Eye Wit

—Ronald Lee

Hamilton, Canada

October 2010

1

Sunday in the city was looking pretty good to Yoko Kamimura before a roller-blader blew by, a hot-air balloon blew in, and her plans blew up.

She’d been walking up Second Avenue just before seven a.m. It was late June, a day that would provide stifling heat and humidity once fully aroused. But at that early hour the city was as cool and tranquil as her heart and just as full of promising possibilities.

Life had turned around for Yoko. Almost a year ago she’d seen a woman gunned down in front of her on New York’s mean streets, been held hostage by goons in the abandoned Quaker Meeting House on Gramercy Park South and barely escaped with her life. Things were different now, thank the gods. This morning she’d only spend an hour or so in her office at the College of Optometry. An optometrist who specialized in behavioral vision care, Yoko worked three mornings a week at the Infants’ Vision Clinic and the rest of the time she researched her specialty. Today, she was just catching up on some of the never-ending desk work while waiting to meet Dan Riley, the NYPD detective she’d met during the bizarre case she’d helped solve. The detective who, when they weren’t at odds with each other, had filled many of her days and quite a few of the nights since then.

Dan’s shift at the 13
^th
Precinct would end at eight o’clock, and they’d spend the day lolling with other city folk on the South Island Beach, the Staten Island Ferry their ride. Eventually they’d return to the city for aerobic frolicking in her apartment. Assuming that Dan wasn’t called back to duty, which happened with disturbing regularity. Yoko shook her head, irritated that a perfect beach day might be cancelled. Her shoulder-length black hair brushed her neck and without breaking stride, Yoko found a rubber band in her pocket and twisted her hair into a tight ponytail, much cooler. She went back to analyzing what bugged her about the New York detective. Top of the list, Dan often arrived hours late for a date. Worse yet, he apparently was incapable of calling to say he’d be late.

“I’m done with him,” Yoko would fume. Annoyingly, Dan always agreed he was in the wrong.

“I’m a first class jerk,” and he’d shake his head, brown eyes full of phony remorse. He’d make some dumb ass apology. “It’s hard to argue with the captain, he pulls rank on me.” If she still looked irritated, he’d drop a tantalizing morsel about the harrowing case that caused the delay. He was a workaholic but a funny one and his Irish blarney was hard to resist.

On the plus side, Dan loved the Japanese-style food Yoko made, noodles or rice with stir-fried veggies, on the rare occasions she cooked. She wasn’t about to suggest sushi again––not after their one disastrous visit to Japonica on University Place. Dan had watched suspiciously as Yoko tasted the maki roll.

Still, under her guidance, Dan had become a connoisseur of the world’s best miso, South River’s wood-fired organic. Major change for someone weaned on cans of Campbell’s.

Finding romance by witnessing a murder hadn’t been in any
Cosmo
article Yoko had ever read, but it certainly beat trolling the Internet or worse yet, seeking Mister Right in a stylishly desperate yuppie bar. Yoko, a third-generation Japanese American born in the U.S.—
Sansei
in Japanese—had scrupulously avoided both venues, despite her mother’s blatant hints.

“Grandchildren, Yoko, it’s time. You’re not getting any younger.”

A horrendous metallic screeching broke her reverie, followed by a series of crashes reverberating off buildings, rattling windows up and down the block. She staggered to a halt, a pinball trapped in a corner of the game. Then silence, total and absolute. Yoko scanned the sky. 9/11? All over again? No, no planes in sight, no buildings exploding.

“Godzilla of an accident,” someone screamed. A young woman roller-bladed past, legs pumping furiously, cell phone pressed to her ear.

Yoko sprinted after the roller-blader. A lone car horn blared, then another, followed by shouts. Yoko sprinted round the corner onto 23rd Street, stopping short at the spectacle of the front of the college covered with red, white and blue material—heavy stuff, but not canvas. Maybe nylon? Yards and yards of it billowed from the rooftop to the ground. It could be a particularly patriotic building wrap by Christo, except for a tangle of ropes, broken wooden spars and the remains of a wicker basket dangling from the fabric and blocking the street, bringing a couple of taxis to a standstill.

“My God, it’s a hot-air balloon,” Yoko said as she reached the roller-blader, who stood over a man sprawled in the wreckage.

“I know they’re not supposed to fly over Manhattan,” the roller-blader yelled into her cell phone, then turned her attention to Yoko. “You a doctor? I think he’s hurt real bad. I called 9-1-1.”

Yoko nodded her head. No point explaining she was a doctor of optometry, not an M.D. She knelt beside the man, picked shreds of the balloon’s basket off his upper torso and face. No sign of blood. Yoko felt the carotid artery in the man’s neck. His pulse was erratic, the spasmodic flutter dangerously weak. His chest expanded, then quivered with the effort of sucking air into his lungs, quick, short, shallow breaths made painful by ribs likely broken.

A police car slid around the corner, tires screaming as it braked to avoid the debris. The tail-gaiting ambulance swerved, managed to stop without hitting anything.

Yoko bent close to the man. “Help is here,” she said. “They’ll take care of you.”

His eyes opened slowly and looked intently into hers, as if seeking enlightenment. The man’s eyes were such a striking, Paul Newman blue that Yoko immediately wondered if the man was wearing colored contact lenses. She knew from her research work as a behavioral optometrist that people sometimes used contacts to hide drug use. Narcotics cause small pupils; methamphetamines make them large. Did this man crash because he was high on drugs? She focused on the man’s eyes. No, he was not wearing contacts. Contacts tend to hide pupils and Yoko could see his clearly. They looked normal.

The man spoke, his intense eyes locked on Yoko’s. “Is…a dream?” Then his amazing eyes clamped shut and remained closed as he gasped for another painful breath.

She watched the life start to ebb from his eyes and his pupils dilate, dark windows to death. He’d die if he didn’t get to the hospital immediately.

“He say his name’s Archer?” It was the roller-blader, busily taking photo after photo of the scene with her cell phone: the balloonist, the wreckage, even the taxis.

“He said ‘Archer.’”

Yoko scrambled out of the way of the approaching medics. She shook her head slightly at their questioning looks. One of them bent over the man and felt the carotid artery, just as Yoko had done.

“Not good,” he muttered. He pulled down the lower lid of the man’s left eye, then the lid of the right eye. “He’s lost a lot of blood, see how pale they are.”