Текст книги "The First Prophet"
Автор книги: Kay Hooper
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Still, he couldn’t quite let it go. “You asked me back there why I came to see you. If you already knew the answer—”
“I just wondered if you’d tell me the truth. Most don’t. As if it’s some kind of test. That was your reason. You’ve been waiting for a…real psychic. Someone who’ll know without any hint from you. Someone you can really believe in.”
Tucker was more shaken than he cared to admit, even to himself.
“Turn left here,” she said in the same detached tone. “The shop’s up ahead a couple of blocks.”
He obeyed, telling himself silently that she was only making shrewd guesses and nothing more. She had not, after all, told him anything remarkable. She’d said herself that people came to her because they were looking for something they hoped she could help them find. And he didn’t doubt that many of those seekers came to her with a chip on their shoulders, waiting for her to “see” them clearly and know without being told what they wanted.
Sarah didn’t seem disturbed by his silence. “You can let me off at the front,” she said.
Instead of doing that, Tucker pulled his car into one of the parking places at one side of the neat, two-story building that had once been a residential home but now joined others on the street as a small business. “If you don’t mind,” he said pleasantly, “I’d like to go in with you. I could use a cup of coffee, for one thing.”
She turned her head and looked at him as he shut off the engine. “I don’t need you to look in the closets for monsters. I don’t mind being alone.”
For the first time, Tucker felt he was getting a sense of her, and he thought she was lying. She did mind being alone. She minded it very much. Ignoring her protest, he said, “If there’s no way to make coffee here, I can get some at that restaurant down the street and bring it back for us.”
After a moment, Sarah nodded and reached for the door handle. “I can make coffee here.”
He couldn’t tell whether she wanted his company or was merely resigned to it, and didn’t ask. He was very good at getting his foot in the door, and for now that was all he wanted.
Sarah led the way around to the rear of the building, where a flight of stairs provided access to the second-floor apartment. They were greeted at the top by a large cat who was sitting on the railing. A large black cat.
Of course, it would have to be a black cat. Tucker reached out and scratched the cat under his lifted chin while Sarah got the door key from under a flowerpot also on the railing. “Yours?” he asked, reading the cat’s name tag in surprise and with a vague sense of familiarity.
“He seems to think so. He showed up a few days ago, and so far no owner’s come forward to claim him, so I’ve been feeding him.” She unlocked and opened the door, stepping just over the threshold to reach inside and deactivate a security system using a keypad by the door. Then she looked back at the cat. “You want in, Pendragon?”
Pendragon did. He jumped down from the railing and preceded them into the apartment.
The place had the slightly stale smell of infrequent use, but it was cheerfully decorated and bright enough. The main room was a combination kitchen/dining area/living room, with low bookshelves separating the dining and sitting areas and a breakfast bar partitioning the kitchen from the rest. There were area rugs in muted colors on the polished hardwood floor, light and airy curtains hanging at the few windows, and overstuffed furniture chosen for comfort in light neutral shades, with plenty of colorful pillows scattered about. There was even a gas-log fireplace and compact entertainment center.
A doorway led to a short hallway, off which Tucker assumed was a bathroom and one or two bedrooms.
Sarah went first to the thermostat on the wall near the hallway and adjusted the temperature so that warm air began to chase away the slight chill of the room. Then she went into the kitchen and got coffee out of one cabinet and a small coffeemaker out of an appliance garage to one side of the refrigerator.
“I stocked the place with groceries just the other day,” she said conversationally as she measured coffee. “And I have spare clothes here. When either Margo or me is out of town, the other one usually spends at least a few nights here. It gives us a chance to catch up on paperwork while we’re keeping an eye on the place.”
Tucker wondered whether she was talking just to fill the silence, or whether it was her way of keeping reality at bay. The numbness couldn’t last forever; sooner or later, she would have to face the loss of her home and belongings, with all the shock and grief that would entail. But if her choice was later, it was, after all, her choice.
He sat down on one of the tall bar stools at the breakfast bar, watching her. “Have you had break-ins here?”
“No. Most burglars are looking for valuables they can put in a sack, or at least carry by themselves; our stock is made up mostly of furniture, with very few easily portable valuables. But Margo is paranoid about theft, which is why we have an excellent security system. And I don’t mind spending time here when she’s out of town.”
“How long will she be gone this time?”
“Another week, maybe two.” Sarah got a pet bowl out of the dish drainer beside the sink and filled it with kibble, then set it on the breakfast bar in front of the stool beside Tucker’s. He watched in silence as Pendragon leaped up on the stool, sat down, and began eating delicately from his bowl, then looked at Sarah.
She met his quizzical gaze and smiled for the first time in genuine amusement. “I found out quickly that Pendragon likes to sit up and eat like people. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No. It’s more his house than mine.”
She nodded, the smile fading, then said, “I think I’ll go change. If the coffee’s ready before I come back, help yourself. Cups are in that cabinet, and the sugar and cream are already out on the counter.”
“Thanks. Take your time. I’ll be fine.” He watched her leave the room, then absently reached over and scratched Pendragon behind one ear. The cat made a faintly disgusted sound, which Tucker took to mean he disliked being touched while eating. “Excuse me,” he told the cat politely, drawing back his hand.
Pendragon murmured something in the back of his throat, the sound this time so obviously mollified that Tucker blinked in surprise.
Peculiar cat.
The coffee was still dripping down into the pot, beginning to smell good but not quite ready to drink. Restless, Tucker left the bar stool to prowl around the room, studying the decorations and furniture without really seeing them. After only a slight hesitation, he turned on the gas-log fire, which immediately made the room seem more cheerful but didn’t do much for the little ripple of coldness chasing up and down Tucker’s spine.
That unnerving sensation drove him to one of the two narrow dormers that provided a view out the front side of the building, and he found himself cautiously drawing aside filmy curtains so he could see the street below without calling attention to himself.
But the caution was wasted, because the tall man in the black leather jacket seemed to have a sixth sense of his own, vanishing into the shadows of an alleyway across the street before Tucker could catch more than a glimpse of him.
“Shit.” Brodie straightened from the crouch holding a piece of charred wood in his hand, his lean face as grim as the curse. He turned the wood in his hands—it had, once, been a piece of decorative porch railing—then dropped it and rubbed his hands together angrily.
“We don’t know they did it,” Cait Desmond reminded him.
“We don’t know they didn’t,” he retorted. “I prefer to err on the side of past experience.”
His partner looked at him for a moment, then looked back at the ruins of what had been Sarah Gallagher’s home. It was nearly dark now, but the devastation was still obvious. A cold wind whined miserably past the chimney that still reared up in a stark silhouette above the dead house, and Cait shivered as she turned up her collar and thrust her hands into the pockets of her jacket.
“Did you find out anything?” Brodie asked her, the anger muted now in his brisk tone.
Cait moved closer to him and kept her voice low even though there seemed to be no one else about and certainly no one within earshot. “Yeah. I talked to one of the neighbors while she was out walking her dog a little while ago. Arson is definitely suspected; a couple of people reported a stranger hanging around today.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me.” It wasn’t a question. Brodie sighed, his breath misting in the cold air. “Well, they didn’t get her, or you would have said so by now. So where is she?”
“According to the neighbor, Sarah Gallagher left here with a tall blond man who ‘looked vaguely familiar.’ Not another neighbor, and not a cop. He was driving a late-model Mercedes.”
Brodie whistled in surprise. “That doesn’t sound like our guys. Their wheels tend to be very unobtrusive.”
Cait nodded. “That’s what I thought. Unfortunately, the neighbor didn’t get a license plate, so that’s no good. She did, however, say that she thought the cop in charge talked to both Sarah and the blond stranger before they left, so there’s a solid chance the locals know where Sarah’s supposed to be. Especially since she probably hasn’t been ruled out as a suspect herself.”
“Yeah, they will check the obvious first.” Brodie nodded slowly.
“So we need eyes and ears inside the local police department,” Cait said. “They probably wouldn’t know me, so—”
Brodie was shaking his head. “I don’t think so, Cait. We need to move too fast; planting someone on the inside takes time. But…I might know someone who already has eyes on the inside.”
“Someone you can trust?”
He smiled faintly, as though he found the question amusing. “I don’t deal with people I can’t trust. Come on—we need to get out of here before that squad car makes its next scheduled pass by here. And let’s find a landline; I don’t want to use the cell for this call.”
When Sarah came out of her bedroom wearing a bulky sweater and jeans, Tucker didn’t mention the watcher outside. It was not out of some outdated—and no doubt unwanted—sense of chivalry that he kept silent, but simply because he was convinced Sarah would not be surprised by the knowledge. She knew she was being watched; he thought she knew why, or had some suspicion why—and it had nothing to do with frightened neighbors.
It was an answer he wanted.
Sarah glanced toward the fire without comment as she passed through the living room, then turned on a couple of lamps and went into the kitchen area.
“I didn’t know how you took yours,” Tucker said, lifting his coffee cup in a slight gesture.
She poured a cup of coffee for herself, taking it black. “No problem. Look, it’s after six; I have some ready-made stew and bread in the freezer, if you’re planning to stay for supper.”
Tucker had to smile at the wording. “I’d hate to impose.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” she said, either another shrewd guess or certain knowledge. Whichever, it was accompanied by a slight smile as Sarah began getting out a pot and the frozen stew, and turning on the oven for the bread.
Tucker reclaimed his stool at the breakfast bar, sitting beside a cat who was neatly washing his paws and face after his own meal. “Okay, so I wouldn’t hate it. I’ve got the nerve of a burglar, according to most of my friends. But I was trained right; if you’re going to do the cooking, I’ll do the dishes.”
“Suits me.” She put the bagged stew into the microwave to thaw, then leaned back against the counter and sipped her coffee, looking at Tucker across the space separating them. “Are you planning to spend the night?”
That question would have bothered Tucker, except for the fact that she sounded totally uninterested in the subject. “That depends on you.”
“I told you I didn’t mind being alone. There are no monsters in the closet or under my bed; I just checked.” She wasn’t smiling.
Neither was Tucker when he said, “There’s one outside. Watching. Wearing a black leather jacket.”
Her eyes seemed to flicker slightly. “You saw him?”
“Yes. A few minutes ago, before it started getting dark. Who is he, Sarah?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why is he watching you?”
“I don’t know.”
Tucker shook his head. “And yet you aren’t worried about it? I don’t buy that.”
“Why worry about something you can’t change?” She shrugged.
“Then you do know why he’s watching.”
Sarah hesitated, then shook her head. “No. I—I don’t know the why of any of it. Just the fact of it.”
Baffled, Tucker frowned and watched her turn to get the stew out of the microwave and put it in a pot on the stove. “So what is the fact of it?” he asked her.
“He’s watching me. He’s waiting. And sooner or later, he’ll do what he came here to do.”
“Which is?”
“I don’t know.”
After a moment, Tucker drew a deep breath. “Yeah, I’m spending the night,” he said flatly.
She looked back over her shoulder at him, her eyes flickering again. “To guard the door? To keep the monster out? Don’t bother. You can’t save me from him.”
Her fatalistic attitude irritated Tucker. “At least I’m willing to try, which is more than I can say for you. Where’s the phone? This is something Sergeant Lewis should know about.”
“He can’t save me either,” she said softly, returning her attention to the stew.
“Why the hell not? He’s a cop, isn’t he? It’s his job.”
Sarah shook her head. “To protect and serve? No. There’s nothing he can do—even if he believed me. Even if he believed you. And he wouldn’t.”
“You can’t know that.”
She turned toward him again, leaning back against the counter and picking up her coffee cup. She was smiling. “Can’t I? Then you’ve wasted a trip, haven’t you, Tucker?”
It silenced him, but only for a moment. “You’re not going to do anything about that guy out there? Not even report to the police?”
“Not even report to the police. I’ve learned to accept what I can’t change.”
“You accepted me awfully easily,” he said curiously. “Why? Was our meeting—meant to be?” The question wasn’t nearly as mocking as he had intended it to sound.
“I recognized you,” she replied with yet another shrug.
“Recognized me? From where?”
“I had seen you.” There was an evasive note in her voice, something Tucker was quick to pick up on.
“Where had you seen me, Sarah?”
There was a moment of silence. She looked steadily down at her cup, a slight frown between her brows. Then, finally, softly, she said, “I had seen you in my dreams. My…waking nightmares.”
“You mean you had a vision and I was in it?”
Sarah almost flinched. “I hate that word. Vision. It makes me sound like some cheap carnival sideshow mystic. Pay your money and come into the tent, and Madam Sarah will look into her crystal ball and tell you your future. All filled with hope and dreams. Except that isn’t what I do. I don’t have a crystal ball. And I can’t get answers on demand.”
Patient, Tucker brought her back to the point. “All right, then. You had seen me in your—waking nightmares. You had seen me in your future. So you knew you could trust me?”
Her slight frown returned. “It has nothing to do with trust. I saw you. I knew you’d be there. When it happens. I knew you weren’t involved in it. At least—I don’t believe you are. But you’re there. When it happens.”
The writer in Tucker was going crazy with her tenses, but he thought he understood her. At least up to a point. “When what happens, Sarah?”
She looked at him, finally. Her gaze was steady and her voice matter-of-fact when she replied, “When they kill me.”
TWO
“You bungled it,” Duran said.
Varden stiffened, but there was no sign of anger in his voice when he said, “At the time, it seemed the best idea.”
“A house fire? Guaranteed to draw law enforcement as well as numerous spectators? How did you expect to remove her from that situation without attracting further attention?”
“Obviously, I intended to remove her before the fire was noticed.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“The fire spread faster than I bargained for.”
Duran turned his head and looked at the other man. Gently, he said, “It was an old house. They tend to burn quickly.”
Accepting that rebuke with what grace he could muster, Varden merely nodded without further attempts to defend himself.
Duran gazed at him a moment longer, then moved away from the window of the cramped hotel room and settled into a chair across from a long couch. “Sit down.” It wasn’t an invitation.
Taking a place on the couch, Varden said in a carefully explanatory tone, “I was under the impression that the judgment of the Council demanded quick action. Tyrell said—”
“Tyrell reports to me,” Duran said with an edge to his quiet voice. “The decision is mine.”
“You thought she could be salvaged?”
“What I thought is not your concern. You follow orders.”
“Yes, sir.”
Duran waited a moment, his gaze boring into Varden. Then, almost casually, he said, “I want Sarah Gallagher.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you’re going to get her for me, Varden. Aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good,” Duran said. “That is good.”
Tucker drew a long, slow breath, trying with calm and logic to keep the chill inside him from spreading. “When who kills you, Sarah?”
“I don’t know who they are. Whenever I try to concentrate on them, to see them, all I see are shadows. Misshapen, sliding away whenever I try to focus on them, impossible to identify as anything except…shadows.” She shook her head a little, helpless. “This is all new to me, in case you didn’t know that. I was mugged last March, and a head injury put me in a coma. When I came out of it, I started having the waking nightmares.”
He nodded, familiar with the facts because a newspaper story had reported them—and had brought him here. “I understand that. What I don’t understand is what, exactly, makes you believe that someone is going to kill you. What did you see?”
The bell on the microwave dinged, and Sarah turned to set her coffee aside and get the stew out. “Haven’t you ever had nightmares, Tucker? The surreal kind, full of frightening images?”
“Of course I have. They made zero sense. And they sure as hell didn’t predict the future.”
“My waking nightmares do.” She was clearly unoffended by his skepticism.
“Okay, then, tell me what you saw. Why are you so convinced you’re going to be killed?”
Sarah didn’t respond for several minutes as she transferred the thawed stew to the pot on the stove and began stirring it as it heated. All her attention seemed to be fixed on the task. And when she did begin speaking, Tucker thought that her voice was very steady the way someone’s was when they were telling you something that scared the living shit out of them.
“Because I saw my grave. Waiting for me.”
“Sarah, that doesn’t have to mean—”
She nodded jerkily. “There are other things I don’t remember, images that terrified me. But the grave…that was all too clear. It has a tombstone, and the tombstone is already inscribed. It has my name on it. In the…waking nightmare…I’m falling toward it, into it, so fast I don’t see the date of—of my death. But the month is October, and the year is this year. And just as the darkness of the grave closes over me, I hear them applauding. And I know they’ve won. I know they’ve killed me.”
“They?”
“The shadows.”
“Sarah, shadows can’t hurt you.”
She looked at him with old eyes. “These can. And will.”
Tucker watched her as she turned to check on the steaming stew and put the thawing bread in the oven. There was a lot for him to think about. On the face of it, his first inclination was to ascribe her “waking nightmare” to something she’d eaten or a vivid imagination; as badly as he wanted to believe in precognitive abilities, he had yet to find a genuine psychic, and years of frustration had inured him to disillusionment.
He certainly had no proof that Sarah Gallagher was indeed psychic. The information he had gathered seemed to indicate that she was, and those witnesses who claimed to have heard her predictions prior to later events seemed both reliable and reputable. But there was no way to be sure that her “predictions” had not come from some as-yet-undiscovered means of foreknowledge that had nothing to do with so-called extrasensory perception.
Each of the “predictions” he knew of could, after all, be rationally explained, given a few reasonable possibilities. Months before, she had been mugged on her way home one night, and the resulting head injury had put her into a coma for sixteen days. She could have overheard information while in that coma, for instance, and—consciously, perhaps—forgotten where it had come from. That could explain her apparent foreknowledge of the early birth of a nurse’s baby, which had been her first recorded prediction. Some doctor with a suspicion of what could happen might have mentioned it within Sarah’s hearing. And though her prediction of a Chicago hotel fire that had killed forty people certainly seemed remarkable, Tucker had discovered that one of the men later arrested for arson had been treated for a minor traffic injury in the same Richmond hospital where Sarah had lain in a coma. It was a coincidence that bothered him.
Other minor predictions she had made could—with some ingenuity—also be linked to her stay in the hospital. Tucker had utilized quite a bit of ingenuity, so he knew it could be done. He hadn’t yet been able to explain away her apparent foreknowledge of several murders apparently committed by a serial killer in California, but he was half-convinced he could, given enough time.
All of which, of course, raised the question of why he had bothered to seek out Sarah Gallagher at all.
“You want so badly to believe.” Her voice was quiet, her gaze direct as she turned to look at him.
“Do I?” He wasn’t quite as unsettled, this time, by her perception—extrasensory or otherwise.
Instead of directly answering that question, Sarah said, “I can’t perform for you, Tucker. I can’t go down that list of questions you have in your mind and answer them one by one as if it’s some final exam. I can’t convince you of something you need irrefutable proof to believe. That’s not the way this works.”
“You mean it’s like believing in God?” His voice was carefully neutral. “It requires faith?”
“What it requires is admitting the possible. Believing the evidence of your eyes and ears without trying to explain it all away. Accepting that you’ll never be able to cross every t and dot every i. And most of all, it requires a willingness to believe that science isn’t the ultimate authority. Just because something can’t be rationally explained on the basis of today’s science doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
“That sounds like the party line,” Tucker said dryly, having heard the same sort of “answers” for years.
She shook her head. “Look, I never believed in the paranormal, in psychics, myself. When I thought about it, which wasn’t often, I just assumed it was either a con of some kind or else coincidence—anything that could somehow be explained away. Not only was I a skeptic, I simply didn’t care; I had no interest in anything paranormal. It didn’t matter to me.”
“Until you found yourself looking into the future.”
Sarah tilted her head a bit to one side as she considered him and his flat statement. Then, with a touch of wry humor, she said, “Well, when you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s a bit difficult to pretend you aren’t involved in the situation.”
Tucker appreciated the humor, but what interested him most was a glint of something he thought he saw in her eyes. Slowly, he said, “So, are you involved in this? Or just along for the ride?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” She turned abruptly back to the stove to check the stew and bread, then busied herself getting plates and bowls out of the cabinets above the counter and silverware from a drawer.
“You know exactly what I mean, Sarah. Are you resigned to dying next month because you believe that’s your fate? Because you believe your destiny is—literally—written in stone? Or do you have the guts to use what you’ve seen to change your fate, to take control of your destiny?”
She didn’t answer right away, and when she did, her voice was almost inaudible. “Strange questions from a man who doesn’t believe I could have seen my future—or anybody else’s.”
Tucker didn’t hesitate. “I’m willing to suspend my disbelief—if you’re willing to accept the possibility that what you saw—or at least the outcome—can be changed.”
Again, Sarah took her time responding. She sliced bread and ladled out stew, setting his meal before him and then placing her own so that she was sitting at a right angle to him. She tasted her stew almost idly, then said, “I saw a hotel fire that killed people, and I couldn’t stop it. I saw the man I loved killed by a train, and I couldn’t stop it. I saw a serial killer commit horrible acts, and I couldn’t stop him. A week ago, I saw my house burn to the ground, and today it burned.”
Tucker began eating to give himself time to marshal his arguments, and in the meantime asked a question he was curious about. “Why didn’t you call the police when you saw your house burn?”
“Oh, right. Officer, somebody’s going to burn down my house. How do I know? Well, I saw it in a nightmare. A nightmare I had while I was wide awake, not under the influence of drugs, and cold sober.” She gave Tucker a twisted smile. “Been there, done that. And I’d really rather not become the poster child for the Psychic Early Warning Society.”
Tucker shook his head. “Okay, so maybe nobody takes you seriously—at first. But sooner or later, that’s bound to change.”
“Is it?” She shrugged. “Maybe. But in my case, that’s hardly relevant, is it? I have this…rendezvous with destiny next month.”
Like most writers, Tucker had a head stuffed full of words, and a very apt quote sprang readily to mind. “‘I have a rendezvous with Death at some disputed barricade,’” he murmured.
“Who said that?” she wondered.
“Alan Seeger. It’s always stayed with me.”
Sarah nodded. “Appropriate.”
“I think so. Think of the phrase he chose, Sarah…some disputed barricade. Maybe there’s always room for argument about where and when we die, even if there is such a thing as fate. Maybe we change our fate, minute by minute, with every decision we make. Maybe destiny becomes the sum of our choices.”
She frowned. “Maybe.”
“But you aren’t convinced?”
“That I can choose to avoid the fate I know is in store for me?” She shook her head. “No.”
“Sarah, you didn’t see your death. You saw an image, a symbol of death. And symbols can’t be interpreted literally.”
“A grave is pretty hard to interpret any other way.”
He shook his head. “In tarot, the death card can mean many things. A transition of some kind. The death of an idea or a way of life, for instance. A turning point. The grave you saw could mean something like that. A change in your life that you’re thrown bodily into, maybe against your will—which would explain your fear. You never saw yourself dead, did you? You never saw your death occur literally, an accomplished fact.”
“I never saw David’s death as an accomplished fact either.” Her voice was quiet. “But I knew he was going to die at that railroad crossing. And he did.”
That stopped Tucker for only a moment. “But you saw the means of his death clearly. In your—nightmare—about your own fate, there’s no weapon, no method by which you could be killed. So it could have been a symbolic grave, a symbolic death. At least it’s possible.”
Sarah pushed her plate away and leaned an elbow on the bar, looking at him for the first time with her certainty wavering. “I suppose so. Possible, at least that I saw something other than a literal death for myself.”
Tucker didn’t make the mistake of hammering his point home. Instead, he said musingly, “I’ve always thought that if it was possible to see into the future, it would have to be with the understanding that what a psychic is actually seeing is only a possible future. Moment by moment, we make decisions and choices that change our path through infinite possibilities. And once a psychic ‘sees’ an event, that psychic becomes in some way involved in the event and so affects the outcome—which causes the ‘future’ event that he or she saw to change in unexpected and unpredicted ways.”
She was frowning slightly, her gaze fixed on his face with what seemed an unconscious intensity. “Or—to actually happen. How do I know that if I hadn’t warned David, if I hadn’t been so insistent that he avoid railroad crossings, he might not have been killed since he wouldn’t have gone to California to get away from me? How do I know that my—my prediction didn’t cause that nurse to go into premature labor out of stress and worry? How do I know that any of it would have happened if I hadn’t…interfered?”
Coolly, Tucker said, “You don’t. If, as you believe, our fates are set, our destinies planned for us at birth, then every step you’ve taken, every action you thought was yours by choice was all just part of the pattern you had to follow.”
“I…don’t much like the sound of that.”
“Then consider another possibility,” he advised. “Maybe you aren’t going to die next month after all. Maybe you can master your own fate. If you want to, that is.”
Since they were both finished eating, he got up and began clearing up in the kitchen. It wasn’t until then that he realized the big black cat had remained on the stool beside his during the meal and conversation without once calling attention to himself. It struck Tucker as odd and curiously uncatlike, though he couldn’t have said why; he didn’t know a great deal about cats.
Even as that thought occurred to him, Pendragon quite suddenly lifted a hind leg high in the air and began washing himself in a definitely catlike manner, and Tucker almost laughed aloud. His imagination was working overtime, as usual. Not that it was surprising; whether Sarah Gallagher was a genuine psychic or not, she was obviously in trouble, threatened by person or persons unknown, and his awareness of that had heightened all of Tucker’s senses. Which explained why he got that creepy-crawly sensation near his spine each time he’d caught a glimpse of the watcher in the black leather jacket.
