The sluggish procession of homeward-bound commuters had already begun, and there was no choice but to join the endless line of cars on the Long Island Expressway. With the crawl of traffic testing my patience, I had more time than I needed to ponder Giannone’s story. I was satisfied that he was who he said he was, a doctor, now defrocked, who’d been at Utica General Hospital when a badly injured Felix — or somebody — was brought in. But had Giannone actually heard Brody propose a grand scheme to the patient in the bed, or was the whole episode just an imagined fantasy that seemed real to a rogue doctor tripping on drugs? Maybe he’d simply misinterpreted what he’d heard. Or maybe it was something Giannone’s addled mind misconstrued now, years after the fact. After all, this was a guy subject to spells of irrational anger, a pathetic addict who saw little animals where there were none. For all of that, should I still believe him? He’d been lucid today, and almost reasonable.
