Eye to Eye: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective by Don Pendleton Read Free Book Online Page B

San Jacinto range east—an area of beautifully
sculptured "mashed potato" hillocks scattered about at random,
formed as a high desert in some dim geological era but now
responding to the stubborn hand of man to yield square mile upon
square mile of citrus and avocado, a lush agricultural bounty which
reminded me that fanning remains California's number one
industry.
    But I was reminded, also,
that I was getting deeper and deeper into backcountry while the gas
gauge on the Maserati was falling faster and faster toward pure
air—and this car has never been known to run on psychic energy, so
I began looking for a refueling spot. I pulled off at Rancho
California, a small town that has been growing steadily the past
few years with the lure of country estates within commuting
distance from the coast. Jennifer kept on truckin' south so I made
just a quick pit-stop that give her maybe a three-to-five-mile
lead. By now we are in a totally different weather situation. The
air is dry and transparent, skies clear and moonlit, and I am
beginning to enjoy this tour of the countryside.
    I had consulted a road map
during the pause at Rancho California because I really had only a
very vague sensing of relative position. Best I could make it, I
was about thirty miles due east of San Juan Capistrano and the
Pacific, roughly fifty miles due north of San Diego on the old
US395 route, now I-15, and just a few miles north of the junction
with state route 76 which climbs eastward toward Palomar Mountain.
I had "known" since the beginning of this trek that Palomar was our
goal. I had to admit that this was probably the fastest route but
if I had been setting off on my own I would undoubtedly have taken
the coast route to Oceanside then SR76 into the
interior.
    As it worked out, I found
myself "on my own" very shortly after the refueling stop. I didn't
understand what was happening, at first; it just seemed that my
"lock" with Jennifer was weakening. Yet I knew from past experience
that this could not be the result of distancing. Distance
apparently has no effect on psychic energy; I can leap to London or
Paris at the speed of light, in my mind, and so can you. A mere
four or five terrestrial miles of separation between attuned minds
would not affect that linkage.
    Yet I was losing her and I
knew it. Let me see if I can explain that, to at least some
approximation of ordinary experience. If you have ever had your car
radio tuned to an FM broadcast while driving cross-country, you
have probably noticed a "fringe area" at the outermost range of a
particular station, an area in which the broadcast volume begins to
subside or to waver, sometimes gaining strength again as you climb
to a higher elevation, sometimes disappearing altogether-and
sometimes you may experience a Ping-Pong effect between two
stations at the same wavelength, where first you hear one station
and then the other, back and forth like that until you finally
leave one station's influence altogether and your radio "locks on"
to the other.
    That is sort of like the
problem I was having with Jennifer. I was losing the "lock"—but
unlike radio waves, which are affected by distancing, my "mental
wavelength" should have an infinite range, so I could not
understand why I was having the problem. At first. I could only
presume that she had turned east onto the little two-lane state
highway 76 toward the Pala Indian reservation and Palomar, since
she had blinked-out on me and I was strictly on my own at that
point.
    I was forced to consciously break the energy
link as I approached the tiny village of Pala, which is within the
reservation. "Forced" the same way you may be forced to turn off
your radio during an electrical storm: the background noise simply
becomes so loud and disturbing that you cannot tolerate it.
    This was not my first encounter with an
Indian reservation. I had experienced disturbing "hits" before in
the vicinity of Indian holy grounds but never anything like this.
For lack