“What?” Cole asked.
“He tells me that Robert De Niro designed the place.” Jerry laughed again at the memory. “Robert Fucking De Niro.”
“How long ago was this?” Cole asked.
“Almost two years.”
Cole did the math in his head. It wasn’t hard. Then he took out his phone and began to flip through the pictures he had stored on it. “Keep going,” Cole ordered Jerry. “What else did you learn?”
“I asked him how it started. He told me that the guy flew him to a new city, let him pick a new name, and two days later he had a bank account with half a million dollars in it. He could do whatever he wanted as long as he kept a detailed journal and kept the guy in the loop on where he was and what he was doing. Whenever the account got low, it got filled up again—like magic.”
“I need more.”
Jerry thought. “He told me that he was only in New York for a couple days. He was flying back from Bali, stopping in New York before heading to Central America. He had a party planned for that night on his terrace. He was only in the city for a couple days, and he already had some swanky party arranged. I asked him if I could come.”
“What did he say?”
“ ‘Maybe next time.’ ” Jerry laughed. “Fuckin’ A, man. I couldn’t even get invited to the party.”
“What else did you talk about?” Cole asked as he kept flipping through the pictures on his phone.
“He told me about how he’d spent the last eight years traveling around the world, surfing and partying. He’d been everywhere. Asia, Europe, Africa, South America. He grew up in a trailer park in Arizona. He’d never met his dad. Before he was picked, he’d never been near a surfboard. Now he’d surfed everywhere in the world. He told me he’d surfed waves as big as mountains. It was crazy. He was the luckiest person I’d ever met.”
Cole sat down in the chair across from Jerry and placed his phone on the table. “Is that him?” Cole asked.
Jerry picked up the phone. He could tell in an instant that the man in the picture was dead, but he could still discern his features. The age looked about right, so did the chiseled jaw, but it wasn’t him. “No,” Jerry said, and slid the phone back.
Cole picked his phone up and flipped through a few more pictures as Jerry kept talking. “I asked him if he was worried about the end,” Jerry said. “You know what he told me?”
“What?” Cole asked, genuinely interested.
“He told me that he wasn’t afraid of anything anymore. Can you believe that? I can. Because when I’m lying on my deathbed and thinking back about my life, I know I’m not going to think about how long it was. I’m going to think about how much fucking life I fit into the time I had. What could be a better life than having someone pay you to make memories?”
Cole put his phone on the table again and slid it back to Jerry, this time with a picture of the body they’d found in New York. “Is that him?” Jerry picked up the phone and stared at the picture. His face went pale for a second. He took a moment. “Yeah,” he finally responded. “That’s him.”
“It’s not a great picture,” Cole told Jerry. “That’s what happens when they pull a body out of a river. You lose a little something.”
“What’s your point?” Jerry asked. “This just proves that everything he told me was true. You can’t deny it now.” Jerry was right. Cole did believe him.
“We recovered this body a little more than two weeks ago. That means the memories are still relatively fresh.” Cole thought about it. Even with his experience, it took him months to make it through a new set of memories, and the memories he inherited sounded pretty simple compared to the ones the Memory Vampire was taking. “That means he’s still working his way through them. I know how long it takes to discover all the memories implanted in your head. I know how bad you want them when you know they’re in your head and you just can’t find them—that desire. I know the lengths that people will go to get to them. You called me out here, Jerry. Do you want me to catch Bon’s killer or not?”
Jerry paused. “I don’t think I have a choice. I don’t think I’m safe anymore otherwise. You aren’t either.”
“Then you need to lead me to the killer, for both of our sakes.” Cole thought about all the conversations he’d had with Dr. Tyson. She’d taught him how to find the memories lost inside his head. She’d taught him about the triggers, about songs and smells and places. The tricks were well known now. “If he knows what he’s doing, he’ll go where the memories take him. I need you to tell me everything you learned about the surfer.”
“I don’t know what else to tell you,” Jerry said with a shrug. “The guy had an amazing life. He could go anywhere. He could do anything.”
“I don’t want to hear about anywhere and anything. I want to hear about specific places and specific things.”
“I only met him for an hour or so. Then he kicked me out to get ready for his party.”
Cole tapped his finger on the table, thinking. “You said he was just stopping in New York. That he was coming back from somewhere in Asia. Where did you say he was coming back from?”
“Bali,” Jerry said.
“Did he tell you where in Bali?” Jerry shook his head. Cole thought about it for a second. “Bali’s too big,” he said. Without the name of a town or beach or something, Cole would never be able to find the killer even if the killer was there. “You said that he was on his way to somewhere in Central America. Do you remember where?”
“Yeah,” Jerry said. “I Googled it almost every day for a week after I met him just to look at the pictures. It was a little town on the east coast of Costa Rica named Puerto Viejo de Talamanca. He told me it was kind of like his home base. He’d travel all over the world, but he’d always go back there.”
“Did he tell you why he went back there?” Cole asked.
Jerry laughed. “If you ever saw pictures of the place you wouldn’t bother asking why. It has everything. Surfing. Sunshine. Girls. Drugs. You name it.”
“That’s gotta be it,” Cole said. “It has to.”
“You think he’ll be there?”
“Maybe. Maybe you haven’t seen him for two weeks because he’s not here. Maybe he just paid somebody to get rid of Bon. All I know is that if I were trying to unlock this guy’s memories, it’s where I would go.” Cole remembered the first time he walked into the home of one of the people whose memories he’d taken. The rush almost knocked him over.
“You’re going to go look for him?”
“I am,” Cole said with absolute certainty.
“In the meantime,” he added, “you could go to the police. I could have you protected.”
Jerry shook his head. “I don’t think so. The fewer people who know where I am, the better. I don’t trust cops any more than I trust anybody else.”
“Okay,” Cole said. “How can I find you again?”
“You can’t,” Jerry said. “This is the last you’ll ever see me.”
“Okay.” Cole hoped for Jerry’s sake that it was true.
Chapter 46
Carter had to pull his car over to the side of the winding coastal road twice. The memories were coming so fast and with so much power now that he couldn’t control them, even faster and more powerfully than during those first few days after the transplant. As soon as he drove past Limón, a shipping town on Costa Rica’s east coast, and turned south, he began to feel them like hit after hit of the most intense drug he’d ever heard of. They came quickly at first, the appearance of new images in his mind, flashes that came and went before he could even tell what they were. He heard echoes of sounds in his head too, the sounds of crashing waves and loud music. Initially, no memory lasted more than a second or two, but he could feel them even before they rose up from the depths of his mind. He felt light, like he was floating into the air.
Carter made it past a small airport and, after that, the road began to hug the coast. His first view of the sea was across a gray beach, but
the water was already expansive, churning all the way to the horizon. The small, winding road ultimately led all the way to Panama and then to the end of the continent. Carter drove slowly to avoid the gaping potholes and to ease his way across each of the many one-lane bridges that he passed. Each bridge spanned a different river as it spilled out into the sea. Every so often, the road veered in from the coast and pushed Carter beneath lush green canopies of broad, thick leaves and past small houses with horses grazing behind low fences. Then the road would turn back again toward the sea. With each return, the water would become more and more blue until the color was almost impossible. With each turn, the surfer’s memories inched closer and closer into Carter’s consciousness.
Soon Carter’s mind was one giant orgiastic muddle of sounds and images. He began to lose the ability to differentiate reality from what was in his head. That’s when he had to pull over. That first time, once the car was stopped, Carter simply leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. He didn’t even want to make sense of it all. He wanted to bask in it. Carter had no idea how long he’d been sitting there before the wave of memories slowed down enough for him to see straight again.
When his senses finally pulled him back to the present, Carter found himself parked on the side of the road next to an open field. The sun was still high in the sky, and the green grass in the field and the green leaves on the surrounding trees almost glowed under the sunshine. It looked like any of the countless images that had flashed through his mind as he lay there in his car. The other images that danced through his head were a wild hodgepodge of sun, waves, bodies pulsating under dim light, flesh moving, dark water lit only by moonlight, more flesh—tan and soft and glistening with perspiration, pungent odors of life and death, giant trees stretching toward the sky, a snake—a huge snake slithering over hot sand, the taste of sweet, wet papaya on dry lips, the feeling of cold rain pouring out of the sky over naked skin, and on and on and on. And those were only the images that Carter could make sense of. There were also those memories that Carter could feel but couldn’t describe. He could taste how close he was.
Once Carter regained control of himself, he pulled his car back on the road. He wanted to get to his destination, wherever it was. He wanted all of it, every free, guiltless moment. He had to pull over again twenty minutes and two towns later. He got out of the car this time, but the memories were so strong that he couldn’t stand up. He knelt down by the side of the road, next to a path leading into the jungle. By the time Carter pulled back onto the road after his second stop, the day was drifting into evening. He wasn’t even certain where he was going. He’d looked at the maps and read the descriptions of the tiny beach towns dotting the southern coast, but the descriptions alone didn’t tell him where to go. He was counting on the memories to show him. Manzanillo, Playa Cocles, Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, all of them? He hadn’t eaten anything all day. He wasn’t hungry—not for food, at least—so he kept on driving.
Chapter 47
Cole tried to sleep as much as he could on the plane, not knowing how much sleep he’d get once he landed. Halfway through the flight, Cole opened his eyes, but only enough to get his bearings, to try to remember where he was. He stared out through a mere slit in tangled eyelashes. Then he remembered. He was on a plane, flying to Costa Rica to find the Memory Vampire. He had called Dr. Tyson before he booked his flight so that she could sanity-check his plan. “It’s a long shot,” she warned him.
“I know,” Cole assured her. “But the idea, it’s not crazy, right? I mean, if he came to you and asked you how to free those memories, what would you have told him?”
“There are a lot of ways to free memories like that,” Dr. Tyson reminded Cole.
“Assume money wasn’t an issue,” Cole said.
“Then I would tell him to go to where he knows the memories were made. I would tell him that traveling to where the memories were made is the surest way to bring those memories to the surface.”
“That’s what I thought,” Cole said.
“Be careful out there, Cole,” Dr. Tyson warned him. Cole could hear a strange resignation in her voice that he wasn’t used to.
“I can’t,” Cole said in response. “Careful’s not going to cut it this time.”
Cole was flying to Costa Rica on his own. He didn’t even try to get the NYPD to approve the trip. He knew they wouldn’t. He knew how much red tape he’d have to cut through. Besides, some of Jerry’s paranoia had rubbed off on him. He wasn’t sure if he wanted too many people knowing where he was going. The only people he told were Dr. Tyson and Ed, but he swore them both to secrecy first. He only told Ed in case he didn’t make it back. He wanted somebody other than Dr. Tyson to know where he’d disappeared. He wanted to think that somebody might care.
Cole continued to stare at the plane through his barely opened eyes. For a second, he didn’t see the plane anymore. Instead, he saw the interior of a bus. A young man was sitting in the seats across the aisle from him. “It’s two-thirty,” the boy told Cole. Cole could see shadows dancing across the boy’s face.
“Huh?” Cole said to the boy, though the voice that came out of his mouth was not his own. It was Meg’s, her mind still groggy from the sleep.
“It’s two-thirty,” the boy said again. “You know? The time?” He shot a smile across the aisle. “Isn’t that why you were looking at your wrist?”
Cole looked down at his wrist, but it wasn’t his wrist. It was the wrist of a teenage girl. He could make out a tan line on the girl’s wrist in the shape of her grandmother’s antique watch. “Yeah,” Meg’s voice said. “I forgot I wasn’t wearing a watch.”
This was the beginning of Meg’s one great adventure. The memory of the hammer tried to push its way in, to shatter everything, but Cole simply ignored it. He wanted to focus on memories of Meg’s life. Death would have to wait. Cole knew that it would.
“Sir, can I get you a drink?” a voice asked, pulling Cole out the memory. A flight attendant was standing over him.
“Sure,” Cole mumbled. “A club soda would be fine.” He glanced at the seats across the aisle from his own. They were all empty. “How long until we land?” Cole asked the flight attendant as he poured Cole’s club soda.
“It’ll be about another hour,” the attendant told him.
Cole had about a five-hour drive to Puerto Viejo de Talamanca. And then what? He didn’t have much of a plan after that, other than to walk around and look for someone who appeared drastically out of place. He had Jerry and Bon’s descriptions of the Memory Vampire, but he didn’t have a lot of confidence in them. He knew how inaccurate memories could be, especially in moments of stress. He believed more in the other clues, and felt certain they would be enough.
Cole finished his drink and then got up to stretch his legs and use the bathroom. The flight wasn’t crowded. Only about a quarter of the seats were full. A couple, maybe newlyweds, sat near the back of the plane. A family of four, the two kids probably three and six years old, sat near the front. Other people were scattered about. Cole thought for a moment that he was the only one on the plane who appeared to be traveling alone. Then he spotted someone else. It was another man, probably in his mid-thirties. He was sitting in a window seat about two-thirds of the way back. He was wearing a gray cabbie hat and, if he had any hair underneath it, it wasn’t much. He was staring out the window when Cole glanced at him, so Cole didn’t get a good look at his face. He had on a solid black T-shirt. Cole could see the muscles in his shoulders and arms. Cole felt like he’d seen the man somewhere before, but that happened to Cole all the time. Cole walked past him and on to the bathroom to try to sort his head out before they made him sit down again for the landing. If Cole had actually inherited Bon’s memories, he might have known what type of danger he was in.
When Cole came out of the bathroom, the man was gone. Cole was still tired. He thought that maybe the man he had seen had been a phantom, like Matt, haunting him from one of the dead people’s memories f
loating inside his mind. The man had seemed so real, though. Cole shrugged it off and went back to his seat. He sat down and buckled up. He’d be in Costa Rica soon enough.
Chapter 48
By the time Cole stepped out of the bus and onto the warm, sunny white sand of Playa Cocles, the ghostly pale skin on Jerry’s body was already frozen. The sun glimmered so brightly off the blue waves that Cole could barely look at the ocean for more than a second or two. He had taken his shoes off and was carrying them in the backpack that he had slung over his shoulder.
The cabin where Jerry had been hiding was still clean. They marched him deep into the woods before they killed him. They didn’t bother burying his body. They’d simply thrown a few branches over it. They didn’t need to do more. As far as they’d made him walk before they shot him, it could be weeks before anyone would find him, even if they were looking for him. So as Cole stepped barefoot onto the sand, out from beneath the shade of the palm trees and into the hot sunlight, Jerry’s lifeless body stared up through two layers of barren branches into the gray, empty sky. Nobody said that life was fair. Only death is the great equalizer. Fergus wasn’t happy that he had to have Jerry killed. He’d liked Jerry, but Jerry should have known better. He’d signed his death warrant when he met with Cole. Fergus had promised the board that he would tie off all the loose ends, even if that meant more people had to die.
Cole stepped onto the beach and was flooded with memories. He heard children who weren’t actually there laughing and playing in the waves, saw nonexistent giant sandcastles built with long-lost fathers, remembered long walks with old lovers he’d never met. They weren’t new memories for Cole. He even recognized a memory of his own. It was from a long weekend that he and Allie had spent in Puerto Rico. He could remember the shape of her body in her bikini, the sound of her laughter over the sound of breaking waves, and the spark in her eyes when she smiled at him. This was still early on, after only his first memory transfer, before too much of him had been buried by other people’s memories.
The Memory Detective Page 25