Memory Man

It was named after Walter James O’Malley, a chief of distinction some forty years ago. He’d dropped dead outside a bar with his mistress clinging to his arm. But that had not stopped them from naming a building after him, which proved conclusively that adultery did not really harm one’s legacy. Even if it killed you.

His old digs were on the third floor. He could see the one window he would stare out, when he wasn’t looking at Lancaster, who sat directly opposite him in the cramped quarters. The holding cells were in the basement and on the side facing this street, which meant that Sebastian Leopold was barely fifty feet away from him.

He had never been this close to his family’s alleged killer. Yet maybe he had, when he’d apparently dissed this guy at the 7-Eleven.

He turned away when he saw two plainclothes and a uniform that he knew. Though he had changed a lot since he’d left the force, he doubted they could miss him. Stepping into an alley, he leaned against the wall. His anxiety level was riding high. Headaches came and went. His brain grew tired because it just never stopped. Not even when he was asleep. It was as though his subconscious was actually his conscious. For a man who never forgot anything it was difficult for him to remember who he used to be. And how he had gotten to be what he was now.

He closed his eyes.

* * *

This “gift” came to me when I was all of twenty-two years old. I was a middling college football player who walked on to an NFL team carrying only fair ability, but a ferocious chip on my shoulder. I stepped on the field for the first game of the season after playing my butt off during the preseason and surviving the final cut. I’m on the kickoff team. My job is simple: Sacrifice my body to create mayhem and holes in the return team so other guys can make the stop. I run my ass down the field. I’m about to make mayhem. I’m running so hard that snot is flying from my nose and spit from my mouth. I’m being paid more money than I’ve ever made in my life. I aim to earn it. I’m about to lay some dude out, stone cold out.

And that’s all I remember. Dwayne LeCroix, a rookie out of LSU, was five inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than me but apparently a force to be reckoned with, because he laid me out on that field with a hit I never saw coming. The dude blew me up, as they say in the NFL. He would be out of the league in four years with both knees devoid of cartilage, his left shoulder pared down to nothing but bone on bone, and his bank account overdrawn. He was currently residing in a max prison in Shreveport for crimes committed against his fellow humans, and he would die there one day either soon or distant. But on that day he walked away, fist pumping and sauntering like the cock over the hens, while I lay on the field unconscious.

And after that collision nothing for me would ever be the same.

Not a damn thing.

Chapter 7

Decker opened his eyes when he heard the commotion across the street. Doors were being thrown open. Cars were squealing as rubber kissed pavement way too hard. Sirens sounded. Raised voices, metal clattering on metal. Heavy boots on concrete.

He stepped clear of the alley and looked across the street as patrol cars, sirens wailing, poured out of the precinct’s underground garage. More officers and plainclothes had burst out of the front door of the precinct and raced to cruisers and unmarked cars parked on the street.