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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 above me. With rubbery legs and arms still spastic, I don’t know how I reached it, but I did.
    I’ve a long list of things I don’t know how I’ve done, but I’ve done them. In the end, it’s always about perseverance.
    Once in the pantry, I pulled the door shut behind me. This close dark space reeked of pungent chemical scents the likes of which I had never before smelled.
    The taste of scorched aluminum made me half nauseous. I’d never previously tasted scorched aluminum; so I don’t know how I recognized it, but I felt sure that’s what it was.
    Inside my skull, a Frankenstein laboratory of arcing electrical currents snapped and sizzled. Overloaded resistors hummed.
    Most likely my senses of smell and taste weren’t reliable. The Taser had temporarily scrambled them.
    Detecting a wetness on my chin, I assumed blood. After further consideration, I realized I was drooling.
    During a thorough search of the house, the pantry would not be overlooked. I’d only gained a minute or two in which to warn Chief Porter.
    Never before had the function of a simple pants pocket proved too complicated for me to understand. You put things in, you take things out.
    Now for the longest time, I couldn’t get my hand into my jeans pocket; someone seemed to have sewn it shut. Once I finally got my hand in, I couldn’t get it back out. At last I extracted my hand from the clutching pocket, but discovered that I’d failed to bring my cell phone with it.
    Just when the bizarre chemical odors began to resolve into the familiar scents of potatoes and onions, I regained possession of the phone and flipped it open. Still drooling but with pride, I pressed and held 3, speed-dialing the chief’s