Before we lifted off, Gershwin phoned the department to check our calls. “Anything?” I said, dreading that Patrick White had appeared, injured in some hideous fashion.
“You had one call, Jefé. Someone named Folger.”
I frowned. Alice Folger? Four years passed like a blur and I was racing through Manhattan trying to get to my brother ahead of the NYPD, while simultaneously appearing to assist their manhunt. Lieutenant Alice Folger started as my adversary, ended up as what Ava might call a brief thang.
What could Alice Folger want?
We were edging toward Okeechobee when I put the air call through my helmet and dialed Bobby Erickson, the ex-FSP sergeant who handled 23rd-floor calls.
“Gershwin told me about a call, Bobby … Folger?”
“Yeah,” he said, chomping something as he spoke. “Name was Alice. With the NYPD.”
“She say what she wanted?”
“Only that an old friend of yours had finally surfaced.” He swallowed. “She sounded real happy, Carson.”
Debro stared through the window at his newest penitent, Patrick White. The man was lying on his back, his head slowly tapping the floor as his eyes rolled slowly in his head. White looked at Debro but, of course, could not see him. He was probably seeing dancing body parts. It was something he had said at the bar: “I’ve got a test coming up tomorrow, anatomy. It’s a toughie and I’ve spent two weeks cramming my head full of body parts.” He had pointed to his head with a laugh, “They dance in there all day, livers, spleens, colons – ascending and decsending, you know – veins, arteries, capillaries …”
“I thought we were solid straight through,” Debro had said. “Like potatoes.”
White had thought that was funny.
Debro felt at his crotch. He’d had two good sessions with White, but the most recent had been two hours ago, and Debro wasn’t back to full heat yet. It was best when you pictured them in your head for an hour or two – imagining it, maybe bringing yourself close with your hand – then stopping and letting it build.
At first he couldn’t get enough – why he started with three in the first week – but since Brighton, one at a time was better. You could focus on things besides sex, like the bad things they’d done and the ways they should pay.
Assuring himself that White was still deep within the triplicate prisons of hallucinations, weakness, and a dead throat, Debro headed downstairs, where the LOGO channel was beaming a trio of female impersonators yammering like lovely little magpies and for a moment Debro savored the thought of putting the whole trio on his floor and beating them with a ball bat.
Debro grabbed a beer, muted the sound, and sat on the couch, feeling relaxed, pleased and, as always, invisible. The cops would be looking for Donnie even more intently, of course. The dead-and-then-alive Donnie, the six-foot-four Donnie, the hospital-orderly-sized Donnie. They’d be looking for dark-complected Donnie. Blue-eyed Donnie. Donnie of the twin tattoos.
Debro smiled to himself. The tattoos had been a stroke of genius, not only bolstering the dead-brother deception, but throwing another wrench into the cops’ machinery.
What was happening with the investigation? He wondered. The only real advantage of having Gary alive was the occasional peek inside Ryder’s head. But the lump of chickenshit had turned pure yellow when Debro finally administered true justice. The fat bitch should have been cheering.
“You took away a boy’s dancing,” Gary had whined the last night of his worthless life. “It was never supposed to be like this.”
“It was your idea, Gary.” Derek had reminded the pouting moron. “Revenge.”
“Not hurting them forever. You started thinking about it that first day!”
A group meeting had just ended at the University, Phase Two, a dozen fat turds sitting in a circle and mewling at Dr Roth. It broke up and it was just Derek and Gary hanging out and talking. Another wave of fatties started in the front door like a parade of elephants, Roth directing them into a side room holding chairs with arms, like when you gave blood. Derek had asked what was going on.
“Those are participants in phase two, the clinical phase,” Roth had said. “There’s more physical monitoring involved. Lipids, cholesterol, insulin levels … tests related to metabolism. There’s a DNA test as well.”
Derek had studied DNA in veterinary school. Like chemistry, it was interesting stuff. Botany, too. A lot more interesting than studying a bunch of stinking animals.
“Why DNA?” he had asked, his senses prickling like he was seeing the future.
“An investigation into genetic aspects of weight.”
“I don’t know much about DNA,” Derek had said, doing his best naïve. “Do the results like, become available for cops to look at? Are they like fingerprints?”
“It’s likely that law enforcement can be granted access to DNA testing, Derek. I should also mention that tens of millions of people are in DNA databanks, so unless you’re planning a life of crime, it doesn’t make a big difference.”
Roth entered the blood-draw room as the pair watched the nurse hand corpulent participants a wood-handled swab so they could brush their teeth for a few seconds, then hand it back.
The Idea appeared in that one, beautiful moment.
What if … Derek had thought. It was just floating-in-his-head kind of thinking. Like when he’d see a cute boy in the street and wonder What if I could tie him down on my kitchen floor and kick that smug look from his face? It was like that. What if you put someone else’s spit in your sample jar. What would happen? You’d be someone else, right? Or someone else would be you.
What if …
It was that very night when Gary – flirting like they were a pair of slender twinks and not a six-hundred-pound monster coming on to a then-three-hundred-pound man – said he was going to enter the Phase Two program. Then he’d put on that ridiculous fucking hat and made all sorts of shit disappear and reappear, Derek pretending it was the coolest thing he’d ever seen but all the time thinking, What if someone else’s spit was on Gary’s swab? What would that mean? What could happen?
Derek had responded to Ocampo’s flirting. Within three nights of sweaty emissions into the rolling bag of fat – Gary sometimes giddy, sometimes weeping – Scott learned the darkest details of Ocampo’s life: the whispers, the insults, the betrayals …
The dead brother.