The Killing Vision - By Will Overby Page 0,19

the bedroom was full of light. The clock said it was almost noon, and he could hear Marla stirring around, doing her Saturday cleaning. He sat up on the edge of the bed, his head thick and groggy, his stomach half-nauseated.

In the kitchen, he grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and headed for the front porch. He brushed past Marla, who was wiping down the counters, but didn’t say a word. Neither did she; he figured she knew better.

He sat down on the cold concrete of the edge of the porch, his feet dangling, which is where he was when Joel pulled up. He wondered again about his crazy night. Where all did he go and what did he do during those hours between screwing around with Shelley and Abby and waking up naked behind the wheel? It was frightening, and it made him angry.

Beside him, his beer had grown warm and yeasty in the midday sun; he drank it anyway.

* * *

1:20 PM

Joel weaved his cart through the aisles of Walmart, trying to stay in the edges of the store as far away from activity as possible. He hated public places like this. Occasionally when pressed with other people in a crowd, he accidentally brushed against them, and their thoughts would float through his head like a drifting radio station. Other times another person’s smell might simply be enough to trigger a vision or strong feeling, but that was unpredictable.

A couple of years ago he’d gone with Wade, Marla, and Derek to a Civil War battlefield that was now a state park. They’d planned on having a picnic and maybe renting a boat down on the river. But at one point, while poking around the battlefield, they had ended up in the park’s museum, a building that had served as a hospital during the skirmish that had occurred there. Everything was fine for a little while; they moved through the exhibits of dusty rifles and minié balls wordlessly and unimpressed. But when they’d reached the room featuring a display of medical equipment, Joel had been unable to go in. The whole feeling of the air had changed. Its sudden heaviness pressed on him and he couldn’t breathe. He bolted, running out of the building to the sunlit park. It wasn’t as if he’d seen a ghost or anything; it had simply been an overpowering and oppressive sense of fear. Later he learned the room had served as the operating ward, where doctors had amputated the arms and legs of screaming soldiers, most times without an anesthetic. The panic and terror of those few wounded men was so strong that Joel had been able to sense it a hundred and fifty years later.

Most objects or places he encountered never had much emotion attached to them. That was particularly lucky considering how much time in other people’s homes his job required. There came a point when you didn’t want to know certain things about people, especially when you were crawling around under their houses or hunkered down on their bedroom floor.

He maneuvered the cart around the end of the aisle, not really looking at anything, just walking and thinking. He stopped. Someone was following him. He could feel eyes boring into him like drill bits. He froze. He had entered the crafts section, and now he scanned the shelves, pretending to be extremely interested in the colors of yarn, but watching along the periphery of his vision.

And suddenly, there she was. A slender dark-skinned woman in jeans and a red T-shirt. Her black hair was pulled back neatly into plaits, and a slight smile curled the corners of her full lips. She was staring at him with an air of familiarity as if expecting him to greet her. He glanced around and saw that no one else was near.

His first thought was that she was some kind of psycho. But as he looked closer, he knew that could not be the case. She was dressed too neatly, was too clean, and had an aura of wealth about her. But yet, there was something in the back of his mind, something both comfortable and thrilling at the same time, something that made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. Was he supposed to recognize her? Had she been a customer?

He cleared his throat. “Do I… do I know you?”

She smiled fully, and it was a smile of kindness. “I don’t think so,” she answered, and her voice was like warm,