The morphine was a white snowbird beneath him. Together they soared. They visited his grandmother's row house on Parrish Street. His father's Buick LeSabre rattled gray-blue exhaust at the curb.
Time toggled on, off. The pain reached for him again. For a moment he was a young man. He could bob, weave, counter. The cancer was a big middleweight, though. Fast. A hook to his stomach flared-red and blaz- ingly hot. He pressed the button. Soon the cool white hand gently caressed his forehead…
He sensed a presence in the room. He looked up. A figure stood at the foot of the bed. Without his glasses-and even they did not help much anymore-he could not recognize the man. He had for a long time imagined what might be the first thing to go, but he had not counted on it being memory. In his job, in his life, memory had been everything. Memory was the thing that haunted you. Memory was the thing that saved you. His long-term memory seemed intact. His mother's voice. The way his father smelled of tobacco and 3-IN-ONE Oil. These were his senses and now his senses were betraying him.
What had he done?
What was her name?
He couldn't remember. He couldn't remember much of anything now.
The figure drew closer. The white lab coat glowed in a celestial light. Had he passed? No. He felt his limbs, heavy and thick. The pain stabbed at his lower abdomen. The pain meant he was still alive. He pressed the pain button, closed his eyes. The girl's eyes stared at him out of the darkness.
"How are you, Doctor?" he finally managed.
"I'm fine," the man replied. "Are you in much pain?"
Are you in much pain?
The voice was familiar. A voice from his past.
The man was no doctor.
He heard a snap, then a hiss. The hiss became a roar in his ears, a terrifying sound. And there was good reason. It was the sound of his own death.
But soon the sound seemed to come from a place in North Philadelphia, a vile and ugly place that had haunted his dreams for more than three years, a terrible place where a young girl had died, a young girl he knew he would soon meet again.
And that thought, more than the thought of his own death, scared Detective Phillip Kessler to the bottom of his soul.