Chapter Three
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.
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 of actual problems, 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 few district 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.
She hitches her tote, does a quick head check of the street: A car is cornering farther along near Hector’s Café, a song by Georgia Satellites blaring from the speakers.
Nomi stays cautious. The last thing either she or Irma needs is to have their continuing connection exposed—bad for Irma, still on the force, and bad for Nomi, whose access to police intel would be crippled.
She turns left onto Washington, then left again toward home, staying low.
Before the deli grocery on Gansevoort, she stops.
Simon Noone is still making his calls at the pay phone kiosk, his paper bag sitting on the phone housing.
His back is to her. To be honest, this is a guy she’s barely noticed except for registering his presence on the floor above with the polite disinterest you maintain as an urban courtesy for your immediate neighbors.
Now she retreats near a dumpster and its typical whiff of garbage and rotted offal so she can examine him like he’s some kind of weird bug.
First, the superficial stuff: He looks to be about mid-twenties.
He has height, a lean build, broad shoulders.
His peacoat hangs well over his black shirt and jeans—the shirt looks like silk, although she might be mistaken.
He’s wearing engineer boots, and he’s pushed his sunglasses up into his hair.
It’s a good look on him; the pieces all seem thrifted, but he clearly knows quality.
Which is interesting, because living among the artists and drag queens of the West Village, Nomi’s learned that personal style is almost always about instinct, what feels good, what looks right.
If this guy really has no memory of his past, if he’s dressing purely on instinct, she’ll bet a dime to a dollar that he once came from money.
And he has no idea. Because he has amnesia.
She chews her lip. Goddammit. Is she really thinking of engaging with this?
That would be stupid, because there’s something off about him, no doubt.
The way he followed her—that lack of recognition of social cues could signify that he’s lived somewhere the cues are different, or it could mean he’s a jerk.
Hard to call. Although the way he monstered Malcolm in the hallway .
. . That’s significant. The blankness of Noone’s tone during the incident was unnerving—then after it was over, he seemed completely casual, as if he’d flicked some sort of internal switch from “intimidatingly scary” back to “normal.”
Noone said he’s good at languages: Violence is a language, apparently one he knows well enough to toggle on and off.
Again, living in Central America for five years might have affected his reactions to incidents that seem threatening.
But confrontational situations aside, there’s something else strange about him, like a flush of fever under his skin, radiating heat when you get too close .
. . Nomi’s own skin prickles in response, although she can’t quite put her finger on why.
The strangeness is there, though: amorphous, subliminal.
Unfortunately, she’s just messed up enough to find strange people interesting.
And it doesn’t dilute her kneejerk reaction to his story.
Amnesia. To lose your memory is to be cut off from everything you know.
All your people. Your understanding of yourself: your lifestyle, your job, your identity.
To be pruned away from all the elements that form a picture of yourself that makes sense . . .
She knows what that’s like. Knows it fairly intimately, in fact.
Noone turns in profile, taps his pen against the phone housing, talks down into the handset, glances toward the dumpster. Nomi feels his attention land when he sees her. He gives her an acknowledging nod, maybe knowing that she is—right this minute—making up her mind about him.
She thinks of the way his hands shook. Now do you see why I need your help?
“You’re not doing this,” she whispers. “No fucking way. Just cut him loose.”
Right.
Nomi marches along the street to the phone kiosk. She makes a small wave, although she’s clearly already got his attention. “Hey.”
“Okay.” Noone’s eyes are on her as he finishes his call. “Yes, I appreciate this very much, thank you.” He hangs the battered receiver back on the hook. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Nomi says. “Who are you calling?”
No preamble, no apology for the rude question—Noone’s eyebrows rise, but he replies anyway. “A bunch of organizations that may have done missionary fieldwork at the border of southwest Mexico and Guatemala from 1981 to 1983. I want to see if any of them lost any people.”
“You think you were a missionary?”
“No.” He makes a thin smile. “But . . . I don’t know. That’s the problem, right? I could have come from anywhere. I could have been a backpacker, or a missionary, or—”