“ Really?”
“ Really.” She reached across the table and took his hand in hers. “Sit quietly for a moment and take from me.”
Alex felt the warmth of her touch and the throbbing life within, heard the heartbeat as it moved along the corridors of her being and into his. The warmth became a radiant heat flowing between them, growing in intensity like the heat from a sun lamp.
“ I'm not a psychological vampiress, Alex. I'm not here to take anything from you. If anything, I'm here to give, not take. I'm no leech, no insect, no worm you need to fear.”
He involuntarily shook with the thought of the worms in his nightmare. “I'll… I'd like to take you home.”
“ Wish you could, but I've got that early morning appointment.”
“ Whoa, I didn't mean my home.”
“ Oh, sorry…misunderstood, I guess.”
“ Well, I mean, I wouldn't mind…” He stopped short and looked curiously at her, his eyes narrowing. “What early morning appointment?”
“ You know, the-”
“ Oh, yeah, the famous or soon-to-be-famous exhumation. Do you really think they'll be going ahead with it, even after what you went through tonight? Isn't there a limit to what you can… reasonably expect to… to give?”
She liked his choice of words and the level of concern in his voice. “I'm okay, really.” She touched a sensitive spot below the bandage to her temple.
“ I just hope it doesn't turn into a circus.”
“ I don't like the idea of exhumation any more than you do, but…”
“ But you have to establish patterns from out of chaos here, right?”
“ Like you, Alex, it's not what I do, it's what I am, and if what I am can indicate a direction, locate a clue, then how can you continue to stand in the way of that? Why won't you let me help you? Is it because I'm a psychic or a woman? Or both?''
“ Me? Stand in your way? How am I standing in your way? You and the others are working right around me, for cryyyy-sake! Everybody saw what happened at the crime scene tonight. No… wouldn't want to be in the way, would we.”
His sarcasm had returned full force, and she gripped the thin edge of the table to remain calm. “Nice try, Alex, but you're hiding again.”
“ Who's hiding? I'm right here, going nowhere.”
“ I have come to believe to a great extent that it is our fears and anxieties that make us who and what we are, or will become, Alex.”
“ Is that supposed to be reassuring, Doctor? Because it isn't.”
In a flashing vision, she saw fat, hungry maggots around him, but ignoring the ugly image, she forced her way through the jungle of his tangled emotions. “We defend the weaker portions of our personalities with an array of defenses, either positive or negative, bright or dreary, such as diplomacy, humor-often macabre humor-patience, self-deceit, temper, clowning and stubbornness.”
“ Ben'll love to hear it. He's the bull-slinging yahoo and I'm the bullheaded mule, right? Nice butter you spread. Doctor.''
“ I think the butter is all yours, Alex, and you're spreading it on thick to cover your true-”
“ That's enough with the psychobabble, Kim. I've heard quite enough, and coming from you, it's doubly rewarding.”
She wasn't sure what he meant by this. “I didn't say I was without fear and anxiety. Quite the contrary.”
“ I'm not going to swap my personality for one you'd like me to try on, Doctor.” He stared across at her, stood and said, “Now, it'll be my pleasure to see you home.”
He threw out a wad of bills onto the table like an angry man who's too upset to count and said, “Are you coming, or do I call a cab?”
“ I'll pay for my own meal, and I'll call my own damned cab, Lieutenant!” she fired back, drawing stares and bawdy laughter from others in the restaurant. Alex's jaw tightened, his face turning red. “All right, fine… suits me.” He then stormed out ahead of her, mumbling something under his breath about women in general. She stared after him disbelieving, yet fully understanding. She'd touched a raw nerve that had been successfully protected for a long time.
She found the pay phone and called for a cab. “To hell with him,” Kim told the lady at the cash register.
“ You just go right on stickin' up for yourself, dearie,” suggested the elderly woman behind the counter.
Alex Sincebaugh was angry with himself. He had never in his life walked out on a woman, leaving her stranded in a public place, and it didn't sit well with him now. He'd gone back to the restaurant to apologize, try to start over with Kim Desinor, but she'd already left. He had thought about locating her at her hotel, but then decided that such a move would only widen the rift between them. He didn't know what to say to her anyway, how to build a bridge between them, how he could comfortably work with her feeling as he did, and the thought of an unnecessary exhumation as a media event continued to gnaw at his gut.
He was a practical man who had come up via a tough life with little love or compassion either received or given, and yet he saw the empathy and heart-wrenching love that the families of victims demonstrated every day, and he respected, even admired people who could convey their emotions so openly and honestly, although he himself could not.
His father had been a policeman with all the military bearing of an army officer in all his dealings, including those that concerned his son. His mother had died when he was eleven years of age, and he recalled her as the only loving influence in his life. It was little wonder that he pushed women away when they got too close, when they began to make plans for him, plans for them, plans that included a home, a family, commitments he felt ill-suited for.
He understood pain and isolation, hard reality, toughness. Toughness saved you from any hurt. It had been with this attitude that he'd left his father's house to go out to San Diego, California, to join the Navy, and having shown so much promise during basic, he was asked to go from there to Coronado, California, to begin a twenty-five-week training session that would culminate in his becoming a Navy SEAL. The course work and field work were grueling, but nothing could have prepared him for week number six, Hell Week, considered a hazing which separated the determined from the doubtful. Sincebaugh's Hell Week had been in January of '67, when he was a boy of nineteen. It took a lot of guys two and even three attempts to pass muster at Hell Week, but Sincebaugh made it through his first time, although it nearly killed him.
Instructors, each one a SEAL himself, worked eight-hour shifts in teams of six throughout the week, while trainees were given only three hours' sleep. One instructor named Gahan told them that Hell Week was to see how young men operate under extreme stress, and that he'd be providing the stress. Everything they did for the entire six days was a race of one sort or another, and the winning team won rest time while the losers had to repeat the race. For those who succeeded, it was not just a physical feat, for they were also subjected to mental pressures, mind games and mockery. For twenty-four hours, he and the rest of his crew, Class 127, were each given their own personal 250-pound log to toss, catch, hurl, twirl and kick uphill; they had to kick the damned thing up sand dunes. In a nonstop marathon they had to shoulder their log and race to a stack of deflated rubber rafts, inflate the rafts and row out to markers some ten miles distant and back. They swam relays, scaled rough-hewn wooden walls and ropes dangled from a chopper, which went clear around the bay with each man hanging on until they began falling like flies. They raced in deep sand and when nightfall came, they didn't sleep, for there were night maneuvers to complete.
On the second night, Sincebaugh, by now a Navy seaman apprentice, along with the others, was ordered into San Diego Bay. Now recalling the hypothermia he'd suffered that night, he felt a rush of icy panic ripple through him again. For twenty minutes the fully outfitted men were made to swim in the January waters of the bay. He recalled now how the instructor, calling through his bullhorn from atop a warm boat with his Mackinaw on, had shouted the order to remove boots and socks in the water, to stuff socks inside boots and tie them over the shoulders and around the neck.