The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams (3 page)

“
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 always 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
.