyant. Perry’s Y2K predictions had provided fifteen minutes of fame and a few years of repeat sales, but now second-tier cities booked Perry for the kind of self-destructive entertainment the man seemed all too eager to provide. The days of world-famous apocalyptic prophecy were long gone.

But before he reached Perry, the driver stopped Jonah and said, Yo. My pen.

Jonah nodded, distracted, and held out the A-1 Limousine Service pen. He meant to let go the instant the driver’s hand came up, but the driver grabbed the pen, Jonah’s gloves, part of his wrist – all of it enveloped in the driver’s huge, hot palm.

The flash leaped up, rude as epilepsy, lightning shooting up Jonah’s wrist and bursting across his consciousness, his mouth flooding with the taste of Fritos. The guy was a radiator, pure heat. Some folks were like that. Some …

Jameson is 17, home alone with afternoon shadows and nicotine-stained curtains. Uncle Winton is in the bedroom while Jameson plays Tomb Raider on the Sega, listening to Naughty By Nature on a freshly shoplifted Diskman. His eyes are dry and red, high from the badass skunkweed he shared in Terrell’s Toyota.

A noise comes from the adjoining bedroom. Wet rumbling. Jameson.

Jameson ignores the sound. His momma will be home soon; let Winton wait.

Jameson. More urgent now. The old man’s voice sounds like old plumbing, full of hair and rust. Need you, boy. In the kitchen.

Jameson shovels a handful of Fritos into his mouth. The crunching sounds reverberate through his skull and drown out his uncle’s wheezing. He leaps Lara Croft onto a ledge, dodging spears. He’ll match Andre’s score before Momma comes home.

His uncle hisses like a radiator: Jameson, you there? Please, boy.

Lara takes a pike in the stomach, dives on the cliff, falls in a heap. Shit! Jameson throws the control on the floor. Yells, Old man, what the FUCK do you want? Huh? What the FUCK is so important about the fucking kitchen?

He saunters toward the bedroom door. Pushes it open with his Adidas. Puffs out his chest, ready to show Uncle Winton who’s the man of the house, make no mistake.

Sees him.

His uncle is having an asthma attack, a massive one, and his breather is nowhere to be found. Winton’s face is swollen, his hands clawing at the collar of his ratty pajamas. As if opening the collar will help him breathe.

Holy shit! Uncle Winton! Shit!

Breather. His mouth opens and closes like a fish on the pier. Kitchen.

The breather is in the kitchen. That’s what was so important about the kitchen. Jameson sprints out of the room, misjudges the cord of the Sega control and it coils around his ankle, pulls tight. Jameson falls, face grinding into the bag of Fritos.

Fuck!

He yanks the Sega deck across the room and runs into the kitchen, grabs the breather next to the telephone and runs to the bedroom, ignoring the tangy corn-chip crumbs freckling his cheeks, yelling, Got it, Uncle Winton! Got it now!

But his Uncle Winton has already slipped into a coma, eyes bulging and his tongue gone purple out the side of his mouth.

… some folks were like that.

Jameson yanked the pen away and glanced at his hand, rubbing his skin as if trying to shake off a bad case of freezer burn, eyes wide.

Breather’s in the kitchen, Jonah mumbled, his tongue raw and his eyes burning, still smelling Terrell’s badass skunkweed. And you’ve got Fritos on your face.

Jameson’s face went slack. The pen fell out of his hands and clattered to the asphalt. Before he could speak, Jonah stepped through the crowd, shoving when he had to, needing to get out of this place. He tugged the gloves tighter on his hands and felt the soft lambskin pinch the webbing between his fingers. He’d been wearing them for six years – six years of hiding in the SkyDance Web department, sifting through the e-mails and proposals that flowed through the website, looking for the one that would help him understand his own ability. The one that would help him turn it off.

But now it was six years after he’d lost Marijka, two thousand empty days, now spent in the shadow of a man clawing for fame. Today, Jonah would fly home no closer to finding the answers than he’d been yesterday. Tomorrow would be no different.

Perry. Jonah stepped onto the sidewalk just as a large yellow school bus shrieked its rusty brakes, purple ribbons trailing from the windows. Let’s go, Mr. Jahn.

Perry’s eyes latched onto Jonah with hooks, and Jonah could tell from the fog enveloping his boss that Perry had heard nothing he’d said to the driver. He’d been too busy retreating from the titters and finger-pointing of other passengers.

Perry studied his watch. There, he said, straightening his sleeve as the glass doors closed behind them. Now we only have forty minutes to kill.

Chapter 2

Natalie O’Bannon needed a shower, even though she’d had a long, scalding one this morning before leaving New Hibernia for the Indy airport, letting the jets massage her scalp until her bright red curls lay flat and her tears ran out of salt. Three hours on the team bus and she felt as if she’d been dipped in sticky testosterone. It fogged the windows and gummed up the purple and yellow streamers. Worst of all, it turned the pages of her reporter’s notebook soggy and curvy. Hard to get the quotes to stick.

"Holy Moses, Jonesy, what’d you have for breakfast? That is rank!"

That ain’t me. That’s Gomer.

Aim your accusations elsewhere, Jonesy. I am incapable of that kind of gas.

Hey, he who smelt it, dealt it.

Not that there were any quotes worth writing down this morning.

Tornadoes! Coach Purcell’s hoarse baritone voice cut through team’s voices with the authority of a shotgun. The silence was immediate and a little eerie, like a tree of screeching raptors struck silent by thunder.

Purcell turned and faced the boys. His purple nylon Tornadoes jacket hissed against the torn Naugahyde bus seat he shared with Natalie. I want to remind you gentlemen that every word that comes out of your mouth reflects on you, your team, your coach and your hometown. That includes your mothers and fathers. Your pastors. Or, in your case, Gomer, your rabbi. And whatever it is you have, Malik.

Natalie could hear the giggles drain out of the boys’ sneakers.

And I will not be represented by fart jokes, Purcell continued. And then he gave Natalie a wink so sly that if it had been an earthquake, it wouldn’t have rippled water. "Especially by a team on its way to the Summer Hoops Classic Championship!"

The boys reacted with such raw excitement that Natalie thought of the IMAX movie Randy had taken her to once, the one about Jane Goodall and the tribe of chimpanzees she’d studied for decades. The New Hibernia Tornadoes – unexpected champions of the Indiana sectional of the Hoops Classic – simply had less body hair.

Coach Purcell turned around as the Tornadoes began to chant Mah-LEEK! Mah-LEEK! Mah-LEEK! a chant that became a town anthem following Malik’s miraculous full-court Hail Mary at the buzzer that put the team on the road to Minneapolis. Natalie still could hear the sound of the ball stripping the net, breaking a silence that gripped the entire Sportsplex. And then the place had exploded in cheers, seized by some kind of uncontrollable, religious awe as Coach Randy Purcell ran onto the court and lifted Malik into the air, tears in his eyes as the flashbulbs strobed. Small school, Hail-Mary champs. The core mythology of Indiana high school basketball, as central as loaves and fishes. In generations to come, people would lie and say they’d been there that day, just so they could claim a scrap of the miracle for themselves.

Natalie smiled at him. Nicely done, Coach. They’re much calmer now.

Gotta keep that energy up.

For another day, at least. I hear Hopkins High is a tough team.

He grinned. Sunlight winked off the gold fillings. For Natalie, part of Randy would always be the 17-year-old star forward in the candy-apple Camaro, despite the threads of gray at his temples and the arthritic shoulder he denied, even on cold wet February mornings when his left hand seized into a claw. His grin was one of those parts.

Hopkins nothing. We’re going all the way to the nationals in Orlando. The way these boys are playing? We’re going to Disney World.

Can I quote you on that?

He started to say something when the bus took the off-ramp a few G’s ahead of its suspension and the International Harvester wobbled. Coach Purcell slid into Natalie, pinning her to the metal wall and sliding window. It wasn’t the first time she’d felt his full weight on her. He said, Is that all last night was? An interview?

She pushed him back into place. Technical foul, Coach.

He chuckled, loosening the gravel in his voice. He’d been giving interviews and talking at town functions all week, raising money to send the team to Minneapolis for the