Mark Smith - The Inquisitor

He answered the call. “Yeah?”

“They’re long gone,” said Mitch. “So where do you want me now?”

Hall glanced at Ray, who was fishing an orange plastic pill container out of his pocket.

“C’mon up here. We’re at One thirty-third and Amsterdam.”

“On my way.”

Hall sank back into his seat. If the three of them ended up sharing a toilet for the rest of their lives-or just got disappeared if the wrong guys found them first-it would be on him. His biggest mistake had been misjudging Geiger. Hall had originally settled on Dalton for the job-the man was a psycho, but what you saw was always what you got-but to his surprise the image of a boy strapped to a chair spitting blood from a mouth that had one lip missing had made him change his mind. Now it occurred to him that, at least in one way, he and Geiger might have something in common-and that in the end, this weakness could put the dagger in both their backs.

Hall turned to watch Ray jiggle two pills into his palm and bring his hand up to his horror-movie mouth. A groan and wince followed immediately. Ray’s brain was telling his jaw to open, but his muscles were balking in protest because the task was too painful. Ray stared at the pills and then looked over at Hall. Words leaked out of his lips like soup too hot to swallow.

“Help… me… out,” he said, and his free hand pointed at his grisly mouth.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Hall said, shaking his head.

Ray’s swollen, purple-circled eyes narrowed into slits. He looked like a huge, angry raccoon.

Hall snatched the pills from his partner’s hand, grabbed Ray’s jaw, and yanked it open. An ursine growl came out of the open maw. Hall shoved the pills into Ray’s mouth and pushed his jaw shut.

Closing his eyes, Ray swallowed. “Thanks,” he muttered.

When the pain first came, Geiger’s mind shut down like an engine sensing overload. Time stopped. The world, the universe, ceased to exist. There was only nothing. Then the void was filled with a visitation from the past. It was not so much an act of memory as an encounter in the present. His mind straddled then and now.

His father, holding a candle, led him to a door. He had finished building the space that day. He swung the door open: the room, if it could be called that, was four feet square.

“You’ll sleep here from now on,” he told the boy.

“But, Father… it’s so small.”

“Go inside and lie down.”

“I don’t want to be alone, Father.”

“You are not alone. You’ll have the music with you.” His father lifted the candle into the space. A cassette recorder and half a dozen cassettes lay on the floor.

The boy stepped inside. “Sleep,” his father said, shutting the door. Now nothing existed but blackness and the boy’s trembling breath.

Groping blindly, he gathered up the cassette player and tapes. He lay on his side, curled tight into a ball. The soles of his feet pushed against one wall, his spine and scapula against another, the back of his head against a third.

He waited for whatever came next.

Geiger opened his eyes to see Ezra staring down at him.

“Hi,” the boy said, and then walked out of Geiger’s field of vision.

Geiger sat up. He had a sense of the floor and walls accommodating his efforts, as if surfaces were solid but somewhat malleable. He stood up and waited while equilibrium gradually returned, and then stepped out of the closet. This had not been sleep, and his involuntary loss of consciousness and suspension of control were new and unsettling to consider. The rules of his migraines had been broken. The dream had always been the trigger, but this time the migraine had come on its own. Now, Geiger realized, he could at any moment be attacked from within and rendered helpless.

He started down the short hall toward the living room, hands up and out at ten and two o’clock, like a man making his way in the dark. He took a slow, careful detour to the desk. Ezra was settled on the couch, arms wrapped tightly around bent legs brought up against his chest.

“Why do you do it?” he asked.

“I get people to tell the truth. I retrieve information.”

Geiger shook loose a cigarette from its pack, turned to the boy, and saw the violin on the couch beside him.

“Was that you playing while I was in the closet?”

Ezra nodded. “I thought maybe you died.” He sighed through his mouth and a soft “Ohhhh” came out with it. “Thanks for the food. And the Advil.” He was greatly relieved that Geiger was awake, but the man was just so strange. How could he be both his protector and a professional torturer?

Geiger stood before him silently.

“What’s wrong with you?” Ezra said.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re not going to have another fit, are you?”

“It’s not a fit.”

“What is it?”

“A migraine. A very powerful headache.”

“Boy, it sure didn’t look like a headache to me. Maybe you should see a doctor?”

“I see a psychiatrist.”

“Really? And he, like, knows what you do?”

Ezra tried to picture Geiger sitting in a room, talking with a psychiatrist about his work, but his mind drew a complete blank.

When Geiger didn’t reply, Ezra went on: “I went to a shrink when Dad moved out. Mom took me.” His bony shoulders jerked in a shrug. “It was pretty lame. The shrink kept asking how I felt-you know, about the divorce-and I hardly talked. So Mom did most of the talking-about wanting to move to California and taking me away from my violin teacher and that kind of stuff. She’d ask the shrink, ‘Was that selfish?’ And the shrink would say, ‘Do you think it’s selfish?’ And she’d say ‘What do you think?’ So we’d sit there and they’d just ask each other questions.”

“I’m going to have a smoke,” Geiger said. He walked to the back door, punched in the exit code, and stepped out into the yard. The lawn flashed in the sun like filaments of green glass, and he had to squint before his eyes could accept the sharp light. His legs felt rubbery, but there had been no trail of echoes chasing the boy’s voice, no visual ghosts lurking at the edges of his movements.

He sat down against the tree and lit up. He was thinking about the boy’s mother, trying to envision the future so he could figure out a way to get there. Too many things felt beyond his control. Hall was close by and, as Harry feared, he clearly had technology on his side. Trains and planes and buses felt like too much of a risk-the possibility of stakeouts seemed real-and the prospect of driving a car seemed unwise, given his current state. Geiger was accustomed to being the master of his mind and body, but now he was more like a slave to both. To believe that there wouldn’t be another ambush from within was foolish, so it would be reckless for him to attempt to bring the boy to his mother. The mother would have to come to the boy. In the meantime, he and Ezra would have to leave this place. He needed to get help.

Ezra came to the doorway and watched Geiger sitting utterly still beneath a tree. He reminded Ezra of the miniature Buddha his mother had put in the garden, and that set off a pang of longing. He saw her sitting at the piano, teeth biting her lower lip, struggling bravely to keep up with him while playing a duet for piano and violin, trying not to curse aloud at her flubs while he tried not to laugh. He always felt closest to her at those moments. The wordless flow, the weaving of a musical tapestry, the sharing of sounds.

“Can I come out?” Ezra asked.

“Yes.”

Ezra went down the two steps, stood just beyond the stoop’s awning, and turned his face up to the sky.

“Feels good,” he said. “So, what happened to the guy I read about? Victor, I think his name was. Did you… slice him up?”