Chapter 13 Running Blind

Marcus left Darius’ building at two-twenty with a promise, a phone number, and the beginning of something that might have been a plan if plans were allowed to exist in situations where every variable was actively trying to kill you.

He walked three blocks before he noticed the headache.

Not unusual , two days of almost no sleep, no consistent food, enough adrenaline to run a small engine. He filed it and kept walking, the music box under his arm, the cold air doing the work that coffee usually did.

By the fourth block the headache had moved. Not deepened , moved, shifting position in a way that headaches from dehydration and exhaustion didn’t, settling behind his left eye with a precision that was almost specific. Like a thumb pressing on a bruise he hadn’t known was there.

He stopped under a streetlight and stood still for a moment, cataloguing.

Left eye. The streetlight above him was doing something it hadn’t been doing a moment ago , not brighter, exactly, but with a kind of presence to the light, a slight halo that he associated with a particular kind of tired. He’d had it once in Kandahar after forty-eight hours without sleep and once after a concussion from an IED that everyone on his team had initially thought was worse than it was.

He started walking again. Slower.

By the sixth block, Sal Greco was walking beside him.

Marcus processed this information, stopped, and turned. Nobody was there. The street was empty in both directions , a parked car, a light at an intersection two blocks down, a cat sitting on a stoop that was not interested in Marcus or anything Marcus was doing.

He turned back and kept walking and told himself it was a sleep trick. The brain confabulated faces , he’d read that somewhere. Pattern-recognition running too hot on too little input, inventing people in peripheral vision.

By the eighth block, his father was standing at the end of the street.

Marcus stopped completely.

The figure at the end of the street was medium height, slightly heavy, wearing the gray cardigan his father had owned for so long that Marcus had started thinking of it as load-bearing , one of those items of clothing that had become architectural, structural to the person who wore it. The figure stood with his hands in the cardigan’s pockets and his head slightly tilted, the way Marcus Sr. had always stood when he was waiting for something, patient in the way of a man who had learned that patience was just another word for not letting anyone see you were afraid.

Marcus’s feet would not move.

“Dad,” he said, and his voice came out very quietly, and the figure at the end of the street did not respond.

A car passed between them and when Marcus could see the end of the street again it was empty, and he was standing alone on a sidewalk at two-thirty in the morning talking to nobody, the music box clutched to his chest with both arms like something he was afraid of dropping.

He breathed. In, four counts. Out, four counts. The technique Dr. Reyes , Carmen Reyes, whoever she was , had given him, that he’d thought was generic and had been surprised to find actually worked.

The headache was still there. The light still had its halo.

Marcus pulled out his phone and looked at it. Three-eleven AM. Two hours and forty-nine minutes to Rafael’s deadline. He needed sleep, food, and a location nobody knew about, in that order, and he needed to stop seeing people who were not there.

He typed a text to his mother. Short. ‘I need to know about the compound. Whatever Rafael’s crew might have used to destabilize a witness. If it exists and if they used it on me, I need to know the symptoms and I need to know the timeline.’

He sent it and stood waiting and tried to remember when exactly in the last two days someone could have gotten close enough to dose him.

The warehouse. The warehouse, where Rafael had stood close enough to clap him on the shoulder, where Sal had been within arm’s reach, where the unnamed man he’d never identified had stood by the dock. Any one of them. Or before , the coffee at Engel’s that the night clerk had left on the table that Marcus hadn’t ordered and had drunk three-quarters of without thinking about it.

His phone buzzed. His mother, back in under two minutes, which meant she’d been awake and waiting.

‘Rafael’s operation has used scopolamine derivatives in the past , modified compounds. Slow acting. Usually administered in a drink. Onset six to twelve hours. Symptoms include paranoia, confusion, visual and auditory hallucination, dissociation. In PTSD patients the symptoms can be significantly more pronounced because the compound interacts with existing trauma responses. Marcus , are you showing symptoms?’

Marcus looked at the empty end of the street where his father had been standing.

He typed back: ‘How long does it last?’

The reply came fast. ‘Forty-eight to seventy-two hours for the modified version. There’s a treatment protocol but you need to be somewhere safe and you need to not be alone. Where are you?’

Marcus looked up from the phone. Looked down the street. Looked at the music box under his arm and the empty night around him and did the math on what it meant to spend the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours in a chemically induced state of compromised perception while Rafael Moretti’s deadline ticked down and a DEA agent waited for a call and his half-brother sat in a West Side apartment waiting to find out if he had a future.

He typed: ‘I’m fine. I’ll check in at six.’

He put the phone away and walked another half block before he heard it , footsteps, real ones this time, two sets, closing from behind at a pace that was not casual.

Marcus did not turn around. He turned left, through a gap between two buildings, and ran.