“Climbing the fence was a short cut.” But to what? She hadn’t known then, didn’t know now. She’d simply felt a compelling urge to do it.
“And how’d you know who killed her? You led the police right to him.”
A trail of goose bumps raised the hair on her arms. She didn’t know how. And she didn’t want to talk about it. That was a year ago. She’d put the whole thing behind her.
“Ever considered this has something to do with my death?” The room cooled around her, the perspiration on her skin chilling. Cameron went on. “You never had visions before I died. Now you hear me, even though no one else can." His voice gentled. "You opened a door when you couldn’t let me go, Max. It’s too late to shut it now. You heard a dead child’s cries. Now you’re seeing that woman’s last moments on earth. You know she’s dead.”
She had two choices, make a joke or pick a fight. She chose the former. “By jove, I think you’ve got it, Watson.” She shook her finger at him, and the next joke died on her tongue. What came out was stark reality. “Watching your husband get shot by thugs, planting him in the ground, and throwing a few clods of dirt on his coffin does something to a person.”
In fact, it drove a person crazy. That’s just what Max wanted to be. She didn’t want psychic. Crazy was better. Crazy meant that she could keep on talking to Cameron as if he were alive, that she could swear he was there in her bed every night, making love to her, filling her body full to its last empty corner. In sane moments, she craved real hands on her, but she’d never give Cameron up. Being crazy meant he was hers forever.
She didn’t have to say any of those things aloud. He knew her thoughts, lived in her mind, her soul. He knew her.
“What a pair we are, Max. You’re slowly dying. And I’m already dead.” He shed his tears for her in his voice, in his words, in the pitiful cry of the cat outside.
His voice in her head was a blessing and a curse. A blessing because even in death he’d never left her, a curse because her life had stopped that night in the 7-Eleven market. She’d been there. She would never block out that memory. She would always live with it.
She knew she had to let him go one day, yet every night she prayed he’d still be there in the morning. She couldn’t imagine what life without him would be like, didn’t want to imagine it.
Max tested her legs, almost surprised to find that enough feeling had returned to support her.
Grabbing her short robe from the straight-back chair beneath the window, she pulled it on, skirted the bed, and headed to the bathroom. Her studio apartment was small. With five steps, she was there.
The interior of the bathroom was dark except for Cameron’s phosphorescence. After two years, she should have been used to the way he moved faster than her eye could follow.
Max flipped on the light, and his glow vanished.
Like a bad omen, a crack, running the length of the medicine cabinet mirror, bisected her face. Dark pouches clung beneath her eyes, fine red veins traced through the pale skin of her cheeks. Her dilated pupils almost obliterated the brown irises. Her dark hair stood on end. Party hair. Or fright.
“You’ve lost more weight, Max.”
He was right. She looked worse than if she’d pulled an all-nighter on a tricky audit. She rubbed beneath her bloodshot eye, then moved to one side of the mirror’s fissure.
Holy hell. Long reddened furrows, just short of bleeding, stood out on the flesh of her neck. She started to shake from the inside out.
“Cameron?”
“Yes, my love?”
She ran a hand down her throat, the phantom roar of jet engines in her ears. “If that dream was real”—staring at her injured throat, she realized that wasn’t such a big if—“then the woman’s body is somewhere in the long-term parking lot at San Francisco Airport.”
*
“I don’t know why we’re going on this wild goose chase.” Max wished she’d never mentioned the airport. The eensy-teensy bit of alarm she’d felt had faded with the morning sunlight. She’d relegated her “vision” back to the dream realm. But Cameron wouldn’t let it alone until he’d gotten her into her car.
“Guess an eensy-teensy bit of alarm is why you wore a turtleneck on a warm day to cover the marks on your throat. How about trying the word panic?”
Max ran a hand through her short, no-fuss hair as she took the airport exit. Okay, so she had felt a touch of panic. She was better now.
It was early, a little after six a.m., but traffic around the airport boxed her in like peak rush hour. Two yellow taxis honked as they vied for the same spot in the right lane, and the thunder of jets overhead rattled the frame of her red Miata. Cameron had bought the convertible for her the year she’d made manager at KOD; Kirby, O’Brien, and Dakajama. The year before he died, when she was on the fast track and life was still normal. Before KOD meant Kiss of Death.
“You have a psychic gift you can’t ignore.”