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The doctors have done CT Scans, which yielded nothing, and are perplexed by my predicament, insisting it’s trauma-induced selective memory or something. Luckily, I’m an excellent liar and they haven’t pegged me as one. I just have to keep up the ruse: I’m American and don’t recall a lick of Portuguese. Repeat a lot of questions and wait for them to give me my things and let me go.
As the day goes on, my roommates are taken in and out of the room for tests and consultations. When it comes my turn, the same orderly helps me out of bed and transports me to an open area where patients speak with people in regular clothes. Visitors, I suspect, before scanning the room for my mom. Force of habit.
“Recognize anyone?” The officer from downstairs speaks from behind me.
I swivel on my heel to face her; she stands inside one of the private rooms, eyeing my interactions suspiciously. I get the sense she doesn’t believe my story much. “No.”
“Not even me?” She lifts her shoulder from the door frame and slides her hands to her boxy trousers, which do nothing for her slim figure.
I like my girls with a little bit more meat on their bones. I don’t want to worry about breaking them when things get a little rough. Considering she’s the one who insisted on putting me here against my will, the urge to hurt her a little is overwhelming. “From the other day... You’re here to take me home?”
The officer cocks her head to the side and crosses her arms over my chest, scrutinizing me before extending her hand out toward the room. “Would you like to come in here?”
If she weren’t a lesbian, I’d think she took a liking to me. I glance up and down the hallway as she holds both palms out toward me. “What are you planning on doing to me?” I joke.
“I’m not who you need to worry about, Styx.” Her face goes stoic and she steps back, emphasizing the need for privacy. “I can’t keep you here much longer, and I’m just trying to help you, but you have to help me. We’re waiting for these kids to pop up all over the place, dead. You can save them.”
She cuts the air with her hand, meaning her suggestion for my entry is more like a command.
“Help you how?” I say as I make my way inside the single room. “There’s nothing I can do if I can’t even remember what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about the drugs. The people who tried to kill you.”
“I didn’t see anybody.” That is the honest truth. Whoever shot me did it from a safe place. I take a peek in the shopping bag on the bed. Clothes. Not like I can ask her where my things are with my temporary amnesia.
Officer Beyer straightens herself and crosses her arms over her chest, nodding at me while taking a few steps forward. “I thought you didn’t remember.”
“I don’t.”
She scoffs and runs a finger down the bridge of her nose. “Of course you don’t. Neither does the girl who found you. Neither do the neighbors.”
“Sounds like a shitty situation.” The people who run Pink Street aren’t the kind of people who welcome tattle tales. That same girl also hasn’t shown up here, so I’m pretty sure she’s floating off the coast somewhere or dismembered and stuffed down the sewers, if she’s lucky. “How is she doing, the girl?”
“I’m not here to discuss her. I’m here to get help. I pulled a personal favor to keep you alive. If you leave here without my protection and are spotted around the city, then I lose the only person who can help me find the drugs.”
I reach into the paper bag and take out the items one at a time. My phone, the tissues, the vials, and the cash. None of that is here.
“Missing something?” she asks.
I glance over my shoulder at her. “Are these mine?”
She scowls and reaches into her back pocket for a cell phone. “We’re doing this, then?”
What is she doing?“You keep asking me questions, butI don’t even know what I was doing on Pink Street.” Mom was supposed to let me crash for the night and hopefully give me a ride to the jet when I called that number on the tissues, which is my way out. “There must be a clue in whatever I had on me.”
Helping me would be returning my belongings.
“You had nothing on you, Styx. Not even a phone. I had to track down your information for the hospital through our records. So either you got rid of your belongings or someone stole them from you.”
Someone stole them. The snow, the tissues with the number, everything.
A couple grand in euros is chump change for the Portuguese Mafia, and those snot-nosed shits would rather wipe their nose on bills than tissues. Nobody in their right mind would have gone outside to risk it.
Which leaves one person.
“Maybe the girl who found me knows something that can jog my memory.” I drop the clue and let the officer interpret it as she sees fit. I’m neither admitting nor denying that I’m putting up a ruse, but I can guarantee the Portuguese Mafia, the crime organization who put a hit on me, is not responsible for the Moroccan Snow. That’s all my father. But if she wants to believe it’s the mob, that’s her death.
“Fine.” She slides her foot to the side and points to the clothes. “Get dressed.”
