Danger Signals

a breath blowing warm past his ear. Shh… It's okay…it's gonna be okay. I won't let him hurt you. Nobody's gonna hurt you. You're safe now. It's okay…

He felt safe, then, and warm, and when the loudest noises came, he crouched down in the warm darkness and waited for the crashing and banging and screaming and yelling to stop and the lights to turn on, so bright they hurt his eyes. So bright he always woke up.

Once, when he was a kid, he'd told Matt about the dream. When he got to the part about the soft voice, Matt had nodded emphatically, the way those little bobblehead dogs do that people put in their cars. 'I remember that,' he'd said. 'It was the angel.'

Wade, being older and past believing in angels, but kindhearted enough not to want to hurt his little brother's feelings, merely asked. 'How do you know?'

'I just do.' Matt replied. 'He always came when I was scared.'

'He? A man angel? Aren't angels supposed to be ladies?'

'Uh-uh-not a man. a boy angel. Like us, only bigger. Boys can be angels, because if a boy dies, what else is he gonna be?'

That was a bit too much for Wade; it gave him a funny feeling in his stomach. So he'd said, 'Boys are too ornery to be angels!' and pounced on Matt and tickled him until he almost wet his pants and had to dash off to the bathroom.

After that, when the bright lights came he'd tried to see the angel's face, but he always woke up before he could.

On this night, though, instead of going back to sleep. Wade lay thinking about the dream and Matt's 'angel.' Nothing had happened in his life so far to change his mind about the existence of angels, but… But what? He had dreams about a presence that comforted him in times of danger. His little brother had an imaginary 'angel' who did the same thing for him. He'd always chalked it up to bad dreams and Matt's vivid imagination, but evidently the presence was a powerful enough part of his own psyche that Tierney had picked up on it, and what did that mean? He had no memories of the years before he'd been adopted, which had happened when he was seven and Matt was five. Except…

Tonight he'd dreamed he heard his mother's voice. Was that just a dream, or was it a memory?

If it was a memory, what about the rest of the dream? Was that a memory, too?

If the whole dream was a memory, what was it about, all the screaming and the noise? As a cop he knew the sounds of violence when he heard them. Could something really bad have happened in his childhood that he'd blocked all memory of, except for this one recurring nightmare?

If so, who in the he-uh, heck-is Matt's angel?

The logical conclusion would be Mom or Dad, he supposed. But again, his experience in law enforcement told him that if Mom was the one doing the screaming, it was most likely Dad doing the shouting. And banging.

Wide awake and sweaty, heart pounding. Wade threw back the wreckage of his covers and got out of bed. A glance at the clock on the nightstand told him he could have taken another hour, but he knew better than to try to sleep. Instead he walked to the window, yawning and scratching, and peered out at the familiar shapes of his neighbors' houses, just becoming visible in the thinning darkness.

In the above-garage apartment he rented from a nice retired couple named Hofmeyer. the bedroom window overlooked the street while the kitchen and sitting room opened onto a deck at the back which enjoyed the nicer and more private view of the neighbors' trees, shrubs and flower gardens. He was about to turn and make his way to the bathroom to begin the process of making himself ready for polite company, when a slight movement caught his eye. He froze, eyes narrowed, zeroing in on the source of the movement, which hadn't come again. Nevertheless, in the rapidly approaching daylight he found it-someone sitting in a car parked directly across the street.

No reason to think anything about that. Could have been someone waiting for his neighbor, running late for their car pool. Could have been-aw, hell, he knew it wasn't any of the things it could have been. Maybe it was what Tierney had said about someone watching him. and the fact that he was beginning to have some respect for that lady's 'impressions.' That, and the feeling in his gut. The cop sense that had kept him out of serious trouble a couple of times in his career told him whoever it was sitting out there in his dark car in the breaking dawn was there because of him.

He eased back from the window so as not to alert the watcher by any sudden movements of his own. In the darkness of his bedroom he found the pair of pants he'd worn the day before-on the floor right where he'd stepped out of them-and slipped them on. Barefoot, he quick-timed it down the stairs and out the door that opened onto the Hofmeyer's backyard. There, he closed the door silently behind him and paused a moment to listen. Heard the far- off hum of traffic, still fitful at this hour. Some muffled breathing-his own. Some rustlings in trees and shrubbery that could have been just about anything, but nothing he needed to worry about. Satisfied the watcher hadn't yet taken alarm, he slipped around the corner of the garage and started down the flagstone pathway at a tiptoe run.

All was well, going his way. Right up until the moment his bare foot made contact with something large, warm and soft. As the object emitted a loud grunt. Wade went down- swearing, a succinct sibilance kept under his breath that probably wouldn't have been loud enough to raise alarms from the watcher across the street. He might have salvaged the situation even then if, in the natural reflexive action of someone in the process of falling, he hadn't flung out his arm and attempted to grab the nearest solid object. This happened to be the gate, or more accurately, the gate latch, which gave with a loud clang, allowing the gate to swing back against the wall of the garage with a resounding thump.

As he lay full-length and prone upon the flagstones, he heard a car's engine start up, then accelerate and move off down the street.

With a groan, he rolled over onto his back, then immediately wished he hadn't, as a pair of large stubby paws planted themselves squarely in the middle of his chest, and a long snout terminated by a large wet nose snuffled noisily across his face. Before he could get an arm up to fend it off, a very long, very wet tongue smelling of well- aged liver followed.

'Ah, jeez, Bruno…' This Wade uttered in a constricted wheeze, as the front half of a grossly overweight basset hound settled onto his chest. 'Get…off. you lump of lard-your breath would gag a maggot, you know that?' In response to the insult Bruno turned his head away with studied disdain, one ear slapping Wade across the face in the process. 'What are you doing out here, you good-for-nothing fleabag? You let some stranger sit right there across the street and spy on me? Some watchdog you are.'

As if to contradict that, Bruno lifted his nose to the dawn sky and uttered a halfhearted, 'Ah-rooo…' Then he proceeded across Wade's body with all the grace of an elephant climbing over a picket fence.

'Someday…' Wade snarled as a well-padded tail slapped his face in a disdainful wave of farewell. However, the threat went unspoken as his senses picked up an indescribably foul odor wafting back from the animal now waddling unhurriedly off down the flagstone pathway.

'Ah, jeez!' was all Wade could manage while coughing and swearing blasphemously. He fought his way to his feet in hopes of finding some less polluted air, and since the gate was open anyway, he darted through it and down the driveway to the street.

But of course the watcher-if that's who it was- was long gone.

Wade went back to his apartment to shower and dress for work, mad enough to chew up nails and spit out bullets. Not even the shower on full cold did much to settle the steam.

Damn it. he didn't need this! He had a serial-now cop-killer on the loose and a city on full alert, a beautiful psychic giving him nightmares and now he'd picked up a stalker? What the hell was going on?

By the time he'd emerged from the shower and scrubbed himself pink, he'd resolved a couple of things. One: last time he'd looked, by God, the name plate on his desktop said Detective Callahan. So it was high time he got off his ass and started detecting. Which meant getting the answers to a whole lot of questions. And two: he had a feeling the person with the answers to some of those questions was the beautiful psychic, the same one responsible for his most recent nightmares.

Which made his first move of the morning a no-brainer: he needed to talk to the psychic.

He probably shouldn't have been surprised when he wiped the steam off of the mirror and saw a smile on his beard-stubbled face. Well. hell, he thought, whistling tunelessly as he picked up his shaver, it's a terrible job, but somebody has to do it…