Chapter 27

I was halfway to Sticks and Stones when I realized it was no longer there. While I’m no fan of texting and driving, just try pulling off to the side in Wicker Park and see if you’ll ever manage to merge back into the stream of traffic again. Instead, I clutched my phone in frustration, aggravated that there was no raised keypad to press and could no longer rely on my pre-programmed memory-dials. “I just want to call Crash,” I complained to the world at large.

“Calling Crash,” my phone said.

Whoa. Be careful what you wish for.

Crash greeted me with, “And to what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Where are you?”

“No foreplay,” he sighed, “straight into the action. How typically you. If you must know, we’re at Still Goods straightening up after our lunchtime meditation. You should stop by and try it sometime. Might help you to deal with that pesky abruptness of yours.”

The whole “we” and “our” business was still jarring. I course-corrected and headed toward Irving. Since it was officially business hours, the other parts of the store were open, not just Curious Curios. There was a woman at the cash register chatting with a customer, neither of them making any pretense of any type of financial transaction. A teenage girl who probably should’ve been in school was scoping out vintage jewelry. And judging by the old-school punk playing somewhere deep within the building, Crash and Red had settled in happily to their new digs. I followed the sound of a slightly out-of-tune guitar track and found the two of them staple-gunning a hunk of colorful brocade to the far wall. “Just in time,” Crash said. “Hold up that end of the fabric, wouldja? We’ve only got so many hands.”

Well, at least I was good for something. I held up my end of the material while Red crowded up to the wall near me and used the staple gun to show it who was boss. Snap-snap-snap. Close enough to me that I could smell him…and he smelled really good, like fresh incense, before it burns and goes all sooty. Hard to say why I found him so profoundly intimidating. Hot, sure. Confident, definitely. But it was the self-contained gravity to his expression that really made me squirm.

“If I had to look at that awful seventies paneling one more minute…” he murmured, and it was some relief, then, to know that even right up against him, I was hardly even a blip on the guy’s radar. Of course, just as I thought that, he turned the full brunt of his dark gaze to me and said, “Something’s wrong. What is it?”

I swallowed hard. “You’re an empath too?”

He non-answered with the shadow of a smile.

“There’s always something wrong with Vic,” Crash chimed in. Except he was watching me hard now too, assessing my level of anxiety and teasing me only for form’s sake. “Why else would he grace me with his presence?”

“Curtis,” Red chided gently. “Be nice.”

Crash gave me a sizzling look and scraped his tongue stud along the ridge of his lower teeth.

Red looped his arm through mine and settled me in a squeaky wooden chair. The lumpy seat was stuffed with springs and horsehair, or maybe old auto parts. He pulled up an ottoman and folded himself onto it, cross-legged, and lavished the discomfort of his full and utter attention on me. “Tell us about it. Talking about your problems can help clarify how you really feel.”

I hesitated, and Crash turned up the mix tape. A repetitive three-chord anthem blared. “Don’t worry. Your secrets are safe here.”

“Fine.” I looked up at the ceiling and said, “So I’m at the FPMP and it should be easy, or at least doable, but the job’s not what I was told and turns out I suck, people are getting killed. Agents. Half my permanent record’s blacked out but I’m in no position to ask my boss why, and now someone I trained with is back and she hates me, and maybe if I could fucking remember something that no normal person would ever forget, I could tell her and set everything right.”

I paused, gulped some air, and Crash said, “Does that about cover it?”

“I guess.”

He asked Red, “You ever work with recovered memories?”

“Some. Although it’s worth considering whether it’s best to leave the past in the past.”

“Normally,” Crash said thoughtfully, “I’d concur. But the ex-PsyCop here has seen so much wrongness, it begs the question: what if his imagination is worse than what actually went down?”

“It’s up to you, Victor,” Red told me.

“Recovering memories. What would it…entail?”

“Just talk to me. That’s all.”

“There’s nothing to say. I don’t remember.”

Red shrugged easily. “No pressure. Just start with something you do know.”

I don’t know squat, I thought, but then the song changed to one of those ubiquitous punk songs that every bratty punk band covers, badly, and if I closed my eyes, I could picture a basement rec room with paneling exactly like the one we were just covering up, and a similar boombox too, with the same song cranking in the background. Three other kids were there. Friends, I guess, kids to swap albums with or share homework. All boys. Straight, and that was fine. I knew where to go to scratch that itch outside our normal stomping grounds, so I wouldn’t end up getting the snot kicked out of me at school. 

“I was fifteen.” Which would’ve made my friends thirteen, given the two grades I’d repeated. I conveniently omitted that detail. And the fact that I was still in middle school. “We came up with the great idea to pool our money to buy a pack of cigarettes. Not sure if I was tall enough to actually pass for eighteen or the convenience store clerk just didn’t care enough to check.”

I remembered us all pooling our cash on the rec room floor. It was linoleum, the color of putty, with gray and black flecks. Damn. If I could dredge up that level of detail, maybe my memory wasn’t as atrocious as I’d always thought.

I’d gone into the store alone, I did remember that, because we decided it would look suspicious if I was surrounded by a group of kids less than five feet tall. I asked for a pack of Marlboros, because back then Marlboro could still advertise on anything that stayed still long enough to slap a logo on it. “Reds?” the guy asked. I didn’t know what he meant, but I nodded anyway. Money changed hands, mostly quarters. And as I walked out of the store with that pack of Marlboro Reds in my hand, I felt, for the first time, like I’d accomplished something significant with my life.

My eighth grade buddies were pretty damn impressed, too.

Chicago neighborhoods vary so widely, it seems like at least a dozen different cities are contained in its borders. Where I’d grown up, dour clusters of small single-family homes in various shades of brown brick squatted, punctuated by strip malls and vast, overgrown stretches of fallow land surrounded by dead steel mills. It wasn’t just easy to sneak off and get up to no good—we were so isolated, it was a damn wonder we ever made it back without being slaughtered for our fresh young kidneys.

We’d trooped out behind the cover of an abandoned outbuilding made of corrugated metal, dented like someone had used it to stop an oncoming pickup truck, and found a spot to divvy up our cigarettes.

“We went over by the railroad tracks to smoke, because everything else was so overgrown, you couldn’t see the rats coming. The tracks were clear. They were still used for freight. I ended up wandering away from my friends because I was too cool to let them see I didn’t actually inhale, and walking from tie to tie, pretty soon I was a few hundred feet away from them. I said to myself, Oh, there’s a shoe….”

Crash nudged Red aside with his butt, and squeezed onto the ottoman beside him.

“A man’s shoe,” I said.

They both leaned forward expectantly.

And then what? No idea. “That’s all.”

Red looked at Crash, then back at me. “Do you remember going back home after you were out smoking? Maybe you got caught. Or maybe you got away with it.”

No memory whatsoever. I shrugged.

“How about supper? Were both your parents there?”

“No parents,” I said blankly. Because I couldn’t really recall specifically who was there. But obviously, I wasn’t a fifteen-year-old eighth grader living alone. “I was with a foster family. I’ve had more than one.”

“How many?” Red asked.

I shrugged. “Several.”

“Are you being vague because you don’t want to tell me, or because you can’t?”

“I really don’t see what this has to do with….” I trailed off as discomfort churned in my gut. “I’m not sure.”

“What do you think happened?”

I rubbed my eye. “Stands to reason I found a body.”

“Are you sure?” Red asked. “Just because you saw a shoe? Could be you found a homeless man. Or someone sleeping off a bender. Or even a bag of trash split open.”

“You see what I’ve seen, all these years, makes it hard to keep an open mind. A woman’s all beat up? It’s her man. Someone disappears? They’re dead. I block out a memory of a shoe on the railroad tracks…it’s more than just footwear.”

“Do you want to know what really happened with that shoe?” Red asked.

I didn’t. Which struck me as awfully damn suspicious. “How?”

“Tell me again about the moment you saw it.” He stood and placed his hands on the creaky chair’s armrests and stared right in my face. It should’ve felt invasive having him that up-close and personal, but his eyes were so riveting, I managed to sidestep my discomfort and focus. “You saw a shoe, and then?”

I put myself on those railroad tracks. I’ve got a cigarette in my hand. I have no idea how to even hold it, and goddamn it, after all the trouble we went through to get them, they taste foul and I can’t believe I blew all my money and I could’ve had peanut butter cups instead. Now I’m stuck with five cigarettes I’ve got no desire to smoke. Maybe I could sell the remaining four to one of the other kids. I’d have to be clever about it. Make some excuse about needing the money. 

Would they go for it, or would I be blowing whatever coolness points I’d scored when I bought the pack? Maybe it would just be easier to throw the rest in the weeds and say I’d smoked them. I was glancing down at the overgrown grass when I saw the shoe. A beige platform oxford. With a spongy bottom and a cracked seam behind the toe where the fake leather was giving way. And when I step off the tracks to get a better look at it—

Nothing.

“I spot a shoe and that’s all. I don’t remember.”

“Did you tell your friends?”

I must have. But when I tried to remember, each of their faces grew indistinct and their names slipped away. If I’d even recalled them to begin with.

When I didn’t answer, Red suggested, “Pretend I’m there. And you’re telling me about the shoe.”

“Okay. Right. So I was on the railroad tracks and I saw this shoe and—” I shook my head. “And then there’s nothing.”

Or so I’d told myself, except the look in Red’s eyes said different. Not an empath, then. A telepath or clairvoyant. He stood up straight and took a deep, cleansing breath.

“Everything okay?” Crash asked.

Red said, “There was a woman.”

“It was definitely a man’s shoe,” I said. “That’s probably the only thing I know for sure.”

“Afterward,” Red clarified. He closed his eyes and thought. “A white woman. Hair slicked back tight, thick glasses. Turtleneck.”

A flicker. Maybe. And then it was gone. “What about her?” I asked cautiously.

“She’s saying…you won’t remember.”