LITMIR.BIZ

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I had been on the road for some time now, going where my unusual talents were most needed, drawn by siren songs that I could not hear but to which my blood responded. Nobody in this place knew me, and I would sound like just another drug-addled paranoid, another piece of sad human wreckage of the kind that littered the landscape of an America that seemed to be rapidly fading out of history in a world growing darker by the day.

      In the market, I stood at a closed checkout station, pretending to be searching for a particular magazine among the many offered, but in fact watching the customer doors at the north and south ends of the building.

      Little more than a month earlier, in a town called Magic Beach, I had for the first time, by touch, recognized a potential murderer. On that occasion, into my mind’s eye—and into his—had erupted a scene from a nightmare of nuclear Armageddon that I’d dreamed the previous night, and I had known that he must be part of a conspiracy to atomize American cities. But I had not dreamed of these children set afire upon a stage.

      I didn’t expect the cowboy to follow me. I expected him instead to board his big rig and head for whatever highway to Hell might be programmed into his GPS. The vision surely rattled him as much as it did me. But as I long ago learned, expectations are fragile and easily shattered.

      The cowboy came through the north doors, spotted me at once, and approached purposefully. He looked like a star in some parallel-world version of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, one that featured maniac country singers.

      I hurried down the cereal aisle, turned right, and crossed the big store to the produce section, buying time to think.

      Even if I could find a sympathetic shopper or a credulous clerk, or an off-duty police officer picking through the McIntosh apples, I couldn’t seek help from anyone because of the aftermath of my few weeks in Magic Beach. Bad people were in jail in that town, and other bad people were dead. Homeland Security and the FBI had been brought in at the end of those events by an anonymous phone call that I placed; and now they were seeking someone fitting my description, though they had no name. I dared not attract the attention of the police in this smaller town, which was little more than a hundred miles farther along the coast from Magic Beach.

      In this big, complex, often mysterious world, I don’t pretend to know much. How to make fluffy pancakes might be the most important knowledge that I possess. In spite of my ignorance, I know without a doubt that if federal officers of any agency were to suspect that I possess paranormal abilities, I would spend the rest of my life in custody, being used for their purposes.

      I would also be studied and might be the subject of unpleasant experiments. I have a perhaps irrational but nonetheless genuine fear of scientists sawing open my skull while I’m awake and sticking pins in various parts of my brain to determine if they can make me cluck like a chicken or bark like a dog, or sing the lead role in The Phantom of the Opera.

      A spectacle in black and red, the cowboy arrived in the produce department. His pistol and his knife were tucked out of sight, but his face announced his madness as obviously as if he had been shouting gibberish and capering like a monkey.

      At that moment, I realized something more striking about this man than just his wardrobe and his taste for psychotic violence. In spite of his flamboyance, he seemed to elicit no special interest from the shoppers or the market staff around us. They appeared all but oblivious of him.

      Of course, a lot of people these days have developed a kind of radar to spot the numerous lunatics among us, and when that little alarm of recognition goes off in their minds, they keep their heads down and avert their eyes. They go about their business as if they are tuned out of here and now, instead tuned in to their private realities: Look at that weird dude with blue fire shooting out of his eyes. And look at these peaches! These are lovely peaches! I have never seen finer peaches than these superb peaches! And look at those grapes. I’m going to buy some peaches and grapes. Or maybe I should mosey over to the baked goods and browse there until I have thought over this … this scary peaches-and-grapes thing for a while.

      But I suspected that he drew no attention for some other reason, which eluded me.

      The cowboy approached me and stopped on the other side of the wide display bin, which offered four varieties of apples on my side, potatoes and sweet potatoes and leeks on his side. His fixed smile reminded me of a hyena, if a hyena had an excellent oral-health plan and a first-rate dentist.

      He said, “You come with me and answer some questions about what happened back there, and I’ll kill you easy. You don’t come, I’ll blow away a couple of these innocent women shopping for groceries, and then I’ll kill you. Want that on your conscience?”

      I didn’t think this was a guy who ever bluffed. He did what he wanted to do and moved on.

      As crazy as he might be, however, he didn’t want to go to prison or to be shot down by police responding to the outrage that he had just now proposed.

      When I didn’t answer him, he drew the silencer-equipped pistol from under his sports coat and shot a cantaloupe on the pile that an elderly woman was examining. Chunks of rind and orange melon flesh flew into the air and spattered the shopper.

      She startled backward. “Oh! Oh, goodness!”

      Although the cowboy still held the Sig Sauer, when the woman looked around in perplexity, her gaze rested longer on me than on him, and the pistol didn’t seem to register with her. She was bewildered, not afraid.

      Apologizing as if from time to time these darn cantaloupes just blew up on people, a produce-department clerk hurried to the elderly woman, showing no interest in the cowboy. The other customers focused on the clerk and the melon-soiled lady.

      The trucker’s hyena smile grew wider.

      I remembered something that he had said when he threatened to make a eunuch of me in the parking lot: You think I won’t do it right here in the open. But you’d be surprised what people don’t see.

      He expected me to run, whereupon he would have to shoot me in the back and forget about the interrogation that he wanted to conduct. But as he might have remembered from our recent encounter in the parking lot, expectations often don’t pan out, and what he did not expect was an assault with high-velocity fruit.

      Without taking time for a windup, I snatched a Red Delicious apple off the display in front of me and put a spin on the pitch. It hit him dead-center in the face, he staggered backward, and a second Red Delicious bounced off his forehead as blood streamed from his nose, stunning him so that he reflexively dropped his gun. I had been a pitcher on our high-school baseball team; and I could still put the ball where I wanted it, with wicked speed. Moving fast along the display bin, I plucked up a couple of Granny Smiths, which are hard little green numbers used for baking. The first hit his mouth maybe two seconds after he took the Red Delicious to the head, and the second caught him in the throat, dropping him to the floor, overwhelmed by apples.

      Shoppers cried out, staring at me as if I were the deranged man and as though the costumed cowboy with the silencer-equipped pistol were as innocent as a lamb set upon by a rabid wolf.

      The produce-department clerk shouted at me, I threw a Granny Smith with no intention of hitting him, he ducked, he popped up, and I threw another Granny Smith. He turned and fled, crying out for help, and all the terrified customers fled after him.

      Around the other side of the display bins, the apple-stunned cowboy, bleeding from his nose and from a split lip, was on his hands and knees, reaching for the pistol that he had dropped. He would retrieve it before I could kick it away from him.

      I ran from the produce department. Past displays of exotic imported crackers, cookies, and candies. Left into the long back aisle. Past coolers offering cheeses and a bewildering variety of pickles.

      Before I got to the fresh-meat display, I slammed through a pair of swinging doors, into an immense stockroom with tall metal shelving units to the left and right.

      A couple of stock boys in white aprons looked up from their work as I sprinted through their domain, but they wisely

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