Empathy by John Richmond

Author:John Richmond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: romance, thriller, horror, serial killer, new york city, psychic, manhattan, empath, phobia
Publisher: John Richmond

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Chapter 16

DRUM SAT ON the couch, the one he’d bought from Pottery Barn after a patient raved about the buttery-soft cow hide. And it was soft, it was. Felt like lounging on a giant tit swathed in scar tissue. The shades were drawn and the TV sprayed light around the room in sheets of flickering blue, but no sound. When television characters spoke it made Drum think of corpses he had known, blurring air past their teeth in a last moan. Empty imitations of life. Everything was, really. You learned that in med school. Everything we were just lead up to the same natural conclusion. Time was the only separation and according to the physics geeks time wasn’t even real. Drum was different though, electrified with life and something else. The TV flickered. So did his eyes.

He felt the officers on the other side of the door before they even rapped against the steel. He could always tell a cop. That bath of old insecurity and anger, depression so ingrained it was like sawdust caught under varnish. Drum loved cops.

Rap, rap, rap. Very authoritative. Drum nodded and snickered. “Coming!”

He placed his hand on the door and stopped. The moment he turned the deadbolt everything would change. No more hiding. No more pretending to be just one of them. He craned his neck around the foyer: mahogany wall table crowned with an empty Waterford vase, etching of a 19th Century operating theatre, the healer in the center up to his elbows in some faceless cadaver. Pewter frame. He liked that frame. His fingers on the brass doorknob were warm, the blood within them an intent. He twisted.

“Doctor Drummond Fine?” Big kid, beefy, twenties, already regretting his decision to join up. Under the cap his hair would be jar-head short. Partner stood next to and behind a step: woman, thirties, tired through the marrow. She was addicted to something. Radio hand-sets sprouted from their shoulders, turned low, crackling. The woman made eye contact with Drum and was smart enough to come full awake.

“We have a warrant for your arrest, sir,” she said.

Drum looked at them each in turn. “Of course,” he said. “I’m ready.”

Handcuffs gleamed in the kid’s hand. “Turn around, please, sir.”

“You don’t need to try so hard, son,” Drum said.

“Just turn around.”

“Certainly.” Drum showed them his back. He got a look at the handmade saltillo tile leading into his apartment, the charcoal grout between each red stone. He’d always liked the way they felt on his bare feet. Easy to clean, too. Metal ratcheted behind him. The cuffs were warm on his wrists where the young cop had gripped them. He hadn’t made them too tight, but Drum could feel his desire to do so. It was a good bet that if this officer had the chance his next arrest would be peppered with a little brutality. A face smashed down on the hood of a car perhaps, the cuffs cinched tight enough to turn fingers blue. A billyclub into a kidney or shin bone.

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