Page 45 of It Runs in the Family

“I never said I was with local police.”

“Then you wouldn’t have said you were taking me to a non-existent local station.” I was getting tired of holding this guy’s balls, and I knew I wasn’t going to get any answers out of him, so I decided to do something that was against my moral code—I had to force a vision of him without his permission.

This wasn’t like mind reading, though. I’d learned that I had to ask a question, and complicated ones didn’t work. I couldn’t ask why he was looking for Selena. I could only ask about precise things that could happen in the future, which meant I had to get the question right.

Keeping my gaze locked on his face, I asked in my head, Does this guy find Selena?

I was greeted with a gray haze, which usually meant the future was undecided. I switched up the question—taking a chance that he was a henchman and not the person in charge, and asked, Will this guy meet his boss?

An image popped into my head, and I was staring at a man in his fifties. He had a thick mustache and dirty blond hair that touched the collar of his dress shirt and tops of his ears. His shirt had enough buttons opened to reveal his hairy chest.

“Well?” he demanded. “Who is she? What’s her name?”

“I don’t know,” I said in a man’s voice. “The woman claimed she was an old friend of hers, but when I looked up the name she gave me, I didn’t find anything useful.”

“What was the name?”

I hesitated for a few seconds before mumbling, “Fuzzy Lumpkins.”

“Fuzzy Lumpkins?” the boss shouted. “Are you fucking kidding me? You believed her?”

“No! Of course not! But she got away before I could get the real name.”

“How’d she get away?” the boss demanded.

I shifted my weight, purposely standing with my feet a ways apart. “She threw dirt in my face, then got in her car and drove away.”

“You didn’t follow her?”

“It took a few minutes to clear my eyes, but don’t worry. I got her address from the guy in the store.”

“And he just gave it to you?”

I smirked. “He’s a fucking idiot.”

Then I was staring into his face again, still clutching this guy’s family jewels as the vision forced me to say, “She got away.”

I wasn’t sure who these guys were, but I knew I was in deep shit. But the vision had given me an additional trick to aid in my escape.

“Who got away?” he demanded.

My answer was to twist his balls hard, then jump back as he cried out in pain and hunched over.

I turned around to look for some dirt to throw in his eyes, and noticed Digger sitting on the curb, clutching a brown paper-bag-wrapped bottle.

“You couldn’t have helped me, Digger?” I snapped as I spotted some sand along the curb. I scooped some up and scraped my knuckles in the process. Then I ran back to my interrogator, who was still bent over, and threw the sand in his face, instigating a new round of howling.

I spun around to get in my car and spotted the paper he’d shoved in my face lying on the asphalt, so I picked it up and then opened my car door.

“Looks like you have everything under control,” Digger commented, his eyelids half closed as he swayed.

“Well, he’s bound to be plenty mad, so you should probably get out of here before he recovers and takes it out on you.” I didn’t wait to see if he took my advice. Instead, I got in my car and backed out of the parking spot, barely missing the guy, who was now rolling around on the ground.

In a moment of insanity, I slid down my window, and as I slowly drove past him, I shouted, “Not so tough now, are ya, big boy?” Then I hit the gas and sped out of the parking lot.

I wanted to call Garrett and make sure he was home, but first, I needed to call Lisa. I suspected I’d pissed the guy off enough that he’d do everything in his power to find out where I lived out of spite, but at least I could slow him down.

Lisa answered her cell phone on the first ring. “Girl, what the fuck just happened in the parking lot?”