Time to Time: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (Ashton Ford Series Book 6) Read online

  Don Pendleton

  Time to Time

  Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective

  by the Creator of

  The Executioner: Mack Bolan Series

  Pendleton Artists

  California

  Copyright © 1988 by Don Pendleton, All rights reserved.

  Published with permission of Linda Pendleton.

  First Kindle Edition, April 2010, Pendleton Artists.

  Originally published by Popular Library, Warner Books.

  Authors Guild Back-in-Print Edition, 2001.

  Cover design by Linda Pendleton and Judy Bullard.

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, groups, organizations, or events is not intended and is entirely coincidental.

  Don Pendleton Books

  The Ashton Ford novels

  Ashes to Ashes

  Eye to Eye

  Mind to Mind

  Life to Life

  Heart to Heart

  Time to Time

  The Joe Copp novels by Don Pendleton

  Copp for Hire

  Copp on Fire

  Copp in Deep

  Copp in the Dark

  Copp in Shock

  The Executioner: Mack Bolan Series of Action Adventure

  Fiction written with Linda Pendleton

  Roulette: The Search for the Sunrise Killer

  Executioner: War Against the Mafia, Comic

  Nonfiction

  A Search for Meaning From the Surface of a Small Planet

  Nonfiction with Linda Pendleton

  To Dance With Angels

  Whispers From the Soul

  Metaphysics of the Novel

  The Cosmic Breath: Metaphysical Essays

  For all those who have shared the experience, and still wonder. Take peace.

  ~dp

  Author's Note

  To My Readers:

  Ashton Ford will come as something of a surprise to those of you who have been with me over the years. This is not the same type of fiction that established my success as a novelist; Ford is not a gutbuster and he is not trying to save the world from anything but its own confusion. There are no grenade launchers or rockets to solve his problems and he is more of a lover than a fighter.

  Some have wondered why I was silent for so many years; some will now also wonder why I have returned in such altered form. The truth is that I had said all I had to say about that other aspect of life. I have grown, I hope, both as a person and as a writer, and I needed another vehicle to carry the creative quest. Ashton Ford is that vehicle. Through this character I attempt to understand more fully and to give better meaning to my perceptions of what is going on here on Planet Earth, and the greatest mystery of all the mysteries: the why of existence itself.

  Through Ford I use everything I can reach in the total knowledge of mankind to elaborate this mystery and to arm my characters for the quest. I try to entertain myself with their adventures, hoping that what entertains me may also entertain others—so these books, like life itself, are not all grim purpose and trembling truths. They are fun to write; for some they will be fun to read. To each of those I dedicate the work.

  ~Don Pendleton

  Time to Time

  Chapter One: Once Upon a Time

  How do you feel about flying saucers? I always wanted to see one. Wanted to ride in one. I kept hearing the same stories you've heard—read all the books, watched all the movies, even spent time camped on a hillside during sev­eral "flap" periods. Never caught even a glimpse of one. Was never contacted or confronted or approached in any way by visitors from another star.

  Or so I thought, anyway.

  Turns out I could've been wrong about that for quite a long time.

  You could be wrong, too, if you think you've never been contacted.

  The sensing I get now is that quite a number of people on this planet could be intimately involved with other-star beings without consciously realizing it. The stories that get written about and talked about could represent nothing more than a few odd incidents here and there that some­how misfired or went wrong.

  I get another sensing that all of us may be aliens, too. Alien to this planet, I mean. All of human life. Maybe it did not start here. Or if it did start here, maybe it was started deliberately by some of those daring beings in their flying machines who needed biological robots to as­sist them in their work with this planet.

  I have evidence to back up these sensings.

  That is what this case is about. So be forewarned. If you believe that UFO phenomena can all be explained in purely psychological terms, then you may not enjoy this case as I did; maybe you should just take a walk right now. Or maybe you shouldn't. I have evidence also to suggest that the most hard-nosed skeptics may unwittingly be the most involved in all this intrigue.

  Whatever your cast of mind, I have no interest here in changing it. I just have a very interesting story to tell you, and you can make up your own mind as to what it means to you. I hope you can make up your own mind. I'm not too sure about that either anymore, for any of us on this planet.

  Once upon a time, you see, long, long ago—about, I figure, eight hundred million years ago...

  Chapter Two: At First Sight

  Ted Bransen was waiting in his Bentley outside my Malibu beach pad when I returned home one night recently. I had been to one of those celebrity soirees in Beverly Hills and I'd seen him there, although we had not spoken. I thought I'd left early so I was more than a little surprised to find the guy at my front door.

  Ted is a pretty good doubles partner and he also has a backhand that comes right off the ground, but that is about the best I can say for him. I never spent a lot of time with him off the court. He'd never seemed to seek my company either, which is another reason why I was surprised to find him waiting for me.

  I don't know his age but he's pushing forty and his miles are beginning to show. Still a very handsome guy if you're going just for surface, and he can be plenty charming when he wants to be. He can also be nasty as hell and I think he has more enemies than friends in the community. In fact, I would probably have to say that most of his friends come via his wife. He is married to Penny Laker. Yeah, that Penny Laker.

  The guy never made much for himself in pictures but he did the next best thing, married Penny and took over the management of her career, which—to his credit—has been going nowhere but up ever since.

  So I was wondering why the guy was parked outside my house at Malibu in the middle of the night when we'd been in the same room together without speaking an hour or so earlier.

  I went on past him and tucked my Maserati in the

  ga­rage, then came back through the house to see if he was still there. He was, nervously working at a cigarette and staring at my door. So I went back out and spoke to him through the open window of his Bentley.

  "Lose something, Ted?"

  "No, I was just waiting to see if someone might be following you home."

  "Someone?"

  He blew smoke at me and replied, "No one in particular. Take it easy. This is no jealous husband routine."

  Well, I was glad to hear that—though I hadn't really thought of that scenario myself.

  "Just didn't want to crowd the court for you, in case, ahhh..."

  I said, "Saw you at Chasen's."

  He said, "Saw you too. That's what—uh, meant to speak to you. Time I got around to it, you were gone. So I..."

  "Beat me home," I observed.

  He grinned. "In that Maserati? You must have stopped along t
he way."

  Matter of fact, I had.

  I said, "You didn't come all the way up here just to say hello."

  "'Course not."

  I sighed. "Well, come inside and I'll rassle us up a pot of coffee."

  "I really don't have time for that, Ash," he replied. "But I want to retain you. Can we get together tomorrow and discuss it?"

  "Retain me for what?"

  His eyes twitched as he told me, "Penny's into some kind of weird shit and it's driving me crazy. I'd rather not get into the details right now because I really need to get back into town, but let's—"

  "Why didn't you just call me?"

  "Look, this has to be absolutely confidential. I'm even afraid to use the telephone. And I couldn't really ap­proach you at the party, could I, with all those columnists nosing around with their micro-recorders humming away. Look, I'll be honest, I didn't even think of you until I saw you tonight. Then it hit me. Shit!—there's the guy for the job!"

  "What job?" I inquired quietly.

  "She's into this weird..."

  "My kind of weird, huh."

  "Think so, yeah. Only maybe worse. I mean, this isn't tea leaves and birth signs. It's something very heavy. And it's going to wreck her career if I can't get her out of it."

  I commented, "She's past twenty-one, Ted. What do you expect me to do?"

  "Let's discuss it tomorrow."

  "Can't," I lied. "I'm tied up the rest of the week—rest of the month, in fact. Sorry."

  He reached through the car window and put a hand on my arm, snarling, "Cut that shit! This is Ted! I'm coming to you for help!"

  "For Penny."

  "Of course for Penny."

  I happened to like Penny Laker quite a lot. Not that we are old friends or even new friends, but we do move about in the same circles and there have been occasional opportunities for quiet conversations. I get invited to a lot of the happenings in town. Not that I am one of them but more like, I think, a part of the atmosphere. I'm a conversation piece, you see. This is Ashton Ford. He's a psychic. He solves crimes. He can tell your future. Ask him about your career. (That's always a big one, in this town.) Ask him how to improve your sex life. (So's that one.) Ask him about cosmic sex. (Double bingo.)

  Don't wonder why I put up with that. The truth is that often I enjoy it. I'm human. And it sure as hell improves my sex life.

  But Penny Laker had never asked me to teach her cos­mic sex, had never inquired about her career, and always seemed too engrossed in the present moment even to wonder about the future.

  Fascination, I guess, is the word. The lady had a fasci­nation for the life processes—and when we talked, we talked deep.

  I liked her.

  So I told her prick of a husband: "Tell Penny to give me a call."

  The prick told me, "You can't be that dumb! You know

  Penny! She'd have a fit if she thought I was interfering with..."

  "With what?"

  "With this new craziness! How the hell do I know what it is? Last year it was trance-channeling, then it was the interdimensional whatever harmonic convergence, then it was—listen!—she hasn't worked for six months, won't look at a script, won't take calls from her agent! I'm crazy with this! I think she's goddamn getting meno­pausal fits or something."

  Not unless she had awfully good plastic surgeons.

  I said quietly, "She couldn't be more than thirty-five."

  He growled, "You're a decade short, Ford."

  I was just playing at this point. I told him, “Then maybe you should be talking to her gynecologist.”

  He said, "She doesn't have a gynecologist. Doesn't have a family physician. Uses herbal remedies and medi­tation. How the hell do I consult her spirit guides? Look, she's in trouble. She needs help. I'm crazy with it."

  I thought, Well, maybe he is. Just because I never liked the guy didn't mean...

  I told him, "Okay. Your place or mine?"

  He quickly replied, "Neutral ground. Meet me at the Polo Lounge at noon sharp. I'll have a table."

  I agreed to that.

  He cranked the engine and drove away.

  I was standing at the curb and watching that departure with a curious feeling of total detachment when I became aware of a low-pitched humming sound that seemed to be coming from the darkness above the house.

  I swiveled about for a look just as a luminously glow­ing disc tilted up over the rooftop and moved smoothly away in apparent pursuit of the departing car. I guess my mind just sort of froze on that sight.

  The thing was about twelve feet in diameter and very thin except for a little housing on top, and it really was not there long enough for me to shift into objective mode and look for details.

  I just stood there gawking until car and disc disap­peared into the darkness.

  Funny. I'd never really expected to see one. I still was not sure that I had.

  But I knew for damn sure that it was going to seem a long wait for that noon meeting in the Polo Lounge.

  Chapter Three: A Problem in Graphics

  I just could not get to sleep. My eyes felt strained and strange but when I closed them, I would get this flood of brilliantly colored images, mostly geometric shapes in a slow tumbling motion almost like computer graphics dis­playing three-dimensional images and slowly turning them this way and that for different perspectives but always looking the same whatever the perspective.

  I fought that for about twenty minutes, then gave it up and slipped into a robe, lit a cigarette, stepped out onto the deck, and stared at the phosphorescent surf for a few minutes. It did not help a hell of a lot. The eyes were still faintly burning and my vision slightly blurred when I went back inside—and now, on top of it, I was getting these slowly tumbling golden triangles superimposed over my open-eyed vision.

  I put on a pot of coffee and made an effort to under­stand what was happening. Mental imagery is no new thing for me, not even involuntary imagery. But this was different, and a lot more persistent than the stuff I'd become accustomed to. This is right-brain stuff, you know. The nonverbal side of the mind. That is where the emotions live, where creativity lurks, where inspiration and intuition do their thing. Being nonverbal, it deals entirely with graphics.

  I'd been doing a lot of thinking lately as to whether the right brain creates the graphics or if it merely acts as a receiver for graphics that are generated elsewhere. You can make "elsewhere" whatever you'd like.

  Carl Jung hypothesized a collective unconscious that communicates with mankind via a system of universal symbology. I have a good friend who is a highly success­ful psychiatrist and also happens to be somewhat psychic. He seems to have settled around a theory that the collec­tive unconscious is actually that psychic faculty present in all humans as a natural function of the right brain. In other words, the whole human race is linked together sort of like a single huge organism, with that linkage through the right brain. Which is his way of explaining extrasen­sory perception. He thinks that everyone's right brain is continually trying to influence the intellectual centers on the left side, but that humanity long ago began relying more on the left brain than the right, and that is why we have developed intellectually much more rapidly than we have developed spiritually.

  I'd been giving some thought to that idea. Actually it could explain a lot more than mere ESP; carried to the logical inferences, it would maybe explain the constant inner conflict experienced by most people and the whole array of mental illnesses that afflict the human race. It would be like everyone has a split personality—split right

  down the middle between left and right hemispheres, with the two as virtual strangers because they speak different languages.

  Most all of the mystics complain of this curious dichot­omy within the human framework. St. Paul wrote lyrically of the problem: "For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would" (Galatians 5:17). Remove that
statement from its religious context and you're talking modern psy­chiatry.

  I guess psychiatry was on my mind that night because I was wondering if I could trust my own mental impressions. Seeing is a mental impression, you know. Had I actually seen the thing?

  If so—or even if not—what was I seeing now—and why was I seeing it?

  I had done some UFO research. And I knew that a respectable body of scientific thought on the question was regarding the entire thing as purely mental phenomena. Jung's damned symbols, I supposed. Which was not to say that the UFOs were not real; just not real in the phys­ical sense. Constructs of the mind—of the collective planetary mind—but very real, as such.

  Well, it was two o'clock and I was still thinking like that and trying to fend off the slow-motion graphics that kept tumbling out of my head. I'd drunk the whole pot of coffee and stubbed out far too many cigarettes. But I knew it would be useless to try to take that stuff back to bed, so I showered and shaved and got dressed, rolled the Maserati out, and drove up into the hills.

  Don't ask why I went that way. I don't know why I went that way. It is sheer wilderness up there. There was nothing up there I'd lost or was looking for. I thought.

  But I damn near ran down Penny Laker.

  She was stumbling along the highway up there above Pepperdine and she was stark naked. I didn't know it was her at first, not until she looked over her shoulder into my headlights. Then I had to chase her down on foot because she started running as for her life. I grabbed her and had to fight her all the way back to the car. She wasn't screaming, just grunting in total panic and thrashing like hell with all four limbs.

  I don't know at what point in all that my own mind stopped its graphic tumbling, nor do I know with any precision how I got Penny into the car and calmed down enough to drive her away from there. I do know that I saw a shooting star move directly across our path as we were descending the mountain, then another a moment later, moving in the opposite direction. At that point, I know, my graphics had turned off.