Blackout

by David Rosenfelt

  “This time.”

  I drive back in the same car with the same people.

  On the way, Captain Bradley, Friedman, and I discuss where we are in the investigation. Bradley’s assessment is that it’s basically over—that Sadri and Gharsi were the bad guys, and that they are now history. He seems to think the Feds share his view; at least that’s what he got from Congers in their conversation.

  “I don’t know how you were on to them in the first place,” Bradley says. “But I guess it really doesn’t matter anymore.”

  I don’t agree with him, but I don’t want to say so now. He tells me to take some time off, that I have been through so much, and could obviously use the rest. “Maybe getting away from this will help your memory,” he says. “You’ve been under a lot of stress.”

  We don’t get back to my apartment until almost 6 P.M. There is still a contingent of media at the entrance of the building, obviously waiting for me, when we pull up. This time I don’t sneak around the back; I just plow my way through them. They throw questions at me, and all I say is, “Guys, I’m sorry. I’ve done enough talking for today.”

  I call the hospital but can’t get an update on Nate’s condition, other than the bland description of him “resting comfortably.” He’s not being allowed visitors, so I order in a pizza and then spend a couple of hours trying to assess the situation, and also figure out a plan to deal with it.

  By the time that is accomplished, I feel exhausted, both physically and mentally. I assume it’s because I’m not yet back to full strength, though at this point in my life I really don’t know what full strength is. Maybe I’ve been like this for years.

  I look in the contacts section on my computer and find Jessie’s home phone number. I call her, and it rings three times without her answering. My guess is she sees my number on caller ID and doesn’t want to talk to me, but she fools me and answers on the fourth ring.

  “Jessie, it’s me, Doug.”

  “Is Nate okay?” she asks. Concern for Nate is probably why she picked up the phone in the first place.

  “As far as I know; that’s not why I’m calling.”

  She doesn’t say anything; just waits for me to continue and tell her why, in fact, I am calling. I can picture her cringing as she waits.

  “I need your help,” I say.

  “What kind of help?”

  “Everybody thinks this is over … except me. I don’t think it’s close to over.”

  “I don’t either,” she says.

  Her answer surprises the hell out of me. “Why do you say that?”

  “First tell me what kind of help you need.”

  “Can we meet to talk about it? Maybe tomorrow morning?” I ask.

  Another hesitation, then, “I was going to stop at the hospital.”

  “Me too. Seven o’clock? Breakfast after that?”

  She hesitates even longer this time, and then finally says, “Okay.”

  Once we’re off the phone, I really want to go to sleep, but it’s only nine thirty. I feel like I need to force myself to get some endurance, so I resolve to stay up for a couple of hours more.

  I surf the Web for a while, with the television on as background noise. I haven’t checked out what’s been going on in pop culture these last ten years, and figure that this is a good opportunity to do so.

  There is no doubt the Kardashian family is everywhere, but I can’t seem to get Google to tell me why. They’re famous enough, but it doesn’t appear to have come from acting or singing or anything like that. I think their father was O. J. Simpson’s lawyer at one point, but I doubt that explains it. Nobody seems to be broadcasting Keeping Up with the Dershowitzes.

  There also seems to be some kind of fascination with real housewives in various cities. These shows seem to just hang out with people, but I don’t know why these particular people were chosen, or why viewers want to watch them hang out. In any event, I think fake housewives might be more interesting.

  I check out movies, and there are quite a few names I recognize. Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Robert De Niro … they’ve all had staying power. Even Clint Eastwood is still around. But there are many more names I’m not familiar with, which I guess shouldn’t surprise me.

  The TV commercials are really weird. They’ve got people selling adult diapers and condoms, and announcers are warning that if some product makes you have an erection that lasts more than four hours, you better get some help.

  If four hours is the new standard, the world has truly passed me by.

  The serious news is a different story. The Middle East is a mess, and the Israelis and Palestinians hate each other almost as much as the Democrats and Republicans. It’s the one area where it seems as if I haven’t missed a thing.

  After an hour I can’t take any more, so I set the alarm and go to sleep. I’m up at six to get dressed quickly and leave. There are only two reporters downstairs; it looks like my fifteen minutes of fame might be wrapping up. That’s fine with me.

  I’m at the hospital to meet Jessie at seven. We still can’t get in to see Nate, but the report is encouraging. His condition has been upgraded from critical to serious, and while they won’t come out and say so, my sense is that if he’s not out of danger, he’s getting there.

  “Where do you want to go for breakfast?” I ask Jessie. “I saw that the Coach House is still there,” I say, referring to a diner on Route 4 that I passed the other day.

  “That’s fine,” she says, but then I think better of it, telling her that it’s a busy place, and if I get recognized I don’t want it to turn into a media circus. I want us to have some privacy.

  “I know the place,” she says, and I follow her to a small café in Elmwood Park called The Cupboard. There are only about eight tables, and three of them are occupied. There’s a fireplace on the far wall; this must be a nice, cozy place in the winter.

  The woman behind the counter’s face lights up when she sees us enter, and she comes around and starts walking toward us.

  “Marleigh Fletcher,” Jessie whispers to me.

  “Doug, it’s so good to see you. We were so worried.”

  She surprises me by giving me a big hug. I never used to be the hugging type, and I don’t think that’s changed. “Thank you, Marleigh. Nice to be back.”

  She brings us over to a table in the corner, and pours us some really delicious coffee. We wait for a few minutes, but no one gives us menus, and I say I’ll ask for them.

  “You haven’t seen a menu here in years,” Jessie says. “You don’t need one.”

  “Of course not,” I say. “Because I have a favorite thing that I always order, and that I have along with my coffee with cream and sugar. And that favorite thing is…”

  “Chocolate-chip pancakes.”

  Sure enough, without us ordering, Marleigh soon brings over a large stack of chocolate-chip pancakes for me, and granola for Jessie. After one bite I can tell why I never needed a menu.

  “So I guess this was our favorite breakfast place?” I ask, when I stop chewing.

  “Doug, I don’t think I’m up for a trip down memory lane. What do you need help with?”

  “I want you to try and get me shot again.”

  She thinks about it for a moment and says, “That works for me.”

  “Did you hear the tape of my phone call to Nate, just before I got shot?”

  Jessie nods. “Maybe fifty times. We were trying to identify other voices, background noise, anything that might help. No luck. Just ambient street noise.”

  “I only heard it once, but I’m pretty sure I’m right. At one point I said, ‘I got him, Nate. This time I got him.’”

  “You did. Those were your exact words.”

  “So it couldn’t have been Sadri I was talking about, and it couldn’t have been Gharsi. Because I had never gone after them before. I wouldn’t have said ‘this time’ if there hadn’t been a previous time.”

  She shakes her head.
“You don’t know that, Doug. Maybe you did go after them, and you just don’t remember it.”

  “No, that can’t be. Because I was talking to Nate when I said it. I wouldn’t have said ‘this time’ like that unless I thought he would know what I meant. So he would have to have known if I had been after Sadri or Gharsi before, yet at that point he never heard of them.”

  I can see that she realizes I’m right about this. “So Nate assumed it was Bennett because it was Bennett.”

  “Exactly; there’s no other explanation that I can see. Which means that Bennett and Gharsi were somehow connected.”

  “That I don’t follow,” she says.

  “I was after Bennett, but I e-mailed Nate a photo of Gharsi. I went to Sadri’s apartment, and he was working for Gharsi. Can’t be a coincidence; it couldn’t be that I was following Bennett and happened to run into an unrelated international terrorist plot. Bennett and Gharsi were working on something together.”

  “Okay, I buy that.”

  “Good, now let me try and sell you this. If what I am saying is true, then it’s not over. If Gharsi’s whole plan was to find a terrorist nut case and blow up a theater, what the hell would he need Bennett for? To take him house-hunting in New Jersey? Maybe the theater was part of it, but there’s no way it was everything. It might have just been the opening act; it could even have been a diversion.”

  “But either way Gharsi is dead,” she says.

  “That doesn’t mean it’s over. And even if it is, I’d sort of like to find whoever it was that put a couple of bullets in me, and killed those people at the hotel.”

  “I understand,” she says. “Where do I fit in?”

  “Do you have any close contacts in the press? Could be local, could be national; doesn’t matter.”

  She smiles; everybody seems to smile when I say something stupid. “My college roommate is a reporter for The New York Times. We went out with her and her husband a bunch of times. You liked her; couldn’t stand him.”

  “No good,” I say. “I don’t want this traced back to you, and if we use your friend, it will be obvious.”

  “I’m sure she can set me up with one of her coworkers. What do you want me to say?”

  I lay it out for her, and she hates the idea, but she reluctantly agrees to do it when I remind her that if I’m right, then a lot more lives could be on the line. “I’ll get on it as soon as I get back to the office.”

  “Don’t call from your office, or even your cell phone,” I say. “Use a pay phone.”

  This time she doesn’t smile, she laughs out loud. “A pay phone? It really is like you were dropped here from a different planet.”

  We get another cup of coffee and talk some more, and I say, “I meant to ask you: last night on the phone, I said this thing with Bennett wasn’t close to over, and you agreed. Why did you say that?”

  “Because you were intent on getting Bennett. If you had stumbled on something else, you would have turned it over to the rest of the department, and let them handle it. Your entire focus was on Bennett.”

  “Why?”

  “Why was your focus on Bennett?” She knows what I had asked; repeating the question like that is an effort for her to buy time, as she thinks about what she should say.

  “Come on, Jessie. You don’t want to talk about our dating, or our breakup, I get that. But I’m asking you about something that is clearly an important part of my life, and I have a right to know it. Nobody will be up front with me about it.”

  She finally nods. “Okay. You coached a baseball team for a few years; the ages of the kids were I think thirteen to fifteen. You loved it, and the kids loved you.”

  It is beyond weird to hear things in my own life related to me like this, but I don’t want to interrupt her to say that. I want her to get where she’s going.

  “One boy in particular, Johnny Arroyo … you were like a father to him. You were great with him, and he worshiped you. His parents had died when he was a little kid, and he went from relative to relative, until he wound up in the foster system. He did not have an easy time of it.”

  She takes a deep breath, apparently to give herself the strength to continue. This is not going to end well.

  “You were going to adopt him. We … we were going to adopt him. And then one evening you took him out, for pizza or something. And there was a drive-by shooting, and he got killed. You were sure that the bullet was meant for you, and that Bennett was behind it, because you had been after him. Getting him became an obsession from that point on; there is no way you would have gone off in a different direction.”

  It’s a painful story to hear, but not because of any emotional attachment I have to it. Hearing about the death of a boy I can’t remember is like hearing about any similar thing in the news. You feel bad, but you don’t feel part of it. I don’t feel a part of anything.

  “Thank you for telling me that. But I don’t remember the boy at all; I wish I did.”

  “I know. I’m not sure hearing it was the best thing for you, but I felt like you deserved it.”

  “You said that we were going to adopt him; does that mean we were engaged?”

  She smiles one of the saddest smiles I can ever remember seeing. “Our wedding date was this Sunday.”

  The New York Times ran the story on the front page.

  People that the public consider to be true heroes, those that have risked their lives to save others, are always latched on to by the media. This is especially true when the heroism takes place on American soil. There was probably no pilot in recent American history more famous than “Sully” Sullenberger.

  Any morsel about heroes gets picked up in the press, regardless of how insignificant it is, or whether it glorifies them or brings them down. But when something major, truly newsworthy, is revealed, it creates a media firestorm.

  The New York Times story on Doug Brock was truly a stunner, and it revived a story that didn’t even yet need reviving. The headline was “Theater Hero Is Amnesia Victim,” and the subheading said, “Has No Memory of Ten Years Prior to Shooting.”

  The headlines were slightly misleading, as any reader’s natural assumption would have been that the amnesia came as a result of the shooting at the theater. But the story itself corrected that impression, and for the most part was reasonably accurate, which is the way Doug had instructed Jessie to tell it.

  It reminded readers, most of whom needed no reminding, about Doug’s being shot at the motel earlier in the month. It went on to say that what had been concealed was that Doug had suffered a brain injury that resulted in a case of retrograde amnesia. It essentially wiped out a decade of his memory, including the shooting itself and the events leading up to it.

  Where the story differed from the truth was in stating that Doug’s memory was slowly returning. It said that the recollections were coming back essentially chronologically, starting with the earliest, so he still was unable to recall the shooting or the immediate events leading up to it.

  Without directly quoting any of them, it reported that both Doug and the doctors were said to be confident, based on his progress so far, that his full memory would be restored in reasonably short order. In their collective view, it was only a matter of time.

  The article went on to state that at no point were his abilities to create new memories impacted, and he had no physical impairments, which was why he was on duty the night of the theater shooting.

  The information in the piece was credited to anonymous sources within the department, all of whom did not wish to be linked to it by name. Near the end, the writer said that he reached Jessie Allen, Brock’s ex-fiancée, who declined to contribute to the story. Attempts were of course made to reach Doug Brock for his comments, but he did not return the writer’s repeated phone calls. His boss, Captain Bradley, joined the long list of “no-commenters.”

  Nowhere was there made any mention of the danger inherent in the revelations, that the people responsible for shooting Doug might be disi
nclined to sit back and wait for him to remember their role in it.

  Nate was awake in bed the morning that the piece ran, and he was watching the Today Show as they reported on it. While a photograph of Doug was on the screen, Nate heard a noise and turned to see the actual Doug approaching his bed.

  “Well, look who’s here. It’s the media superstar. Had I known you were coming I would have dressed up.”

  “It wouldn’t help; you’d still look like shit. How you doin’, big guy?”

  “I’m living it up here in the fast lane; sucking down Jell-O like there’s no tomorrow. I can’t wait to weigh myself.”

  “So get your ass out of bed. I’m going to need some help.”

  “I wish I could,” Nate said. “Doctors say at least a couple of weeks. They also said you saved my life; that you stopped me from bleeding to death.”

  “I was conflicted about doing it.”

  “Yeah, I bet. And I hear you nailed Sadri with one shot. Funny thing is that I can outshoot you any day of the week.”

  “Since when?” Doug asked.

  “For years now. I’m the best in the department.”

  Doug doubted he was telling the truth, but couldn’t know for sure. Either way, it certainly didn’t matter. “You up to date on what’s been going on?” he asked.

  “I think so. Congers was here, and so was the captain. They filled me in. Gharsi and Sadri are both dead, truth and justice have won out again, and I’m lying here with a goddamn tube up my nose.”

  “Isn’t it great when things go just right?”

  “Yeah. I heard what you said about me at that press conference. Thanks for that, too. So they say you got your memory back? Does that mean I can’t claim you owe me money?”

  Doug walked to the door and closed it, so no one could hear them. Then he came back to Nate’s bedside.

  “It’s total bullshit, right?” Nate asked, before Doug could even say anything.

  “One hundred percent pure.”