The Juvie Three (11 page)

He shifts into drive and feels the transmission pull forward. His foot is half an inch from the pedal—he's visualizing himself wheeling into traffic—when it finds the brake again. He slams back into park and slumps in the seat.

No. That's the old Gecko, the one who could tell himself he's just driving and ignore the fact that the car is filled with stolen goods and Reuben's gang of crooks.

Yes, things are crazy and getting crazier. But life has to be faced.

“Hey, you!” bawls a voice beside him. “Get out of there before I call a cop!”

Gecko steps down to the pavement. “There was a kid here who wanted to steal your truck,” he tells the angry driver. “I chased him away.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Sometimes being totally screwed can set you free.

Strange but true, Arjay reflects as he walks down Lexington Avenue. When Gecko brought home the news that Healy's memory was gone, it seemed like the end of the world.

It was Terence who said, “Look at the bright side. When we thought he was coming back, we were slaves to that. Not anymore.”

They're still going to school, and community service, and attending group therapy. The only difference is that it's no longer temporary.

Welcome to the new normal.

True, sooner or later, someone is going to check on them. The big question is when. It could be tomorrow; it could be months from now. As long as the school reports to Social Services stay positive; as long as there are no complaints from people like Jerry or Dr. Avery; as long as Ms. Vaughn's heavy caseload keeps her away from East Ninety-seventh Street, they just might be able to keep this going.

And as long as they stay afloat, there's a chance that something might save them. Arjay can't imagine what that could be. But it definitely won't happen if they're sitting in jail.

It reminds him of a story he studied in middle school. A condemned man staves off his execution by promising that, in a single year, he can teach the king's favorite horse to talk. Someone asks why he would make such a ridiculous bargain.

He replies, “A year is a long time. I may die. Or the king may die. Or the horse may die. Or the horse may talk.”

Freedom equals possibility. The horse may talk.

Arjay has been locked up for so long, he barely remembers having a choice about what to do with his time. He has to get a life—literally. He walks with Gecko as far as Yorkville Medical Center, where the kid starts babbling about someone named Roxanne.

“Hold up.” Arjay grabs him by the sleeve. “Who's Roxanne?”

Gecko hems and haws, but the embarrassed flush in his cheeks is as good as a lie detector test.

“You've been going to the hospital to keep an eye on Healy, and you wound up with a
girlfriend
?” Arjay demands.

“No!” Gecko defends himself. “At least, I don't think so. But you should see this girl, Arjay. You can't not like her. She's just a volunteer, but when she's on the ward, the whole place practically revolves around her. I mean, the seventh floor might as well just shut down if she ever stops going.…”

Arjay tunes him out. Well, that explains why Gecko hasn't been complaining about his countless jaunts to visit John Doe. A girlfriend! Even if it's an innocent crush, it's still dangerous. The more people who get to know them, the greater the chance that unwanted attention might fall upon their lives. In the scrutiny department, they can withstand exactly none.

He sighs. The increased risk is another part of their new reality. This isn't a couple-of-days kind of thing anymore. They can't stay locked in the apartment 24/7. God knows Terence isn't letting their situation cramp his style. He's already off on his own, looking for trouble. Arjay has no doubt he'll find it.

“Listen, Terence,” Arjay told him, “I know what you consider a big night, and I'm not going to try to talk you out of it.
But be careful!
It's all our butts on the line, not just yours! And remember, if you get arrested, it means you read
To Kill a Mockingbird
for nothing!” He grins, recalling the look of horror on Terence's face.

He sends Gecko off with a similar warning, yet it's hard to be specific. Disaster is never far away, but the truth is they have no idea what to look for. It could be an inspection by Ms. Vaughn; it could begin as innocuously as this girl Roxanne saying “Let's go over to your house.” Will Gecko have the brains to put her off? He's a fourteen-year-old kid. Who knows how smitten he is?

It's out of your control, Arjay reminds himself. Still, with memories of Remsenville permanently loaded in his cerebral hopper, it isn't easy to let the chips fall where they may.

He gets on the subway at Eighty-sixth Street and rides downtown to Spring Street, where he heads east on foot. Nightlife begins to sprout around him. Snippets of live music escape from unmarked storefronts.

He's read about this area, but he never expected to have the freedom to experience it firsthand—not as a convicted felon in a halfway house.

A few more blocks and he's in the middle of it all. On the surface, it's a neighborhood of run-down tenements. Yet with the opening of every door, the pounding of drums, the thrum of bass, a few syllables of wailing vocals mingle in the street—a cacophonous mixture of rock, jazz, blues, funk, hip-hop, reggae, punk, and ska.

The club names are bizarre: Lucifer's Basement, Uber-freaky, Bottomless, This Ain't Kansas. After much deliberation, he selects the Green Zone, mostly because the words
no cover
have been acid-burned into the steel door. Zero is precisely the amount of money he has to invest in this expedition. Even with Social Services paying their rent and utilities, cash is becoming a problem. The hundred eighty bucks in Healy's wallet won't last long. Terence has managed to get his hands on another hundred by “unloading a couple pieces of consumer electronics.” Arjay didn't ask for the details.

Inside the club, the air moves with the blast of sound that greets him. The bouncer thinks better of asking for ID—the newcomer doesn't seem very bounce-able. Arjay nods his thanks and pushes through a makeshift divider of hanging weather strips into the club proper, which is barely the size of the apartment on Ninety-seventh Street.

The band is called Collateral Damage—either slow punk or fast metal, and
very
loud. A mass of about forty die-hard fans are pressed to the claustrophobic stage, hopping with the beat, because horizontal movement is impractical. The only comfortable place to stand is at the back, by the bar, amid a late-teens/early-twenties assortment of piercings, tattoos, and black leather.

“Get you a beer, pal?” shouts the bartender over the roar of the music.

Arjay shakes his head no. He can't afford drinks; he's barely able to part with subway fare to get here. But the music is in the air, and poverty can't prevent him from listening.

Collateral Damage is pretty mediocre, yet Arjay inhales the experience, loving it as only a newbie can. He pays special attention to the guitarist, mentally translating the electric wail onstage to his ongoing lessons with Mr. Cantor. The relentless punk chords bear little resemblance to the music teacher's jazz/soft rock stylings, but he watches and learns, the fingers of his left hand running up and down imaginary frets. It's a night of wonder and discovery. As a caged animal in Remsenville, he forgot how it feels to
want
something. Why bother, when you have no chance of getting it?

I want to be that guy on the stage, I want to make music.

Collateral Damage finishes its set, relinquishing the stage to the next performers, Blecch Squad, and later, the headliners, Bad Haiku. Arjay basks in every decibel. Three bands in a shoe box club, one of dozens in the neighborhood, in a city of dozens of neighborhoods, one of dozens of cities where musicians hatch their strobe-lit dreams.

It's after three a.m. when the Green Zone finally disgorges its sweaty and exhausted slam dancers onto Chrystie Street. All the clubs have let out around then, and nobody wants to go home just yet.

Arjay loiters among the loiterers along a construction fence plastered with bills. There are ads for concerts, political rallies, independent films, and—what's this?

GUITARIST WANTED
ALL ORIGINAL MATERIAL/NO SKYNYRD COVERS
HAIR-METAL WANNABES AND OTHER LAMERS
NEED NOT APPLY

At the bottom hangs a series of strips bearing the contact phone number. Most are pasted under by a flyer decrying the cultivation of broccoflower. But one still dangles free. Hand shaking, he tears it off and stuffs it in his pocket.

“Arjay?”

Only the lisp from her tongue stud gives her away. Casey Wagner blends into the downtown crowd so well that it takes a moment to recognize her. But come to think of it, this is exactly the place for her—with the spiked hair and punk clothes and attitude from the black lagoon. She fits right in. She probably reads out her death lists between sets.

“Oh, hi, Casey.”

Her cheeks are flushed with excitement, which detracts somewhat from her complete lack of coloration. “Did you catch Drip Dry at the Puke Emporium? Man, they blew the roof off that dump!”

“I was at the Green Zone,” he tells her. “Bad Haiku and a couple of other bands.”

“You must have good ID. They're big-time gestapo over there. I can't believe it!”

“Nobody carded me.”

“No, I mean I never would have pegged you as the type.”

“What type?”

She shrugs. “You know—cool.”

“Thanks,” he says sarcastically.

“I love it down here,” she enthuses. “It's so authentic.”

“Authentic what?”

“You know, not plastic. When Zee Shrapnel choked on his own vomit, it was on
this corner.
Only—” She frowns. “Are you allowed to be out like this?”

Arjay bristles. “Are you?”

“My mom's sleeping pills are like nerve gas. I can come and go as I please. It's not the same with you. Didn't you, like, kill somebody?”

Most of the magic of the night evaporates with those words. “Listen, Casey. I'm breaking rules; you're breaking rules. Let's just leave it at that.”

Leaving it at that is not Casey's strong suit. “But aren't you guys in some kind of halfway house thingie?”

Arjay sizes up the punk rock girl. She's probably harmless—good-looking even, if she'd lose some of the facial hardware. Yet there's nothing harmless about what would happen if word gets around that he, Gecko, and Terence are on their own, unsupervised in New York City. A curfew violation is a minor infraction, but if it invites inspection, they might as well be caught robbing banks and garroting puppies.

The old wartime warning jumps to mind:
Loose Lips Sink Ships.
What lips could be looser than a pair pierced by half a dozen metal rings?

He has to close this subject permanently.

“No offense,” he says carefully. “I've got two other guys in this with me. I can't talk about it.”

“It'll be our secret,” she says with a conspiratorial smile.

Arjay swallows hard. The last thing he wants is to share a secret with Casey, who sees Dr. Avery, who, in turn, reports to Ms. Vaughn. But what choice does he have?

They shake on it.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

For John Doe, the world has become a strange and uncomfortable place.

How could it be otherwise? A grown man—between thirty-five and forty, the doctors estimate—waking up in a hospital bed with no idea who he is or what's happened to him.

Concussion, they say. That's not hard to believe. The former Douglas Healy feels like someone has taken a baseball bat to his head. And anyway, the diagnosis is right there on the chart.
Acute retrograde amnesia resulting from blunt force trauma to the upper cranial region.

“In other words, you bonked your conk,” Dr. Radnor explains. “Incidentally, the fact that you can read your chart is important. In total amnesia, a patient might forget the English language. He might have to relearn how to reach up and scratch his nose when it itches. This proves you have
some
memory.”

“What good is that if I don't even know my own name?”

“Don't rush yourself,” the doctor advises. “You know you're a human being. You know you're an American. You know you're in New York City—”

Healy is agitated. “Because you told me!”

“But you know what New York City
is.
Your mind hasn't been wiped clean. You were in a coma for more than a week. That's not a small thing. But I have every confidence that a good portion of your memory will return. You just have to be patient.”

That's easy for Radnor to say. He isn't the one who's been plunked in the middle of a world that's a complete mystery. It's like walking into a movie halfway through, not recognizing the plot or any of the characters. Only that movie is your
life.

He tries to reason through his predicament, but that leads him down even more upsetting lines of inquiry. For example, does he have a wife and family somewhere, devastated, wondering where he is?

Turns out, the police have already thought of that. “We've been combing missing person reports,” Detective Sergeant DaSilva informs him. “So far no luck.”

“What does that mean?” Healy demands. “Nobody's looking for me?”

“Not necessarily. The world's a big place. Lots of different databases to check. Or maybe you just haven't been reported AWOL yet.”

“How could that be? I've been in this hospital for days.”

“Maybe you're the kind of guy who likes to disappear for a while—the lost weekend type,” the cop suggests. “Or you could have been on a business trip when you got hurt. Happens all the time. Nobody misses you because they know you're out of town.”

The sergeant's all-business attitude only raises Healy's level of agitation. “How can you be so calm about this? I could be anybody! What if I'm a criminal?”