Chapter 4: Leviticus

Six months go fast when you're having fun, and for the first time I was having fun. Shaylynn and I had been seeing each other as often as possible for the first four months till I finally asked her to move in with me so she wouldn't have to get dressed and go home every afternoon before work to get ready. Besides it would save her money on her apartment. And seeing as most of her clothes were here anyway, it made more sense to move the rest of her stuff to my place.

Before you ask, yes, she introduced me to the wonders of sex the night after our first date. I will not go into the details as I'm trying to be a gentleman, but let's just say that as an instructor she was amazing and according to her I'm a fast learner and would be getting A-pluses on my next report card. Needless to say, I went for as much extra credit as she was willing to allow me.

I made friends with several of her co-workers and I still believe that some of them had something to do with my expedited license. It seemed they were happy that I didn't want to make a big deal out of the hostage situation when I first met Shaylynn. Her boss Capt. Torance (David) would just smile at me when I asked if he had anything to do with it and say "I don't know what you're talking about, but I do still owe you that 'solid' one of these days. Besides, you make my goddaughter happy".

A week after our first night together I took Shaylynn to a little piece of property I bought just outside Eastland Texas (about 95 miles from my place, it was out in the middle of nowhere with no one around for miles) to use as a gun range. I had a small cabin setup and gave some very specific instructions to the construction crew about the way I wanted my range built. They must have thought that I was crazy wanting a twenty foot high, forty foot deep sand berm six hundred yards long and twenty yards wide, but as I was paying top price, they were happy to go along with the eccentric (read crazy) guy paying the bills.

Anyway, standing by Shaylynn's side, I setup everything and took a couple of test shots to show her how it worked, then let her have her turn with 'little Bubba' as she now called my rifle. I felt bad afterward as her first shot almost broke her shoulder (the bruise didn't start to go away for two weeks). She had to call in to take the next day off after we went to the clinic (I told you it had some nasty recoil).

After tinkering with the recoil absorption system, I finally found a way to drop it to almost nothing by using magnetic repulsion. I also managed to get the firing rate up to four per second by switching to four high density compact fuel cells firing in series and using deep cell high voltage capacitors. It may have added twenty pounds to the total weight, but for me that was nothing.

When my license came in shortly after Shaylynn moved in, I figured that instead of working for someone else I would start my own business. I wouldn't have to answer to anyone and I would finally have an excuse for having access to so much money. Setting up a corporation with myself as President/CEO, I put Shaylynn as Secretary/Treasurer, and put some of her and my friends as board members (just to round out things). Then I offered several of them jobs if they became tired of working for the Dallas P.D.

I bought a building in Grand Prairie to set-up as an office front and even went so far as to hire a receptionist. Also delivered to this office building were several items that could only be bought on the black market or stolen from some of those supply depots that did not exist. Things like long range Taser pistols and rifles, mil-spec GPS trackers/homing units, C.N. gas (no not C.S., this stuff made CS gas feel like 'No More Tears', hit with this you just wanted to lay down and do the funky chicken), H.E., W.P. and Hydrofluoric Acid filled paintballs (What does the 'F' in Fluorine stand for? Fuck you out of Ions), C-12 Plastic Explosive, several SR-25s (7.62 NATO rounds on a M-16 frame), mission variable ammo, Vincent Mark 3 hand held Sat P.D.A.s with 1024 bit encryption, and 32GHz button cameras (1,000 yard transmit range in spectrums from I.R. to U.V. and 1⁄4 Lux Night Vision). And, just for my girlfriend, a Barrett 121 Sniper Rifle so she could show-off the other folks on the force and not have her new toy taken away from her.

Now some of you might think that I was going a bit overboard, but I figured that it's just the standard kind of stuff to keep a person safe on the street or in the middle of a hot LZ. It's not like I'm paranoid or anything. There really are people out to get me.

Over time I found my mental abilities had grown in strength. I could now control my ability to levitate so well that it was no longer a conscious effort to control my apparent weight. I could step on a scale and have 240lbs come up rock steady. I could now implant thoughts and ideas into someone else's mind and make them think that they had always been there so well that if someone was watching a room or hallway I could implant the vision of an empty room and they would ignore me as I walked in danced a jig and yodeled at the top of my lungs (trust me not a pretty sound, sorta reminds one of the sound of someone scraping their fingers over a thousand chalkboards). I could throw up a telekinetic wall or dome over not just myself, but other people and objects. Pyrokinesis was to the point that I could vaporize steel at twenty yards. Cryokinesis was just as cool (bad pun). With it I was able to freeze the water in my pool in about two minutes or freeze a frog solid in under a tenth of a second, thaw him out and have him hop away.

During the two months after getting setup, I managed to start a decent business. Not too many cases, but the ones I did get were medium to high profile. A lost child that turned out to have been kidnapped by a scumbag looking to make his dreams of having a child slave come true (don't get me wrong I think that like minded folks should be allowed to do as they please unless what they want to do is against a participant's will, then it's a bad thing). I managed to find the child before too much damage was done to her both physically or mentally, once I found him however I can't say the same thing happened before I turned him in to the police. I made sure, though, that I kept my face out of the papers. Anytime I even thought I saw a photographer, I exited the area fast. And it got so that all the credit was given to Security Blanket Inc. and its employees who wish to remain anonymous due to their need to do undercover missions.

Between the cheating spouse (I hate those, but they make money fast), missing person cases, recovering some missing family heirloom or guard some visiting bigwig to make sure that he/she is safe from bad guys and the like, work picked up and I hired more of the Dallas P.D. and even some from Ft. Worth to pick up the case loads.

During all this time I had been gradually putting out feelers to try and find out more about this rouge sect of the Catholic church (at least I was hoping that it was a rouge sect and not the entire church itself), but to no avail, then came 'THE CASE'.

It started out as the standard missing person case. Seventeen year-old James Paterson of Arlington was reported missing after a Friday night football game two months ago. His parents filed the report the next afternoon when they found that 'Jimmy' had not come home during the night (as he sometimes stayed out with friends after a game) and was still missing after lunch (which had never happened before). His friends and other students had told police that Jimmy had left in his car right after the game and didn't go to any of the after game parties and that even his girlfriend was unable to contact him.

His phone was found with his abandoned car on and isolated stretch of I-20 outside of Weatherford. There were no signs of a struggle, no blood, and the only fingerprints were Jimmy's. The police had nothing to go on and there had been no ransom demand or note, as far as the cops were concerned Jimmy might as well have walked off the face of the earth. After two months of frustration his parents (Donald Paterson and his wife Grace) had finally had enough. They were sent to me through a mutual friend with the hopes that I could pull off a miracle

The first thing I did was get hold of the case file from the police and see what they had covered so far (no one likes going over the same thing if they can avoid it). I then asked his parents if they had anything of his from the night that he went missing (sometimes I can get a feeling for someone from a personal object that they last used or held). They came up with the jersey he wore during the football game. Third, I asked his parents if there were any new or unusual events in Jimmy's life before he disappeared. And they said that there was nothing unusual except for the fact that their son had a sudden increase in the amount of time he spent going to church. They thought it might have been a girl he was seeing in the youth group or something like that. I looked over the notes from the detective's file and found they had interviewed Jimmy's friends, but came up with nothing new or out of the ordinary. From the jersey I got a little more. It seemed that Jimmy was very excited during the game, but even more after the game. The sweat in the jersey gave up its own little secrets as well. For those of you that don't know it, sweat has an odor that changes with the mood of the person -- call it pheromones if you want. It does not change the fact that I can tell a great deal about you. Jimmy's jersey was screaming 'happy and content'; he didn't seem to have a care in the world, almost like he was in the euphoria one would feel after a really good orgasm. I also detected sea salt, ashes from an ash tree, and a hint of wine.