Майкл Корита - If She Wakes

A block in her memory rises again, and she has a distinct vision of a wolf with its ears pinned back and its hackles raised.

Hobo. The wolf’s name is Hobo.

Why would a wolf have a name? But Oltamu is a name that registers; he is the black man with the nice smile and the expensive watch. Memories are returning now, scattered snapshots.

His name was Amandi Oltamu, and I was driving him. But who is he? Why was I driving him, and where? And what did he do to me?

Tara’s mind is whirling now, trying to capture each crucial detail, knowing that she must catch them all before they escape into the blackness like fireflies and disappear for good.

“Think his family will sue the college?” Shannon asks.

“Maybe. But I don’t see their case yet. The only thing that’s odd is why she parked where she did.”

Because he told me to, damn it, Tara thinks without hesitation. He wanted the Tara tour. This element is strangely vivid amid the fog of all the memories she’s lost — Oltamu asked her to get out of the car. She sees the two of them walking toward a bridge and she knows that this is true. We were both out of the car. We were both out because he wanted to walk, and I was worried about that because of the time, time was tight. But he told me that he wanted to walk, so we started to walk down to the bridge and then the wolf got us. The wolf came out of the darkness and got us.

She knows this is madness, and it scares her that it seems so logical, so clear.

I am not just paralyzed, I am insane.

“Nobody can answer that but her,” Abby Kaplan says, studying Tara’s face, and again Tara feels that strange electric sense of connection just beyond her grasp, like a castaway watching a plane pass overhead. “Do you know anyone who was with her at that dinner?” Abby asks Shannon.

“A few people have reached out.”

“I wonder if anyone would remember whether Oltamu had a phone on him.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s dead, and she can’t talk,” Abby says, running a hand through her hair as if to tamp down frustration. “People are on their phones all the time. He could have been using it right up until the end. And one of these” — she lifts the shoe box — “belongs to him. Unless the salvage guy kept it or sold it already. Neither would surprise me.”

He took pictures with his phone, Tara tells them silently. A selfie with me, because he needed to increase his social media presence. That was what worried him right before he died and I was erased from my own life. The last time I ever smiled, it was for a selfie with a stranger so he could improve his social media profile. If not for that, I’d have been across the bridge.

The lucidity of this is exciting, but she knows it’s still not complete. She is circling the memory like someone fumbling through a dark house searching for a light switch.

“I’ve wondered about her phone,” Shannon says hesitantly, as if she isn’t sure she should make this admission.

“Why?”

“Because when she drove, she put it on one of those magnet things on the dash. It wasn’t there, and it wasn’t in her purse. She was wearing a dress and a thin sweater with no pockets. So if it went into the river, that means she got out with the phone in her hand, as if she was using it.”

Shannon pauses then, which is wonderful, because Tara is frantically snatching at all these fireflies — phone, dress, sweater, river — trying to capture them before they escape into the darkness.

Abby Kaplan clears her throat and says, “I hope she comes back to you soon. For her sake and yours, of course, but also because I’d like to hear what she remembers.” She gives Shannon a business card, tells her to be in touch with any questions, and wishes her well, as if Shannon is alone in this struggle.

She does not look at Tara again before she leaves.

The untimely death of Carlos Ramirez was supposed to bring an end to a problem that should have been resolved easily, but this situation seemed determined to keep turning up like the proverbial bad penny.

Gerry Connors had dealt with such problems before, though, and he wasn’t worried by this one. Not just yet, at least. The potential for concern was floating out there, simply because of the price tag on this job. The price tag, and the German’s reputation. He had never met the German, but he’d heard of him, and when he did meet him, he certainly didn’t want to be delivering bad news.

For this, Gerry had Dax Blackwell, and he needed him to be as good as his bloodline promised he’d be.

Gerry Connors had first made his way into organized crime in the 1990s in his hometown of Belfast, working with the IRA at a time when work was easy to come by for a man who didn’t mind killings and bombings. Gerry felt no fierce loyalty to either church or state, and he hadn’t met many like him in that struggle until the Blackwell brothers arrived. Two freelancers from Australia who looked like sweet lads, blond-haired and blue-eyed and innocent-faced as altar boys, they’d entered a room filled with hardened IRA men, outlined their plan, and didn’t blink in the face of all the hostility and all the bloody history. Men had shouted at them, men had threatened them, and the brothers had calmly named their price and said take it or leave it.

Eventually, the boys in Belfast took it. A week after that, three members of the constabulary had been buried, the nation was in an uproar, and the Blackwells were wealthy — and long gone from the country.

They’d come back, of course. When the money was right, they returned, and during the 1990s, Jack and Patrick found plenty of work in Ireland. So did Gerry. He’d moved to America and gone into contract work, providing papers and identification for those who needed them. Soon he was providing more than papers — cars, guns, and, inevitably, it seemed, killers.

Jack and Patrick had come back around often then.

It was just after 9/11, and the business was experiencing fresh risks when Jack Blackwell requested multiple sets of identification for his newborn son. Gerry was reluctant to take on the task in those days, but he was even more reluctant to disappoint Jack Blackwell. He produced the requested birth certificates, which came from fifteen different states in America, as well as four sets of international papers, Australian, British, Dutch, and Swiss. Each was in a different name, and Jack provided all of the names, which led Gerry to wonder if they meant something to him, if they indicated something from his past life — or perhaps indicated lives he’d ended.

Gerry had no idea what the boy’s real name was, but the first time he’d met him, Jack had called him Dax, and so that was what Gerry went with, even though there was no paperwork for that name. Or at least, none that Gerry had created. Knowing Jack, Gerry figured he’d likely sourced identification from more than one person.

More than a dozen years later, when Gerry had need of Jack and Patrick’s services again, Jack told him they themselves were unavailable, but his son could handle the task. Gerry’s first response was to laugh — a very dangerous response when one was around the Blackwells, but Gerry knew the boy wasn’t even old enough to drive yet.

Jack Blackwell hadn’t laughed. He’d waited until Gerry said, “You’re not serious,” and then the faintest of smiles had crossed his face, and he nodded exactly once.

That was enough.

Nine days later, Dax Blackwell completed his first professional killing. Or at least, his first professional killing for Gerry Connors.

Over the years that followed, Gerry had been in touch with the boy fairly often. He had no idea where he lived or where he’d gone to school — or if he had gone to school, although he was certainly well educated, almost preternaturally bright. He also had no idea how much time the boy actually spent with his father and uncle, but based on his mannerisms and his skills, Gerry suspected that he was with them more often than not. After hearing word of Jack’s and Patrick’s deaths in Montana, Gerry considered offering his condolences to the boy, but he hadn’t. Instead, he offered him work, and the boy accepted the job and completed it. Small-time stuff, mostly, no high-dollar work, no international work. Gerry viewed it as an internship.