Chapter Three
When Maggie gets off the Amtrak at New York City’s Moynihan Train Hall, Porkchop is already waiting by the tracks.
Porkchop is not playing with a phone. He’s not shuffling his feet.
He just stands there with Zen-like patience, an older version of his surgeon son.
Porkchop looks like what he is—a lifelong biker.
He’s got the salt-and-pepper beard, green bandana holding back the long hair, leather jacket, faded blue jeans with splashes of motor oil discoloring them.
His silver belt buckle is a skull and crossbones.
His skin is tan and weathered from years on the road, his face handsome and hard, like something carved into stone.
Porkchop meets her eye and gives the slightest of nods.
If he’d been wearing a cowboy hat, he would have tipped it at her.
She hurries over, trying not to run, and Porkchop spreads his thick arms wide to welcome her.
When he hugs her, she vanishes for a moment.
Her eyes close. Porkchop is a big bear of a man.
He makes her feel small and safe, and since those feelings don’t come often, Maggie just settles into that for a few moments.
He holds her close and stays silent. Porkchop exudes both calm and electricity.
Like his son.
There is the faint whiff of Marlboros—Porkchop has always been a smoker—and here that familiar smell deepens her comfort. She almost asks him for a cigarette, even though she hasn’t smoked in ten years.
Once they step back, Porkchop asks, “Where are you staying?”
There is no reason for the normal “how are you, how was the trip” type pleasantries with Porkchop; the embrace took care of those.
“Aman hotel.”
“Whoa. Classy.”
“Yes.”
“I thought you were broke.”
“I’m not paying for it.”
Porkchop arches an eyebrow, and she sees the echo of his son when he does. “Oh?”
“It’s a business proposition,” she says.
“Oh?”
“Stop that.”
Porkchop grabs her overnight bag, and they start for the door. “Want to tell me about it?”
“I do not,” Maggie says.
“Then should we head to Vipers?”
“It’s a little early, no?”
“We do a nice brunch now.”
“Seriously?”
“Tourist trade, my dear. The gang is anxious to see you.”
Vipers for Bikers is partially what it sounds like—a biker bar located in the shadow of MetLife Stadium off Route 17.
Back in the day, it was a hardcore biker bar/strip joint with the moniker, written out in neon flickering script, Hotties on Hogs.
Porkchop had bought Hotties when it went bankrupt eight years ago and gentrified it into a touristy cosplay biker bar/restaurant called Vipers for Bikers.
“That’s nice,” Maggie says. “And I want to see everyone.” Then she puts her hand on Porkchop’s arm. “But I need to stop at Trace’s apartment before we go.”
She waits for Porkchop’s reaction, but she doesn’t get much of one.
“Why?”
“Because I always do that when I’m in the city.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And maybe we can get a beat on where he is.”
“Bangladesh.”
“Do we still believe that?” Maggie asks.
Porkchop doesn’t reply.
They exit the station onto a packed Eighth Avenue. Madison Square Garden in all its coliseum-like splendor is across the street. Porkchop’s bike is parked on the corner of 31st Street. Maggie is surprised when she sees it isn’t a Harley-Davidson.
“Since when do you ride a BMW R 18, Porkchop?”
“Since they started sponsoring me.”
“For real?”
Porkchop nods. “I get a free bike, free gas, plus a grand a month.”
“Sweet,” she says.
“I also prefer the BMW’s shaft transmission over the belt transmission of a Harley. Makes for a smoother ride. The BMW has three ride modes—rain, roll, and rock—whereas the Harley only has one.”
“They tell you to say that?”
“And exactly that,” he replies with a grin. “Took me three weeks to memorize it.”
Two young bikers guard the BMW. Both wear a patch with the Serpents and Saints logo on their upper right sleeve.
Serpents and Saints is Porkchop’s… She would call it a motorcycle “gang,” but that brought up Hells Angels connotations and that didn’t come close to fitting anymore. Maybe thirty years ago. Not anymore.
The Serpents and Saints logo is a mean-looking, black-and-gold, heavily fanged snake with a halo over its head.
Marc had a tattoo of it on his upper right quadriceps, albeit a far more cartoonish version with a goofily smiling serpent who looked about as mean as Snoopy.
Instead of black and gold, his Serpent and Saint was garish orange and purple; instead of an intimidating glare, his serpent had a silly, exaggerated wink.
The tattoo, Marc had explained in bed, was the result of a late-night drunken visit to a New Orleans parlor on Mardi Gras when he was nineteen.
“It’s kind of ugly,” she’d told him.
“Don’t worry, my love. Only you’ll see it. Unless you think I should wear a Speedo.”
“Only I’ll see it.”
One of the young bikers is tall, thin, long-haired, white. The other is short, round, buzz-cut, Black. Together, they look like a bowling ball heading toward a pin. Porkchop takes two helmets from the Pin and hands her one. Maggie straps it on and hops on the back of his bike.
“Pinky will drop your bag at the Aman.”
Pinky, she now sees, is Bowling Ball. Porkchop, Pinky—the members like nicknames.
Pinky takes her suitcase. Porkchop gets on the front of the bike.
Maggie wraps her arms around his waist and feels the hum as Porkchop starts up the engine.
When Marc had first introduced Maggie to his father, it had taken her a little time to get used to riding on the back.
It wasn’t that Maggie didn’t trust Porkchop’s driving—it’s just that she hated to be in any situation where she wasn’t in control.
Now she relishes it. No talking. No music. No podcast. Nothing but the feel of the world being washed away by the wind.
Porkchop cruises them up Eighth Avenue. They turn west to Riverside Drive and then back north.
Fifteen minutes later, Porkchop pulls up to the front of their old apartment building in Washington Heights, four blocks from NewYork-Presbyterian medical center.
For a long moment, she and Porkchop just stand there, both of them straddling the bike.
“Porkchop?”
“It’s fine. Go. I’ll wait here for you.”
She watches Porkchop for another moment, but he is already fiddling with something near the throttle. As she turns toward the entrance, the doorman greets her with a wide smile. “Doctor Maggie!”
“Hey, Winston.”
Winston looks as though he wants to hug her, but decorum is what it is. She wants to reach out too, but she isn’t sure she can handle another hug right now. They both stand there for an awkward second before Winston’s smile fades away.
“I’m sorry about…” He stops. “Just about everything.”
“Thank you.”
“You still have Doctor Trace’s key?”
“I do,” she says, showing it to him. “Have you seen him at all?”
“Not in many months,” Winston says. “Doctor Trace’s mailbox got all filled up. We emptied it out, put everything in a box for you. It’s in his apartment.”
“Thanks.”
Maggie stays quiet as the elevator dings its way up to the eighth floor.
They had all moved in at the same time. Maggie and Marc had taken a two bedroom on the fourth floor.
Trace had grabbed a one bedroom on the eighth.
They’d chosen this building because it was reasonably priced and had doormen and, most importantly, it was walking distance to NewYork-Presbyterian medical center.
All three of them had crazy hours doing their surgical residencies.
She unlocks his door and enters. She expects the place to smell stale, but it doesn’t.
There is almost no dust, and Maggie wonders whether Trace hired a housekeeper.
Probably. At Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, the team used to tease Trace for being such a neat freak.
Maggie had at first seen Trace as more hyperorganized, an überpreparer, someone tightly wound in a way that made him focused, detailed, a great surgeon.
The furniture is modular, beige, functional; everything about the place screams, “A man lives here alone.” There are two items on display with any flair or prominence—and they stand side by side on his acrylic dining room table.
The first is a model of the human heart signed by two legendary cardiothoracic surgeons credited with creating the first artificial heart, Michael DeBakey and Denton Cooley.
It’s the kind of anatomy model you might find in any doctor’s office or biology class.
The second item, displayed under Plexiglas next to the DeBakey-Cooley model, is an inoperative (though it would definitely be described as cutting-edge and state-of-the-art) prototype of, per the engraving, THUMPR7-TAH—what they’d all hoped would eventually be the next generation in making artificial hearts more permanent and efficient.
Maggie stares at the device, pushing away the bad flashback.
The THUMPR7 had been developed and registered by WorldCures Alliance—that is, Marc, Trace, Maggie.
She hadn’t wanted that—her name attached—because though she had trained in cardiothoracic surgery and assisted Marc and Trace plenty of times, she’d opted to make reconstructive and trauma surgery her official specialties.
The TAH stands for Total Artificial Heart, but the THUMPR7, despite its blend of robotic design, DNA coding, and stem cell research, remained a distant pipe dream.
Maggie knows that better than anyone.