A Medium Medium

“He’s sitting on a sofa, watching the Knicks I think.”

“You think? Dammit I thought you could see?” He’d hire me to consult to track this guy. We were in a quiet white room. Lights off. It was one of the interrogation rooms leftover from the days when they were needed.

“ A light blue wall. No defining features. A bachelor pad if I ever saw one. We ain’t even get up for commercials.”

“That’s it? C’mon Charlie, give me something.”

“It’s a bit fuzzy.” No doubt a transmitter error, I think. “I think it could be any apartment in Brooklyn. Hell all of New York, even. Maybe we can take a break.”

I remember the good ol’ days when radio jamming wasn’t everywhere. You could just nab a guy from his chip. GPS, I love it. Now any bodega sell’s these little cheapo jammers. Right next to the prophylaxis and cough syrup. Society might’ve got wise to our tricks. But we had magic on our side.

“Well shit charlie we need more.” The bounty hunter yells. I ain’t the best medium, but I’m getting some picture. A medium medium. This bounty hunter’ll have to give me time. I open my eyes. He’s just fucking standing and staring at me. Like that’ll help.

“Give me time.”

“It’s been an hour.” He couldn’t take a hint.

“Let me try something, alone.” Something illegal is unsaid. “Turn off the camera for a sec. And close the door.”

“It is.”

“Close it on the other side.”

In a huff. He flips the switch. It hurts my eyes. Stamps out. He knocks on the two-way mirror. Classless that’s what that is. That’s what you get when you help an amateur.

Focus is everything when you wanna see clearly. That means either headphones or a silencer to drown out your sound, a deep dark eye mask, and a calm. Calm in pill form. I pull out the Quietmaker. It looks like mace and absorbs the sound in a radius around. The silence is maddening for most. Most can’t stand the ringing in your ear makes for the lack of sound.

Oh, it wasn’t exactly our side. I was freelance, but still. Near the blue line. Above it? I don’t understand the analogy.

Anyway I get the silencer up. I down the pills dry. And put on my mask. It kicks in quick. The drug name psuedopuedopophephedamine worked by exciting action potentials of the memory center and parotid gland. I was basically paralyzed living in my consciousness with limited output and input from sensory and motor neurons respectfully. Or vice versa. I’m not a scientist.

People think it’s black, but it’s more like gray. Like squinting with dry eye. You see things, and then the focus fades in. You see through the target. That’s my ability. And now I see things more clearly. 70 - 81. Knicks - Brooklyn. The Fourth. The wall above the flatscreen had a dent. Like it’d been punched. A robin’s egg blue wall. This guy most definitely a bachelor. It’s sparse. Or staged. I can hear now. The trip is deep. It’s a rarity to hear. A buzz on the couch to his left. He reaches and clicks it on.

Unknown caller: Hello Charlie.

The room was white but grey with the fluorescents off. The door allowed hallway light in. 

When the bounty hunter returns, Charlie is on the floor, bleeding and having what looks to be a seizure.

“Ah fuck,” like those words needed to be said. The silhouette of him falling down on him to put him on his side as foaming forms in his mouth looks like a puppet show.

From the window from the ladder from the seedy alleyway, a special ops looking son of a bitch climbs into a light blue apartment. The target lays between the couch and the coffee table dick down, face up. His nose bleeds on the floor. Bubbles fizzle out like soap from his mouth. His eyes are wide. The intruder donned in jet black everything pulls out the gun and silencer. 

The body coughs and contorts flipping over. They share a stare. The floor fella kicks the intruder in the groin. He drops the silencer and pulls aim. The near-dead soul scrambles to the door. He’s shot in the back. He falls with hand clutched to the antique brass knob.

I awaken in the ambulance. Shocked, I get up rigid. The IVs and nebulizer cords jangle.

“Whoa there buddy,” The female EMT says. 

The male pushed me back to lay down. “Yeah, chill out, king. All is well.”

“Overdose,” She says. “We picked you up at Charlie’s. He’s got a penchant for bringing in the worst. No offense.”

“Well, you’re stable. You’ll get some tests. Make sure you’re in tip-top shape. Or at least not gonna die there. Sorry. I’ve got this bad habit of saying what’s on my mind.”

“You’ll be fine is what he means. Just a little hiccup is all.”

I lose the comfort of gravity as the ambulance rolls and twists from outside impact. My heart skips a couple beats. The door flies open. The EMTs jostle about slamming into the tight walls of the cabin.  The box car slides on its side. I try to pry the needles out from my arm nook. I give up before I push it all the way in.

Flashlights stream in my vision. From the whiteness, a man steps between the lights.

“You gotta come with us.” The growl talks.

The men shot the EMTS in the head. 

Now, it’s not tradition for me to follow blinding, but I’m stuck and probably concussed. So I oblige their wishes for now. 

The cell I sit in smells like fresh plastic and bleach, with a hint of lemon. Not unlike the white room, it’s sparse save a cushioned bed and metal toilet. One whole side of the cube is made of a plexiglass material. No doubt bullet-proof, shatter-proof, toilet-thrown-for-maximum-impact-proof, and all-around impenetrable.

The hunter emerges from the dimly-lit space outside my lockup. He smirks.

“You got lucky, Charlie.”

“Lucky? Let me the fuck outta here.”

“Well, not so much lucky now. Lucky in a sense of prolonging life. But that’ll be over soon.”

“Why not end it now? Your boys coulda saved one of those bullets for me.” the hunter smiles harder.

“Suffering. See the modern criminal justice system is just too soft. So much rehabilitation, prolonging the inevitable. Justice, true justice, isn’t doled out so much as it resembles a slap on the wrist.”

“The fuck I do to you?”

“It’s not you. It’s me,” He says with a chuckle. “With more of you magic makers off the streets, we can enjoy true freedom.”

“You won’t get away with this. Someone’ll track you down, tracker man.”

“Oh, no doubt they’ll try.” And just like that, a doorway emerges from solid wall of my cell. I proceed towards it and see the red hallway. I see the solid block of the doorway against the wall of the hall. And walk into it.

Once I’m face to face with the hunter, his face contorts back to a resting bitch face.

“You’re free to go. Follow me.” He walks rigidly like Frankenstein’s monster. “I am Sam. We studied magic together.” 

“I knew, Sam. He couldn’t even see a clear image from across a room.”

“Knew you’d always thought I wasn’t any good. But I’m here now, to get you outta this whatever it is. Here, take a gun.” He pats his pockets and pulls out two and flips one to me. “Us magic-types need to stick together.”

“How’d you know?”

“What we do is the tip of the iceberg. There are more people. People are more special than you. And especially me.” He winks. “We know how to manage the gifts better. We were alerted when you were in the van. They tried to make you have conscious death. Transferring your consciousness to that of a host. When they die, you die. While they host dies physically, your consciousness would live in blackness forever. Without outside input, you’d live out your days in blackness, blindness, deaf, dumb, mute and unable to do anything but think about all your mistakes that led you there. And there were plenty.”