Q: More specific, please?
A: I lost my investigator’s license. I lost my license, my job, my wife, my daughter, my life.
Q: How the hell did that happen?
A: Mostly because, for the last few years of work, I was stoned each and every day. Screaming high on crystal meth for like 18 hours a day, easing down on booze for another four, sleep for two and then right back at it.
Q: Wild guess—you got busted?
A: Not for drugs. For manslaughter.
Q: Oh?
A: I was chasing down this junkie skank who’d snatched his girlfriend’s son. The girlfriend’s family had hired my agency to get the boy back. I caught up with the guy the night he broke into his girlfriend’s house, pulled a gun and threatened to kill her if she didn’t go back with him. The bullet I put in his thigh knocked him to the floor and pretty much took him out of commission. But instead of calling the police at that point, I shot him in the head.
Q: Why? You were so fucked up on drugs?
A: That and something else.
Q: What?
A: I just didn’t like him.
Q: Sounds a little more aggravated than manslaughter.
A: I caught a break. The girlfriend lied to the investigators, swore the guy was pointing his gun at me when I shot him the last time. The DA offered a manslaughter plea. I took it.
Q: You told all this to Wooly?
A: In abbreviated form. Mostly, we talked about my time in Red Mountain Correctional, upstate. I told him two good things happened to me there, once I decided I didn’t want to keep killing myself any longer, once I decided I wanted to live. I got sober through the AA meetings up there, I got into zen meditation through the Prison Dharma Network. For a lapsed Catholic, the two made a nice getting-God-back combination.
Q: Then what? You saw the light and became an editor?
A: Yeah right. Real Story was doing something on the Prison Dharma Network. They wanted to interview me. I asked if I could write my own story. They liked it, hired me when I got out and I climbed up from there.
Q: You still straight and sober?
A: I’ve stayed clean.
Q: Still trying to become a good Bhuddist?
A: More like I’m trying to become a good human being.
Q: How’s that going for you?
A: Sometimes it’s not so easy.
>>>>>>
THURSDAY JUNE 14, 11:50 a.m.
MASHED POTATOES AND KLEENEX
Driving up on Braxton Road, I could see that Wooly had made an odd addition to the house. There was a full set of living room furniture—couch, armchairs, even a pair of floor lamps—sitting in a square right on the front lawn, about 15 feet from the big double doors. There was even an ottoman by one of the chairs. And the stuff wasn’t out there to be thrown away. This was a permanent arrangement—the lamps had wires running to an outlet sticking out of the ground.
As a design style, you’d have to call this Prominently Eccentric.
I headed for the doors but I had to check this displaced living room out first. Interesting—the furniture was all made of outdoor materials. What looked like wood was actually cast aluminum. The upholstery was some heavyweight, waterproof fabric. It was basically outdoor furniture made to look like indoor.
What the hell would possess somebody to do this? To make up for the lack of a porch?
I never got a chance to find out because a few seconds after I rang the bell I heard Genevieve Cornell yelling inside, “Well excuse me for THINKING.” She opened the doors. “Nice to see you again,” she said. “Want some advice? Never marry a fat white fool.”
“Something wrong?”
“No, he’s just his usual asshole self.”
She took me through the house: modern décor, large open spaces, lots of light. The place had to hold 7,000 square feet.
Wooly was in the kitchen, digging into a breakfast menu that included two bagels with cream cheese and lox, a plate of sausage patties, another plate of scrambled eggs and a bowl of mashed potatoes. He was packing it all away with gusto, with intense concentration. From the look in his eyes, you’d think he was doing the New York Times crossword.
“Your opinion, Mr. McShane,” said Genevieve. “Your rock bottom opinion. Isn’t that just a little too much food for one disgusting mouth?”
“You’ll have to excuse my wife,” said Wooly. “She’s PMSing all over the place today.”
“Oh grow the fuck up.”
“I’m told I have seven days to live, seven days to stay bounded to this world. I’ll eat what I fucking want.”
“Don’t talk about that!” Genevieve began crying. She pulled a Kleenex out of her pocket. “And bounded’s not the right word.”
“You’re coming down on my grammar now?”
“I’m just trying to tell you… Nickie, have something to eat. There’s more than enough.”
I spun around. A woman was standing behind me, a folder in her hand. I’d never heard her come in. Not a sound.
Wooly made the introductions, though he didn’t offer any food. Nickie Castillo, the security consultant he’d hired for full time protection.
I’d call her a good looking woman, caramel skin, brown eyes, snow white teeth. Only two things might make other people disagree—the two scars gouged into her right cheek.
“Show him the thing,” said Wooly. “That’s what was left for me.”
Nickie slipped a sheet of paper out of her folder and placed it on the table. It was a demented mess of a message made up of cut out and pasted words. Always a creepy technique.
Is there any reason why you should stay alive?
Is there any explanation for your disgusting life?
Do you understand why you are going to die?
Nickie said she’d checked it for prints, other trace indicators. Nothing. It was ICU sterile.
She was confident when she talked, but I was sensing a wariness, a holding back. Like she wasn’t sure what role I was supposed to be playing here.
“What about those protestors?” I said. “F.L.A.C.? They still bothering you?”
“That’s all died off with the economy,” said Wooly. “I employ 48 people, 48 local jobs. The town’s happy with me now.”
I looked at the note again. “Somebody isn’t.”
“I’m thinking if it’s anybody, it’s fucking Georgiana Co— Shit, wait, something I forgot to show you.”
He grabbed a spoon and his bowl of mashed potatoes and took us into the living room.
He’d said Georgiana Copely’s work wasn’t like anything he’d ever seen. I had to cast my vote with him. I didn’t know where the photo on the wall had been taken, possibly in the Paumanok woods, but the trees and bushes were all shrouded in rainy veils. Their shapes were confusing, elusive, unexpected, beautiful. It was a photo of matter you would never be able to find in this world.
“Pretty good for a blind woman, no?” said Wooly. “Shame she’s insane.” He looked at his watch. “Let’s take a ride. I want to show you the factory, show you where the shots were fired.”
“You’re going out like that?” said Genevieve.
Wooly was wearing his usual—soiled sweatpants, shirt left untucked to hide his bulges.
“Why?”
“What’s that white shit on your pants?”
“I don’t know. It’s either bird shit or toothpaste. It tastes more like toothpaste.”
>>>>>>
THURSDAY JUNE 14, 11:50 a.m.
CRUNCH TIME
Gorgeous day, tire tracks of clouds in the sky. Even the sunlight out here smelled different. Wooly drove his Lexus LS, Nickie rode shotgun, I sat in back. He put music on, said he needed some beat in his seat. Nickie talked about the shooting scene, saying how difficult it was to narrow ballistics down around here. This was big hunting country, she said. Everyone’s got guns and knives.
“You know the area,” I said.
“I should. I grew up here.”
Hidden Lake,
she said, had really gone through some changes. Town had maybe 6,000 people a few decades ago. Up to 18,000 now, with a lot more pockets of wealth. Spillover from the Hamptons had pumped in a lot of money.
But Hidden Lake had also become poorer in the process, or more divided along money lines. Yeah, there’d been a smattering of wealth and poverty before, but most of the people here then were blue collar, making a living by farming or fishing. Not anymore. The farms had all been sold off, and the fish population was so decimated or restricted all but a few die hards had given it up. So what do you do when you’re one of the first generations in your family who can’t survive off the land or the sea? You scramble to find work in the health or service industries. Or you go on unemployment. Or you end up living in the Paumanok like the woodsies.
I kept studying her while she talked. No jewelry, no wedding ring. And when she turned her head far enough around, I studied the scars. They weren’t recent. Two light colored, almost white lines running in diagonals down her cheek, embedded over time in built up layers of darker skin. The lines were smooth, not jagged or broken—probably put there by a blade.
“I grew up over by Blessed Redeemer,” she said. “The nuns woke us up every morning blasting America, The Beautiful over the loudspeakers.”
“Ray Charles version?”
“No. That’s why I left. Got my first security job with an agency in Melville, then moved to the city for a Manhattan agency, Pierce Inc.”
“I know ‘em.”
“Now I’m running my own place, based in Riverhead.”
“I did the same thing,” said Wooly. “I did the exact same thing. Got outta Hidden Lake with my first job. A fabric-testing plant over in Jersey, Fort Lee, just over the George. Then I got another job, this one in the Garment District, back when there was a Garment—“
The car came out of nowhere. It exploded out of the shadows, a green blur, less a car than an echo of a car, accelerating across the lane and grinding down on us head on. Something gleamed at the driver’s window. Gunshots drummed on Lexus metal while Wooly yelled What? What? and birds scattered from the trees.
It was on us in a second. I heard a convulsive crunch as the car swiped us, a crush as loud as a junkyard crane dropping the carcass of one car on a pile of others. The floorboard was all vibration, white heat ran along the side. All I could see on the driver was a pair of eyes staring through a ski mask.
Wooly swerved and braked. The friction drag carried us over the side of the road and brought us to a stop on the grass. I got out and ran to the back, heart beating at the top of my head.
The fleeing car was a green Ford Fusion, no license plate. Its tires hissed on the asphalt. Dust filled the air.
Nickie was standing next to me. We both had guns in our hands. Her, a Smith & Wesson 46. I’d pulled my Glock out from the back of my hoodie. Great minds.
With nothing to see now. Nothing to hear except our ragged breathing, and Wooly, still in the car, muttering What the fuck? What the fuck? under his breath.
>>>>>>
THURSDAY JUNE 14, 12:35 p.m.
TOP PRIORITY
Alex Tarkashian, Hidden Lake’s Chief of Police, was a skinny, soft-shelled man in a tired uniform. He had a little bit of Q-Tip cotton still stuck in his ear. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said as he examined the damage to the Lexus—the broken headlight socket, the deep scrapes and missing paint on the side. “This is like the shit you pull from a clogged drain. I don’t know what it is, but it’s a mess.”
“That’s the best you can do?” said Wooly, his face glazed with sweat. “A mess? You got to do better. Gimme a thought. A plan. A theory.”
“What am I supposed to tell you?”
“Tell me fucking something. You know what it is? You guys aren’t cops. You’re just playing cops. You’re just a bunch of fucking Al Porcinos.”
Even if they were playing cops, they weren’t doing a very good job of it. Alex Tarkashian was on scene with two other officers, both with extremely low centers of gravity and neither inspiring much confidence. One was collecting shell casings in the road. He was wearing latex gloves, which was a good thing, but he was also picking his nose, which wasn’t.
The other cop stood by the Lexus, glumly eating a Quiznos hero. He looked bored and not at all happy about having to stand out in the sun.
Alex checked his notes. “Green Fusion, no plate. Driver in a ski mask. I’ve had more detailed descriptions in my time.”
“Whatta you want?” said Wooly. “It was all fast. That’s all we saw.”
“And you have no idea about a possible perp.”
“What did I tell you last time? NO. NO. And NO.”
“Then what the hell do you expect out of me?”
“Fuck!” Wooly turned and began pounding on the roof of his car, thudding the thing so hard he was gonna add another $800 to the repair bill.
Alex came over to Nickie and me. Were we all right? Any broken bones? He didn’t seem especially friendly to Nickie.
The cop eating the hero crumpled his Quiznos wrapper up and tossed the ball to the ground. So much for littering laws.
“That’s two attempts,” Wooly shouted. “Plus a death threat.”
“Don’t remind me,” said Alex.
“I’m a fucking target here. Somebody’s made me a priority hit.”
“When you figure out why, maybe you’ll let me know.”
“Not something you could do, is it?”
Alex shrugged and started walking away. “All I can do is what I can do.”
“Which means farting,” Wooly muttered, “through your fucking teeth.”
Alex stopped and whirled around. “What did you say?”
“I said it under my breath.”
“Your breath is so thick there’s no way to get under it.” He kept walking.
Wooly went back to pounding on his car.
>>>>>>
THURSDAY JUNE 14, 2:40 p.m.
THERE’S A KIND OF ANCIENTRY AROUND HERE
Bad enough that he wasn’t saying anything. The most shocking development was that he wasn’t eating anything. Genevieve offered him lasagna, tuna salad, cold chicken, cracklins, mac and cheese, prosciutto, cornbread, pancakes, oranges, strawberries, brownies, rice pudding. Wooly just sat at the kitchen table, totally tuned out, not even here.
Nickie told Genevieve that the Lexus would be okay. The car’d been towed, the dealer was sending over a loaner. She also said that the next time Wooly went to work, she’d map out some different routes.
Genevieve sat next to her husband. “He can get like this at times.” She touched his arm. “Say something.” She gently shook him. “Wooly, say something.”
“I’m going to die. I really am going to die.” He sounded all caved inside, like he’d been hollowed out by sickness.
Genevieve sighed, got up, walked around the kitchen, wandered over to one of the windows and stood looking at the woods outside. “Why don’t you take a walk, go see the rock? Doesn’t it always calm you?”
“What’s the rock?” I said.
“No,” said Wooly. “It’s too sweaty out.”
“Why don’t you take Quinn to the rock,” said Genevieve. “He’s never seen it before.” She looked at Nickie. “That would be all right, wouldn’t it?”
Nickie nodded. “Long as Quinn’s carrying.”
Genevieve came back to the table, put her hands on Wooly’s shoulders and began massaging him. “Why don’t you take Quinn. Why don’t you tell him the story.”
Head down, Wooly seemed to be measuring something, considering it, reconsidering it. He looked up at me, suddenly little-boy bashful. “You have the time?”
“All the time in the world.”
>>>>>>
I’ll never forget what it’s like to walk into the Paumanok. You pass through walls of 50-foot-high oaks and pitch pines, and after only a few moments the silence falls over you like a curtain. All the background buzz of the world, the hum you alway
s hear but never notice, it suddenly fades away and you’re passing through sheer, breathless quiet.
Wooly took me on a trial heading due east. There were thousands of footpaths in these woods, he said, and some of them—maybe this one—had been here for hundreds of years. They’d been laid down by the Algonquins, the Indians who’d given Long Island its first name, Paumanok. It was easy to imagine we were walking an Algonquin trail, seeing the same things they saw—the oaks and pines and cedars and tupelos that had been left behind thousands of years ago by a pair of glaciers. You walk these woods, you’re going way back in time.
It took a few wordless minutes before he loosened up and started talking. He told me what his life was like a few years ago, what a brain-blasted muddle it had been. Like most egomaniacs, he believed deep down that he was a worthless shit. He thought of himself as a genetic fumble—his life was just a useless growth, a wart on the face of the universe. At one point, he said, he tried to fix the problem with booze, then with coke, then with cough medicine—robotripping on DXM.
“I was bad. I was in a very bad way. Delusions, hallucinations, paranoia. I started hearing voices—you know, in my head. I’d hear voices saying, Are you hearing voices in your head? Drove me nuts. Then they’d up the volume. Start shouting at me, You’re guilty! You’re guilty! You’re motherfucking guilty! I’d say, Of what? They wouldn’t say. Just you’re guilty, guilty, guilty. I’m starting to think, shit, I must be guilty of something.
“One day I go down to village hall, the police station, I tell Alex Tarkashian I want to turn myself in. I want to confess that I’d killed the Pope. I was sure that somewhere along the line I’d killed the Pope. Alex says, ‘Well, I’ll arrest you if you want, only thing is, the Pope isn’t dead.’ He’s been a little leery of me ever since.”
The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams Page 2
