"Look, Gail, I'm required to keep a lot of things secret, but I also have a lot of freedom of action. I'd like to help out where I can. The Sheriff and I have an understanding about that. I'd like you to know that it's not exclusive. If you need me you can call me and I'll come running. And you know I can run."
"No shit. OK. How do I reach you?"
I hadn't thought about that. The city people weren't on the same communications network as the county, which seemed dumb to me. I supposed that was some political turf thing. But it meant she couldn't call me on the radio without going through a dispatch relay. After thinking about it some more, I wrote my home phone number on one of her business cards.
"If I'm not there, anyone who answers can be trusted with a message."
"You ought to get a cell phone," she said, handing me a card to keep.
"Next thing on my list. I swear. This is early days for me, here. I'm still getting the equipment sorted out."
'Equipment' to her meant only one thing. She asked, "What sort of piece do you carry? Or is that a question you can't answer?"
I grinned and looked around for something destructible. A few feet away, there was a temporary barrier fence around a work-site where they were putting up another one of those granite benches. I walked over and picked up a five-foot long steel fencepost that was lying on the ground beside some building materials and went back to where Gail was standing near the still-horizontal perp.
"See this?" I asked, holding the fence post out to her. She took it and hefted it in her hands. It was a standard fencepost, with a W-shaped cross-section and a coat of dark green paint. She handed it back and I did my trick and turned it into a big pretzel in one smooth motion. I dropped it on the ground, where it hit with a dull thump. The ease with which I did it surprised me. Apparently, in addition to the recent improvements in my eyesight, I was still getting stronger as well. That also explained why I had gone airborne while jumping over the bench.
Gail stared at the twisted post and then she stared at me. She blinked like she thought there might be something in her eyes that was affecting her vision. While I waited for her to say something, Neeka put in her two cents.
"You show-off! You love doing that, don't you?"
"Yes, I do. I enjoy seeing their faces. It's like they suddenly wake up and find that the world is a different place from what they thought it was. Right now, Gail looks like she just found out that Santa Claus is real after all. Wait a sec, where are you?"
"Still in the garage with the bike. And yes, our range does seem to have increased. I haven't been able to read you this far away before. We've been together all weekend, so I don't know if it's a sudden thing or if it happened gradually."
"Maybe it happened Saturday, when we... merged."
"More likely it's just part of an across-the-board improvement you're having. It seems to come in spurts."
"Don't talk dirty. Did you hear Gail talking about The Torturer?"
"Yeah. It must be bad if a veteran cop like her can't bring herself to describe it."
"We can only hope."
"Hush! You be careful! I think you're getting cocky."
"He, he! Must be all that testosterone in my system."
"You think you're kidding. Maybe you're not."
"Oh, no! I hadn't considered that! I'd just been happy not to have an itchy pussy every two hours. You think all this boy-juice in me might be affecting my behavior?"
"Too much of a good thing? It's a possibility."
It was true. I was feeling a little jazzed. I had been very quick to show-off for Gail, like she was a girl I was trying to impress. Actually, that's just what I was thinking at the time. I hadn't been trying to get her to like me as a person as much as I had been trying to impress her with my speed and my strength — just like a boy.
I thought back to yesterday when I deliberately turned my clit into a small cock, and then used it to pleasure a girl. I remembered the exquisite feeling of thrusting my organ into Jolene. I remembered the heady feeling that penetrating her gave me, her expression when she felt me enter her, and the feeling of power it gave me to make her cum. Could all of that been due to male hormones?
I was so deep in reflection that I missed what Gail said to me when she got over being impressed by my macho display.
"Hunh?" I said.
"I said, 'if I hadn't seen it, I never would have believed it'. That wasn't a trick, was it?"
"No, it was real," I said, apologetically. "Please excuse me. I shouldn't be showing off like that. It isn't ladylike."
"Not ladylike, she says." Gail picked up the ruined fencepost and turned it over in her hands. "It's warm," she said.
"It's the atoms of the metal being rubbed together. They are momentarily being forced to behave like a fluid and when the metal stops moving the energy gets released as heat. It's conservation of energy, the first law of thermodynamics." I suppose that's what I get for paying attention in Physics class.
"Please don't take this the wrong way," Gail said, "but are you from this planet?"
I started to laugh out loud at that one. It was the first time someone had accused me of being an alien from outer space. I stopped in mid-chuckle when I saw she wasn't kidding.
The temptation to spin a yarn for her about me being from the planet Zygnxx-Prime in a galaxy far-far away; being stranded on Earth when my flying saucer crashed; and having to wait ten years for an intergalactic tow-truck to pick me up was almost too much to bear. I managed to resist, but a smile fought its way to my lips.
"Somewhere else you might ask that," I said. "But I think you mean, 'you ain't fum 'round heah, are ya?'" I put on my best Southern drawl for that and it came out perfectly.
Somehow space aliens and Southern drawls just don't go together. Gail laughed so hard her eyes began to water and tears rolled down her cheeks.
"OK, I guess that answers my question," she said.
A car so plain it had to belong to the government pulled up in the boathouse parking lot. Sgt Adams collected her prisoner and marched him off. Since I was already halfway around the lake, I decided to keep going in the same direction.
As I jogged along, I was still smiling over the story I had been about to tell Gail. It sounded just dumb enough to be plausible and I wondered if I might be able to use it on someone later on.
There were even fewer people in this section of the park than there had been near the garage and the picnic area. I didn't see anyone other than a Sanitation worker with his trash-barrel on wheels and his broom. He was sweeping up some trash on the path ahead of me, so I slowed to a walk so as not to trip over the broad-headed broom.
He glanced up as I stepped past him and I nodded as I went past. I had only gone a couple of steps further when a hand clamped a cloth over my face and yanked me off my feet.
For an instant I was too startled to react. Since he seemed to be threatening to smother me, I took a deep breath to get some oxygen. I knew as soon as I did so that it wasn't a good idea. The sickly-sweet smell from the cloth told me he had dosed it with some sort of drug intended to render me helpless.
"I can deal with that," I thought. "I just have to crank up my metabolism and I'll burn it off before it can take affect. I just..." At that instant, everything went black.
I woke up with Neeka screaming in my head. Her lovely voice had acquired a distinctly unpleasant shrillness and I wished that she would be quiet and let me wake up without being screamed at.
"Sam! Sam! Thank goodness! You were..."
"Unconscious? Yeah. Thanks. I got that part." I swam closer to wakefulness and examined my most recent memories for clues to my condition. "Some guy chloroformed me. I just woke up. Ugh! How long was I out?"
"About an hour. I was so worried. I could hear you, but you weren't thinking or even dreaming. It was just black. Are you all right?"