Thriller by James Patterson

air-conditioning.
    I believe she noticed the ugly swelling on the knuckles of my
    right hand, and the place in the wall where I’d dented it.
    “Bad day?”
    “No. Pretty ordinary.”
    She reached out and touched my face, fanning her fingers
    across my right cheek. Which is more or less when she told me
    she was an empath.
    I won’t lie and tell you that I knew what an empath was.
    A look had come over her when she touched my face—as
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    if she’d felt that part of me which I rarely touch myself, and
    then only in the dark before the Johnny Walker has worked
    its magic.
    “I’m sorry,” she said.
    “For what?”
    “For whatever did this to you.”
    This is what an empath can do—their special gift. Or curse,
    depending on the day.
    I learned all about empaths from her over the next few weeks.
    As we talked in the basement, or bumped into each other on the
    way into the hotel, or grabbed smokes outside on the corner.
    Empaths touch and know. They feel skin and bone but they
    touch soul. They see through their hands. Everything—the good,
    the bad and the truly ugly.
    She saw more ugly than she wanted to.
    The ugliness had begun to get to her, to send her into a very
    dark place.
    It was one of her customers, she explained.
    “Mostly I just see emotions,” she confided, “you know, happiness, sadness, fear—longing—all that. But sometimes…sometimes I see more…I know who they are, understand?”
    “No. Not really.”
    “This guy—he’s a regular. The first time I touched him, I had
    to pull my hands away. It was that strong.”
    “ What?”
    “The sense of evil. Like touching—I don’t know…a black hole.”
    “What kind of evil are we talking about?”
    “The worst.”
    Later, she told me more. We were sitting in a bar on Sunset
    having drinks. Our first date, I guess.
    “He hurts kids,” she said.
    I felt that special nausea. The kind that used to subsume me
    back in the confessional, when he would come for me, that dark
    wraith of hurt. The nausea that came when my little brother dutifully followed me into altar-boyhood and I kept my mouth
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    zipped tight like a secret pocket. Don’t tell…don’t tell . There’s a
    price for not telling. It was paid years later, on the afternoon I
    found my sweet, sad brother hanging from a belt in our childhood bedroom. Over his teenage years, he’d furiously sought solace in various narcotics, but they could only do so much.
    “How do you know?” I asked Kelly.
    “I know. He’s going to do something. He’s done it before.”
    When I told her she might want to report him to the police,
    she shot me the look you give to intellectually challenged children.
    “Tell them I’m an empath? That I feel one of my clients is a
    pedophile? That’ll go over well.”
    She was right, of course. They’d laugh her out of the station.
    It was maybe a week later, after this customer had come and
    gone from his regular appointment and Kelly was looking particularly miserable, that I volunteered to keep an eye on him.
    “How?”
    We were lying in my bed, having taken our relationship to the
    next level as they say, both of us using sex as a kind of opiate, I
    think—a way to forget things.
    “His next appointment?” I asked her. “When is it?”
    “Tuesday at two.”
    “Okay, then.”
    I waited outside the pool area where the clients saunter out
    looking sleepy and satiated. He looked frazzled and anxious.
    She’d slipped out of the room while he undressed to tell me
    what he was wearing that day. She needn’t have bothered—I
    would’ve known him anyway.
    He carried his burden like a heavy bag.
    When he got into the Volvo brought out from the hotel-parking
    garage, I was already waiting in my car.
    I followed him onto the 101, then into the valley. We exited
    onto a wide boulevard and stayed on it for about five miles, finally making a turn at the School Crossing sign.
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    He parked by the playground and sat there in his car.
    It came back.
    The