The Man Who Could Read Minds Revised Edition 2012 by Paul Seifert

Author:Paul Seifert [Seifert, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2012-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

17.

Jon Dough had tried a little reefer now and then he sampled once or twice the sweet white madness of the girl, but his real dope was booze—simple rot-gut whiskey.

Drinking had always been part of the action at the gaming tables, whether an odd six-pack or two at the penny-ante poker games in the beginning or, more recently, the never empty champagne flutes served by the higher class European casinos.

Like most drunks, Jon Dough was convinced his imbibing would never get out of control. There were dozens of great Country and Western songs about what booze could do to wreck a man’s life, but few of the guys who wrote those songs believe the words they wrote pertained to them. Jon Dough didn’t believe the words applied to him either.

No way!

By the time Jon Dough hit the skids, his financial empire was basically taking care of itself. Other than an odd phone call, very little hands-on management was needed. Surprisingly, he made some of his slickest and most profitable transactions during total alcoholic blackouts.

The blackouts were happening more frequently now. Jon Dough would regain consciousness in the morning totality unaware of much that had happened from noon the day before. Where he might have gone or who he might have interacted with was lost to him. Jon Dough imagined possible scenarios.

“I’m a multimillionaire and I can read minds.”

“Sure, asshole, and I’m the fucking Queen of Sheba.”

She sure doesn’t look like any sheeny zebra.

Then came the nightmarish hangovers, the splitting headaches, and the puking up of blood.

Yook…yooka.

But none of these things compared to the spine-tingling and horrifying moment when Jon Dough—reeling like a jack-in-the-box atop a bar stool—read for the first time a thought laden with a wrenching veneer of infinite sadness. Thoughts such as this one must have been there all along, but Jon Dough, using his egocentric process of tuning in and tuning out, had simply dismissed them.

“No!!” he cried out loud.

That simple monosyllable was to become the overture to an angry soliloquy sung a cappella by Jon Dough to the unheeding stars above him.

He tried desperately to ward off these unwelcome thoughts of despair and sadness by drinking even more heavily, but this ploy was not successful. Before he could regain peace, he would be forcibly removed from the world of uncensored thoughts to serve time within a confining padded cell.

There was a brief interlude in Jon Dough’s descent, when terror of a different sort induced him to go on the wagon for three agonizing days.

Jon Dough awoke one Sunday morning with a mouth that smelled and tasted like he had undergone burial in a shallow grave. He shuffled the pages of a week old newspaper searching for his bottle of aspirin. He noticed by chance an article on a series of killings.

The week old article reported that a third murder in the same number of weeks had taken place in Atlantic City. The nefarious details were only hinted at in the press account, but what came across was brutal enough.

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