Forsaken By Shadow (2 page)

“
Eric Tobin.” He tried the name out, rolling it off his tongue with a slight southern drawl. It felt neither comfortable nor awkward. It was just a name. If it was his, he didn’t feel it.

He checked the address. Las Vegas. It was as good a place as any to start looking for answers. Resolved, he put the car into gear and headed south toward Sin City.

* * *

Even as he bought a map at a gas station on the edge of town, he knew this was not how normal people would react to this situation. Not that normal people very often found themselves in this situation. He knew the logical step would be to go to the cops or the hospital. Get those burns looked at. Get the wheels in motion to find out who he was and what had happened.

But his gut told him to wait. To check out the address on the car registration. Get some more clues to whether he really was Eric Tobin or if he just, for some reason, had Eric Tobin’s car.

Nothing looked familiar as he drove through the deserted streets. He was far from The Strip, driving into an area that got progressively rougher with each passing block. Graffiti covered the concrete walls of buildings with broken out windows behind bars. Padlocks hung from many doors. This part of town was industrial and failing. Not the sort of place you listed as a residential address.

A few more turns and he found the street listed on the registration. He slowed the car, eyes shifting over building faces, searching for street numbers. On the second pass, he found one and began counting the buildings until he came to the right point in the sequence for the address on the registration. Set between an apparently abandoned warehouse and a plant of some kind, all that remained was a vacant lot with a few piles of rubble. Weeds grew haphazardly from cracks in what was left of the foundation.

He sat, engine idling, for a good fifteen minutes, staring at the empty space and struggling to remember… anything. But the effort was fruitless and made his head ache. Eventually he put the car back into gear and wove his way back through the dark streets.

Because he didn’t know what else to do, when he saw a sign for a hospital, he followed. Several blocks later, he swung into the drive of St. Rose Hospital, following the signs for Emergency.

The first set of automatic doors slid open with a quiet whoosh. He passed a set of payphones and some restrooms. Then came the second set of doors. As soon as they slid shut behind him, he felt his chest tighten. The scent of too many bodies combined with the hospital smell made him want to puke. As the walls seemed to press in, he squeezed his eyes shut and fought to level out the sensation he recognized as panic.

Hospital phobia. Okay, that’s something else I didn’t know before.

“
Can I help you, sir?”

He opened his eyes and looked at the nurse who spoke from the reception counter. She wore hot pink scrubs and had her sandy hair up in a perky little ponytail. Brown eyes studied him with a mixture of concern and polite inquiry.

He started to say ‘No’. To turn around and walk back out. But where would he go? What would he do? And there were the burns on his hands. So instead he blurted out, “I don’t know who I am.”

Her face didn’t shift into lines of shock. Instead she gestured with one hand to a little clipboard. “Sign in please.”

He blinked at her. “Did you hear what I said? I
don’t know who I am
.”

“
Yes, sir, I heard you.” She wrote something on the pad herself. “Have a seat. We’ll be with you as soon as we can.”

Shoving the frustration down, he moved into the waiting area, a twenty by thirty foot room decorated in a fugly combination of white and orange. The center was dominated by a big ass tropical fish tank with rows of linked chairs spiraling out like arms. There were thirty-three people in the room. He sat where he could see the fish and one of the two wall-mount TVs playing muted reruns of Gilligan’s Island.

I know every character on this stupid show, and I can’t write my own name on a form. What the fuck?

He picked up a stack of magazines and checked out the dates. The most recent he found was an issue of
Reader’s Digest
from March 2000. Of course who knew how far out of date it was.

Eventually the nurse came back. “Sir, if you’d come with me.”

She hadn’t come out for anybody else, but since he didn’t have a name to call, he guessed that made him a special case. He rose and followed her to an area behind the reception desk. A sign on the wall read
triage
. Moving past her into one of the two rooms, he sat. She leaned against a counter, pen poised over a chart.

“
Have you been drinking?” she asked.

“
No.”

“
Have you used any other drugs?”

“
I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t feel high or drunk or impaired. I just don’t know who I am.”

She made some notes. “Okay, what’s the last thing you remember?”

“
Waking up six hours ago in a hotel room about two hundred miles north of here.”

“
And before that?”

“
Nothing.”

The nurse stopped writing and arched one brow. “Nothing?”

Frustration simmered in his blood. “Nothing. Not my name, not where I’m from, not what I do. I remember nothing before six hours ago. It’s like I didn’t exist.” His voice had risen with each word, such that by the end, the other nurse working the reception desk had stuck her head in the room. “Everything okay?” Miss Hot Pink waved her away.

He rubbed his palms on his jeans, hissing when the pain reminded him of his other injuries. He wished his sour stomach would settle.

“
What’s going on with your hands here?”

“
Burned. I don’t know how. It’s pretty bad.”

“
Let’s take a look then.”

He held still as she unwrapped the gauze, bracing himself for her reaction to the mangled flesh. But when the bandages came away, his jaw dropped.

“
Pretty serious first degree burns, maybe second degree in places, but nothing you won’t recover from,” pronounced the nurse. “Though you’ll probably scar.”

He stared at his palms. “I don’t understand.” The skin was no longer charred and curling. It was a smooth expanse of angry red blisters.
I’m going crazy
, he thought.
B
urns that severe don’t heal in six hours.

“
Burns of any degree are painful, so people often think they’re worse than they are. We’ll get you some Silvadene and fresh bandages while we wait for the doctor.”

The nurse efficiently bandaged his hands back up and sent him out into the waiting room. He thought about walking out again. But how else would he get answers?

Eventually he was called back to an exam room. A doctor came in, his white coat waving like a flag as he walked. Unlike the seemingly unflappable nurse, this guy looked harried and tired, like he was at the end of his shift.

“
Amnesia, huh?” said the doctor, looking at the chart.

Not knowing what else to do, he nodded.

The doctor shone a light in his eyes and ordered blood tests and a CT scan. He was formally admitted to the hospital. Sometime after the scan and while still waiting for the results of the blood tests, the cops showed up to interview him. He was thankful he wasn’t still in the damned hospital gown.

Neither officer seemed particularly inclined to believe him. He guessed in Vegas they saw all kinds of weird shit and people who wanted to forget who they really were. That was supposed to be the point of Vegas, wasn’t it? They asked questions. He repeated himself a lot. They got annoyed when he gave them no answers. Eventually they took his fingerprints—and weren’t they fucking lucky that those hadn’t been burned away?—and left.

He slept fitfully, off and on, exhaustion tugging him under despite the rock hard exam bed. Hours later, after the tox screen came back negative and the CT scan had verified that there was nothing physically abnormal with his brain, another woman showed up with two cups of lousy coffee in her hands. She was older, with streaks of silver shooting through her dark brown hair. A well-used leather briefcase hung over one shoulder of her black pantsuit, which hung wilted on her slightly plump frame.

“
I’m Alice Graham,” she said, handing him one Styrofoam cup. “I’m with the Clark County Department of Social Services. Have you eaten?”

The irritated grumble of his stomach answered that.

“
C’mon, we’ll hit the cafeteria.”

Not until they sat at a table in the mostly empty cafeteria with plates of questionable spaghetti did she pull a file out of the briefcase by her chair. She slid the plain manila folder across the table.

“
What’s this?” he asked.

“
According to your fingerprints, you.”

He stared down at the folder, suddenly uncertain whether he really wanted to know who he was. What if he was a criminal with a record longer than his arm? What if he was in massive debt? What if he was some deadbeat dad who’d run out on paying child support and alimony?

When he looked up at Alice again, she was gazing at him with sympathy. It occurred to him that if he was in real trouble, they’d have sent the cops back instead of a social worker. So he opened the folder.

The page on top read
MISSING
. The boy pictured looked out of a sober, unsmiling face. A shaggy mop of brown hair fell over blue eyes. Beneath the picture he read
Cade Shepherd, Age: 8, Disappeared: August 9, 1985.
He waited for the zing of recognition, the trickle of a memory. Anything that would connect him to this boy. But he felt nothing.

He looked back up at Alice.

“
You’ve been missing for fifteen years, Cade.”

The name didn’t feel any more familiar as it tripped off of her tongue.

When he didn’t make any move to page further through the folder, Alice continued. “You’re from Tennessee originally. Memphis.”

That explained the accent.

“
You disappeared from a hospital there right after your mother passed away.”

His mother had died in a hospital. He should feel something at that, but he didn’t. That would explain why he hated hospitals.

Cade roused himself to speak. “How did she die?”

Alice paused as if gauging whether to tell him. “She was admitted with the kind of severe trauma consistent with being beaten.”

“
By my father?”

“
Are you remembering?”

“
Guessing.”

“
Records indicate he was probably abusive. There was a child services record on you. It’s all in the file.”

“
Where is he now?”

“
He died eight years ago. Lung cancer.”

There was a distant, grim satisfaction in that. “Any family?”“he asked.

“
No siblings. We’re still looking to see if there’s any extended family, but it doesn’t look like it. There’s an attorney in New Orleans, where your father relocated. His number is in the file too. I spoke with him briefly this afternoon. There’s a small inheritance, maybe enough to help you get back on your feet. Assuming you need help getting back on your feet. You may remember everything tomorrow or next week.”

“
They don’t know what’s wrong with me,” said Cade.

“
It’s called a dissociative fugue. It’s a rare, temporary form of amnesia where you’ve blocked out everything about your personal identity. It’s usually brought on by some form of traumatic stress. God only knows where you’ve been the last fifteen years or what you went through. It should clear up in a matter of days or weeks.”

“
And if it doesn’t?” he asked.

She tipped her head, studying him. “Some people would give anything for this kind of blank slate. This is your opportunity to turn yourself into whoever you want to be. I’d make the most of it.”

Chapter 2

S
tadium
seating rose high on either side of the steep concrete steps. Embry paused at a landing, ostensibly to check the row number nearby and swept her gaze over the cavernous space. Almost every seat was filled. Not surprising given that this was the last fight of the evening. In the center of the coliseum, she’d expected to see something like a boxing ring. Similar to what they had in the training areas at headquarters when they weren’t just doing mat work. But here there was an eight-sided platform, surrounded by black chain-link fencing, with some kind of thick padding on the railing. A cage. It reminded her of Mad Max, except that it was only about five feet tall.