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- Herausgeber: Bastei Entertainment
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: THINK
- Sprache: Englisch
Two years have passed since Think's slip-up with Sebastian... and though she's physically recovered, Think still worries her own thoughts may not be as private as she assumed. But before she can figure out who's listening into her, Think will need to listen into a brand new criminal on parole - Ezzie - who also happens to be in a coma. Can Think trace Ezzie's memories to discover how she got this way? And what other memories might be stirred up?
About the series:
Kathy "Think" Lipinski is a brilliant, yet disgraced psychotherapist who has changed careers to become a probation officer. The job is perfect for Think: a ground-breaking and highly controversial technology has made it possible to telepathically monitor the thoughts of convicts on probation. From now on, Think can listen to the thoughts of her "protégés" in her head. But every innovation comes at a price, and soon Think must ask herself whom she can trust - herself included...
Trent Kennedy Johnson is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, California. He most recently wrote the six-book crime series THE BAY for Bastei Entertainment, and is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago.
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Seitenzahl: 175
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Contents
THINK – About the series
Kathy “Think” Lipinski is a brilliant, yet disgraced psychotherapist who has changed careers to become a probation officer. The job is perfect for Think: a ground-breaking and highly controversial technology has made it possible to telepathically monitor the thoughts of convicts on probation. From now on, Think can listen to the thoughts of her “protégés” in her head. But every innovation comes at a price, and soon Think must ask herself whom she can trust – herself included ...
About the Book
Two years have passed since Think's slip-up with Sebastian... and though she's physically recovered, Think still worries her own thoughts may not be as private as she assumed. But before she can figure out who's listening into her, Think will need to listen into a brand new criminal on parole -- Ezzie -- who also happens to be in a coma. Can Think trace Ezzie's memories to discover how she got this way? And what other memories might be stirred up?
The Author
Trent Kennedy Johnson is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, California. He most recently wrote the six-book crime series THE BAY for Bastei Entertainment, and is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago.
Trent Kennedy Johnson
Episode 4A Glimpse of Dreams
»be« by BASTEI ENTERTAINMENT
Digital original edition
»be« by Bastei Entertainment is an imprint of Bastei Lübbe AG
Copyright © 2019 by Trent Kennedy Johnson
Copyright for this edition © 2019 by Bastei Lübbe AG, Schanzenstraße 6-20, 51063 Cologne, Germany
Written by Trent Kennedy Johnson
Edited by Allan Guthrie
Project management: Lori Herber, Kathrin Kummer
Cover illustrations © shutterstock: gyn9037 | faestock | logoboom
Cover design: Christin Wilhelm, www.grafic4u.de
E-book production: Dörlemann Satz, Lemförde
ISBN 978-3-7325-7418-6
Twitter: @be_ebooks_com
ONE – Clay
Remember me?
TWO – Olivia
(Remember us?)
THREE – Sebastian
Do you remember me? The things I said? The things I’d do to you, you little minx? The way I’d part your legs with one hand, with force, with authority, with ownership, in public, unabashed, and often, and you would tremble for me!
FOUR – Maddox
They call it the striatum.
FIVE – Sebastian
Do you remember?
SIX – Maddox
It controls the motor system.
SEVEN – Sebastian
And I would ask:
EIGHT – Maddox
You hope it’s healthy.
NINE – Sebastian
“What would you do for it?”
TEN – Think
“Stop!” her mother cried. She gripped the knob of Think’s childhood bedroom door with nearly enough force to tear it off and cradle it, while Think stood on a chair, on one leg, her good leg, with a broom in both hands. Its uncooperating bristles attempted to twist a dead lightbulb on the vaulted ceiling. “We’ll call someone, Kathy!”
“To replace a lightbulb?” Think caressed the bulb with the bristles.
“To simplify our lives, yes. To bring us peace.”
“We’re not helpless, Mom.”
“Get down, Kathy.”
“We are adults.” And Think was glad she said it, too, aloud, as a reminder to herself. It could be difficult to remember when she was living (briefly) in this house (temporarily) with her parents (and for only another minute, she swore), until her leg, her bad leg, the broken one in the cast, was all better.
“Get down!” cried her mom, but alas, Think lost her balance, tumbled off the chair, fell on her leg at the wrong angle, and broke the fucking thing again.
ELEVEN – Agent JX-88
We interrupt this report on Kathleen Lipinski to bring our collective attention to an individual of great concern. Her name: Esmeralda Garcia. Her age: twenty-seven. Her location: East Los Angeles. Her mental state: self-loathing. Her crime: homicide. Her past: torrid. She had once felt deeply for a man. In retrospect, the romance was like a machine: built, fabricated, empty inside except for the moving parts, prone to break. She’d known her beau hadn’t told her everything. She’d long suspected he might be sharing more with someone else. But she never anticipated the “someone else” was only thirteen years old. This was when she murdered him, and called the police, and admitted everything, and went to a correctional facility, and volunteered for Transference probation.
This is the first reason she matters to us now. The second reason pertains to Kathleen Lipinski and will become evident later in this report. The third reason is better illustrated by pulling directly from her SOC, chronicled and logged hours earlier at a small nightclub in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, called the Fourth Inning.
For the concerns of those in Total Information Awareness, please note Esmeralda Garcia regards herself internally by her lifelong nickname: Ezzie.
TWELVE – Ezzie
You.
You murderer.
You duck away from the insults, the slights, the reprimanding, the name-calling, the ones that linger in your head, the ones you call yourself, and you feel the beat of the music, feel how it makes the air throb, you just feel, you feel the heat of the lights, you just feel it, the heat of other humans, the mathematical rhythm of dance and song, and you feel this, you miss this, bitch, do you fricking miss this!
You twist on the chorus and dance and spin and laugh, imagining Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds, swimming in a fragrance of sweat, beer, cologne, perfume, and relief. One city’s collective week of worries shaken off, and stepped on, and kicked aside, out the door, onto the street, out you go, where it belongs, and good riddance! Do you like what you hear? Do you like what you see? Can you see anything at all, shifting from dance partner to dance partner, catching fractions of faces in hues and shadows, more elemental than man, closer to a communion than choreography, loud and dark and bright and sudden like a dark cave with a movie crew, lights-camera-action, a place to hide and be seen, atmospheric, kinetic, and were you asking yourself a question at some point? Can you remember? Can you think? Do you even feel?
“Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” a man once told you. “They don’t think. They don’t feel. They simply become. Like you.”
You. You’re a whore for nostalgia. You’re a slave to glamour. You’re the basic bitch of black-and-white classics, of romance and drama and dance!
The track has changed. The lights evolve. The dance floor rides with it, you included. You and the music are one and the same. For a moment, you can forget about the machine stapled to your brain, or the prison sentence stapled to your resume, or the ex-boyfriend stapled to your marriage certificate, or your dying abuela or your weird, unsociable, problematic brother, and instead, you are anonymous. You are not you. You have disappeared, and you like this.
“You are gorgeous!” proclaims a man to your right. You catch him in a traveling orange light. He’s tall, built like a Roman column. He’s cute. He’s Latino. He wears a silver bolo tie that’s not far from your eye level, featuring a tiny, painted, buffalo skull. You wonder momentarily where the tiny skull comes from, if it’s real, or if it’s carved. You notice he’s a good dancer. You can tell he doesn’t give a fuck if he’s good or not, he just wants to dance. You like this. You like him. You tell him so.
“I like you.”
And he tells you he feels the same way. Do you like what you see?
“Early for dancing,” he says, when the music takes a natural dip, and the two of you have migrated to the edge of the floor.
“Got to land those happy hour drinks,” you say.
“Pre-gaming?”
“Mhm. Long evening ahead. What’s your excuse, Bolo Tie?”
“Early bird catches the worm.”
“Hi, I’m Worm,” you joke. You shake his hand in an exaggerated manner.
“And I’m Bolo Tie,” he says. “Worm’s a weird nickname.”
“It was a joke.” Did he get it?
“Can I call you Necklace instead?” He points at your silver necklace. You are not your necklace. You. You murderer.
“Worm’s good.”
“What you doing tonight, Worm?”
“That’s to be determined.”
You and Bolo Tie leave the floor and find a corner. You remind yourself again that you are alone with this man you do not know. You decide this is an acceptable risk. You feel safe.
“You a voyeur?” he asks.
“Voyeur? What do you mean?”
“You know, you got a Quorumet?”
You sweat a little, and that’s not the afterglow. Your heart rate jumps. “How’d you know?”
“Didn’t. It was a guess. A lot of hip-ass people in this neighborhood electing themselves for the non-invasive new editions. You don’t know about this?”
“No, I…” But you stop, because you were about to say: you just got out of prison.
“They got apps for them and everything now,” he says, “Podcasts, right in your head.”
It occurs to you how little you know about what’s hip these days. That can happen when you spend most of your time in your abuela’s home, or insulting yourself in your bedroom, or working your shitty job, or re-living your time in a prison cell. You change the subject. “You don’t sound like a fan of the future, Bolo Tie.”
“You kidding?” He turns away from you and points at an X mark behind his right ear, where scalpels and needles once penetrated his skull. The scar is so much smaller than yours, though yours is well hidden under your outgrown auburn locks. You like his scar. You like him. You’re relaxed again.
“So, you’re one of these so-called hip-ass people.”
“And what about you, Worm?”
“Stud, please. I got an original.” You run fingers through your hair to find the scar, and he leans in close, and you can smell his beard oil. You miss this.
“Yeah,” he says. “Thought so. You look like the kind of woman who gets off on being some other place than she actually is.”
You think about your prison cell. You think about how you found your ex-boyfriend with that child. You think about how much you thought about being anywhere else, or nowhere at all. You. You murderer.
“Got me to a tee.” You flash him your sexiest grin. You like him. You’ve already told him so.
“I know a place after this,” he says.
You wink at him, and the music slides into a new track, and everyone’s excited about it. They’ve been waiting for it, this specific song, Bolo Tie included, as he sinks into the diaspora of arms, legs, and neon. Does he want you to follow? Shit, you’re not that easy. You decide to evoke mystique. Anyway, you need a break. And do you need to piss? Do you need a drink?
No. You need a smoke.
You find the back exit door and step outside to the quiet, wet back alley. The Los Angeles evening sun is bright and pink. You like this. It means there’s a lot more to come before you need to worry about getting home, preparing for work, confronting life. All that. The music dims as the door shuts behind you, replaced by the distant wail of ambulance sirens drifting off to an emergency you’ll never hear about. You. You uncaring, unfeeling, foul creature.
You pull out a cigarette from your purse, and light it, and smoke it, and shove away the insults, and focus on the muffled bass, and realize you’re the only person out here right now, shoeboxed by brick walls and chain link fence, with an abandoned lot beyond that. You could jump that fence, if you wanted to. You chuckle at this; how jumping is a human right we take for granted when we’re not in prison. You can jump fences, unlock doors, sleep in, or take a smoke break whenever. You miss this.
You never heard the door open behind you. That’s surprising. You recall it being a loud door, and if it had opened, you would’ve heard the music blare from within, if only temporarily. That seems to suggest that whoever else is out here with you, hiding, watching you, must have been here first. His inhale gives him away, sharp and through the nose with a slight whistling noise, but that’s the only tell-tale you discern before you feel the stinging impact against your skull, and the rushing pain from your forehead as it slaps against the cement, and the kicks to your ribs, one, two, three, four kicks, and the tearing of your dress, and you realize this is happening. This is you, right now. You remember reading that most sexual assault occurs between people who already know one another, and for whatever reason, you find yourself reaching internally for statistics or percentages related to that, as if it might somehow help you, as if you were on a quiz show, and not being twisted around so your shoulders are pinned to the cement. You attempt to frame his face in your portrait, but he wears a black three-holed balaclava mask, and his hands scrape at your neck, and you feel a pressure on the tip-top of your spine for only a moment until something makes a popping sound, and you realize it’s your necklace. He’s taken your necklace. He’s a fucking thief. He puts the weight of his knee on your stomach and he stands up and he grabs your purse as well, which you dropped during the first blow, and he runs for the alley’s end, with the fence, which he climbs over, and he’s gone. This was assault, or battery, or both, and theft, and shit, did it fucking hurt.
You breathe in deep. You feel a sharp pain on the right side of your body. You can’t stand up. Your vision is dizzy. You hear the clink of the chain fence again, and you try to see it clearly, and you realize it’s the same guy, and he’s cursing to himself as he comes over, and you try to elbow your way out of danger, but he drops over to your side, and in the slickest motion, he kicks you in the face-
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THIRTEEN – Think
“Wait!” her mother pleaded, while Think tried to hop down the stairs, but she fell cast first, and she broke the fucking thing.
FOURTEEN – Think
“Watch it!” said her dad, as Think pulled at the poodle’s leash, but when a poodle sees a squirrel, a poodle’s gonna run, and it took her by surprise, and the leash pulled her out the open back door, onto the deck, where her cast crashed against the patio table, and she broke the fucking thing.
FIFTEEN – Think
“Stop!” her mother cried, but Think didn’t listen, poked at the lightbulb with the bristles of the broom, lost her balance, and she broke the fucking thing.
“It doesn’t even hurt this time,” said Think.
She could hear her dad hurry up the steps (‘hurry’ being a relative term for him) while her mom fetched her phone in her bedroom, called 9-1-1, and arranged for yet another shameful trip to the hospital to set her bones.
“Honest, it doesn’t even hurt.”
The stupid poodle followed her dad up the stairs and barreled into the bedroom first, pillorying Think with unwelcome kisses since she was floor-level.
“Kathy,” said her dad, at the door frame. “I got a joke for you. Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Knock knock.”
“Who’s – I don’t get it. Is this supposed to be funny?”
“Exactly.”
She may have been lame but she wasn’t blind. Her parents’ welcoming arms had loosened since she returned to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She had meant to be here for six months while she recovered from the Sebastian-Mexico incident on a voluntary (forced) sabbatical. How could she have anticipated she’d re-break the tibia before it healed? Or that she’d re-break it again? Or a third time? Yes, perhaps, after the first twelve months home, she should have sucked it up and returned to Los Angeles to see through the rest of the recovery on her lonesome. But there was something about the Pennsylvania air that she swore hastened the bone-mending process. Or maybe it was the poodle, or Mom’s cooking, or the irrational sense that somehow, being here, away from Los Angeles, made her more distant, less accessible, to the enigmatic individual that she suspected was listening to her every whim, like right now, as we live and breathe, her butt falling asleep on the bedroom carpet, due to the awkward angle she needed to assume to sit with the broken cast.
Let it sleep, Renee. Go numb, darling. All the better for your favourite lover, yours truly, Sebastian Garner, to creep up on you and-
She shut Sebastian up. He wasn’t even real; he was dead. This was a construct of him. A mental manifestation of a narcissistic killer. (And if she kept telling herself that, he might finally go away.)
But no, no, there was one individual in her head who was real: Dear Diary, she called him (or her) (or it). Do you like what you hear? Does all of this still interest you? Are you planning to call the chopper, mobilize the boys, pull me out again, like before? Are you ever going to reveal yourself?
Or would Dear Diary let her break her leg again? And again? And again! How many emergencies would it take to pull the perverted overseer out of his (or her) (or its) hiding place? And what did she have to say to get this damn dog to stop licking her face?
“Someone call the hound!” she said.
“It’s not a hound. It has a name,” said her mom, returning to the scene, her phone in hand.
“Don’t remind me.”
“And it’s not an it. It is a she.”
“It’s disgusting.”
“Call her by her name.”
“I won’t.”
“America!” said her mom. “Come here, America. Kathy, call it America.”
“No!”
“If you don’t want America so close to you, maybe you shouldn’t be sitting down there.”
“Stop it!”
“Sweeties!” her dad boomed. Even America, the poodle, lowered at the decibel. For the sake of his precious blood pressure, and to disarm the drama, her dad forced a toothy smile.
That’s the Duchenne Smile, came an internal voice.
