the shadows for Sarco. But he’s not here. He’s nowhere. I’ve stared into how many shadows these past weeks? Scanned how many empty streets? It seems never-ending. I keep waiting for the shivering dread to pass, for my old reckless self to come back, unsullied by fear. But it won’t. Far as my mind is concerned, Sarco waits around every corner. He slides along alleyways, slinking out when I’ve turned my back and vanishing again when I spin, blade drawn, to confront him. I can’t go on like this, chasing my own shadow.
I march up a flight of rickety stairs, brush past a guy in his underpants, drooling, all scratchy beard and flimsy, tracked-up arms, and find another room full of human desecration. I knock my cane a few times on the wood-paneled floor. “Anybody seen a tall, pale dude with long, nasty black hair?”
A few guys look up at me and then look back down. One nods his head toward the back of the room, and I gingerly step over a few huddled clumps to an empty spot of floor. Balled-up rubber gloves and blood stained bandages lay scattered around like someone just turned over a hospital garbage can. Then I realize that whole part of the floor is a shade darker than the rest.
Blood.
“What happened?” I ask no one in particular.
“Dweezo crapped out,” a grizzly old man offers. I recognize him—Delton Jennings: one of the regular homeless guys who make their night rounds through the city.
“Dweezo?”
“The guy you lookin’ for.”
“Was he a Muppet?”
“Naw, man, that was just what they called him. I dunno.”
“All right, how’d it play out?”
“Nah, he was just all fucked-up-looking when he showed up this morning. Blood kept trickling out his eye and shit.”
“His eye?”
“That’s what I said! And then he started coughing. He was up here and he started coughing and then he threw up and it was bright red, yo, and then, well . . . that.” He nods at the sizable stain stretched across the wood floor.
“EMS just left a few minutes ago.”
“You know where they took him?”
“Woodhull, I think. It was all kinda rush-rush.”
I thank Delton and work my way back downstairs and out the door. The same phantom nastiness tries to get in my way again, cooing his horrible song, but I step past before he can really become a nuisance.
“Shmloooo,” the thing gurgles as I walk away. “Carlossss . . .”
* * *
Woodhull looks more like a prison than a hospital. The hulking cement monstrosity sits at the geographical moment where Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Bed-Stuy converge. Three massive towers jut out from an aggressively plain block of nondescript windows. One concrete ramp loops around into a parking lot and another peels off from the street into an awning-covered driveway, where ambulances idle outside the ER doors. A series of grumpy-looking surgeons, security guards, and EMTs share cigarettes and horror stories on the curb directly in front of a NO SMOKING sign.
I wait, blending with the passing bums and street riffraff, until an ambulance crew rolls up and unloads a screaming bearded guy who appears to be velcroed to the stretcher. A couple cops jump out, looking exhausted. “Fuck ya mothas!” the guy yells. “Fuck all ya fuckin’ fuck mothas. Twice!” Perfect. “I will”—he bangs his head against the stretcher—“fucking kill you all!”
Hospital cops are running everywhere, looking for restraints, trying to appear competent. It’s a mess. I slip in on the current of that chaos, veer off down any old hallway and find an elevator. The morgue is all bright lights and bland colors. We have a guy down there, Mortimer, who lets us pretty much roam free when we need to. I don’t know if he knows what all is going on, or if he just takes whatever handout the Council has for him and forgets what he sees. Either way, he nods his jowly old head as I strut past and mumbles: “Row seven, bin A.”
I walk down the aisles, peering at the numbers like I’m using the damn Dewey decimal system for the dead. The little silver doors seems to go on forever, and I try not to think about dozens of bodies decaying around me, many unclaimed, unnamed. Death is one thing. The moment of the release of the soul, all that: fine. But the physical body after the fact? Get it away from me. That smell of rot, that festering, bubbling transition into mold and then dust? Hell no. Good night. I don’t like