Forever Odd

power. His green gaze shone bright with terrible knowledge; these were the eyes of one who knew the many ways out of the Garden. His scaly lips formed the curve of a perfect lie: a smile in which malice tried to pass as friendly intent, in which amusement was in fact dripping venom.
        Before I could think of a serpent metaphor to describe his nose, the snaky bastard struck. He squeezed the trigger of a Taser, firing two darts that, trailing thin wires, pierced my T-shirt and delivered a disabling shock.
        I fell like a high-flying witch suddenly deprived of her magic: hard, and with a useless broom.

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    FOUR
        
        WHEN YOU TAKE MAYBE FIFTY THOUSAND VOLTS FROM a Taser, some time has to pass before you feel like dancing.
        On the floor, doing a broken-cockroach imitation, twitching violently, robbed of basic motor control, I tried to scream but wheezed instead.
        A flash of pain and then a persistent hot pulse traced every nerve pathway in my body with such authority that I could see them in my mind’s eye as clearly as highways on a road map.
        I cursed my attacker, but the invective issued as a whimper. I sounded like an anxious gerbil.
        He loomed over me, and I expected to be stomped. He was a guy who would enjoy stomping. If he wasn’t wearing hobnail boots, that was only because they were at the cobbler’s shop for the addition of toe spikes.
        My arms flopped, my hands spasmed. I couldn’t cover my face.
        He spoke, but his words meant nothing, sounded like the sputter and crackle of short-circuiting wires.
        When he picked up the broom, I knew from the way he held it that he intended to drive the blunt metal handle into my face repeatedly, until the Elephant Man, compared to me, would look like a GQ model.
        He raised that witchy weapon high. Before he slammed it into my face, however, he turned abruptly away, looking toward the front of the house.
        Evidently he heard something that changed his priorities, for he threw the broom aside. He split through the mud room and no doubt left the house by the back door.
        A persistent buzzing in my ears prevented me from hearing what my assailant had heard, but I assumed that Chief Porter had arrived with deputies. I had told him that Dr. Jessup lay dead in the master bedroom on the second floor; but he would order a by-the-book search of the entire house.
        I was anxious not to be found there.
        In the Pico Mundo Police Department, only the chief knows about my gifts. If I am ever again the first on the scene of a crime, a lot of deputies will wonder about me more than they do already.
        The likelihood was small to nonexistent that any of them would leap to the conclusion that sometimes the dead come to me for justice. Still, I didn’t want to take any chances.
        My life is already muy strange and so complex that I keep a grip on sanity only by maintaining a minimalist lifestyle. I don’t travel. I walk almost everywhere. I don’t party. I don’t follow the news or fashion. I have no interest in politics. I don’t plan for the future. My only job has been as a short-order cook, since I left home at sixteen. Recently I took a leave of absence from that position because even the challenge of making sufficiently fluffy pancakes and BLTs with the proper crunch seemed too taxing on top of all my other problems.
        If the world knew what I am, what I can see and do, thousands would be at my door tomorrow. The grieving. The remorseful. The suspicious. The hopeful. The faithful. The skeptics.
        They would want me to be a medium between them and their lost loved ones, would insist that I play detective in every unsolved murder case. Some would wish to venerate me, and others would seek to prove that I was a fraud.
        I don’t know how I could turn away the bereft, the hopeful. In the event that I learned to do so, I’m not sure I’d like the person I would have become.
        Yet if I could turn no one away, they would wear me down with their love and their hate. They would grind me on their wheels of need until I had been reduced to dust.
        Now, afraid of being found in Dr. Jessup’s house, I flopped, twitched, and scrabbled across the floor. No longer in severe pain, I was not yet fully in control of myself, either.
        As if I were Jack in the giant’s kitchen, the knob on the pantry door appeared to be twenty feet