“No. My wife was. Said I was too drunk.”
“Roy, I read that report. The steering column of that car impaled you—almost went straight through your body and into the back seat.”
“I, uh …” Roy was at a loss for words. “So what? Does it matter anymore?”
18
Why had Penny lied to him? Roy seethed. She told him she was driving. How could the steering column go through him if she was behind the wheel? And the obvious next question: Was she even in the car? The scar on her forehead—where did that come from? And why was she lying about Leila? Did she kill the dog, too?
What was going on?
Roy took a sip of his beer, then motioned to the bartender for another shot of Jameson. Detective Devlin—Del—had left hours ago, but instead of leaving with her, he had deposited himself on a stool at the bar. The after-work crowd had thinned out to a few late-night stragglers. It was a Tuesday night, and even in the East Village people had to get up for work. But not Roy. The bartender ignored him, so he waved again for the shot of whiskey.
“Hey, watch it,” the lumber-sexual beside Roy complained. “What’s your problem? You just knocked my drink over.”
“Shorry.” Lumber-sexual. Roy giggled to himself at his funny word, a compression of “lumberjack” and “metrosexual.” The complainant had on a red-checked shirt and heavy work boots, but Roy was sure the guy had never gotten a callus or nicked a manicured fingernail in his life. “I’ll get you another one. What is that?”
“Forget it. Just stop hitting me.”
“Hey.” Roy motioned at the bartender. “Another shot. You want one, too? On me?”
Bow-Tie-and-Suspenders put down his dishrag. “Maybe you’ve had enough, mate?”
In the months at Eden, they had injected opioids into Roy’s bloodstream, and he wished he could dive into that sweet nothingness again. Maybe he should go back to Tompkins Park, find that kid who had offered him “something.” He had experimented with drugs in college, but he’d been too scared of the heavy stuff, instead opting for a steady diet of alcohol and safer recreational drugs. Cocaine and ketamine were in your bloodstream. “Safer” was a relative term. Right now he needed another drink.
“Just one more,” Roy said. He waved an arm, holding up a finger.
“I said to knock it off, pal,” the lumber-sexual growled as Roy bumped into him again.
The bartender said, “I can’t serve you.”
“I’m not drunk.” Roy held out a fistful of hundreds. “Just one more? And could you plug me in?” He pulled the charging cord for his exo-suit battery from his pocket.
“Jesus, did you spill your drink on me?” The lumber-sexual turned to face Roy. He had a bushy red beard, with his hair side-combed in the same style as the bartender. Maybe he hadn’t worked outside in his life, but the kid sure had spent some time in the gym. He was huge.
Roy looked down. The kid’s jeans had a dark stain along the outer seam, but Roy’s khakis were soaked.
“What the hell! Did you piss yourself?”
“Ah, damn it.” He should have put on the adult diapers before going out. Control of his bladder was still hit-and-miss. “I’m—”
“That is disgusting. What the hell is your problem?”
Roy stumbled off the barstool to his feet. His charging cord dangled to one side. He couldn’t even feel the dampness between his legs. Couldn’t feel anything. “My problem? What’s yours, asshole?”
Is this smart? a voice inside asked. You just had this head surgically attached to this body. Metal pins still held some of the vertebrae together in his neck. What if this kid hits you? He might literally knock your head off. And then another voice answered, I don’t care. Just let him try.
The lumber-sexual stood up. He towered a good six inches over Roy. “You’ve been banging into me all night. And now you’re pissing on me?” He lunged forward to shove Roy.
Roy saw it coming before it even happened. Sidestep and deflect, then disable. The thought came automatically. In one smooth motion, his body turned sideways and ducked. The kid’s hands slipped past him into thin air. In the same motion, Roy’s left hand shot up and grabbed the kid’s wrist, wrenched it around. Crack. The six-four, 220-pound bodybuilder dropped as if his legs had been cut out from under him. His friend was almost as big, and seeing Roy standing over his buddy, twisting his arm, the friend didn’t hesitate. He threw a straight jab right at Roy’s face.
Momentum, a knowingness in Roy’s muscle memory said. Slide past it and use your opponent’s momentum.
Letting go of the lumberjack’s wrist with his left hand, as if in slow motion he spun around, lifting his right elbow up. It felt like dancing. The momentum of the friend’s punch carried him forward. Slipping just outside the jab, Roy turned from the hip and brought around his elbow, crunching it into the friend’s temple. The kid crumpled onto the drink-and-urine-wet floor.
“Hey, hey!” yelled the bartender, palms up in surrender. “We don’t want any trouble.”
“They came at me.”
“Yeah, I saw. Just, no more trouble.”
Roy wasn’t even breathing heavily. The friend lay sprawled on the floor, with an upended bar stool across one leg. The lumber-sexual groaned, cradling his hand in the crook of his other elbow, and backed away as he got to his feet. He looked terrified.
The wave of rage crested, ebbed, then disappeared below the horizon of Roy’s mind. What just happened? He’d never fought anyone in his life. His hands were shaking, his exo-suit cord still dangling from the pocket of his pee-stained pants. He had never even thrown a punch before, and he just felt as though he could have killed those kids with his bare hands. Wanted to kill them—that’s what he’d felt.
He reeled out of the bar without another word.
19
“Have you seen the house?” the old woman asked.
She pointed a gnarled finger at a shantytown of corrugated metal and plastic sheeting. It was the red-brown woman from the backyard at Mott’s Point, Roy remembered. Her skin so papery thin, it could burst into flame over the cold blue veins beneath. Roy floated down the stairs, his tiny eight-year-old body lighter than air.
Long grass waved in the sand.
“But don’t worry, your secret is safe,” the woman said, her lips not moving, eyes opaque. “Some gold paint will hide the bones.”
“What do you want?” Roy tried to get away, but the air was like molasses. He knew they had buried a body, but it was forgotten, wasn’t it? Behind the woman, a young girl with flaming red hair—just a baby, not more than four—ran squealing in terror.
“Get her!” Roy screamed. “It’s not safe!”
He pushed the air aside and slid forward through the space it left.
“Get the girl!”
Roy’s feet touched the ground, and he fell forward. His face lay flat against a striped floor. He rolled over and blinked, reached out again for the girl. His hand slapped into something hard that wobbled and crashed. He rolled over again and breathed deep. His eyes focused, and he inhaled the stale reek of sweat and old cigarette smoke. Spat out crumbs his half-open mouth had gathered from the sheets. He rolled onto his side. The dream faded, replaced with dingy reality.
“Oh, my god.”
His mouth felt stuffed with cotton balls. His brain, too. There was throbbing pain behind his eyes. He rubbed his face but couldn’t feel his hand. The already-numbed sensation he had of his body was almost gone, replaced with pulsing pins and needles. And nausea and gut-wrenching vertigo.
Roy propped himself up on one elbow on the stained mattress. He still had on the khaki trousers, now two-toned from dried piss. The exo-suit cord still hung out of his pocket, the batteries long since dead. He struggled to shift one leg and then the other and felt some sensation through the pulsing static of his nerves.
With a grunt, he
threw his legs over the side of the bed. His socked feet slopped into the water from the glass he had just knocked over.
Dim light filtered in through the dirt-streaked window of his new basement apartment. The knuckles of his left hand were scraped, his hands and forearms covered in caked dried blood. From the fight? The fight was the last thing he remembered, but there hadn’t been any blood. What else had he done?
He struggled to his feet, teetering sideways until he caught himself on the wall. He clicked on the incandescent bulb in the tiny bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. The jagged scar that encircled his neck—the literal intersection of his old life and new—was red and inflamed. His eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with angry blood vessels.
“Damn it,” he mumbled.
* * *
“You look like hell,” Angel said cheerfully. “You want a mango-chutney smoothie? I’m telling you, they’re the best.” He hunched lower to get a better look at Roy, then motioned to the waitress as he held up his glass. “Excuse, please, another one of these over here?”
They sat perched on blue wooden stools at a brushed-aluminum table on an enclosed sidewalk terrace on First Street. After Roy said where he’d rented an apartment, Angel had told him that the best juice bar in town, Juicy Julie’s, was right next door, and why not to meet him there? It seemed like a good idea yesterday, not so much today. Death would be an improvement on how Roy felt.
In a playground across the street, children chased each other, screaming like banshees. He glanced over from time to time, watching three little girls in parkas and scarves and mittens playing a game of tag. Angel was depressingly chipper, his square jaw, aviator sunglasses, and razor-creased slacks looking as if he’d just stepped off a movie set.
Even from five feet away, he smelled clean—or maybe it was just that Roy stank.
“Here you go.” The waitress set a tall glass of orange-yellow sludge on the table.
“You okay?” Angel asked. He had already finished his smoothie.
“Gotta excuse me. This is the first hangover I’ve had in this body.” Roy grunted, picked up the drink with one hand, and rooted in his pocket with the other for his pills—three of the antirejection medication, two ibuprofen for the headache, two blood thinners, and two others whose names he didn’t recall, only that they were blue and he had to take one at night and one in the morning. He assumed he’d forgotten the one last night.
“Sure you should be drinking, brother?”
“Orange juice ain’t gonna kill me.”
“I mean whatever you had last night. You got that sour stench, man. Those blackouts you talked about? Might not be safe. You gotta take care.”
“It’s like I’ve been in jail for two years, and anyway, I got a brand-new liver.” He gulped down the mouthful of pills. “Someone’s following me.”
“Pardon?”
“I said, someone is following me.”
“Who?”
“That’s your job, isn’t it?”
“My job—”
“Is whatever I’m paying you fifteen hundred a day for.”
Angel’s expression changed. The eyes narrowed. “You’re being followed now? Here?”
“Not sure. It’s like someone is there but just out of sight. Can you tail me?”
“Is this turning into a bodyguard gig? ’Cause the rate goes up.”
“Charge me whatever you want.”
“Fine. I’ll arrange it. You still want to talk? You look like you need to lie down.”
“I met the cop yesterday. There’s a medical examiner’s report from Stony Brook about my accident. Seems to say I was the driver, not my wife—at least, it says the steering column tore my body in half.”
“That wasn’t in the East Hampton report,” Angel mused. “Did you see the report? With your eyes?”
“Just what the detective told me. No reason to doubt her, but she said I had to go through official channels to get a copy.”
Angel said, “I’ll get it, but I might need your signature. So your wife might be lying to you. Any idea why?”
Roy shrugged. No, he didn’t. His brain wasn’t quite firing on all cylinders yet.
“Can you find out if my wife filed something with the police?”
“For what?”
“Domestic disturbance. Something like that.”
“Did you fight with your wife?”
“Not exactly. Just what I told you.”
Angel looked at him as if he weren’t telling him everything.
Roy said, “Devlin told me I wasn’t under investigation for anything. She has to tell me, right? If I was? Otherwise, it would be entrapment?”
“Doesn’t quite work like that.”
“She said it was only coincidence she came by that morning I got home.”
“Because of that hiker?” Angel tapped his phone and brought up a story on the web. “They found her a week after you got home, cut up in pieces. In a bag on the beach.”
None of this was news to Roy. “Did you do any real detective work yet?” He was in a foul mood. The sunshine was too bright, the people on the street too happy.
“Is that your blood?”
“Just dirt.” Roy had changed his shirt—another black turtleneck—and washed his hands, but he hadn’t been thorough. There was still blood caked on his forearm, visible as he leaned against the table and the sleeves edged up.
“You get into a fight last night?” Angel’s expression made it clear he wasn’t convinced. He pointed at Roy’s chafed knuckles.
“Only with the sidewalk,” Roy lied.
The detective gave up, dragged a hand across his black buzz cut. “I looked into this OPTN—the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network. Set up by Congress in 1984, and in 2012 they started allowing face, foot, hand, and arm transplants. So they started collecting those body parts. Three years ago, they opened limited trials for whole-body transplants—”
“You do all your detecting on Wikipedia?”
“I mean, how can you tell when someone is really dead dead?” Angel said, ignoring the sarcasm. “I read stuff where people were in a vegetative state for ten years—the doctors said they were brain dead—but their families kept them alive, refused to turn them into sacks of body parts, and now they’re waking them up. Coming back to the land of the living. Stimulating their vagus nerve—that thing you were talking about. Man, I ain’t never donating my organs.” Angel rubbed the scar on his cheek with the back of his hand.
“Thanks for the advice.”
“You died, right? Dead for an hour, you said. I’m Catholic, or at least, I was, but I mean … what was it like? What did you see?”
I was dead. Maybe I am dead. Even now. Maybe this is hell. What did he see? Just flashes. Light. The past. “I don’t remember. What about their databases?”
The private eye looked disappointed but didn’t press. “I called them, said I was your lawyer.” He snickered. “They told me they had your letter, but the donor family wasn’t accepting any communications. I tried, but they get this stuff every day. Locked down tight as a nun’s panties. There’s this Transplantation Society, an international group. Danesti’s involved in that, I think. Some very shady stuff going on out there. Organs taken from living donors, from Chinese prisoners—there’s big dinero in the shadows out there.”
“Can we stick to my case? What about hacking them? The OPTN?”
“You watch too many movies.” Angel looked away and up. “But maybe there’s a way. Easier to send someone in on an intern job, but that takes time. What we need is another transplant surgeon, like that Brixton you talked about? Someone who has access to the list. Did you ask Danesti? I mean, what did he say about your body?”
“He only said it came from the OPTN. That it was a young guy, early twenties. Bodybuilder or something.”
&nbs
p; “So at least, we know you’re American, or that body came from inside America, anyway.” Angel wasn’t quite sure how to refer to Roy’s lower half. “Male, Caucasian, early twenties. That narrows the search to just half the country.”
“I’m going to look into the money.” Roy planned to go to his dad’s old office today. Usually, he just showed up for board meetings, and he hadn’t been there in over two years.
“It’s always about the money,” Angel said. He sighed, whistling the air out and shaking his head. “Are you sure about this? The donor family seems like they don’t want to be contacted.”
“Family? How do you know it’s a family?” Roy looked again to his left, at the screaming little girls running in circles around the jungle gym.
“That’s just the word they use.” Angel tracked his client’s eyes. “Might not mean kids. It might just be a brother. Cousins, maybe. Might be nobody. Maybe that’s why there’s no response. I have no idea.”
“Exactly, so just keep digging.”
“You sure?”
Roy said, “That’s what my gut tells me.”
20
“So you’re back?” Gary asked Roy. “You look great.”
The man sat just on the edge of the chipped wooden table that was Roy’s desk. They were in Roy’s office, which was twenty feet square but devoid of any other furniture except for a computer screen and the chair Roy sat in.
The window behind Gary was arched into a point at the top, the letters “LCT” at the apex. All the doorways and hallways were arched in this neo-Gothic skyscraper built more than a century ago. Walking into the lobby had felt like entering St. Peter’s Basilica.
Gary half leaned on the desk, giving the impression he wasn’t staying, and also that he didn’t want to wrinkle his four-thousand-dollar bespoke Italian suit. His full head of hair was coiffed to perfection, as if he had just come straight out of a salon—his nails buffed, his blue silk tie gridded with tiny Louis Vuitton logos.
“I thought I’d get back into the swing of things.” Roy gave an artificial grin. He had on old sneakers and loose jeans from the Gap and hadn’t showered in two days.
The Dreaming Tree Page 11
