Please see Disclaimers in Part 1…

* 250 Pender Street: In Season 1, the legend above the precinct simply says 
“Cascade PD 510” and the building opens directly onto the sidewalk, but by Night 
Shift, the legend has changed to “250 Pender Street”, and the car driven by 
Johnny Macado mounts the sidewalk and drives several yards across a wide paved 
plaza before crashing into the double glass doors. I have accepted 250 Pender 
Street as being the more realistic option. 
    
This story is dedicated to Bruce Alan Wilson, as explained in Part 1.

Author’s Note: I started this as a short story that would take 8 weeks, max, 
to finish. Oh boy. First it was delayed when I got hit by mega mutant plot-
bunny, then the brickbats of life came a’rainin’ down on lil ole me. I can 
only apologise for the length of time it has taken to post this, and do my 
utmost to finish the story as soon as possible.


DESTINED 
Part II


CHAPTER FOUR

Blair sat in front of the imposing desk of Beechwoods owner/manageress 
Marianne Caldecott, his hands clasped in front of him. After Eli’s stunning 
revelation he had walked ‘home’ – to his sleeping place at Warehouse #17, 
anyway – in a daze. He was due to report to Cascade PD’s Central Precinct 
on 250 Pender Street* tomorrow morning at 9:00am sharp, but everything 
had been shoved aside by the driving force of that one reality: his mother 
still lived.

Blair had presented himself at Beechwoods’ main reception and launched 
into his well-practised posthumous-son-named-for-father-Australian-fire-
working-at-Rainier-Consultant-with-PD story to nearly half a dozen assorted 
doctors and staff, becoming more and more confused as the minutes passed. 
Beechwoods housed nearly 123 elderly people: bachelors, spinsters, widows, 
widowers and married couples, some infirm, some robust. 

What they all had in common was money: lots of it. Beechwoods was a 
private, extremely exclusive, residential care complex and the annual fees 
had 3-4 zeros on the end. Naomi had not detested material wealth but had 
considered it unimportant; the odds of her being able to afford to spend one 
week, never mind eight years, at Beechwoods were roughly about the same 
as Jack the Ripper being elected “Man of the Year” by the Women’s 
Institute. 

Mrs Caldecott passed back his ID, having been the last to hear his 
explanations, and as if satisfied that he had passed some test, steepled her 
fingers. “Mr Sandburg, you may, of course, see your grandmother now that 
we have established your bona fides. You may also visit her whenever you 
wish – Beechwoods is a home, not a prison. However, please be assured that 
I will do everything in my power to protect her interests if I find that you 
are a scoundrel.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Blair whispered.

Giving him her first genuine smile, Mrs Caldecott’s pleasant expression 
faded away again. “I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and 
assume you have no ulterior motive in visiting Naomi. However, I have to 
warn you. Your resemblance to your father will make Naomi greet you as 
her son, and she will never understand that you are her grandson.”

“I don’t follow…?”

“Naomi has suffered extensive memory loss concerning the last 29 years – as 
far as she is concerned, it is always January 1969, shortly before your father 
was killed.”

“I don’t…how…” Blair  stumbled.

She looked at him searchingly, seeming to come some sort of inner decision. 
“I’m going to tell you the story of Beechwoods, Mr Sandburg, as it will 
explain your grandmother’s legacy to us who live here.”

Blair gave a jerky nod, deeming it safest not to say anything – and silence 
might get him to see his mom quicker.

“I was raised by my paternal grandparents from the age of 6 months when 
the rest of my family – parents, maternal grandparents and a childless uncle 
were killed in an automobile crash on the way home from our vacation. I 
had a blissfully happy childhood, but my grandparents were often harassed 
by do-gooders who acted as if their advancing age automatically rendered 
them mental imbeciles, and devastated them with gibes about “wouldn’t 
little Marianne be happier with a proper family?””

“I hear that,” Blair couldn’t help the words slipping out – remembering 
times during his own childhood when Naomi had persecuted on sight by 
those who believed that any woman not modelling herself on Martha Lincoln 
was some sort of Scarlet Woman.

Mrs Caldecott sighed, “I am deeply, deeply ashamed to say that I became a 
self-centred twenty-something with exactly the same attitude. My 
grandparents loved their little cottage, but I worried about them leaving the 
stove on, having a fall; besides, it was such a long way to get to them from 
where I lived. So, when my unsubtle suggestions of selling up and moving 
closer or into an elderly peoples’ home fell on deaf ears, I took matters into 
my own hands and started to arrange the sale of their cottage and a transfer 
to a nice modern care home, without telling them, all for their own good of 
course.”

“Uh-uh.” Blair couldn’t prevent the mutter slipping out.

“Oh, I agree, totally, I was a blindly selfish little madam, intent only on 
suiting myself. I was summoned by my grandfather urgently and went 
hurrying down imagining all sorts of disasters – had grandma blown up the 
kitchen? Had grandpa been fleeced out of his life savings by some con 
merchant who’d charged him twenty grand for a hundred buck gutter-
cleaning job?”

“What happened?” Unconsciously Blair put on his most soothing voice as it 
was clear that even so many years later, this was a painful subject for 
Marianne Caldecott to relate.

She gave a self-derisive smile, “When I arrived, Grandpa was waiting at the 
door and – he refused me entry.”

“He wouldn’t let you in?”

“No. I was confused until he icily told me that he and my grandmother Anne 
had discovered my intentions and were devastated that the young woman 
they adored had turned into the same type of self-centred, patronising, 
condescending idiots that had plagued them during my childhood and always 
talked to them like they were mentally defective children for no better 
reason that they had hit 65 years of age when they took me in.”

“Ouch.”

“Don’t feel sorry – I deserved every word and more, I was an egocentric 
little madam. My grandfather informed me that they were disowning me and 
I was no longer welcome in their house.”

“Did he...?”

“No. I repented fervently and I was forgiven, but things were never quite 
the same, even though they continued to love me as unconditionally as I 
should have loved them. Eighteen months later, shortly after I married my 
husband, my grandparents died…” She swallowed and said softly, “They 
were discovered sitting side by side on the couch, dead from gas poisoning. 
The coroner recorded accidental death because my obviously senile and 
dotty old granny had turned the stove on but forgot to light it, and the 
house filled with gas while they were watching TV.”

“I’m sorry.” Blair said, sincerely.

“I was devastated,” Mrs Caldecott leaned back in her chair, her face grim, 
“because I knew it wasn’t an accident. My grandparents committed suicide, 
and it was my fault.” 


Blair was unable to hid his reaction to this; he could understand her sense of 
guilt – he felt it at having left his mother alone to “fend” for nearly three 
decades, even though he knew it was through no fault of his own. Mrs 
Caldecott surely was experiencing an extreme sense of - 

“…Misplaced guilt, Blair Sandburg,” she finished his thought. “Yes, I’ve seen 
the same thoughts writ large on the faces of other people; sometimes I even 
allow myself the fantasy of ignoring what I know just for a second to belief 
that. Bu my grandmother would never, ever, ever, have left the stove unlit 
under any circumstances.”

“How can you be sure?” But Blair asked with curiosity not scepticism, 
respecting the absolute conviction in her voice.

Marianne Caldecott gestured towards one of the old photographs on her 
office wall, a very, very old sepia group shot of a man, woman and family of 
children, all posed in stiff, formal clothing. 

Two of the children were identical twin girls and Marianne indicated the one 
on the right, “My grandmother Anne was the younger of twin sisters, that’s 
her with Mary, their parents and brothers and sisters, but all of them bar my 
grandmother were killed by an unlit stove.”

“How so?” Blair asked softly, seeing her grief.

Without melodrama, Marianne Caldecott related the tragedy that had killed 
her grandmother’s family. Marianne’s great-grandmother, her grandmother 
Anne’s mother, had insisted that each of her six children would take turns 
to cook the family’s dinner – the evening meal - one weeknight and she 
cooked it on the Sabbath. One day, Marianne’s grand-uncle, her 
grandmother’s baby brother Clark (a chubby, toothy toddler on the 
photograph), who at the time was only eight years old, failed to turn the gas 
ring on the stove off properly, though tragically nobody realised it.

Mrs Caldecott’s voice was soft as she paused, recalling the story, “My 
grandmother and her twin sister Mary were racing each other home from 
school and my grandmother, Anne, fell down and so dropped behind Mary. 
She hurried on after her sister and saw as their father and eldest brother 
Edward, who was 21 and in the Army and quite splendid, strolled up the 
back porch steps to the kitchen…” pausing significantly, Marianne Caldecott 
went on, “…her Da with his old, carved clay pipe, Edward puffing on the 
expensive cigarettes his military career enabled him to buy. They opened 
the door, stepped inside and…” 

“Oh…” Blair’s imagination filled him in on the consequences of the two men 
walking into a gas-filled kitchen whilst smoking tobacco products.

Mrs Caldecott let out a breath, “…my grandmother was knocked head over 
heels as the entire house disintegrated into a huge fireball that horrifically 
also engulfed Mary who was at the front yard gate.”

“That must have been horrific to witness,” Blair as ever, was able to 
empathise with an old, long-deceased woman he’d never met; such 
compassion was innate to him.

Marianne Caldecott nodded as she finished relating the devastating event in 
her grandmother’s life, “Firemen and rescue workers were only able to 
actually identify Anne’s twin Mary because she had been outside the house. 
From what was left of the rest they believed that the mother and one of the 
children had been in the kitchen when Edward and the father came in, and 
that one or possibly two children had been in the next room. There wasn’t 
enough left for them to identify so apart from Mary they ended up in a 
single grave…My grandmother was 12 years old and from then on developed 
fire safety into a paranoid art form.”

Blair prudently remained silent – any platitude would simply have been 
insulting, and the story made it abundantly clear that Marianne Caldecott’s 
certainty her grandmother had not accidentally left the gas on was not some 
irrational guilt. 

“My callous stupidity obviously preyed on their minds, and they worried so 
much about being a burden to me and being forced to leave their beloved 
home that they ended their lives.” Mrs Caldecott wound down.

There was a momentary silence, then taking a deep controlling breath, she 
went on more evenly, “My late husband helped me with Beechwoods – he 
was a wonderful man who understood what I was trying to do here – and so 
did your grandmother Naomi.”

“How long has she been here?” 

“She came here in 1989. She’d been suffering from dizzy spells and unlike 
some elderly people, was extremely sensible about the fact that she lived 
alone and had no family in case of more serious injury. So, once she’d 
assured herself we weren’t an open prison, she moved in. She was a 
godsend. She instituted the Honorary Grandparent Project for children with 
no grandparents and those of our residents who have no grandchildren or 
family. She arranged day trips, vacations, sightseeing events, had us going 
into schools to talk to children and teenagers about what growing old was 
really about, taught geriatric anti-mugger self-defence classes, you name it, 
she did it – when she was here. Often she would come into my office, 
announce she was going to Nepal or Bali or Moscow for three weeks and 
toddle off, then bring back stunning video footage for us to “ooh” and “aah” 
over. She loved being able to go but come back to a secure haven where she 
was not a danger to herself and others.”

“The dizzy spells…?”

“Got worse, though very gradually.” Marianne Caldecott looked at him. 
“Your father was the light of her life, she adored him totally and his death a 
few days after his 21st birthday completely devastated her. The one good 
thing about her situation is that she perpetually lives in 1969; we show her 
some of the letters Blair wrote from February and March of that year and 
it’s as if she’s seeing them for the first time.”

“What happened?” Blair croaked past the agonising pain in his chest.

“Basically, some sort of stroke, but she’d already been bleeding in her 
brain. The fact that she lived at Beechwoods saved her life, but she was in a 
coma for three weeks from April – May 1992. When she woke up, her 
memory from birth to January 1969 was intact, but everything after that 
was gone, or scrambled up. She remembers some of the many travels she 
went on after 1969, but fortunately they all blur into one. As long as an idea 
fits into her timeframe, she would remember it. So, if I tell her on Monday 
that I am redecorating my kitchen, she will come to me on Friday with 
colour schemes. If I go to her on Monday and tell her that Friday is the 21st 
march 2001 and it will be my Golden Wedding Anniversary, on Friday she 
will come to me with a generic wedding anniversary card because the 
knowledge of it being any later than January 1969 has gone, and all she will 
remember is that it is my wedding anniversary. Doctors believe that the vast 
majority of the memory loss was physical – caused by the stroke, but that a 
minor part may be psychological – she has blocked out everything - including 
the actual event and aftermath of her son’s death, the one truly tragic 
event in her life.”

“I need to see her.”

“I thought you would.”

The solar was a huge, high-ceilinged room with a bank of polished Georgian 
windows along one wall. A wide variety of elderly men and women were 
knitting, reading, playing chess, drinking tea, gossiping, strolling past the 
windows in the garden and generally looking about as far from geriatric as 
possible with their neat clothing, styled hair, jewellery and general 
demeanours.

In the corner of the room, earnestly explaining something a white haired old 
lady who was obviously deaf, stood a tall, slender woman, only slightly 
shrunken with age. She finished speaking and turned to face them, the 
familiar auburn bob framing her beloved face, only the streaks of white 
above one temple hinting at the site of the brain injury that left her 
perpetually three decades in the past.

“Mama?”

“BLAIR, HONEY!”

He was engulfed, enclosed, embraced in joyous comfort, the vast empty 
void in his soul suddenly swamped to overflowing. Mom was here, and she 
would make everything okay. The peculiar scent of the lily of the valley, 
honeysuckle and tea-rose that his mother blended herself for her own eau 
de toilette, filled Blair’s nostrils as the hands caressed his face. For a split 
instant of time, the world was as it should be.

“Everyone, this is my son! Blair, I told you, he’s at Rainier studying 
Anthropology!” Naomi extravagantly introduced him, praising him as the 
next Einstein.

Blair stood, tongue-tied, still wrapped in the distancing cocoon of his 
mother’s perfume, until he saw the faces of Mrs Caldecott and the other 
residents. Without exception, everyone in the room came to shake his hand 
and greet him warmly, without exception every face held a mixture of love 
and compassion for Naomi, and the question: Who are you really, young 
man?

If anyone had told Blair a week before that he would be desperate to leave 
his mother if he found her again, he would have hit them. It took thirty 
tortured minutes before he was able to extricate himself from Naomi, with 
a feeble excuse about having to attend a lecture, and return with Marianne 
Caldecott to her office. “She’s happy.” He murmured more to himself than 
anyone else.

“Yes, she is happy and, I’m pleased to say, far healthier than many in her 
position. Assuming she does not have another major stroke – highly unlikely 
with the health regimen we operate here – she should easily live another ten 
to twenty years, if not more. As I said, the one good thing about the whole 
affair is that the sole faculty her stroke robbed Naomi of was the ability to 
remember the tragic death of her only child.” Mrs Caldecott said.

“How often can I visit? What are her favourite foods? What clothes does she 
like?” Blair began to babble, “I work at the PD and the university, but I 
could come nights, weekends too, I mean, if that’s okay, I don’t want to 
disrupt –”

“Blair!” She cut off the near-hysterical flow. “I admire your feelings for your 
grandmother, but I will not allow you to make yourself ill or exhausted 
trying to make up for the lost years you two did not have together. You are 
welcome at Beechwoods whenever and for how ever long you can make it – 
remember, for Naomi, time as we know it has little meaning. She will greet 
you with sincere enthusiasm whenever you visit and never notice that 
months might have passed since you last came.”

“Oh, right.” Blair ran a hand through his hair. “Thanks, I mean…thanks. Oh, 
wait, erm, can you give me a few weeks breathing space to sort out my 
bank account. I’ll probably have to pay in instalments – ”

“What are you talking about?” Her expression was baffled.

“Mo- Naomi didn’t believe in material possessions.” Blair explained, “I’m 
truly grateful for you taking care of my mo- grandmother when she had no 
assets, but I must owe you a fortune in back-rent.”

Mrs Caldecott smiled as if he’d won the lottery. “I knew I liked you, Mr 
Sandburg. You came to see her expecting nothing, and were still willing to 
come when you thought she had nothing.”

“Huh?”

“Naomi Sandburg is rich beyond either of our dreams.”

“Huh?” Blair sat down again, “but…”

Mrs Caldecott sighed again. “Dr Roderick Douglas, your father’s best friend, 
was a genius in many ways, not least in his judgement of character. I went 
to Rainier with your father actually, but I was a year below him. Dr Douglas 
walked, talked and spoke like an ultimate nerd, but he had a mind like a 
steel-trap, even about the people around him. He looked at the love 
between Naomi and Blair, and understood all too well that his family viewed 
him as a marketable commodity to be exploited, not a human being. So, he 
left his entire estate to Blair.”

“W-w-what?” Blair repeated, absolutely stunned. He knew Roddy’s family 
were loaded. He also knew that Roddy was rich in his own right due to 
owning some lucrative patents from several of his inventions. However, Blair 
had never thought about Roddy’s material wealth, and the idea that Roddy 
might make him a beneficiary of any will had never once crossed Blair’s 
mind.

“Oh yes,” Marianne Caldecott smiled with not a little malicious satisfaction. 
“What’s more, Dr Douglas stated quite explicitly that, should Blair 
predecease him, his entire estate was to go to Blair Sandburg’s beneficiaries 
or next-of-kin if Blair had no will.”

“So – you mean –” Blair stumbled as he worked it out.

“I do indeed. At the time he was killed in that warehouse arson, Blair did 
have a will, but his sole beneficiary was your grandmother, Naomi 
Sandburg.”

“Mo – Naomi inherited…everything?” Blair tried to comprehend that much 
money and failed.

“Yes, though not without initial difficulty.” Marianne Caldecott explained, 
opening a desk drawer and rummaging around in it, “Dr Douglas 
unfortunately knew his family all too well and left behind some rather 
explicit letters about them, which were to be given to the judges and 
lawyers should the case come to court.”

“And it did.” It was a statement not a question; Blair’s opinion of Roddy’s 
family had been contemptuous even from the little contact he’d had back 
then in the 1960s; a less charming, more avaricious bunch of clacking old 
crows you would be hard-pressed to meet.

“Yes, it was all very unsavoury. Dr Douglas’ family did everything they could 
to paint Blair as a sexually perverted gold-digger who had lured him into a 
life of drink, drugs and debauchery and played on his naïveté. What they 
said about Naomi Sandburg I will not repeat. Dr Douglas’s letter caused 
quite a stir in court, with all the newspapers there.” 

Ferreting in her desk drawer, she finally pulled out a yellowed, crackling 
newspaper clipping, and pointed to a section in bold italic print. Blair read 
his friend’s letter, obviously reprinted in the newspaper verbatim:

I am all too aware, Your Honour, of the scurrilous, vindictive and totally 
untrue campaign of slander my avaricious relatives will doubtless have 
launched against Blair, my dear friend, and his mother, Naomi Sandburg. 
Yes, they corrupted me, by showing me what a family should be – a place of 
love, laughter, and security. From before I could walk I was bullied, 
coerced, pushed, prodded and hectored into providing my family with 
financial gain and public prestige. The fact that I was often so unhappy I 
vomited resulted only in a terrible harangue of my failure.

 Yes, Blair Sandburg has been in my bed. He fed me soup, hot lemonade and 
aspirin; changed my stinking, sweat soaked sheets and lay down to stop me 
doing myself harm, for five days without sleep when I had flu and thrashed 
in delirium.  He had known me only three weeks, yet it was first time in my 
entire 27 years of life that anyone had cared enough to do it. Neither of my 
parents bothered when I came down with chickenpox at five, nor measles at 
seven, nor laryngitis at ten. 

Yes, he has one or two beers of a weekend, but is nowhere close to the 
piscine-proportional intake of my father, and both his brothers, who can 
sink a bottle of Jack Daniels in under two minutes and whose Rudolph red 
noses are not, I assure you, from fresh air and exercise. Yes, he indulges in 
the odd spliff, but rarely for he does not like the smell; considering that 
my extremely neurotic mother has spent the last score years floating 
through life on a cloud of Valium and prescription tranquillisers, she is in 
no position to cast the first stone. 

As for Naomi’s lifestyle, she has caused nobody any harm and is greatly 
admired and respected by many eminent people, unlike my sister and my 
mother’s sister who are both called “margarine” because they spread 
easily. As for other accusations of sexual perversion against Blair, may I 
refer you to my mother’s brother Albert, who had to resign his position as 
Headmaster of a boys’ preparatory school? Respectfully, Your Honour, my 
family cannot have their cake and eat it: out of the left corner of their 
mouths they paint me as the Second Einstein, out of the right, a naïve twit 
led around by the much less mentally acute Blair Sandburg. I am fully in 
control of my faculties when I bequeath everything that I have to Blair 
Sandburg, who, along with his mother, has been the only real family I have 
ever had.

“Damn.” Blair wiped his eyes; Roddy had always wielded a mighty pen. 

“Keep reading,” Marianne suggested.

… Finally, as a scientist, I cannot prove the existence of the afterlife, of a 
great beyond, but nor can I disprove it. Should such a Great Beyond exist, 
and should there be a failure to carry out my explicitly expressed wishes 
regarding the disbursement of my estate, please be assured that I will rise 
from my tomb a perpetually tormenting spirit, to hound and to harry, to 
plague and to persecute, without surcease.”

“Ouch.” Blair winced at the unsubtle threat. 

“It worked.” Marianne Caldecott smiled, a little sadly. “Actually, the judge 
was a remarkably fair-minded man for that time in 1969 when segregation 
had just ended and considering Naomi was an unmarried mother and hippie 
and a Jewess. He looked at the Douglas family, sitting prim and spiteful in 
their expensive clothes and dripping jewellery, sneering at and denigrating 
their dead son’s character and mental capabilities, then he looked at Naomi 
Sandburg, who, two months after the tragedy, was still under a doctor’s 
care and could barely stand to mention her son’s name or Roddy Douglas’s 
from sheer, devastated grief. He found in favour of Naomi.”

“Oh, Roddy,” Blair handed back the paper clipping. “I’ll be back as soon as I 
can to visit. Thank you for everything you’ve done.”



CHAPTER FIVE

With unerring accuracy, Jim Ellison tossed his keys to land precisely in the 
centre of the small bowl on the counter top as he entered his apartment 
and let the door slam shut behind him, the locks automatically clicking into 
place, securing his terri-

No. Jim slipped off his shoulder holster grimly and went into the kitchenette 
area, putting the kettle on. Though he would never let it show on his face, 
he was secretly relieved at the depth with which he had missed Major 
Crimes and its people during his torturous secondment to Narcotics. The 
comfort and happiness Jim had felt upon returning to Simon and Rhonda, 
Henri, Rafe, Joel and the others had gone a long way to reassuring himself 
that he wasn’t becoming the emotionless automaton that he heard people 
decry him as in whispers that they thought no-one could hear.

That no normal human could hear.

Jim moved away from the kitchen and made his way to the French windows, 
opening them but not stepping out onto the balcony as he looked out over 
the glittering skyscrapers of Cascade; a vibrant Northwest City with the 
architecture and sophistication of Seattle, but still a small enough 
metropolis to retain that personal touch – to Jim, simply home, he had been 
born here.

He looked around the loft reflectively. It would have taken a five year old 
all of ten seconds to figure out that his team were sacrificial lambs who had 
been betrayed by their own side, and while the U.S. Army Rangers were 
many things, stupid wasn’t one of them. By the time the chaotic minutes 
from the chopper’s impact to the survivors dragging themselves clear of the 
burning wreckage had played out, pretty much everyone had figured out 
that their Commanding Officer, Colonel Oliver, had sold them out to the 
local drug lords. 

Sarris, Khera and Pearce had been killed on impact, but each man left knew 
that his own injuries, while serious and critical, stood a good chance of 
being non-fatal if he could be gotten to Bethesda within the hour. Each man 
also knew that dear Colonel Oliver would be haunting his HQ ready to 
intercept any message that indicated survivors and that making any sort of 
SOS call would be so tantamount to suicide they might as well put their guns 
to their heads and blow their brains out themselves. 

Jim fought against the familiar anguish, the invisible vice that squeezed his 
chest; he was the Captain, he was responsible for choosing those of his unit 
to go on that mission, therefore responsible for his men’s safety, regardless 
of the fact that they had been betrayed by their own immediate superior. 
Indeed, it was his own personal disquiet and nagging mistrust of Oliver that 
had made him pick his unit’s best men – and his closest friends; his 
emotional need had gotten them all killed!

Jim had been injured but much less seriously, sheer blind luck seeing him 
thrown from the open chopper into a cushioning canopy of foliage seconds 
before the chopper hit unyielding South American jungle. His men had seen 
this, and so they had died for him. Jim had performed to the best of his 
medical training, which was no small thing, but all he had done was make 
their deaths as physically painless and emotionally comfortable as he could. 

They had seen his anguish and tried to be the comforters, despite their pain 
and knowledge of their own futile battle for life. Each had quietly pointed 
out to Jim – more than once - the futility of radioing for ‘help’ that would 
only allow assassins to finish the job. Each of his brave, bright team had 
slipped quietly away from injuries that would have been treatable.

Turning away from the vista in front of him, Jim went back inside and made 
himself a coffee. Proper coffee, expensive connoisseur’s coffee; never one 
to follow the Epicurean snobbery of his wealthy family, ironically the finest 
food and drink were all that his acute taste buds could tolerate. 

When he’d been rescued for real by the Delta Force eighteen months after 
the crash, he had returned to the USA with one goal: annihilate Oliver. He 
had been thwarted by shadowy men who clearly sympathised but who had 
explained that nevertheless…

Concessions had been wrung from the shadow government. Each of the dead 
soldiers’ families were contacted and discovered that their loved one had 
had lucrative life insurance, won money on sweepstakes, or other such 
fabrication; spouses had financial security, children were going to college. 

Jim let it be enough, once the shadow men had assured him that Oliver was 
being used as stool pigeon to dupe the other side. He had accumulated 
$50,000 back pay during his MIA period and for previous missions and set 
about finding a home in Cascade. He had instantly known that the loft was 
‘it’. In the - then - rundown historical area of Cascade, having that much 
space was still value for the $50,000-to-buy option. Jim had felt an almost 
irresistible craving to walk out onto that balcony and watch the sunset. It 
was his balcony in a way he couldn’t explain, but simply knew. 

It was that sensation that led him to his current position as owner of the 
entire 852 Prospect Street building – including the ground level shops and 
the parking strip in the middle of the street out front. His immediate 
connection to the loft had panicked Jim, made him edgy and uncertain – he 
didn’t want to have those weird senses he’d had in Peru back again. 

His hesitancy had made the then-owner offer him not just the loft but the 
entire shooting match for $250,000; to Jim’s own surprise he said yes, and 
when he went to the bank to organise a loan, he found that his account 
mysteriously contained enough funds – courtesy of a convenient and entirely 
fake insurance payout - to purchase it with some left over for 
refurbishment. A final gift it seemed from the shadow men, a startling 
display of humanity towards the betrayed warrior who had demanded high 
financial reparations for his fallen subordinates, but never anything for 
himself.  

However, Jim had quickly realised the pragmatic nature of their gesture too 
once he had the title deeds in his hands and the previous owner was en 
route to his family in California. His new status as a property owner meant 
Jim was initially too busy to be brooding about Colonel Oliver. The building 
had been completely rewired and had updated plumbing and heating 
systems a couple of years before and it was structurally sound; a soaring 
late 19th Century construction intended to withstand pretty much anything, 
it had been built with pride in craftsmanship and attention to detail. It 
would outlast many flashy modern upstarts. 

There had only been two problems – the prehistoric elevator that broke 
down on average every thirty minutes, and Jim’s loft. Taking out the 
ancient relic and installing a modern successor that nevertheless didn’t jar 
with the architectural ambience had been expensive but worth it; Jim’s new 
loft had required a more creative approach. 
The loft was the only apartment in the building that had been owned when 
Jim arrived, the others were all rented and still were; the man who had 
bought the loft from the original owner had died with no family to inherit it, 
and it had remained empty until Jim purchased it and the entire building. 

His then still active super-senses confirmed his deceased predecessor was 
not a smoker or a pet owner, but the problems were easy to see. Mr Phelps, 
852 Prospect’s ex-owner, had informed Jim as the new tenant-landlord that 
the previous owner of Apartment 307 for some reason had had an acute 
phobia about fire and had had the loft installed with several large, ugly grey 
metal fire doors. Originally intending to sell only the loft and not the 
building and parking strip, Mr Phelps had been forced to drop the loft’s 
price by over $20,000 down to the $50,000 Jim had found it advertised for, 
as prospective buyer after prospective buyer balked at paying out for an 
apartment they would have to spend further money on renovating.

Still fuming over Colonel Oliver and irritated constantly by his heightened 
senses, Jim found the loft therapeutic. From a Special Forces viewpoint, the 
doors were a complete liability. Each one was in military parlance a serious 
PoV – Point of Vulnerability – wherein bad guys had too easy access and they 
meant it was impossible to successfully ‘hole up’ in the loft because there 
were too many weak points that could be attacked to gain entry. Jim’s first 
job had been to remove every door and brick up what was left, though he 
did put windows in most of the top halves of the gaps. 

Apart from the main door into the loft from the corridor, the only fire door 
he left in was the one at the end of the small hallway past the kitchen and 
bathroom, which led directly onto the fire escape. However, he had 
reinforced this in a variety of ways, such as embedding the hinges in plaster 
and moving the lock to a non-standard position and putting bolts in top and 
bottom. In the unlikely event of a fire, egress could be obtained quickly by 
pulling the bolts and twisting the lock, while yet making it very hard to get 
in.  

A whole range of phobias about foam filled furniture and flammable paint 
on the part of the late previous tenant had made the loft a stark, sterile 
place when Jim moved in. Much simmering aggression had been worked 
through as he slowly made the loft his own. He had sanded the whole floor 
square foot by square foot until it was smooth enough to super-sharp eyes 
and super-sensitive finger tips, then he had varnished it and re-varnished it 
to a smooth, butternut-brown polish, bar the kitchen floor that he had hand 
done with big, thick real Welsh slate tile. New kitchen units and a stainless 
steel sink with gleaming faucets marched with military precision along the 
walls under the bank of square skylight-roof panes of glass. 

Using a steam-stripper on the old 1950s-era wallpaper had led to the 
collapse of half the wall, and once he had tidied himself so he didn’t look 
like someone had upended a bag of flour on his head, Jim had simply gone 
to the hardware store and returned, taking everything back to the 
stonework and re-plastering. The new work had then been repeatedly 
painted various shades of cream, magnolia and delicate peach so it looked 
spacious and clean yet didn’t fall into the bleak starkness of an operating 
theatre. He had varnished the pillar supporting his bedroom area a dark oak 
brown and painted the simple metal handle rail of the steps and the 
platform rail around his bed a pale grass green that made them a lot less 
ugly.

Jim’s prized Red Heron poster hung on the back of the door, but apart from 
the small TV and old fashioned dial operated stereo system, the loft’s most 
well used recreational implements were the bird-watching books on the 
small bookcases along the back wall behind the couch. Even when Jim’s 
senses suddenly ‘dematerialised’ back to ‘normal’ about a week after he’d 
finished refurbishing the loft, they were better than average for anyone 
else. By that time, trying to watch TV or listen to anything other than the 
softest music had been painful for so long that he had gotten out of the 
habit of using either for recreation – even his beloved Santana was agony if 
his hearing spiked. 

Under Jim’s bedroom platform was another room that originally had only 
curtain across it, but he had eventually put French-window style double 
doors on. Now Jim looked at it with faint regret. Initially he had used it as a 
gym. When he and Carolyn married, she had co-opted it as a study, moving 
first a futon and then a proper single bed in for those times when their 
respective work shifts at the Cascade PD meant that one could come home 
and go to bed without disturbing the other. As their marriage crumbled from 
within, the place had become her de facto bedroom. The bed, large desk 
and computer workstation were all in there complete with bookcases, a 
‘guest’ bedroom that nobody bar Simon Banks occasionally used.

Jim’s lips tightened as he thought of his ex-wife. His senses had remained 
dormant for the duration of his marriage, though his better-than-average 
tactile skills made him an excellent sexual partner in a physical sense. 
However, Carolyn had rejected that area of their marriage before he did, 
complaining that he was emotionally detached. Jim had to admit that 
maybe she had a point. Jim had taken great care never to reveal his sensory 
abilities to her, which of necessity meant editing out entire swathes of his 
childhood and Army career from those inevitable reminiscences that couples 
tell each other. When he excluded all his black ops missions that he also 
could not reveal, plus the many unhappy incidences after his mother left 
and his parents divorced and William Ellison sabotaged his sons’ relationship 
with each other, it left precious little to reminiscence about.

Jim knew that Carolyn that would have tried to ‘help’, but also knew that 
she wouldn’t have believed his senses were hyperactive. Carolyn had been 
one of the PD’s finest Chief of Forensic appointees, but she tended towards 
a blinkered mind and a sliced-white-bread approach to life. Her ‘help’ 
would have been psychiatrists and other psychobabblers who all too often 
used their patients to work through their own psychological problems.

Jim was relieved that Carolyn had taken the promotion to San Francisco PD, 
for she would have been too observant not to notice that something was 
wrong with Jim and too aggressive in demanding answers. Within weeks of 
joining SFPD she had met a police Inspector in the Special Investigations 
Unit and was now blissfully happily married with a toddler son and a 
newborn infant daughter. 

Jim was happy for her, but it only highlighted his own loneliness. Apart from 
Simon he had no close friends, though he got on particularly well with 
Detectives Rafe and Brown, Captain Joel Taggart who was currently on 
secondment from the Bomb Squad, and Simon’s secretary Rhonda 
Delagardie; but he made sure he avoided his family. Though his father, 
brother, surviving grandparents, several maternal and paternal cousins, 
aunts and uncles all lived in Cascade or the surround, Jim hadn’t seen his 
immediate family since he returned from Peru, and intended to keep it that 
way. But more and more just lately the loft seemed to be a hideaway rather 
than a sanctuary…the difference was subtle, but there nonetheless.

Jim went through his nightly ritual. A large bowl of thick vegetable soup 
that had been chosen for the brand’s blandness when it came to seasoning; 
an hour on the couch desultorily watching the Cascade Jaguars basketball 
team lose (as always) followed by an hour’s light workout with the punch-
bag and some limbering callisthenics, followed by his greatest indulgence in 
the loft – a shower. The second thing after the balcony that had sold him on 
the apartment was the potential inherent in the bathroom. The puny water 
heater had been exchanged for a bigger, meaner beast and Jim had 
completely removed all the fittings and tiled every surface before having a 
new toilet, washbasin and sunken-Jacuzzi-bath no less, fitted. 

His pride and joy was the shower. Originally a walk-in rectangle, Jim had 
had it replaced by a larger cubicle with a frosted glass door, and then went 
to town. The other three sides had powerful adjustable showerheads 
protruding from them and the whole thing had so many things you could 
twist, turn, press, pull and adjust that it strongly resembled a NASA space 
shuttle control console. Jim could adjust it exactly to the fluctuating 
requirements of his over-sensitive skin.

Tonight he picked a gentle spray and allowed the warm but not hot water to 
wash away the strains of the past few days before drying himself with his 
largest towel, noting to himself that it was getting to the replacement 
stage. While his clothing wasn’t too bad, apparently protected by dyes and 
the constructing materials, bath towels had proved a hopeless case. 
Following months of trying to find a detergent that washed them without 
turning them into sandpaper, or saturating them with chemicals that 
blistered his skin the minute he touched one, Jim had given up on the 
towels and simply used them four or five times and then trashed them, 
buying new sets and repeating the cycle. 

His ablutions finally complete, Jim exited the bathroom, gave his apartment 
one final security check…and went to bed, resolutely ignoring the fact it 
was barely quarter-past-nine.  Had anyone been brave, or foolish, enough to 
enquire, Jim would have sharply retorted that for someone of his heavy 
workload, early nights were beneficial. It certainly had nothing to do with 
the dreams. 

Despite the fact that he couldn’t remember them within minutes of waking, 
the fact did remain that he awoke after such nights feeling strangely 
energised but also re-filled with a previously long-lost sense of anticipation 
for the coming day, an apprehensive but keen interest in what lay ahead 
that he hadn’t experienced since he’d walked into an Army recruiting office 
and asked, “Where do I sign and how soon can I go?”

Jim relaxed deeper into his pillow; the pure, uncoloured Egyptian linen 
bedclothes had cost him a fortune to purchase and import directly from the 
manufacturer, but were worth every cent. Cool, soft, and above all they 
didn’t turn him into a giant red tomato after a short period of contact with 
his skin. He’d also managed to find an extortionately expensive but non-
perfumed wash powder, Ivory Snow, which got them clean, though it didn’t 
work on his towels.

Despite the early hour, or may be because of it, the surrounding blocks were 
quiet. At this time people were still either at work; doing the shopping; out 
with friends and so forth; the noise level wouldn’t begin to increase until 
about ten-thirty to eleven o’clock. Sheltered by his eye mask and earplugs, 
Jim’s eyes closed and he drifted idly into sleep…

And dreamed…

Continued in Part 3…

© 2006, C D Stewart