David Baldacci: Memory Man

“How’d you get this number?”

“Friend of a friend.”

“Second time I’ve heard that phrase today. Don’t like it any better this go-round.”

“Mr. Decker, it’s been sixteen months. You must be feeling something knowing that the police have finally made an arrest.”

“How do you know they have?”

“I work the police beat. I have contacts. Solid ones that told me a suspect is in custody. Do you know any more than that? If you do—”

Decker hit the end button and her voice was cut off. The phone immediately rang again, and he turned it off completely.

He hadn’t liked the press when he was a detective, though they could be useful in small measures. However, as a PI he had no use for them at all. And they would get no story or help from him about the case “involving” his family.

He left his room and caught a bus at the corner and rode it to a second bus, which he took all the way downtown. There were a few skyscrapers mixed in with a bunch of other buildings of low and medium height, some in good shape, others not. The streets were well laid out on a tight grid of right angles and straight thoroughfares. He hadn’t spent much time downtown. Crime, the serious crime at least, was either on the north side of town or in the suburbs. But the precinct where he had worked, and where the holding cell was for arrestees, was right here, smack in the center.

He stood on the street and stared across at a building he had walked into every day for a very long time: Precinct Number 2. It was actually Precinct Number 1, because the old number 1 had burned down. But no one had taken the time to redo the numbers. Probably not in the budget.

It was named after Walter James O’Malley, a chief of distinction some forty years ago. He’d dropped dead outside a bar with his mistress clinging to his arm. But that had not stopped them from naming a building after him, which proved conclusively that adultery did not really harm one’s legacy. Even if it killed you.

His old digs were on the third floor. He could see the one window he would stare out, when he wasn’t looking at Lancaster, who sat directly opposite him in the cramped quarters. The holding cells were in the basement and on the side facing this street, which meant that Sebastian Leopold was barely fifty feet away from him.

He had never been this close to his family’s alleged killer. Yet maybe he had, when he’d apparently dissed this guy at the 7-Eleven.

He turned away when he saw two plainclothes and a uniform that he knew. Though he had changed a lot since he’d left the force, he doubted they could miss him. Stepping into an alley, he leaned against the wall. His anxiety level was riding high. Headaches came and went. His brain grew tired because it just never stopped. Not even when he was asleep. It was as though his subconscious was actually his conscious. For a man who never forgot anything it was difficult for him to remember who he used to be. And how he had gotten to be what he was now.

He closed his eyes.

This “gift” came to me when I was all of twenty-two years old. I was a middling college football player who walked on to an NFL team carrying only fair ability, but a ferocious chip on my shoulder. I stepped on the field for the first game of the season after playing my butt off during the preseason and surviving the final cut. I’m on the kickoff team. My job is simple: Sacrifice my body to create mayhem and holes in the return team so other guys can make the stop. I run my ass down the field. I’m about to make mayhem. I’m running so hard that snot is flying from my nose and spit from my mouth. I’m being paid more money than I’ve ever made in my life. I aim to earn it. I’m about to lay some dude out, stone cold out.

And that’s all I remember. Dwayne LeCroix, a rookie out of LSU, was five inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than me but apparently a force to be reckoned with, because he laid me out on that field with a hit I never saw coming. The dude blew me up, as they say in the NFL. He would be out of the league in four years with both knees devoid of cartilage, his left shoulder pared down to nothing but bone on bone, and his bank account overdrawn. He was currently residing in a max prison in Shreveport for crimes committed against his fellow humans, and he would die there one day either soon or distant. But on that day he walked away, fist pumping and sauntering like the cock over the hens, while I lay on the field unconscious.

And after that collision nothing for me would ever be the same.

Not a damn thing.

Decker opened his eyes when he heard the commotion across the street. Doors were being thrown open. Cars were squealing as rubber kissed pavement way too hard. Sirens sounded. Raised voices, metal clattering on metal. Heavy boots on concrete.

He stepped clear of the alley and looked across the street as patrol cars, sirens wailing, poured out of the precinct’s underground garage. More officers and plainclothes had burst out of the front door of the precinct and raced to cruisers and unmarked cars parked on the street.

He continued to watch as a bulky SWAT truck lumbered down a side alley on the precinct side of the street, made its turn, and then the driver slammed his foot on the gas and the metal rhino charged down the road.

Decker inched closer to the street, joining a bunch of citizens who had appeared from the crevices of their lives to watch this disturbing spectacle. He listened to the others to see if they knew what was happening, but everyone there seemed to be stunned by what they were seeing.

Decker hurried across the street when he saw the man emerge from the precinct.

“Pete?” said Decker.

The man was dressed in a suit with stains on the sleeve. He was in his early sixties, very near retirement, slightly stooped and with comb-over gray hair. He stopped and looked up at him. Decker could see that Pete Rourke had his service weapon out and was checking the mag.

“Amos? What the hell are you doing here?“

“I was just passing by. What’s going on?”

Pete turned pale and looked ready to collapse on the pavement. “Got some sicko at Mansfield High School. Walked in loaded for war and started shooting up the place. Lots of bodies, Decker. Mostly kids. I gotta go.” He let out a quick sob. “Shit, my grandson goes there. He’s just a freshman. Don’t know if he...”

He turned and stumbled toward his car, a light tan Malibu, fell inside, started it up, and left tire rubber on the street.

Decker watched him go. An army of cops heading to a shot-up high school? Mansfield High. Where Decker had gone, a thousand years ago.

He looked around as the sounds of the sirens dissipated. The folks across the street were dispersing, returning to their slivers of existence. Many were checking their phones for news. Decker did the same, but there was nothing as yet. It was all still just happening. However, the news would pick it up and then not let it go.

Until the next shooting came along. Then they would rush headlong that way.

Until the next one.

Decker stared up at the door to the precinct. He wondered how many personnel would be left in the building. Surely they would have kept some behind. They had a high-profile prisoner in a cage there.

He touched the bulge of the gun at his waistband. That would be a problem. A magnetometer was right inside the front door. He looked around and spotted the trash can next to the building. He walked over and lifted the top. It was barely a quarter full. Trash pickup wasn’t until the end of the week, he recalled. There was a rag on top of the trash pile. He slipped out his gun, wrapped it in the rag, and set it down in the can.