It was just him, a table and an oppressive overhead light. The window was sealed shut, keeping a small cloud of smoke from his cigarette in and the bitter rain outside. His upper body felt warm and itchy while his legs stayed lukewarm. He wanted out of that room as soon as possible.
They were kind enough to provide him an ashtray, and he sprinkled the last bits of ashes into it. He was out of cigarettes, and it was only 20 minutes.
Finally the metal door swung open. It made him start, but he tried to stay as still as possible, keeping his eyes on the fading embers in the ashtray.
Lt. Brady sat down across from him. He waited for the chair to stop creaking before he started.
“You picked the right night to get caught, I guess,” he said.
“Why’s that?” asked J.L., avoiding Brady’s glare.
“You got something we could use,” said Brady.
“Oh?” J.L. picked his head up. Brady’s deadpan expression didn’t faze him. “It’s $200 an ounce.”
“Not quite,” said Brady. “We need your cooperation with something. I know that might be a price too high for you.”
“What do you mean?” said J.L. He was not expecting this at all.
“Just come with me. Take that stupid hat with you too,” said Brady.
* * *
He was taken by cruiser somewhere out in the suburbs, probably east of the city. It was too dark to really see where they were going, but it was someplace somewhat decent because there were streetlights. The air still had a sulfur smell to it, though. Not too fancy.
He was led up to a dark house. It was crawling with cops, Grays from the city. They saluted Brady as he came through.
He was taken to a foyer of some sort. He removed his wet hat and set it aside on the red sofa he sat on. A few lights were on, not enough to give a good look, but enough to see a large TV idling nearby, a blackened test pattern urging the user to turn it off to conserve power. There was also a few large bookcases, but they were mostly empty.
Brady sat down on a metal chair in front of him. Behind him emerged the silhouette of a Gray, suited up in a trenchcoat. He sat down next to Brady. He was carrying J.L.’s carrier bag.
“J.L., this is Cpt. Cofield, operating out of Brooklyn. He’s the reason you’re here now,” said Brady.
“I wouldn’t say that,” said Cofield, a large, dark-skinned man with a bald head, gray eyebrows and sunken eyes. “This is Stepback, right?” he said, pulling a vial of a clear, blue liquid out.
“It is,” said J.L.
“This is real, no-taint Stepback?” he said, holding it out.
“I couldn’t get away with charging that much if it wasn’t,” said J.L.
“That’s good,” said Cofield, dropping the vial back in the bag. “I’m sure you know we don’t usually do this…”
“Huh? I thought you hire felons all the time,” said J.L.
“Hey!” said Brady. Cofield elbowed him.
“No, we don’t usually ask ex-cops to help us out,” said Cofield.
“I don’t think you’re asking me, though,” said J.L.
“I guess not, because if you say no, you go down empty-handed. If you say yes, you go home empty-handed.”
“So what do you want?”
“We got a case, maybe you heard of it. Made the news, even.”
“The one about the retard’s missing kids? The one Nelson was going nuts over?”
“Yeah. We gotta find those kids. Nelson is serious about this, after all.”
“And Stepback has what to do with it?”
Cofield gave an annoyed glance at a door to the rear. “Hey!” he yelled. “We’re ready out here!”
“Just a minute, he’s not done eating,” came a muffled voice.
“I don’t give a fuck!” said Cofield. “Brady, go get him.”
Brady was already on his feet before Cofield could finish. He trudged off, leaving a trail of muttering behind.
Cofield turned to face J.L. “We got a guy who we think knows what happened to those kids. We need your help interviewing him.”
“Did you beat him a bit too hard or something?” said J.L.
“An attitude like that, wonder why you left.”
“Because the force is filled with the kind of people who need a drug dealer to help them solve cases. When they do try to do that, anyway.”
“Well I’m glad you found a more stimulating line of work,” said Cofield. The door creaked open, and in came a man strapped to a wheelchair. Behind him was his handler, and then Brady.
“J.L., meet Jason Fernandez,” said Cofield. Fernandez was kept near the back wall as his handler went back through the door. Brady pulled his chair next to Fernandez.
Fernandez didn’t seem to mind being strapped in. He stared blankly ahead, his eyes not quite able to focus on anything. Bits of uneaten lettuce sat on his stained shirt.
“I’m sorry, but Stepback doesn’t work with dead people,” said J.L.
“Actually, according to the people in this house, Mr. Fernandez is the brother of the missing kids’ mom. He turned up like this a few months ago. The kidnapping took place a few weeks after, and the same day, the mom is killed in just another street shooting. We brought him here to be with what’s left of his family,” said Cofield.
”So what’s his problem?” asked J.L.
“Uh, Wells’ll tell you,” said Brady. “Here he comes now.”
Wells, the handler, rolled trolley loaded with medical equipment into the room. It nearly tipped over the door jamb. He immediately set about connecting it to the wall socket.
“We’re gonna need more sparks,” said Wells.
“Yeah I know. In three minutes we’ll get it,” said Cofield.
“That’s Dr. Wells,” said Brady. “Police medical unit. Pretty much the only guy who could really tell what happened to Fernandez, and he recommended Stepback for this… procedure, I guess.”
“I don’t get it,” said J.L. “This guy’s a plant.”
“It’s a memory problem,” said Wells ovr his shoulder. “I’ll show you.”
He turned on one of the machines, a PET scanner. He took out an EEG, but before he placed it on Fernandez’s head, he waved J.L. over. Cofield gave him a nod.
“This is what happened to Fernandez,” said Wells. He took out a small flashlight and lit up the back of Fernandez’s scalp. In a shaven section, there was a keyhole-shaped opening. The brain was just visible beneath it.
“That hole can only be made by one thing,” said Wells. He set aside the EEG and took out a device composing of many metallic tentacles, each tipped with a small hook. They ran into a battery, shaped like a key.
“They cut up his brain?” asked J.L., sitting back down.
“We actually call it the brain torch,” said Wells. “You see, with this they can erase memories. Well, ‘erase,’ isn’t the word, more like ‘destroy.’ You’d attach this to an EEG or some kind of brain imaging device, and then you’d ask the subject questions to get them to remember things. The torch looks out for any areas of the brain that light up when accessing those memories, and then…”
With the push of a button, blue arcs of electricity ran over the torch’s tendrils. Fernandez flinched just a bit.
“Looks like it took out more than just his memory,” said J.L.
“It’s supposed to be very precise,” said Wells. “We used to use it on prisoners for experiments. It’s very good at what it does. It can delete memories precisely, but there’s a problem. It has no way of telling what the subject is remembering when it goes to work. It just takes out whatever lights up. And it looks like you weren’t very careful, were you, Jason?”
Fernandez looked at Wells. “W-what?” he said. Before Wells could answer, he returned to staring blankly at J.L.’s knee.
“If you have this thing in your head, and your mind wanders, it’ll just as soon take out whatever pops up. We had people forget their own name, where they lived, what year it was, who their family was… We had a guy who couldn’t remember that your hair wasn’t some kind of creature trying to eat your brain. When you burn up connections in the brain, no matter how precise, something is bound to go wrong.”
J.L. looked Fernandez in the eye, getting no reaction. “So someone went to town on his memory with one of those things. And you say you had those in the force?”
Wells looked at Cofield. Brady was getting red again. “He would say that,” said Cofield.
There was the humming sound of more electricity than usual going through the walls. One lightbulb, not having to deal with that much stress for years, immediately burst. The room was now a dull orange, and the TV glowed its test pattern more clearly. Fernandez groaned and feebly covered his eyed with his hands.
“About time,” said Cofield. “Nelly doesn’t want us to wait, so let’s get going right now.”
“Not that I don’t want to be of service,” said J.L., “but Stepback doesn’t restore memories or shit.”
“No, nothing can reverse what the torch does,” said Wells. “I know what Stepback does.”
“Oh? Then what do you need me for?” said J.L.
“He knows what it does,” said Brady. “He doesn’t know how to use it, though, for what we want it to do.”
“Basically, I’m thinking that if we can make Fernandez think he’s back in time to when this happened, we can maybe figure out who did this to him, maybe figure out what happened with those kids,” said Wells.
J.L. leaned back and closed his eyes. He couldn’t stave off going without a smoke much longer. “Not a bad idea, I guess,” he said. “But again, if his memory is shot, it’s not gonna work.”
“Depends on how thorough they were with Fernandez, and judging by how much damage he’s taken, they were very thorough,” said Wells. “But it’s always possible that some small details were overlooked. We’ll see.”
“Nelly wants us to know what happened, J.L.,” said Brady. “When someone floated this idea, he went chub out for it. So go with the program.”
“Chub out is right,” said J.L. “More crackdowns than I’ve seen since the crash.”
“Yeah, we got tons and tons of all kinds of shit, enough to feed the force for years,” said Brady. “But tonight we finally got some Stepback.”
“Oh good,” said J.L. “You know, the shit’s in that bag, that alone’s about 10% of the total haul in the whole region, including all five fugee zones. So you really, really owe me.”
“Don’t worry,” said Cofield. “You wanna smoke?”
Cofield pulled a pair of cigs out of his trenchcoat pocket. They weren’t even bent. J.L. took them and lit one up. “It’s a start,” he said after he sucked in his first puff.
“Let’s go, Wells,” said Brady. Fernandez had the EEG on, and the machine had just finished scanning his brain. J.L. could just make out a few dark-blue regions all over Fernandez’s brain. Dead zones.
“Wait, hold on,” said J.L. Fernandez was still lamely covering his eyes, and his feet were shuffling back and forth. “Turn off some of these lights. They’re pushing on Fernandez over there. You want him to stepback right, you gotta keep him relaxed. If he has a bad trip, it’ll take a long time for him to come down, and you don’t have much liquid to spare.”
Most of the lights were killed, whcih is how many it took to get Fernandez to put his hands down and sit still. J.L. took the time to stand up and stretch. Brady’s eyes stayed on him the whole time.
“Okay, anything else?” said Wells, pouring some of the Stepback into a paper cup.
J.L. looked around. “Yeah. How many months ago did he turn up like this?” he said.
“Five or six,” said Cofield.
“You gotta make him think it’s five months ago, as close to that as possible. If you can, make this room a bit colder. You know what’d really help? If you had any music playing that was new back then.”
Cooling the room was the easy part, making it feel like the lukewarm mid-winters they’d grown used to these past few years. It took them an hour to scrounge enough “new,” terrible music from the cops milling about the house. Cofield was never more embarrassed to issue that APB.
There was now a soft techno ballad being played, quietly, by the old stereo system that miraculously worked. The song, its artist plunged back into obscurity since it debuted, didn’t seem to move Fernandez at all.
“Now what?” asked Wells.
“What was he doing before he was torched?” asked J.L.
Cofield took out a piece of grimy paper and unfolded it. “A year ago, he was working with NASDAQ when it closed for good. He parlayed his connections into a job in SoHo, helping to set up the new street markets there. Not a bad post. He disappeared for four days before they found him wandering the streets asking people for dollar bills,” he read.
The old stock market crew. When the market was finished, they tried to take over the southern parts of Manhattan. Most of them were run out to the outer boroughs, but a few managed to build up some new scams, trying to keep the gravy train going even when it was off the tracks. He dealt with them before, but they were shitty tippers and the cops usually weren’t interested in taking them on.
“So some fucking wizkid zapped Fernandez’s brain, probably covering up the eventual kidnapping,” said J.L. “Let me guess: He doesn’t know who did it.”
“Don’t know where, when, how, who or why. Well, I guess we know why,” said Brady.
“So they probably take him to a dark, cold place, like this. Strap him into a chair, like that. Put something on his head. Now all we need to do is rebuild that memory,” said J.L.
“I guess that’s where Stepback comes in,” said Cofield.
“Yeah, but I hadn’t considered this,” said J.L. “Never heard of someone trying to step back to something they couldn’t remember. I have no clue if this will even work.”
“Well whatever, can we give him the stuff now?” asked Brady.
J.L. took one last look around. The room was nearly all dark, with Fernandez only visible in the glow of the EEG reader. He was looking at the cup of Stepback, his lips stiff and parched.
“Go ahead,” said J.L. Wells tipped the cup into Fernandez’s mouth, and he swallowed it eagerly, apparently not minding the bitter taste.
“How long until he, uh, steps back?” asked Cofield.
“Depends. Shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes,” said J.L. “Just worry about keeping him in the timeframe you want.”
“Okay, six months ago. January 11 is when we think it happened,” said Cofield. “So, so what? We just ask him questions?”
“We gotta put him back in that chair when they fried his brain,” said J.L. “Ask him questions that would put him there.”
Brady, Cofield and Wells exchanged glances. “Like what?” asked Brady.
“Well you’re a fucking cop,” said J.L. “What do you do when you pull up some punk and harrass him?”
Cofield turned and looked at Fernandez. His face, barely visible, was expressionless, though his eyes began darting around more than usual.
“How will we know he’s stepped back?” asked Wells.
“When his eyes dialate, that means he’s no longer seeing us,” said J.L. “He’ll also begin to act like he’s back in time. By the way, I hope that brain torch thing doesn’t hurt too much because he might break his back or something if he fucking spazzes.”
“He’ll be fine,” said Wells.
“Stop wasting time,” said Cofield. “Let’s… let’s try to suss this out of him, or something.”
Brady pulled his chair closer to Fernandez. “Hey, Jason, can you he–”
“Don’t call him that,” said J.L. “I don’t think his captors would’ve called him by his first name.”
“What? I do that all the time,” said Brady.
“Well, I wouldn’t do it if I were you,” said J.L.
Brady shook his head. “Fernandez, ummm, so, what’re you, uh, what’re you up to today?” said Cofield.
Fernandez looked in Cofield’s direction. “W-what?” he asked. “N-nothing…”
“You, uh, you get into any trouble lately? Maybe with your friends?” asked Cofield.
Fernandez seemed to struggle to answer. His head began shaking. Cofield looked back at J.L., and he relished that look for a second.
“Fernandez, you okay? You’re not in trouble, are you?” said Brady.
“Hey Fernandez, can you believe it man? A year to the day, almost,” said J.L. At least he thought January 11 was the day the NASDAQ closed. It was close enough at least.
“You mean… yeah… my job…” mumbled Fernandez.
“But we got through it, right? Took us only a few months to take over the joint.”
“We did… Not still making money and… but…”
“Ain’t the same. Ain’t the same at all. Now we’re just running… shit, uhhh, some crack, some blue–”
“Nyeh?” said Fernandez, shifting in his seat. Wells quickly flashed a light in his eyes. They were still focused on something, probably Brady. “No no, what? No… Just some metal, some, some meat we take out of the trucks. Good prices.”
“Yeah that’s right,” said J.L. “Yeah, we got a good thing going here.”
“I hope so,” said Cofield. “I mean, everything’s okay?”
“When… when is it ever?” mumbled Fernandez.
“Well, nothing’s going on with your sister, though, right?” asked Brady.
J.L. immediately waved Brady off, prompting an angry shrug in response.
“…I have a sister?” said Fernandez, twitching in his seat.
“No no, not her,” said J.L. “Umm, anything going on with… with the girl you’re living with?”
This time Fernandez couldn’t even muster a response.
“Y’know, umm,” J.L. started. He walked over to Cofield. “What was her job?”
Cofield looked through another document from his coat. “Ummm, here, says here she was a social worker at… one of the hospitals. Not a whole lot of useful–”
“Yeah you know, that girl who works… on the East Side?” said J.L.
Fernandez furrowed his brow. “Lots of people work there…”
“Yeah but she has… ummm…” J.L. looked at Cofield again. “What does she look like?”
Cofield pointed at the wall. J.L. saw (thanks to Brady’s flashlight) a picture of the Fernandez household: an old, mustachioed man standing next to a fat woman with a receding hairline. Fernandez, his crew cut really the only thing he shared with the image in the picture, stood to the side. In front of them was a short woman with long brown hair and a pleasant face.
“She’s got brown, shoulder-length hair… You know the one… A birth mark just above her nose?” said Cofield.
“…Ohhhhhhhhh…” said Fernandez. His face relaxed.
Wells kept his eyes on the EEG reader throughout the ordeal. He turned around to face J.L.
“Okay, I think I’ve been tracking what parts of his brain he’s trying to access. I think I’ve isolated the parts where the memories related to his sister. He’s been trying to access them,” he said.
“That’s great,” said J.L., trying to keep his voice down. “How does that help, though?”
“I’m thinking that there may still be in-tact connections in there. If he can access them, he might remember what we need.”
J.L. nodded. He turned back to Fernandez.
“Yeah, you know her. What’s she up to today?” he asked.
“Ah… That reminds me, I gotta pick her up later today,” said Fernandez, though he wasn’t looking at anyone now.
“Pick her up?” said J.L.
“Haha, no, not anymore. Um, but yeah, gotta… gotta walk her… somewhere…”
“Walk her home?” asked Brady. J.L. wanted to kick him in the face.
“Uhhhhh, no… I wouldn’t… wou– wouldn’t… uhhhh…”
“No no, just, you’re gotta take her someplace,” said J.L. “But, this isn’t something you normally have to do, right? I mean, the market’s still open at night…”
“She asked me to. She said… something about… I guess we have to talk about something.”
“Something about the market? Maybe the guys who work there?” said Cofield. Fernandez could only stare blankly ahead.
“Those guys probably had his memory deleted,” said J.L. “Good lucky trying to identify them from anything he said.”
“If we can’t do that, we’re fucked,” said Cofield.
J.L. turned back to Fernandez. He thought for a few seconds as he watched him, helplessly sitting there, his brain shifting between times.
“So she needs to see you, but everything’s alright at work right?” he said.
“Sure, why not?” said Fernandez.
“And everything else is okay with the family? Mom and dad and all that?”
“… What mother?”
“Holy shit,” muttered Cofield.
“Nothing about the market? I mean, everything’s okay…?”
“What? What’s wrong? I don’t know,” said Fernandez.
“Wells?” said J.L. He felt like he was on a balance beam, struggling to stay on it. Wells simply shook his head and shrugged, not taking his eyes off the EEG reader.
J.L. sighed and thought a bit more. “Well, okay Fernandez, I got news for you: Cancel your appointment with her,” he said.
“Huh? Why?” said Fernandez.
“Because we need to talk. There’s something you don’t want to do, and if you ain’t gonna do it, we’re gonna have to rub you out.”
“What? Wait, guys…”
“Look, Fernandez, we’ve talked about this before… maybe. But you have to understand that we’re under serious fuckin’ pressure here. And you’re not playing ball.”
“You know I’d do anything for you guys, but…”
“We needed you to do this one thing, and you’re killing us, Fernandez. So we need to take you out… out back…”
Fernandez shook his head feverishly. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”
“Yeah you do,” said J.L. “You do. I’m asking you one more time to just be quiet about it, or we will take care of you.”
“It’s insane… It’s just… It’s…” Fernandez suddenly became rigid, and he stared dead ahead. Wells turned around in his seat, giving thumbs up. He flashed a light in Fernandez’s eyes. They were as wide as wide could be.
Cofield stiffened up. “Now what?” he whispered.
“He thinks he’s back to that day, I suppose. He no longer sees us, though it’s anyone’s guess what he sees now,” said J.L.
“Just keep going,” said Wells.
“Right, well why are you being so stubborn, Fernandez?” said J.L.
“…About what?” asked Fernandez, his voice calm an clear.
“About her, you know! Shoulder-length brown hair, you gotta pick her up today? Well forget it!”
Fernandez could see her again, some time ago, holding a kid in her arms. Her face was a blurry mess, but she was asking him for help…
“No, it’s insane. What you want is insane, and you’re not gonna get away with it!”
“Oh that’s right,” said J.L. “You wouldn’t cooperate even if we gave you all the money in the world, if it was still worth a shit. So that makes this easier. We’re just gonna torch your memory, so when the cops find you, you won’t be worth a shit either.”
“That’s… what? You can do that?” Fernandez’s vision went blurry again.
“Forget that. She was up to something, though. We’re gonna stop it. Her and her fuckin’ kids.”
Fernandez’s vision was still blurry. “What kids?”
“Uhhh, you know…” J.L. was stuck again. “How old’s the youngest kid?” he asked Cofield.
“Five or something.”
“Five? How old is Fernandez?”
“Thirty-three. She’s around 36.”
J.L. thought back to the family portrait. That was taken over a decade ago. He looked around the room, but from what he could see, none of the pictures there had any of the kids in them. He spat the cigarette butt out of his mouth.
“Well yeah,” he said, returning to Fernandez. “You remember, five years ago? You had that party out in…”
“Flushing,” said Cofield.
“Yeah, in the back yard with the rest of ‘em?” said J.L.
Fernandez could see her, holding the kid. Their faces were just a blank.
“Oh, oh yeah…” he said. “But what do you want with her?”
“You know what we want,” said J.L. “You know exactly what we’re after. And we’re getting paid handsomely. Tough luck, Fernandez!”
She was walking with him a week ago. She was worried. He could tell by her expression, a blank face. What was she saying?
“That kid can’t stay with her,” said J.L., keeping his voice just below a shout.
“From the party? No, he belongs with her. Don’t you go near them!” said Fernandez.
“Oh shut the fuck up, we have to do this. So what’s wrong with that kid?”
She was telling him something. What did she sound like? Another voice came in his head talking about a clinic. Two people were standing in front of him in a pitch-black room.
“Nothing’s wrong with him. Why would there be anything–”
“Oh shut up, Fernandez! What was she doing? Was she poking around someplace she wasn’t supposed to be looking at?”
“No!”
“It was the kid then. What’s wrong with that kid?”
She was saying something. He saw a hospital. They used to call it Bellevue. Now it was hobo central…
“What about his dad?” continued J.L. “What’d he do?”
Actually J.L. was wondering that himself. While Fernandez fidgeted, trying to come up with something, he turned to Cofield. “Why’d she marry a retard, anyway?”
“I thought he wasn’t born that way?” said Brady.
“No, he wasn’t,” said Cofield. “He picked up some kind of disease… Here, something about lead poisoning from paint in their apartment.”
“Huh,” said J.L. Wells was giving a very frantic thumbs up from his seat. “But that boy’s gonna be sick, isn’t he?”
“What?” said Fernandez.
J.L. thought a second. “That boy doesn’t belong with her. He needs a real home. He needs to be back in the back yard, where it’s safe!”
“He belongs with her. You can’t take him away!” said Fernandez.
“Or what? What’ll you do about it?”
“Mmmh, you can’t do that! It’s insane and it’s wrong!”
The people were shifting in front of him. He could see them clear as day, their faces blackened into nothingness. He couldn’t move. They trapped him like she said they would.
“He’s gonna be sick, Fernandez. Is he gonna turn out like his father?” said J.L., getting close enough to get in his face. Behind him, Cofield was quietly summing a trooper to get his binder that contained even more of the case material.
Fernandez looked him right in the eye, both of them wide enough to swallow up the whole room. “No… You stay away from her. I gotta walk her back… She needs to see it for herself.”
“No, it’s too late Fernandez. We got you now. She’s not going anywhere. That boy’s coming with us. And we’re gonna clean you out. We have ways of removing those pesky memories.”
She asked him if he wanted to move out west to one of the fugee zones. Why leave Manhattan? It was safe here. But he could see the worry in her eyes, two blank, white marbles in her blurred face.
“You stay away from him,” said Fernandez, starting to twitch with rage. “And you stay away from me! We’re not gonna leave! You can’t do this to me!”
“Who’s gonna stop us?” asked J.L., going eye-to-eye with Fernandez. Fernandez gritted his teeth, spittle jumping out between them. “That’s right… They’re on our side. You got nobody. She can’t help you, and you can’t help her. You’re just stuck here, and when you wake up,” he said with a snap of his fingers, ”all of this will be gone.”
Someone walked behind him. Then his head dipped forward and his eyes bulged. There was incredible pain in his head, and it felt like his skull would break apart. What were they doing?
“Stop! Stop! Stop it!” Fernandez yelled. His legs started dancing as much as they could while the rest of his body contorted, except for his head, which stayed pretty much in place. “Oh God stop it! Stop it!” he continued. The chair swayed, seemingly ready to fly apart.
J.L. backed away, overtaken with the sight of Fernandez reliving something painful and incomplete. Fernandez had dove head-first into one of the black holes in his brain. The appearance of Wells before him abruptly snapped J.L. back to reality.
“Good news!” he said. “I think I’ve mapped out the exact part of his brain that correspond with the specific deleted memories.”
“That’s great,” said Cofield, his attention fixated on the binder he was thumbing through.
“Holy shit,” said Brady. He was standing a few feet away from Fernandez, who was struggling with all his might, which wasn’t much, these days. “Is he going through what I think he’s going through?”
“I guess this is how they burn brains down in SoHo,” said J.L.
“Look at this,” said Cofield, pointing to a page in the binder. “The father’s name is Ryan Celezny, lives near old Union Square in apartments built during the first migration to the city. Moved there four years ago. Turned into a retard two years ago. Guess who built those apartments?”
“You’re kidding,” said Brady.
“Ricardo Fernandez,” said Cofield. “Grandpa.”
J.L. and Brady looked at each other. “Guy marries her daughter, has kids with her, moves into his apartment, gets sick. She notices the similarities between him and the clinic she works at, realizes it could happen to her kids, tries to bail out…” said Brady.
“Yeah but everyone knows those apartments are shit,” said J.L.
“Not those apartments. In that area, people expect to live in places that aren’t fucking slow-burning death traps,” said Cofield. “If she steps forward with that, it could turn the city against Ricardo.”
“So he takes her and the kids, the only evidence anyone would really buy that his shit was dangerous; turns Jason into a blathering idiot; then when it all blows over, maybe arranges for the kids to be found so he can raise ‘em out here…” said Brady.
“I expect nothing less from these people,” said Cofield.
“Can you make it stick?” said J.L.
“Maybe. We’ll worry about that,” said Cofield.
Cofield got up and tossed J.L. his bag. He motioned for him to follow. They walked to the front of the house as Fernandez, finally without strength, slumped in his chair.
“The APB on you is lifted. Get the fuck outta here. Don’t come back,” Cofield said as J.L. looked out into the darkened street.
J.L. wondered how long Fernandez would be on his trip, reliving a story he thought was mercifully obliterated from his mind. He could still hear him begging those guys not to destroy half his soul just to cover up a cheap power grab. He also wondered if he’d ever meet Cofield again. It was hard to see how they wouldn’t. In a city this large, a million stories are told every day, and sometimes they even end.
* * *
Ricardo Fernandez was caught trying to flee the state after he caught wind of police interest in his whereabouts. Patrick, Ryan Jr. and Celeste Celezny were found alive and relatively unharmed in a construction sight in Chelsea.
