CHAPTER ONE

        I woke up with wet asphalt beneath me and a hunk of concrete for a pillow. The damp had seeped through my shirt, and it felt like someone had been tapping out Morse code on my lower spine with a rattan cane.

        I decided that this was not a good omen for my day.

        The morning light that pierced through my eyelids had left me with a dull but insistent headache, and the parts of my brain that didn't hurt felt like cotton candy. I let my inner pilot open my eyes and immediately regretted the decision, as the dull throb became a full throttle attack by what I could only assume was a miniature Panzer division. I shielded my eyes with my hands in an attempt to cut off their fuel supply. Gradually, my eyes adjusted and the light became far less offensive, despite the lingering feeling of caterpillar treads.

        My body was stiff and sore, curled into a position as if I'd been trying to ward off blows or bracing for some sort of pain. I felt almost locked into the pose. Everything hurt.

        How long had I been curled up like this?

        I was in an alley. At least that was my best guess, as I appeared to be flanked by the ass ends of buildings. A cool breeze brushed over me, carrying with it the sickly sweet smell of hot peanut oil. Sense memory stirred. Slowly, I sat up and got a better look at my environs. I saw a white sign next to a loading dock.

        LUCKY CHINA BUFFET. DELIVERIES ONLY.

        Peanut oil mystery solved, and then a bell rang in the back of my skull. I was missing something important. My eyes wandered back to the sign.

        Lucky China Buffet.

        Home.

        Lucky China meant home.

        I grabbed the edge of a dumpster and pulled myself up as quickly as my body would allow. Every last joint screamed with the effort. I hung on to the dumpster a little longer until I could feel my equilibrium return.

        Something inside compelled me to look down at myself.

        Two legs, the something said. Two feet. Hands. Pajamas a little shabby for outdoor wear, but at least we're not naked.

        Naked?

        As soon as I got back inside, my brain and I were going to have a nice long chat. Possibly with liquor involved. Or is it too early for that? I realized I'd lost all sense of time. The sun was high, the air had a chill, but none of that meant much. I searched my memory for some clue as to what I'd been doing before I'd fallen asleep, but nothing beyond the initial damp feeling on my back and the piercing brightness in my eyes was coming to mind.

        Shit, said the something inside. We've gone and done it again.

        I needed to get back into my apartment.

        Apartment.

        Okay, I could remember that much at least. My hand, almost on its own, reached down into my pajama top and dragged out a key on a chain around my neck. A good boy scout is always prepared. Apparently.

        Slowly, carefully, I stepped out of the alley and onto the street. The clock in the window of the bank across the street said 8:00 – prime morning rush hour in the city, but not in this neighborhood, it seemed. The traffic of automobiles and pedestrians was sporadic. Not light, but not a stampede, either. Those who did pass by gave me no notice, or at least pretended not to notice. It said something about the atmosphere of the neighborhood I lived in. Here was a damp, barefoot hobo wandering the streets in his pajamas, and no one gave a second glance. No screaming, no ogling. No frantic calls to 911.

        I stepped into the vestibule between Lucky China and a boarded up bodega and fumbled for the key again. My head was buzzing, my ears had started to ring, and I felt like the ground was going to rush up at me. I leaned up against the cool glass of the apartment building door and let the wave of dizzy pass over me.

        Once the feeling of balance had returned, I shoved the key in the lock and let myself in. Still fuzzy, half dazed, I let my feet carry me via fuzzy sense memory towards my final destination, up one flight of stairs and then another. I climbed up to the fourth floor, resisting the temptation to crawl, and found my apartment door.

        Fumbled more and rattled more – the door swung open and I fell into my living room, catching myself on the arm of a threadbare sofa as the dizzy clobbered me again. I hung my head until the spinning feeling stopped, then dragged my tired carcass toward my bedroom until I slumped over my dresser with my hands pressed down on the cool top.

        With a little hesitation, I raised up my head and looked into the large mirror over the bureau. Drawn face, sharp nose. Hair dirty blond and a little longer than short, a rat's nest. Five o'clock shadow that was obviously clocking some overtime. Grey eyes a little red around the edges and baggy underneath.

        I've looked better, said the voice in the back of my head. I've looked worse, too.

        There were two pieces of paper jammed into the mirror's frame. One was an aging photograph, a portrait of the face in the mirror that looked a little cleaner and a little happier, but only just. The other was a sticky note in a neat hand that I knew wasn't mine.

        Your name is Raymond Walsh, it read.

        I knew that. Thank the gods. Last night's adventures hadn't created a complete tabula rasa, at least.

        You are standing in the bedroom of your apartment on Wright Blvd.

        The phone rang.

        I shook my head and turned away from my little shrine to self-awareness. I flopped down on my bed and picked up the phone on the nightstand.

        “Hello?”

        “I need you, Ray,” said a man's voice on the other end. It sounded familiar, but it wasn't registering in my admittedly faulty memory. I decided to play for time.

        “I'm flattered,” I said, “but it's very unattractive when you start off sounding desperate.”

        “Fuck you, Walsh. It's not like you're fighting off the work lately. We've got a floater needs your special touch. There'll be a car at your place in ten minutes.”

        “Yes sir, Lieutenant!”

        Lieutenant? Yes. Knowles, that was it. My brain was starting to catch up.

        After a pause, I said, “Danny?” The name sounded somehow right. “Make it twenty. I need a shower if I'm gonna be with polite company.”

        “Whatever, Ray. Just bring the mojo.”

        Danny Knowles hung up and I headed for the shower. I stripped out of the alley-stained pajamas and took bodily inventory in the bathroom mirror. Sweat and grime, but nothing bruised. The only marks on me were the scars along my shoulder blades that had been with me for as long as I could remember, the relics of some long forgotten skirmish, of which there were, I supposed, rather many. I wouldn't know for sure. I don't remember much past the last decade, and most of that's been carefully constructed with the help of dear and clever friends so that I can have something that resembles a normal life.

        Who was I before? Who knows?

        Today, my name is Raymond Walsh. It says so on my driver's license.

#

        Twenty minutes later, I walked back out the front door of my apartment showered, shaved, and dressed much more appropriately for the hour. A uniform leaned up a against a patrol car. He nodded as he saw me and opened up the passenger door.

        “Front seat?” I said as I climbed in. “It's sweet how you guys almost respect me now.”

        Uniform said nothing, but turned on the siren and peeled off the curb at an unhealthy speed. Ten minutes later we pulled into the parking lot of a warehouse along the river. I hopped out and headed over to where the action was, heeding the siren's call of yellow crime scene tape. There was a living, breathing Ken doll in a navy overcoat, plastic-handsome and obviously aware of it, giving orders to a uniformed posse.

        “I bring the mojo,” I said to the Ken doll.

        “About damn time,” said Lieutenant Knowles. “Your beauty regimen all square?”

        “Trust me,” I said, “I did you a favor.”

        “Like I could've smelled you over the bouquet of corpse and dead alewife,” he said, cocking his head in the direction of the crime scene.

        The coroner's assistant was crouched down over a corpse, male by the look of it, although it was hard to tell from the waterlogged swelling of the body.

        “Rent-a-cop at the shipping warehouse called in at seven this morning,” said the Lieutenant. “Victim was floating face down in the river, butted up against a pylon. Frogs fished him out about an hour ago.”

        The body was grey and swollen and the areas around his lips and nostrils were ragged.

        The ME's assistant looked up at me with bloodshot eyes. “He's been dead about three days,” he said. “Most likely he's been in the water that long, too. Long enough for the local river fauna to use him for a light snack.”

        I shuddered at the image and then took a deep breath.

        “No ID,” said Danny, “and we've got no idea how long he's been hung up on the dock here, or how long he's been following the current. I need a crime scene, Walsh. And a name, if you can swing it.”

        I shrugged. I didn't relish the thought of laying my hands on John Doe's nibbled up head, but it's how I make most of my living. I have a particular talent when it comes to the missing and the unknown. Cops like Danny Knowles had closed dozens of cases because they're not afraid to use my talents (although admitting that to their superiors was another story).

        I kneeled down beside the poor soul. The ME's assistant took one look at me and rolled his eyes.

        “A little early to be bringing in the freak show, isn't it?” he asked Danny.

        “I'm a closer,” said the Lieutenant. “I don't like to waste time.”

        I shut out the banter over my head, took a deep breath to brace myself for the impending mindfuck and reached out to the corpse's head.

        Dark.

        Dark and suffocating.

        I float now, feeling little but the cold. Even the feeling of dampness has dwindled as my body becomes saturated with polluted river.

        I force myself to work backwards, floating away from this pylon and against the flow of the river back towards the beginning of my final journey.

        Faster and faster I flow upstream until I feel the shock of cold and wet against my body, the feel of rushing air replacing that shock almost instantly, until I find myself standing on a precipice looking out over the city skyline and the river that divides it in two.

        I pause in this moment to gauge how I'm feeling.

        Sorrow pierces my heart, a pain different from any other.

        I'm flunking out of the engineering department.

        Kathy's gone.

        Everything hurts.

        I tried talking to one of the school's counselors, but I don't think they heard me. Just handed me a prescription for antidepressants and sent me on my way. The waiting room was full of exam-panicked undergrads. No time for the lovelorn, I guess.

        I crumple the prescription and Kathy's breakup note into a ball and watch it as it drops down into the rolling water below.

        I always liked this bridge.

        She told me she loved me on this bridge.

        I hold that one perfect image in my mind and let go of the fence.

        I came back to reality with a stabbing feeling in my heart and damp cheeks. I realized that I'd started crying at some point while connected to the corpse's last moments of life. I turned my head away, embarrassed, and rubbed my eyes on the sleeve of my coat. When I turned around again, I found Danny's hand reaching out to help me up.

        “Who do we have?” he asked as he dragged me up to my feet.

        “University student,” I said. “No name, sorry. You might want to check with the engineering department, though.”

        “And my crime scene?”

        “Suicide,” I said as I tried to banish the lingering feelings of wind rush and plummet. “Let himself drop off the west side of the sixth street bridge.”

        Danny shook his head.

        “Poor bastard,” he said.

        I nodded.

        “Thanks,” he said.

        “I'll bill you,” I said, then turned away.

        “Can I have one of the boys drive you home?”

        “No thanks,” I said. “I need a walk in what passes for fresh air around here.”

        “Sure thing, Walsh. Thanks again.”

        “Just pay me on time.”

        I had a good hour's walk ahead of me. Honestly, the ride home would've been nice, but I did need some time to think. I was still feeling a little shaken by my rude awakening, so I decided to use the walk as a meditation. See if I could remember what had gone on the night before.

        What had I done with my day?

        Sat in my office, I seemed to recall. Actively avoided my answering machine. Chased down some past due consulting fees.

        Then what?

        Dinner, I thought. Then fuzzy remembrances of watching the ballgame on TV. A bourbon or two. And then?

        Falling, said the voice in my head. And then we were falling.

        Ah, yes. The regularly scheduled nightmare. An endless fall through a big, dark nothing. Now I wished that I hadn't remembered.

        It's not a nightly experience, but the falling dream had been visiting me on a regular basis for as far back as I can remember, which is, embarrassingly, not that far back.

        Usually, when I had the dream, I would wake up in my own bed. Sweating and screaming, sure, but in my own bed. Waking up in an alley? That didn't feel right. I was pretty sure somnambulism was not one of my hobbies, and yet the image of that alley in the morning light and the memory of that dampness against my back were not unfamiliar. I'd done it before. I think. The picture was fuzzy, but the sense of deja vu was overwhelming. I'd woken up in an alley to the lingering memory of a terrible fall.

        I tried to push the paralyzing feeling of the dream out of my head. It took the rest of the walk home to do it. And I succeeded. Mostly.

        The early dusk of autumn had settled over the neighborhood. The neon beacon of the Lucky China Buffet called out to me through the growing dark as my stomach began to rumble. I had skipped a meal or two today. I ducked in to the Buffet and tried to drown out the lingering creepy feeling with a little char siu lo mein and a helping of coconut bao. A heaping plate of greasy MSG heaven.

        Back in my apartment, my appetite sated, I found myself staring out the window over a pauper's share of skyline. I knew what I'd been doing last night before things got weird. What was I doing before all that?

        I sat down on the sofa, pulled out my wallet and emptied its contents onto the coffee table.

        One driver's license, issued to Raymond Walsh. There was my picture on it. It felt right. Nothing weird there. There were business cards from the various police officers I'd worked with. There was Danny's card.

        When had he given that to me, again?

        There was another card. Walsh Security Services. Mine, apparently. That was my business, yes. That felt right.

        Everything there felt right. I could remember it all on principle. But in actuality? Pictures of the past were a little fuzzy.

        How the hell had it all gotten there? How the hell had I gotten here? In this apartment? In this city, even?
        Shut the fuck up, Ray, I thought. You're just feeling disoriented after your little adventure this morning. One good night's sleep and you'll be feeling better.

        I was probably right. Staying awake and fretting about it all certainly wasn't helping. I walked over to the kitchenette and poured myself a little nightcap.

        “Ah, bourbon,” I said to the empty room. “Perhaps you're just the key I need.”

        I walked back over to the window and took a sip of the sweet, smoky amber, enjoying every last inch of alcoholic burn down my throat.

        It'll all be better in the morning, I thought, then went to lean my head against the window. The window had other ideas, however, and ceased to be solid. The rest of my body's weight followed my head, and I screamed as I began to fall, but only for a moment. The sound was soon choked off as I blacked out from the terror.