Swinging around one of the chairs from the conference table, Egan sat facing Ray across the catercorner desk.
“So I understand you’re from Hopewell Houses originally,” he said, hauling one leg up across the other, the weak afternoon sun hitting his exposed shin, making the fish-white skin there gleam like marble.
“Originally,” Ray said, waiting for more.
“I’m from the Howard Houses myself. Used to be half-Irish back then. It was never a picnic but it wasn’t like it is now.”
“No kidding,” still waiting.
“And you graduated from here, what . . . the late seventies?”
“Seventy-eight.”
“Seventy-eight. That’s great, just great. And for how long were you a writer on that show?”
“Three years,” Ray said, understanding now that all this Q and A was nothing but a preamble to an apology.
“Three years,” Egan mused. “Out in LA?”
“Yup.”
“I spent some time in San Diego when I was in the navy, but I never made it over to LA. Got any new projects in the works?”
“Not really,” that question always weighing a ton. “Just kind of recharging my batteries for now.” Then, to speed things along, “Other than, you know, teaching this class here.” He gestured to the empty conference table.
Egan looked at his wristwatch; winced. “You know I told my Language Arts people, ‘Get your kids to the workshop, it’s an incredible resource. Make sure you get them . . .’ You try to delegate responsibility around here. You try . . .” He winced. “Look, the truth of it is, getting a dozen kids in this building to commit and see through on a voluntary class? It’s like pushing a rope. But I know they want to do it. You want to shoot for tomorrow? Same time, same station. And I will personally, physically, get them in here.”
“Sure,” Ray said, the day now like chalk in his mouth.
Egan got up, shook his hand.
“Hey, we have Wall Street guys coming in here seven, seven-thirty in the morning to tutor? I call the kids at home the night before. ‘Yeah, Mr. Egan, I’ll be there, I’ll be there.’” He shrugged. “Like pushing a rope.” He shook Ray’s hand again.
“I thank you for your patience with us.”
Chapter 2
Nerese—February 9
Entering the Hook for the first time since graduation twenty-two years earlier, Detective Nerese Ammons, lugging two slide carousels featuring a freak show of murdered bodies, confiscated weapons and various drug still lifes, approached the security desk on shaky pins.
The uniformed guard, tilting back in her folding chair as she watched Nerese coming on, was Tutsi-tall and sharp as flint, the set of her eyes and mouth exquisitely unforgiving, eight silver rings dangling in a crescent along the outer shell of her right ear.
“You got a visitor’s permit?” It was more of a throw-down challenge than a question.
“A what?” Nerese half-snapped, the impersonal hostility combined with the psychic disorientation of being back in this building working on her nerves.
The guard just stared at her.
“I’m here for a special assembly,” Nerese said more evenly.
“Do you have, a visitor’s permit,” the guard said a little more loudly, a little more slowly, Nerese wondering if perhaps at some point over the years, she had locked up a member of this bitch’s family.
“Let me ask you something!” Nerese near shouted as she prowled the stage of the auditorium, mike in hand. “Let me ask you”—addressing the fistful of hyped yet surly At-Risk students who made up her audience—“who do you think, remember we’re talking the police now, who do you think, is the more dangerous of the species. Male? Or female . . .”
“Male!” the boys howled, hooted, spreading their tail feathers, but not really listening.
“Male, huh?” She laughed, the detective’s shield clipped to the waist of her dark blue skirt suit winking gold in the mahogany-stained hall. “Male, OK, male.”
Having blown off the entertaining yet useless slides after the first tray, the “Be a Leader, Not a Follower” speech altogether, Nerese was winging it this afternoon, almost free-associating.
Trailing mike cord, she walked off the stage to stand before the students in the front row.
“You.” She pointed at a big lunk slouched so low in his seat he seemed to be melting, the kid shave-headed with small turned-down ears. “Come on up here . . .”
That was enough to make the others cut loose with another twist-and-shout session, the boy tentatively rising to his feet half-smiling and fake-limping down to the police in front.
She had picked a giant; six-four, -five, towering over her self-consciously, muttering “Shut up” to his classmates in the seats.
“What’s your name . . .” She had to rear back to make eye contact.
“Jamiel.”
“Shamiel?”
“Jamiel,” then, “Shut up,” again to the seats.
“OK now,” holding Jamiel by the elbow as she addressed the others. “I’m on patrol, I come up on Jamiel here in an alley and he’s up to no good. But it’s just me and him . . . All things being equal, who do you think’s gonna come out that alley like nothing happened. Who . . .”
Some of the kids got all thinky and quiet, trying to suss it out as if it were a trick question, others spinning out to new heights, Nerese ignoring the ruckus. “Who . . .”
“You?” one girl said cautiously, the others tentatively agreeing, the alternative way too obvious.
“All things being equal, you think me?” She curled a hand against her chest. “Hell, no. Look at this ol’ boy! He can kick my behind up one side of the block and down the other . . .”
Jamiel started rocking, a hand covering his face.
“Look at him! What do you think, they teach us some supersecret karate moves? Do I look like Jackie Chan to you?”
The kids turned into popcorn.
“Look at him, and look at me. But now, and this is why I’m telling you the female is the far deadlier of the species . . . Because all things are not equal, and if it’s just me and him in that alley? I’m gonna do whatever I have to do to survive. If I got the time? I’ll get on my radio, call out the troops. But if I don’t? I’m goin’ right for Baby Huey,” patting the holstered Glock on her belt. “See, a male cop, he might be all macho, thinking, Yeah, I’ll take this kid down with my bare hands, and all that. But me? Unh-uh. I can’t take him like that. And I will survive . . . The female, boys and girls, is the far more deadlier of the species . . .”
The PA speakers affixed to the balcony booped loudly, signaling the end of the period, and the kids began to file out of the auditorium, not one of them even looking back at her over their shoulders.
“You’re welcome,” she said out loud but not really put out, seized as she was by the irresponsibility of her own crackpot lecture, once again proving to herself that you could say anything you wanted in this school system—in this city, most likely—because no one ever really listened anyhow.
She had never considered herself a sour or even pessimistic individual before, and she hoped after retirement she would come back up to the light, but these last few months of endgame assignments were just straight up kicking her ass.
Coming off the stage with her Crime Doesn’t Pay slide show in a Waldbaum’s shopping bag, she noticed a gray-haired gent in a shiny suit sitting by himself toward the rear of the auditorium, and as she made her way up the aisle he rose to greet her.
“Detective Ammons?” The guy offered his hand, Nerese faltering as she stripped the gray from his hair, filled in a few facial creases.
“Mr. Egan?”
“Yeah,” cocking his head. “Do we know each other?”
“Mr. Egan.” Nerese brightened. “I was in your English class like twenty-odd years ago. Nerese Ammons?”
“Nerese?” he said tentatively, not remembering her.
“I loved that class. I’ll never forget, you
read us parts of Grendel in Old English.”
“Beowulf?” he gently corrected.
“What did I say,” Nerese flushed, praying that he hadn’t sat through her Looney Tunes lecture.
“So you’re a detective,” he beamed. “That’s great, just great.”
“I also had two years of college,” she blurted, embarrassing herself further. “You still teaching English?”
“Well, these days I’m the principal, actually,” he said, almost apologetically.
“Hey, there you go.” Nerese smiled, but just wanting to get the hell out of there now.
“Listen,” Egan took her hand in both of his. “These kids, I can’t tell you how grateful we are for you coming in like this.”
“No problem.” Her hand slid free as she headed once again for the doors.
“Listen, Denise . . .”
“Nerese,” she listlessly corrected him, just like she had to correct every third or fourth person who addressed her by name every day of her life.
“Nerese. Sorry.” He perched on the arm of a chair. “Can I talk to you about something?”
She dropped into the hinged seat directly across the aisle from him, the two of them dwarfed by the oceanic emptiness of the hall.
“Which district do you work out of?”
“The Bow and Arrow district,” she said.
“Come again?”
“I’m ten weeks from retirement. When you have less than a half-year to go they take you out of the field, give you stuff like this.” She flapped a hand toward the stage.
“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”
“It’s a long story.” Nerese sinking, sinking.
“The reason I’m asking, Nerese, is that we had a teacher here, a volunteer no less, local guy, terrific guy, was a very successful television writer out in California, came back to town, came to us, offered to teach a writing class off the cuff, got stood up by the kids three four times in a row before I could make it happen. The guy was patient, never complained, just kept showing up until we finally got the thing airborne. Taught here for a month, like I said, a great guy, an incredible resource for us . . .” Egan took a breath, hauled one leg up across the other.
Nerese stole a peek at her watch: 2:15.
“Anyways, two days ago, the guy was assaulted, got his head bashed in pretty good. He’s laid up in Dempsy Medical. And, I made some inquiries, they don’t know what happened, who did it, but the poor bastard almost died.”
“This was in school?”
“No no no. In his apartment. Now, I know a few detectives, made some calls, but my guys, turns out they’re retired, on vacation, one guy’s under indictment apparently. The thing is, whoever did this? They’re still out there and for whatever reason there doesn’t seem to be much of an investigation going on, and you know, Jesus Christ, I’d like to see someone nail that sonofabitch.”
“No, I hear you,” Nerese said softly, thinking, Not my table.
“I mean, I feel like I owe this guy for what he did for the kids here, you know?”
“You think it was any of them?”
“His students? Nah. I mean who the hell knows these days, but no. Not really. Anyways, I’m just wondering if I could impose on you, you know, see if you could look into it, light a fire under somebody’s ass, because . . .”
“I’ll look into it,” Nerese said, just to say something, as she cautiously rose from her seat.
“That’s great, just great.” Egan offered his hand again, Nerese having to put down her shopping bag to shake.
“By the way,” she said. “Your security guard?” She nodded to the lobby. “Has got a real attitude problem.”
“Hey,” he shrugged, “she’s a security guard.”
“Nice to see you again, Mr. Egan.” And once again she began to make her way up the aisle to the doors.
“Nerese?”
She turned.
“You want the guy’s name?”
She just caught herself before asking him, What guy.
“Ray Mitchell,” he said.
“Ray Mitchell.” She nodded, embarrassed yet again; lethargy tending to perpetrate itself.
She headed for the rear doors again, stopped, turned back. “Ray Mitchell?”
He nodded.
“From Dempsy?”
“Originally,” he answered cautiously.
“How old’s this guy . . .”
“How old? I don’t know. Forty? Early forties?”
“Early forties?” Nerese put down the Waldbaum’s bag. “And you’re saying he was assaulted?”
Nerese read Egan’s awkward silence as a yes, and for the first time in months she felt within herself something akin to joy.
Chapter 3
Hospital—February 10
Contrecoup contrecoup contrecoup—the word leaden and tasteless, a gray mantra that braided its way through Ray’s open-eyed dreams, the dreams themselves going on and on, stretching like putty and always involving his daughter, Ruby—Ruby in a crowded elevator, someone lecturing her, “They don’t give out trophies for trying, and they don’t give out trophies for crying”—Ruby building a house out of ice bricks for herself, cheerily rejecting Ray’s entreaties to put on a hat and make some friends—Ruby and her dead grandmother in bed, Ray setting up TVs for them to watch; a dozen in a tight horseshoe around the mattress.
Ray clawed his way back into the world with a tooth-grinding hypnagogic lurch; then lay there in the hospital bed, balloon-brained, trying to remember what had happened to him. He slipped back into dreams, then fought his way out again and again and again, each time resurfacing with another detail, another crummy piece of the puzzle.
All the beds in the monitored-care ward were separated from each other by Plexiglas partitions and open at the foot facing the nurses’ station, so that the only way he could get any privacy was to keep his eyes shut; the problem with that was the brilliant juddering sparks that went off against the darkness every time he lowered his lids.
Catching his reflection in a stainless-steel pitcher on the night table, he discovered that the whites of his eyes had turned cherry red, the surrounding skin from forehead to cheekbone now slick and purple as a braised onion. And then, with a sleepwalker’s detachment, he took in the shaved patch, the circumference of a wineglass, on the left slope of his skull, bristling with blood-blackened stitches.
A nurse entered and adjusted his IV drip.
“Your wife and daughter’s out there, do you want them to come in?”
He could tell from the set of her mouth that it was taking him too long to process the question.
“No,” he finally, drunkenly blurted, his head paper-thin and pulsing. “No,” saying it more calmly, trying to seize control of himself, but no way would Ruby get to see him like this.
“No problem,” she shrugged.
He noticed that the pinky on his left hand was thickly taped, the dressing extending down across his palm and terminating in a mooring bind around his wrist.
“Contrecoup,” he said.
“Come again?”
“Contrecoup. What’s contrecoup.”
“That’s the fourth time you asked me that today.”
Ray waited.
“It’s a shift in the brain mass,” she said easily. “You take a good enough whack up here?” She suspended the heel of her palm between his eyes, the mere thought of contact nauseating him. “The brain gets bounced to the opposite side of the cranial cavity, then rebounds back to the center. It’s like whiplash of the gray matter. Contrecoup. Maybe I should write it down for you.”
There was no way he could judge if this last comment of hers was sarcastic, and he couldn’t marshal his wits to ask if that was what had happened to him, although why else would that be the new word for today. Or yesterday. Or the day before that . . .
Sighting from the open foot of his bed straight through the glass exterior wall that separated the monitored-care ward from the main hallway, he caught a slice of his e
x-wife and their daughter seated on a couch out by the elevator bank, Ruby’s eyes wet, mouth pursed, his ex with an arm around her shoulder, looking self-contained yet braced: a crisis goalie.
But before he could organize a coherent reaction to the sight of them, a short heavyset black woman wearing a stocking cap and a North Face coat, a grocery bag in either hand, came barreling into his stall with the proprietary air of a nurse coming on duty.
“Hey, Ray! How you doing?” near-shouting as if to be heard over loud music, the hip-length puffy coat making her as round as a ball.
She put down the bags, which were brimming with videos; Ray now thinking that she was some kind of civilian candy striper, a recreation aide.
“Do you know who I am?” She briskly rubbed her hands as if she were still outside, then unzipped her coat to reveal the detective’s shield clipped to the breast pocket of a lumberjack shirt.
“A cop?” he said distractedly, desperately trying to put together a response to Ruby and her mother out in the lobby.
“But who am I,” going all playful on him like it was a game.
She brought herself to the edge of the bed, Ray reading “N. Ammons” off her shield.
“I don’t believe this,” she said with theatrical exasperation.
“N. Ammons,” he said, a little frightened of her now; all this bizarre familiarity. “N. Ammons, N. Ammons . . .”
“Ray,” she cut him off. “Up here.”
She touched the remains of her left eyebrow, more than half of it a whitish plug of scar tissue, all the more livid for being set against the deep brown of her skin.
“Tweetie,” he said flatly.
“Tweetie . . .” She laughed deep and gravelly like a man, took off her coat and dropped heavily into the visitors’ chair next to his bed. “Nobody’s called me that since the Flood.”
“Tweetie Ammons,” he said, his eyes flitting back and forth between the elevator banks and this woman who might or might not actually be here. “And you’re a cop.”
“Going on twenty years. So you remember this, huh?”
“The stickbat. With Dub.”
“With Dub. He’s a cop too now, a sergeant over in Jersey City.”
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