Our cook had been lost in his own broody mood. I realized how resistant he normally was to my telepathy only when he forgot to be. I was waiting on an order to be up at the hatch, and I was looking at Antoine while he flipped a burger, and I heard directly from him, Not getting off work to meet that asshole again, he can just stuff it up his butt. I’m not telling him nothing else. Then Antoine, whom I’d come to respect and admire, flipped the burger onto its waiting bun and turned to the hatch with the plate in his hand. He met my eyes squarely.

Oh shit, he thought.

“Let me talk to you before you do anything,” he said, and I knew for sure that he was a traitor.

“No,” I said, and turned away, going right to Sam, who was behind the bar washing glasses. “Sam, Antoine is some kind of agent for the government,” I said, very quietly.

Sam didn’t ask me how I knew, and he didn’t question my statement. His mouth pressed into a hard line. “We’ll talk to him later,” he said. “Thanks, Sook.” I regretted now that I hadn’t told Sam about the Were buried on my land. I was always sorry when I didn’t tell Sam something, it seemed.

I got the plate and took it to the right table without meeting Antoine’s eyes.

Some days I hated my ability more than others. Today was one of those days. I had been much happier (though in retrospect, it had been a foolish happiness) when I’d assumed Antoine was a new friend. I wondered if any of the stories he’d told about going through Katrina in the Superdome had been true, or if those had been lies, too. I’d felt such sympathy for him. And I’d never had a hint until now that his persona was false. How could that be?

First, I don’t monitor every single thought of every person. I block a lot of it out, in general, and I try especially hard to stay out of the heads of my co-workers. Second, people don’t always think about critical stuff in explicit terms. A guy might not think, I believe I’ll get the pistol from under the seat of my truck and shoot Jerry in the head for screwing my wife. I was much more likely to get an impression of sullen anger, with overtones of violence. Or even a projection of how it might feel to shoot Jerry. But the shooting of Jerry might not have reached the specific planning stage at the moment the shooter was in the bar, when I was privy to his thoughts.

And mostly people didn’t act on their violent impulses, something I didn’t learn until after some very painful incidents as I grew up.

If I spent my life trying to figure out the background of every single thought I heard, I wouldn’t have my own life.