Chapter Three
September 1987, Friday
Amnesia.
Let me think about it.
Nomi hits the corner of Gansevoort and turns right onto Washington. She hardly needs her beanie—fall has arrived, but the afternoons refuse to let go of the last heavy summer heat. She keeps it on anyway for anonymity. Sun shoots through the iron rafters above her as she passes under the portico of Centaur beef packaging. Her boots already have that tacky feeling underfoot from walking around on streets and sidewalks that never really lose their residual lip-gloss scum of blood, no matter how well the meat workers hose everything down. She adjusts the tote with her groceries and keeps marching, trying to reach Enrique before he finishes work at three.
Underneath, the awareness that she’s also marching to get some distance from Simon Noone and his bizarre, alluring story, too much like aNational Enquirerheadline to be real:Amnesia in the Guatemalan Jungle! Details page 4.
If she hadn’t been watching Noone as he explained his problem, she wouldn’t have believed it. But she saw his face when she told him he’d been speaking Italian in the grocery: You can’t fake that kind of shock. It wasn’t just surprise; he was genuinely horrified. Nomi’s willing to bet real money he’s now standing at the phone kiosk back on Gansevoort,combing his memory for all the times he might’ve spoken a foreign language without even realizing ...
But she doesn’t have time for this now. Solange Jackson is relying on her to stay focused, and that woman has a metric ton ofactualproblems, not some possibly invented amnesia story. Even if Noone isn’t lying, trying to run a line of some kind—to what purpose? Who the hell knows, the world is full of shysters—maybe even the stuff he told her, the stuff he thinks is true, is compromised by his fucked-up brain. Because how do you survive a gunshot wound to the head? In her time on the force, Nomi never saw such a thing.
So Noone’s probably lying, and his reaction outside the grocery was a really good fake-out. Also, she just doesn’t need to be around the brand of slightly terrifying menace that he exhibited with Malcolm Forest outside her apartment. And that should be the end of it.
Right.
She avoids getting run down by a J.A.W.D. Inc. Poultry Distributors truck as she crosses at the corner of Washington and Little West Twelfth and turns right. A bunch of white vans, some of them tagged with graffiti hieroglyphics, are parked haphazardly off the curb up ahead. The metal shutter of the auto-mechanic shop is open: Nomi can hear someone working an angle grinder, and the background radio noise of Billy Idol mixing with the sound of a pneumatic wrench.
She walks through the wide door, nods at the two other men in the workshop. There are a lot of metal edges and sharp tools in here, which she’s mindful not to look at. Skirting the carcass of a utility van, she scouts for legs at floor level, finds them under the body of a diesel one-ton truck jacked up on three tires.
“Enrique, you home?”
He slides out on the crawler board from underneath the truck, a good-looking Puerto Rican guy who seems like a typical grease monkey except for the pierced ears and the eyeliner. “Hey, baby girl—you want to pass me that piece-of-shit socket wrench there? I got your mail, don’t worry.”
“You’re a champ.”
“I know it.”
Nomi finds the socket wrench; Enrique fishes out a gold envelope from the top pocket of his coveralls; they make the swap.
“Appreciate this,” Nomi says.
“No problem, babe. And hey, I heard from my jeweler friend, Marco, about that piece you ordered? He says maybe it’s ready today or tomorrow.”
“Really?” Nomi feels her palms sweat a little, controls it, redirects. “Okay, that’s great. How’s your aunt doing?”
Enrique fits a spark plug socket to the wrench. “Irma’s good, sends her love. Says she wishes you were still hanging out with her in the RMP.”
“Yeah, man, I wish that too.” It’s the right thing to say, but it’s a lie. She loves Irma, her former partner, like she loved her own mother, but there’s no power on earth that could make Nomi want to return to radio motor patrol—or any other patrol—with the New York City Police Department. “You give her a hug from me, okay? Tell her I’ll try to arrange for us to meet up soon.”
“Will do.” Enrique slides halfway back under the truck, pops out again. “You coming to the thing tonight?”
“What’s that?”
“At the Riverview. Gonna be some party.”
“Your girls will be there?”
“You betcha.” Enrique taps the wrench head against the metal undercarriage. The radio has switched from Billy Idol to Kim Wilde. “We’re onstage about eleven, but I’ll be around before then. Come along and I’ll comp you.”
“Well, that would be fine.” Nomi grins, taps his booted foot with her own. “Cool, see you then.”
“Bye, hon.”
Back out on the street, Nomi retraces her steps toward Washington. A Friday-night party at the Riverview means she can talk with a fewdistrict contacts. Irma’s envelope hopefully has the information she needs on Eric Lamonte’s priors, which will help with Solange Jackson’s case, but Nomi still needs more on Lamonte’s associates, which is news she might be able to get locally.
