If She Wakes

by Michael Koryta

  Abby is holding an old, wet shoe box. She clears her throat and says, “Hello, Tara. It’s good to meet you.”

  Tell me why you’re here, Tara screams silently. Abby doesn’t, but why would you tell a piece of furniture what your purpose in the room is?

  Abby’s attention is back on Shannon when she says, “Have the police asked you any questions about the accident?”

  The accident. This is interesting. This is the first time anyone has spoken of what led her to this terrible, trapped place.

  “Sure,” Shannon says. “But nobody talked about her phone until your boss called me. The police said it was clear who was at fault. The driver admitted that at the scene. And then he repeated it, on the record.”

  The driver. So it was a car accident. This resonates in a way that is both exciting and troubling; it sets off a tingle of memory, but no images come forth, just a feeling of dread.

  “I know that. And now he’s going to hire an attorney who will find any way possible to mitigate the driver’s responsibility. It’s not right, but it’s what happens. My job is to get out in front of that.” Abby pauses, then says, “His story has some issues too.”

  “Do not tell me you’re questioning his version of things.” There’s a warning in Shannon’s voice.

  “I’m not questioning that he was at fault.”

  “Good.”

  “But—”

  “Oh, boy. Here we go.”

  “But I do not like his facts. It’s clear that he hit her car, that her car was stationary, and that she was out of the vehicle. Of course he’s at fault. But he’s also mistaken about the details, and I don’t understand why.”

  I was out of the vehicle. Tara feels that tingle again, stronger now, and she wants to grab Abby’s hand and squeeze, wants to tell her to say more, paint a better picture, because she is close to remembering, she is very close, this woman can help Tara bridge the void.

  “He’s probably confused because he was staring at his damn phone,” Shannon says.

  Abby Kaplan shakes her head, and a muscle in her jaw flexes, as if she’s grinding her teeth.

  “The angles are wrong,” she says softly. “The angles and the speed. He was driving terribly, yes, and he was negligent, but if he swerved like he says he did, then he should have flipped that van before he hit her.”

  “The police can probably explain that to you,” Shannon says curtly.

  Abby shakes her head, eyes distant, as if she is envisioning the scene.

  Say what you’re thinking! Tara screams, but of course Abby doesn’t hear her.

  “No, they actually can’t,” she tells Shannon. “They haven’t driven the right kind of cars at the right kind of speeds to know what is possible and what isn’t.”

  “And I suppose you have.”

  The short, slender girl looks at Shannon then, and there’s a spark to her when she says, “Yes. I have.” She takes a breath and the spark fades and she seems sad. “Anyhow, you don’t need to worry about me messing up any claims. It wasn’t your sister’s fault. But…it also didn’t happen the way Carlos Ramirez said it did.”

  “So Ramirez was confused.”

  “Maybe.” Abby Kaplan turns to face Tara, and this time she lets her stare linger. Her eyes are on Tara’s when she says, “I’m confident she would have a different memory of the way it happened.”

  Tara stares back at her from within her corporeal shell, trying somehow to convey how desperately she needs the facts. If someone can just walk her through it, then maybe she can remember.

  “Have you talked to the other victim’s family?” Shannon asks. “Oltamu’s?”

  “Not yet.” Abby turns away from Tara.

  Oltamu. Shannon says the name so casually, but it’s a cataclysmic moment for Tara.

  Dr. Oltamu. A visiting speaker. She was driving him from dinner to the auditorium. She was driving him and then…

  A block in her memory rises again, and she has a distinct vision of a wolf with its ears pinned back and its hackles raised.

  Hobo. The wolf’s name is Hobo.

  Why would a wolf have a name? But Oltamu is a name that registers; he is the black man with the nice smile and the expensive watch. Memories are returning now, scattered snapshots.

  His name was Amandi Oltamu, and I was driving him. But who is he? Why was I driving him, and where? And what did he do to me?

  Tara’s mind is whirling now, trying to capture each crucial detail, knowing that she must catch them all before they escape into the blackness like fireflies and disappear for good.

  “Think his family will sue the college?” Shannon asks.

  “Maybe. But I don’t see their case yet. The only thing that’s odd is why she parked where she did.”

  Because he told me to, damn it, Tara thinks without hesitation. He wanted the Tara tour. This element is strangely vivid amid the fog of all the memories she’s lost—Oltamu asked her to get out of the car. She sees the two of them walking toward a bridge and she knows that this is true. We were both out of the car. We were both out because he wanted to walk, and I was worried about that because of the time, time was tight. But he told me that he wanted to walk, so we started to walk down to the bridge and then the wolf got us. The wolf came out of the darkness and got us.

  She knows this is madness, and it scares her that it seems so logical, so clear.

  I am not just paralyzed, I am insane.

  “Nobody can answer that but her,” Abby Kaplan says, studying Tara’s face, and again Tara feels that strange electric sense of connection just beyond her grasp, like a castaway watching a plane pass overhead. “Do you know anyone who was with her at that dinner?” Abby asks Shannon.

  “A few people have reached out.”

  “I wonder if anyone would remember whether Oltamu had a phone on him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s dead, and she can’t talk,” Abby says, running a hand through her hair as if to tamp down frustration. “People are on their phones all the time. He could have been using it right up until the end. And one of these”—she lifts the shoe box—“belongs to him. Unless the salvage guy kept it or sold it already. Neither would surprise me.”

  He took pictures with his phone, Tara tells them silently. A selfie with me, because he needed to increase his social media presence. That was what worried him right before he died and I was erased from my own life. The last time I ever smiled, it was for a selfie with a stranger so he could improve his social media profile. If not for that, I’d have been across the bridge.

  The lucidity of this is exciting, but she knows it’s still not complete. She is circling the memory like someone fumbling through a dark house searching for a light switch.

  “I’ve wondered about her phone,” Shannon says hesitantly, as if she isn’t sure she should make this admission.

  “Why?”

  “Because when she drove, she put it on one of those magnet things on the dash. It wasn’t there, and it wasn’t in her purse. She was wearing a dress and a thin sweater with no pockets. So if it went into the river, that means she got out with the phone in her hand, as if she was using it.”

  Shannon pauses then, which is wonderful, because Tara is frantically snatching at all these fireflies—phone, dress, sweater, river—trying to capture them before they escape into the darkness.

  Abby Kaplan clears her throat and says, “I hope she comes back to you soon. For her sake and yours, of course, but also because I’d like to hear what she remembers.” She gives Shannon a business card, tells her to be in touch with any questions, and wishes her well, as if Shannon is alone in this struggle.

  She does not look at Tara again before she leaves.

  14

  The untimely death of Carlos Ramirez was supposed to bring an end to a problem that should have been resolved easily, but this situation seemed determined to keep turning up like the proverbial bad penny.

  Gerry Connors had dealt with such problems before, though,
and he wasn’t worried by this one. Not just yet, at least. The potential for concern was floating out there, simply because of the price tag on this job. The price tag, and the German’s reputation. He had never met the German, but he’d heard of him, and when he did meet him, he certainly didn’t want to be delivering bad news.

  For this, Gerry had Dax Blackwell, and he needed him to be as good as his bloodline promised he’d be.

  Gerry Connors had first made his way into organized crime in the 1990s in his hometown of Belfast, working with the IRA at a time when work was easy to come by for a man who didn’t mind killings and bombings. Gerry felt no fierce loyalty to either church or state, and he hadn’t met many like him in that struggle until the Blackwell brothers arrived. Two freelancers from Australia who looked like sweet lads, blond-haired and blue-eyed and innocent-faced as altar boys, they’d entered a room filled with hardened IRA men, outlined their plan, and didn’t blink in the face of all the hostility and all the bloody history. Men had shouted at them, men had threatened them, and the brothers had calmly named their price and said take it or leave it.

  Eventually, the boys in Belfast took it. A week after that, three members of the constabulary had been buried, the nation was in an uproar, and the Blackwells were wealthy—and long gone from the country.

  They’d come back, of course. When the money was right, they returned, and during the 1990s, Jack and Patrick found plenty of work in Ireland. So did Gerry. He’d moved to America and gone into contract work, providing papers and identification for those who needed them. Soon he was providing more than papers—cars, guns, and, inevitably, it seemed, killers.

  Jack and Patrick had come back around often then.

  It was just after 9/11, and the business was experiencing fresh risks when Jack Blackwell requested multiple sets of identification for his newborn son. Gerry was reluctant to take on the task in those days, but he was even more reluctant to disappoint Jack Blackwell. He produced the requested birth certificates, which came from fifteen different states in America, as well as four sets of international papers, Australian, British, Dutch, and Swiss. Each was in a different name, and Jack provided all of the names, which led Gerry to wonder if they meant something to him, if they indicated something from his past life—or perhaps indicated lives he’d ended.

  Gerry had no idea what the boy’s real name was, but the first time he’d met him, Jack had called him Dax, and so that was what Gerry went with, even though there was no paperwork for that name. Or at least, none that Gerry had created. Knowing Jack, Gerry figured he’d likely sourced identification from more than one person.

  More than a dozen years later, when Gerry had need of Jack and Patrick’s services again, Jack told him they themselves were unavailable, but his son could handle the task. Gerry’s first response was to laugh—a very dangerous response when one was around the Blackwells, but Gerry knew the boy wasn’t even old enough to drive yet.

  Jack Blackwell hadn’t laughed. He’d waited until Gerry said, “You’re not serious,” and then the faintest of smiles had crossed his face, and he nodded exactly once.

  That was enough.

  Nine days later, Dax Blackwell completed his first professional killing. Or at least, his first professional killing for Gerry Connors.

  Over the years that followed, Gerry had been in touch with the boy fairly often. He had no idea where he lived or where he’d gone to school—or if he had gone to school, although he was certainly well educated, almost preternaturally bright. He also had no idea how much time the boy actually spent with his father and uncle, but based on his mannerisms and his skills, Gerry suspected that he was with them more often than not. After hearing word of Jack’s and Patrick’s deaths in Montana, Gerry considered offering his condolences to the boy, but he hadn’t. Instead, he offered him work, and the boy accepted the job and completed it. Small-time stuff, mostly, no high-dollar work, no international work. Gerry viewed it as an internship.

  The pupil flourished.

  They never spoke of Dax’s father and uncle formally, but they each mentioned them in passing and never referred to their deaths. Gerry followed the boy’s lead in keeping discussions of them in the present tense, as if they were still there, ghosts in the room, just waiting for the call to summon them back.

  And in fact, when Gerry sent for Dax, that was exactly how it felt. As the boy grew, Gerry saw more and more of those two Aussie lads who’d walked so calmly into the room of hardened IRA killers.

  Yes, he felt very much like he was calling on a ghost when he sent for Dax Blackwell.

  Today the ghost arrived. He entered Gerry’s office in Boston’s North End expecting a paycheck for a completed job, having no clue yet as to the trouble that had occurred. Carlos Ramirez had needed to kill one man and steal one phone. Somehow, Carlos Ramirez had managed to steal the wrong fucking phone. Gerry understood this because the German had told him not to worry about a trace on the phone because it wasn’t active and had no signal. The phones in Gerry’s desk drawer had signals. Both of them had been ringing, and that was a problem. That was, maybe, an enormous problem, as the German was due to arrive by the weekend to pick up something for which he had already paid handsomely but that was not in Gerry’s possession. The German did not travel internationally to pick up things in person that could be mailed unless the items were of the utmost importance. Based on Gerry’s understanding of the German, he felt that this in-person disappointment was not the sort of thing one would want to experience firsthand.

  Enter Dax Blackwell.

  “The job’s not done,” Gerry told him as soon as the door was closed behind him.

  “Not done? Did Carlos walk out of the morgue?” the kid asked as he sat down. Make no mistake, Dax carried his family’s blood. Which was to say that he was empty and cold in all the right ways, but he also carried his father’s smirk and his uncle’s deadpan delivery. Gerry had never been a fan of those qualities.

  The only thing Gerry hated more than Dax’s attitude was his wardrobe. Jeans and hoodies, tennis shoes and a baseball cap. Always the fucking baseball cap. Whatever happened to gangsters with class? When did people decide they could come see him without shining their damn shoes, maybe putting on some cuff links?

  But Dax wasn’t a gangster, of course. You had to be patient with the young ones. When young shooters became old killers, then you could demand more from them. If they made it that far, they’d probably figured it out on their own. Right now he was an Australian version of what the cartels called a wolf boy—a teenage killer, an apprentice assassin. Wolf boys were valuable in the border towns. Why couldn’t they be useful on a larger scale too?

  Dax Blackwell, the Aussie lobo, descendant of ghosts.

  “We are missing a phone,” Gerry said, leaning back and propping his feet up on the glass-topped coffee table so the kid could get a good look at his hand-stitched, calfskin Moreschi wingtips. Put style in front of his face, maybe it’d seep through his skull.

  “He gave me two. You have them.”

  “Neither is right. One is hers, and one is his, but neither one is right.”

  “Carlos’s house was clean. So was his bag.”

  “What about his pockets?”

  The kid looked nonplussed. Dax Blackwell didn’t like to be asked questions for which he didn’t have ready answers.

  “Didn’t check,” he said eventually. “I hadn’t been asked to. You told me get two phones; I got two phones. But I also don’t think he’d have kept one unless he knew its value. Did he?”

  This was both more attitude and more inquiry than Gerry wanted from the kid, but he wasn’t wrong to ask the question. Carlos had no idea what the phone was worth. Gerry didn’t know anything about the phone other than that he was supposed to hand it to the German.

  One thing Gerry had learned over the years was not to ask too many questions about what went on above your pay grade—hell, not to think too many questions about it—and he surely did not want to begin t
hinking about what the German needed from this cell phone. What he was willing to extend his personal curiosity to, however, was what would happen if he disappointed people above his pay grade, and he didn’t have to work too hard to imagine the outcome.

  He needed that phone.

  “Police found Carlos’s body,” Gerry said. “If he had the phone, it’ll be in evidence lockup, and I’ll get it. But I don’t think he had it.”

  “I don’t either. If he was going to make a mistake like that, he’d have done it a long time ago.”

  Again, more confidence than Gerry wanted to hear, more swagger, but also, again, not wrong.

  “Probably. Which means it’s missing somewhere between here and there.”

  Dax Blackwell thought about this, nodded, and then said, “He needed two phones, so he grabbed Oltamu’s and grabbed the girl’s. Dumb mistake, but that’s probably what he did, and he didn’t pause to check properly, so he missed the third. By the time they’d cleaned the scene and I picked them up by the river, the phone you needed was gone with the cars.”

  Now he sounded just like his old man. Jack Blackwell always got right to it, but he never showed impatience, and he never rushed.

  “That phone is imperative,” Gerry said. “I need it fast, and Carlos is no longer able to assist.”

  “I heard he was…deported, yes.”

  Now this was his uncle’s personality, everything about it pure Patrick—no twitch of a smile, and yet you knew he’d amused himself with the comment.

  “Unless you want an expedited trip to the same place, spare me the wit,” Gerry said. The kid didn’t so much as blink. Gerry wasn’t sure whether he liked the kid’s response or if it infuriated him. Composure was appropriate. But fearlessness in front of Gerry? Less appropriate.

  “I’ll get the phone, then,” Dax said. “You should have just let me take the whole job from the start.”

  Gerry looked at him over the gleaming toe of the Moreschis, considered his response, and let silence ride. If it bothered the kid, he didn’t show it.