The Missing Piece (8 page)

In rehab, Gary had learned the distinction between psychogenic erections, which began in the brain, and reflexogenic erections, which began closer to home. The nerves that relayed brain signals to the penis traveled through the lower spine, and an injury anywhere higher up interrupted the signal. So while Ursula's sexy nurse act could not get him hard, her direct stimulation certainly did. She straddled him and grinded against him and kneaded him between her thighs. And when the moment was just right, she stuffed him inside.

“I'm very popular on the paraplegic ward,” she said, panting, as she spooned alongside him.

“You don't mean that,” he said.

“You're right. I don't.”

And now, remembering what they had done had no effect on him. He could call it to his mind, but not to his dick.

The phone rang, and Gary dragged himself over to answer.

“They finally turned over the security tapes,” said Felix Tyrone. “They're not tapes as such, but computer files. You still up for viewing them?”

“I'm not going anywhere,” said Gary.

He used the trapeze suspended from a reinforced beam in the ceiling to lift himself off the bed. He had two wheelchairs. One was the baroque, motorized model that he called his battle chair. It had a height-adjustable seat, a precise steering mechanism, and an engine that reached speeds faster than most people could run. The other wheelchair, the one he dropped himself naked into now, was a light hand-powered model with a mesh seat and backrest designed for the shower. He rolled into the bathroom, waited for the water to heat up, then bumped the wheelchair over the raised tile that prevented the shower from flooding the apartment.

In the months following the shooting, filing a lawsuit had been the furthest thing from his mind. He was so lonely and depressed it took a monumental effort just to open his eyes in the morning, let alone endure hours of physical and occupational therapy. Plus, he knew a thing or two about the law from having stood guard in so many courtrooms. The shooting had occurred on the job, which entitled him to workers' compensation benefits and prohibited any lawsuit against his employer. Unfortunately, with the two gunmen in the wind and none of the litigants responsible for what happened, the court system was the only potential target of a lawsuit.

Just short of three months after the shooting, Felix Tyrone visited Gary at the rehab center. Tyrone had worked as a staff attorney for the legal benefits plan offered by the court officers' union before starting his own firm. He explained that the workers' comp prohibition against suing an employer did not apply to a grave injury, and a partially severed spinal cord that resulted in paraplegia qualified as grave. Like sex in Gary's new world, the revelation piqued his interest but not his desire. Tyrone needed to convince him that suing the court system was neither disloyal nor greedy, then capped his pitch with a commonsense argument: Gary was still young and strong with arms like a weightlifter and hands like a blacksmith. He may not need financial help now, but when the sympathy ran dry and his friends had moved on and he was just a name to the new officers on the job, he might feel differently.

Gary finally agreed to sue, and the court system quickly made a settlement offer that he would have accepted had he been interested in money alone. But Gary was interested in more than money, and Tyrone, who thought the offer chintzy anyway, was happy to press for a trial.

The shower stream turned tepid. Gary shut the water, dried himself off, and rolled back into his bedroom. Then, through a complicated set of maneuvers, he lifted himself onto the bed, dressed, and then plunked himself into his battle chair. He was waiting when Tyrone buzzed from the lobby.

Tyrone was razor-thin, balding, and perpetually rushed. Unzipping his briefcase, he followed Gary to the corner of the living room, where a dual-monitor computer sat on a table high and wide enough for the front end of the battle chair to fit underneath.

“Very confusing stuff,” said Tyrone, producing a flash drive. “The feeds are from security cameras inside and outside the courthouse. Putting it together spatially and chronologically is like working a jigsaw puzzle.”

Gary stuck the flash drive into the computer's USB port. The screen lit up with file icons.

“Each one a different camera?” he said.

“Forty-three of them,” said Tyrone. “You can't fart in the courthouse without someone seeing you.”

Gary opened the first file, which showed the front steps of the courthouse from a camera positioned across Centre Street. The steps were bright in the sun, with people ascending and descending at many angles. Halfway down the steps stood a group of six court officers, obvious in their white uniform shirts and dark blue uniform pants, but unidentifiable at this distance. One of them broke away from the others and climbed up into the shade of the portico. Foxx, he recognized from the smooth, swaybacked gait. Less than a minute later, Foxx rejoined the others.

Gary closed that file and opened the next. The view was a high-angle shot of the front steps from a camera at the top of a column. He opened a third file, which was a low-angle view of the magnetometer lines inside the lobby.

“These first several files are the obvious shots of the front entrance, the rear entrance, and the doors on Worth and Pearl,” said Tyrone. “The others are from cameras set deep inside the courthouse in places that I've either never seen or don't recognize.”

“I'll look at them,” said Gary.

“Are you sure you want to?”

“I've gotten past a lot of shit, Felix. I can handle it.”

“That's good, because I want to present these feeds as a single narrative of the gunmen exploiting a security breach as they enter the courthouse, move through the courthouse, and exit the courthouse. No one knows the courthouse as well as you.”

Tyrone left in his usual rush and promised to phone tomorrow to check on Gary's progress. Gary opened the first camera feed on the left monitor and the second camera feed on the right. He ran the first feed to the point where the hand truck reached the top of the steps, avoiding his own image because seeing himself walk, in the last few hours of his life when he could walk, was too much to bear. Besides, he'd been waiting months to see these feeds, and he needed to focus on the task at hand, not descend into self-pity.

He froze the first feed, then switched to the high-angle shot from the top of the column until the hand truck and its entourage, with Foxx and McQueen trailing behind, passed beneath. He then opened the third and fourth feeds. The third showed the six officers, the two workmen, and the hand truck skirting the mags in the aisle reserved for court employees and attorneys with security credentials. The fourth feed showed two men standing side by side in separate mag lines. Each wore a white T-shirt, while one wore green gym shorts and the other dark jeans. The officers working the mags called them forward. As the two men passed through the mags, Gary knew that these videos would show much more than Felix Tyrone ever could guess.

 

CHAPTER 8

Ivan and Jessima met at one of their supply closets each day at lunchtime. Ivan's was on the third floor, at the end of one of the six corridors that connected the courthouse's circular core to its outer hexagon like the spokes of a wheel. Though the same size as all the other supply closets, Ivan's was cramped with cartons of CFL bulbs destined to replace the dying incandescents. Jessima's was on the fifth floor, directly across the corridor from the entrance to Judge Conover's chambers. It was well organized with shelves and hooks and easily accommodated her cleaning cart at the end of the day. Ivan's had the virtue of privacy, Jessima's the virtue of space. And so they more often met at Jessima's.

Jessima ate her sandwich quickly, then chewed half a piece of gum as she stripped naked. She hung her jeans on one hook, her bra and panties on another. The floor felt gritty against her bare feet, so she slipped back into her new pair of sneakers that made her the exact right height for Ivan. Sometimes, like today, she put her smock back on, as well. It cut nicely across her thighs and tapered gently at her waist. She left the top three buttons open and spread the collar to expose her breasts.

Ivan knocked. Jessima cracked the door just enough to pull him inside.

Ivan lifted her onto the sink and licked at her nipples as he unzipped his coveralls. Jessima ran her hands up and down his arms. He looked so skinny in clothes, but was surprisingly well-muscled when naked. She tilted herself forward, opening up to accept him. Then she hung, pinned between him and the edge of the sink, her hard nipples scraping against his chest hair. He squeezed her ass, bit her earlobe. Her sneakers kicked.

Yes yes
, she panted in his ear. Then,
now now
.

He eased off. She slid to the floor, turned her back to him, and gripped the faucet handles.

Afterwards, folded together over the sink, Ivan rubbed the arch of one foot against the laces of her sneaker. His chin lay in the hollow of her shoulder, his stubble tickling her skin. She reached around to pat his thigh.

“Off with you,” she whispered.

He groaned, kissed her shoulder, pushed himself back.

She dressed quickly. He reached down to the coveralls puddled around his ankles and plunged a hand into each sleeve. She unhooked her jacket.

“Going somewhere?” he said.

“I have an errand.” She spoke this way, running “errands,” meeting “people,” scheduling “appointments.” At first, he thought these generalities were meant to keep him at a distance. Now he understood them simply to be her way.

She patted her pockets, then pulled back her hair and tied a scarf over her head.

“You don't need to leave,” she said.

“Are you coming back soon?”

“Not that soon.” She laughed and kissed him on the mouth. “It was nice.”

“Only nice?”

“Wonderful. How you say, stupendous.” She grabbed him between the legs. “See you later.”

Jessima rarely went out of the courthouse during the day, and the brightness of the noontime sun and the noise of the streets assaulted her eyes and ears. Traffic was thick on Centre Street. Skateboarders zoomed around the fountain and launched themselves into the air. A small crowd stood in the park, holding signs and listening to a man speaking from a bench. A loudspeaker amplified his voice, but Jessima could catch only a smattering of words like
justice
and
fairness
and
what's right is right
.

She stayed on the courthouse side of Centre until she crossed over at the intersection with Worth Street. Along the north end of the park, several benches faced the sidewalk. She found an empty one and sat lightly at first, leaning forward on the front slat. The shade felt cool, almost cold. After a minute, she relaxed and settled back on the bench.

*   *   *

Foxx, dressed in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, lowered the freebie newspaper to his lap and turned the page. Across the park, Ronan Hannigan continued to speak indignantly about “money” and “power” and “the entrenched institutions of the city and state.” Foxx remembered Hannigan from Cardinal Hayes High School, a universe they occupied at the same time though in very different orbits. Hannigan had been a champion distance runner, while Foxx only ran from the authorities. Something happened to Hannigan during the summer before senior year. Foxx never knew exactly what, but it was school-wide news when Hannigan quit the cross-country team. Later, well after the college years passed, Foxx began seeing snippets of Hannigan on the local news, a firebrand tackling the many injustices in the city. Foxx had his own idiosyncratic worldview and found himself agreeing with much of what Hannigan said. But the protestors definitely seemed bored, except for a dreadlocked man who circulated among them and unsuccessfully tried to start them chanting.

The speech ended. Foxx took the cell phone from his pocket and saw he had received a text message from Bev. Texting was her new ploy since he rarely answered his phone and still pretended not to know how to retrieve his voicemail.

I
MAY NEED YOU,
the text read. Bev loved all caps.

Foxx folded the newspaper and massaged his brow as he counted twenty protestors. He decided on reporting twenty-one, since Kearney would think it more accurate than a round number. Hannigan, down off the bench, crossed Centre Street and headed past the courthouse toward Chinatown. The dreadlocked man walked toward the benches facing Worth Street.

W
OMEN EITHER NEED ME OR NOT,
Foxx texted back. W
HICH IS IT
?

The dreadlocked man reached the sidewalk and sat beside a woman on a bench. Foxx trashed his newspaper. He angled out of the park at the corner of Lafayette, then walked back toward Centre on Worth Street. At first he didn't recognize the woman sitting with the dreadlocked man. But after he passed he realized it was the cleaning woman named Jessima.

*   *   *

“I'm protesting today,” said Damien. “Not sure what I'm protesting, but neither do any of the protestors.” He rolled his paper sign into a long tube and tapped her knee. “What is this great thing you got for me?”

Jessima took the box out of her pocket and the test stick out of the box.

“I found it in her trash,” she said. “She must have brought it from home this morning because it wasn't there last night.”

Damien gingerly pinched the tester between his fingers and moved it back and forth so that the little window caught the light. Jessima watched silently. Some of the things she found for him were worth something, and he paid her a piece of what some interested party paid him. Some were worthless, and he paid her nothing. She wasn't sure where this one fell.

“Hold this,” said Damien.

Jessima held the tester while Damien photographed it with his phone. He checked the picture, then dropped the phone back into his pocket.