“I said what any self-respecting woman says to a lyric-quotin’ man named Michael Jackson,” Annie said. She took a drag off her cigarette for dramatic effect. “I told him to beat it.”
Now we were both cackling, Annie blowing smoke into the sky and me wiping away tears, and I was so grateful she was here because after the morning I’d had, the art my hand had just spun—and the somber evening to come—goddamn, I needed a good belly laugh.
We smiled in the noon sunlight, enjoying the buzzy, giddy afterglow you get after sharing a good joke. I reached into my lunch bag and pulled out my sandwich. She finally nodded at the art pad still in my lap.
“You’re really good,” she said. “Maybe it’s even better than it was before. You get into a zone, don’t you?”
I took a bite of my sandwich and nodded, enjoying the salty-sweetness of the peanut butter and raspberry preserves.
“Michelle’s like that, too,” Annie said. “Twelve years old, but she’s gonna be a star someday. She bangs the hell out of those drums, Zach. Practices all the time. But when she plays, oh dear, look out. She’s in another place.”
“Yes,” I said. “We all have that secret, safe place inside.” I paused, noodling over her words. I tapped the sketch. “You said it was better than it was before…”
She inhaled an emphatic uh-huh, and then exhaled. “This black stuff you drew on him. Makes it less real, but more… realistic. I bet that’s what he’s like on the inside. I’m here today because I’m pulling a double shift, Zach. I was the one who admitted him last night. Midnight, to avoid the media.” Her face faltered. Her voice was low now. “He’s cruel.”
My stomach tightened, again. I stopped in mid-bite, felt the raspberry jam squirt between my teeth, sensed a glob of the stuff land on my shirt. I swallowed, hard.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked. It came out sounding more like a dry-throated croak than a question, but Annie didn’t seem to notice. “I’m… ah. Doc Peterson assigned me to him. I’m going down in a few hours.”
Annie’s chocolate eyes narrowed.
“Sonuvawhore,” she said, and then immediately pressed a hand over her lips. Now it was her turn to blush. “I’m sorry about that, I truly am.” I shook my head: It doesn’t matter. Her eyes flitted to my art pad, then back to my face. “I just can’t imagine why our attic madman would put you on this. You know this cat’s story, don’t you? You’ve seen the papers, right?”
“His admittance report, some of his background.”
“Not his papers, hon,” Annie said. She rummaged in her purse again. “Newspapers. Here.”
She passed over a crumpled page torn from that morning’s New York Times. I read the headline—MURDER TRIAL BEGINS NEXT WEEK FOR ‘BLIND’ MAN—and scanned the article, which was mercifully short. My eyes reached the end of the story. They stopped. They doubled back to the last paragraph.
There was my surname, in the walk-off quote.
“I cannot understate my office’s dedication to convicting Mr. Grace,” said New York District Attorney William V. Taylor. “We will not allow a serial killer to walk these streets. The man might be blind, he might not be. But he is guilty, and I’ll personally ensure that he is punished to the law’s fullest extent—including the death penalty, if the jury allows it and the moratorium is lifted.”
“Oh shit,” I said.
Annie placed her hand on my shoulder. Her voice was gentle, sympathetic. “Yeah. I’m sorry, darlin’, but it looks like you’re in a real professional pickle.”
I pulled my eyes away from the newspaper, to Annie’s worried face. So. She knew, too. I wasn’t upset by this. I’ve never tried to hide whose son I was (well, not since back in my Anti-Zach days), but I’ve never flaunted it, either. Within days of being hired at The Brink, people had deduced that my dad was the D.A., confirmed it with me, and tweeted the news like little songbirds. I was a little surprised that the gossip had crept up the clock to the night shift staff… but them’s the breaks.
Annie patted my shoulder again. “I’ve seen him on TV. I bet he’s just putting on a show for the reporters, right? You gotta be a bulldog on crime in this town. But I think it’s just an act, just for the cameras.”
I shook my head. “It isn’t,” I whispered. “It never has been.”
After a minute of strained silence, Annie and I stood and walked away from Primoris Maximus, back toward The Brink. As Annie made small talk and I half-listened, I gazed up into the bright autumn sky, marveling at the battleship clouds scraping across the horizon, knowing that it would be sunset when I saw the sky again, knowing that it would be far darker, long before that.
It was time to make my rounds and tend to my people.
And then, time to meet Martin Grace.
4
Brinkvale is the mental health equivalent of Tatooine.
“If there’s a bright center to the universe,” my hero Luke Sky-walker once said, “you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.” My patients’ stories are stranger than anything you’d find in that planet’s intergalactic cantina, but luckily this day’s sessions were brief and mostly positive that afternoon.
Understanding my patients requires patience, the kind reserved for puzzle boxes and correspondence chess. Today, I finally understood a message that Nam Ngo, a benign Vietnamese watch repairman from Brooklyn, had built into a sculpture. The man hasn’t said a word in twenty years. But when I poured a boxful of clockwork parts onto his dorm table two weeks ago and asked him to tell me about himself, Nam’s bespectacled face brightened, and he’d gotten to work.
Brinkvale staff now called him “The Clocktalker” (many of my patients seem to acquire these superhero-like nicknames), and I’ve been charged with deciphering the meanings behind his tick-tock sculptures.
Today, Ngo’s sculpture was a man-shaped thing with a watch for a head. Nam twisted a key in the tiny mechanoid’s back and beamed. The metal man ran in place, its head ratcheting to look over its shoulder. As it repeated this, Nam had made a circle with one hand and placed it to his eye. His other hand turned an invisible crank near his face.
Ten minutes later, I’d deduced that his favorite movie was North By Northwest. The compass-like position of the hands on the watch’s face was the critical clue. The automaton’s movements replicated Nam’s favorite scene: Cary Grant being chased by the crop-duster.
That was the session. No blaring breakthrough “Hallelujah chorus”; Nam was simply telling me his story. I considered his case a long-term project.
After my visit with The Clocktalker, I spent time with “Bloody Mary”—Mary Winfield, a beautiful thirty-something with a phobia of reflective surfaces. When we met a month ago, she painted the same image, day after day, with her elegant brown fingers: Mary’s mirror image, covered in streaks of blood, holding a decomposing infant. “Baby Blue” represented the son she’d drowned a year ago at a public pool in Queens.
Since then, Mary’s art had slowly pulled away from this horror. In today’s finger painting, Baby Blue was beginning to leave his mother’s arms. The child would ascend as the weeks went on, I suspected—rising higher and higher on the canvas, until Mary finally found peace.
Jaded Morlocks say that The Brink’s foundations slide a little deeper into New York’s bedrock each year. The structure is home to vermin of all kinds: spiders the size of silver dollars, rats as fast as they are large, legions of fat, black cockroaches. Our charitably named “pest control problem” has been a source of shrieking, screaming madness for Gerald Carver, a former bug spray chemist.