Ben Winters - World of Trouble

I lurch up out of the bed and my right foot stumbles into something on the ground that makes a wobbling hollow noise as it falls over. It’s the carafe, from our rickety coffee-production operation. It’s all here, carafe and pencil-sharpener grinder and hot plate and an approximate half share of our dwindling beans. Cortez betrayed me and attacked me and dragged me up here, exiled me and my intentions, and left me here in the jail cell with food and water and coffee and beans. He is way down there rubbing his hands together, flitting among his treasures, a dragon on his pile.

I stare at the beans, halfway up and halfway still lying down. Didn’t I have a feeling that I would end up in here? Didn’t I? I can’t remember, but I think I did, I think I recall staring at poor sick Jean and imagining myself, unwell and declining in the same spot, poor sick me. Like it’s all a loop, like time is just this bending, folded-over strip, eating its own tail.

I try to stand up again—I succeed—I’m up—I try the door, the door is locked.

Nico, I’m just—I’m trying to do it. I’m trying. Okay? I’m doing my best .

I bring my hands up to my face, the stubbled surfaces of my cheeks. I hate my face right now, this ungainly disorder, like an overgrown garden. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe there’s plenty of time left. I’ve lost track of it. I’ll rot in here. I’ll piss in the corner. I’ll get hungrier and hungrier. I’ll count the hours. Man in a box.

I can see it on the wall opposite the cell: the hook just inside the door where the key ring used to hang.

This is a death that is worse than death, buried alive in a country jail cell, knowing a lot but not enough—what I have is the dark circle of the story like a rock and I need to keep it rolling forward and accreting mass like a snowball, I need for it to grow . What time is it, what day—maybe it’s about to happen right now, right now: the boom, the flash in the sky, the rattling of the ground and then everything to come after, and in the chaos and fire the crime scene will be burned away and this police station will collapse in on itself and I’ll be dead and no one will ever know what happened.

I scream full-throated and launch myself at the bars and grip them and shake them and still screaming I slam my hands open-palmed against them, again and again, because I have to get down there, I have to know, I have to see.

And then footsteps, coming down the hall. I shout and bang on the bars.

“Cortez? Cortez!”

“Who the fuck is Cortez?”

“What?”

The back wall of the cell explodes, showering dust down all around me. Then the dust is clearing slowly and Jordan is on the other side of the bars, holding a black semiautomatic pistol in one hand, holding the keys to the cell in the other hand, and he’s staring at me and his eyes are burning and fierce. No sunglasses, no jaunty ball cap, no smug smile.

“Where is she?” he says, holding his gun straight up in the air. “Where’s Nico?”

I edge backward in the cell. There’s nowhere to hide. Just a bed and a toilet.

“She’s dead,” I tell him. “You know that she’s dead.”

He fires again, and the heat of the bullet rushes past me and the back wall explodes again, closer to my head, and I discover that I have thrown my hands up over my face, ducked and flinched. It won’t end—that dumb animal instinct to live, to keep going. It doesn’t end.

Jordan looks bad. I’ve only known him smiling; smirking; leering; taunting. That’s how he lives in my mind, the punk kid lording it over me, hoarding his secrets in Concord. Now he looks like a composite photograph where they’ve aged the criminal so you can recognize him after years have passed. His young face is mossy with stubble, and he has a deep gash running down from one ear to the corner of his cheek. There’s some manner of acute infected injury on his right leg, the cuff of his pants rolled up over a haphazardly bandaged wound, dripping around the edges with red and black and pus. He looks grief stricken and desperate. He looks how I feel.

“Where is she, Henry?”

“Stop asking me where she is.”

He did it. He killed her. The clarity is like fire. Jordan steps toward me. I step toward him. It’s like the bars are a mirror, and we’re both the same guy, two images coming together.

“Where is she?”

He raises the gun and aims it at my heart. I feel again the stupid shivering need to live, to turn around and duck, but this time I stay put, I grind my heels into the floor, staring at his wrathful eyes. “She’s dead,” I tell him. “You killed her.”

His face narrows with pretend confusion. “I just got here.”

He points the gun at me, and now I do, I feel like, fine, that’s fine, let me die here, let the bullet collide with my brain and be done with it, but first I need the rest of the story. “Why did you cut her throat?”

“Her—what?” he says.

“ Why? ”

I drop quickly, bring my knee down on the coffee carafe and bust the glass. Jordan is jerking the gun to follow my actions, Jordan is saying “stop that fucking moving—” but now I’ve got an uneven triangle of glass in my hand and I launch myself forward off the ground in an ungainly leap, find his stomach between the bars and stab him in the gut. “Hey—goddammit—” He looks down, horrified. It’s a superficial wound, the glass dangles at a shallow angle, but there’s blood coming out of him like crazy, a thick fast welling out of blood like oil, and my hand is darting for the key on its ring in his other hand. I’m a beat too slow, he flings the ring and the key out behind him, out the doorway and into the hallway.

I say “Damn it,” and he says “You asshole,” clutches a hand to his stomach and brings it up all bloody.

“Why did you kill her?”

I have to know. That’s all I need is to know. I am dimly aware of the RadioCOMMAND still going, “ DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED ,” and Jordan reaches for my throat between the bars, but his hand is all slick with the blood from his stomach and it slides off me. I move backward and spit at him. “I’m looking for her,” he insists. “I came here to find her.”

I slide a long hand between the bars and grab his leg, worm my forefinger under the bandage and jam it into the wound on his calf and he screeches and I jam it in more. A nasty trick, bad-guy wrestler move. Jordan writhes away from my hand, but I don’t let go—I’ve got both of my hands wriggled through the bars now, one hand clamped onto him at midthigh, the other hand still gouging his infected wound. I’m behaving like a monster. He is screaming. I want answers. I need them.

“Stop screaming,” I tell him, both arms extended as if through the holes in a puppet theater, holding him fast through the bars. “Talk. Tell me.”

“What?” He says, choking out the word, gasping from pain. “What?”

“The truth.”

“What truth?” Jordan gasps. I ease up slightly on my grip, give him a moment of relief, not wanting him to pass out. The information is more important. I have to know. He’s heaving desperate breaths, clutching at his wound, both of us on the ground in the grime. I give him what I already know, build a bridge of common understanding, Farley and Leonard, Criminal Investigation , chapter 14.

“You abandoned your girlfriend in Concord. You and Abigail were supposed to stay but you left anyway. You made sure you were here on the big day, T-minus one week, when the whole group was supposed to go underground. How did you know that was the day?”

“I don’t know anything. I told you.”

“Liar. Killer. You were here at five on Wednesday the twenty-sixth because you knew that that’s when they’d be going underground and you knew that Nico would leave. Maybe you told her—maybe you told her to leave, to meet you outside the station. And there she was. She had a backpack on. She was happy to see you.”