Ben Winters - World of Trouble

“You monster,” she whispers, and he ignores her, replies cheerily: “You did it!” Like he’s proud of her. Like she just bowled a perfect game. “You’re back! I’m so proud of you, baby.”

“No, you’re not,” she says to him.

“Sure I am, little sister.”

“Stop.”

“Okay, I’ll stop,” he says, and he smiles at her and licks his lips. “I’m stopping. But I’m so proud of you.”

“You’re a liar.”

I look at him, smirking and naked. A liar is the very least of what he is. He killed them all. Not just Cortez, and not just Nico. There was no suicide pact—he poisoned the lot of them. It was his plan B. Just his.

Jean can’t shoot him—she’s working on it—she’s gathering the nerve. DeCarlo moves his non-gun hand down casually to scratch his ass. Comfortable, easy in his skin, high out of his mind. I’m trying to get the details right, thinking as fast as I can. What is he proud of her for? It’s a lie, she is calling him a liar, but what is the nature of the lie?

She’s getting ready, charming monster or not, she’s going to shoot him. He tried to kill her, and now she’s going to shoot him and the rest of the answers will be dead.

“Jean,” I say, but she doesn’t even hear me.

“Look at me,” Jean says to Astronaut, running her finger across the line of her scar, like I saw her do over and over during her interrogation. “ Look .”

“You look beautiful, little sister,” he says. “You look amazing.”

“Look what you made me.”

I glance behind me at Agent Kessler and I can tell that he’s as confused as I am by this dialog, but I can also tell that he doesn’t care, the details don’t matter to him anymore. All he knows is that Astronaut killed Nico, whom he loved, and now he is bringing up his own weapon, trying to get around me to get his shot, even as I say “Jean,” sharply, loudly, to draw her attention and keep her from pulling the trigger.

Everybody needs to hold on—everybody needs to just hold on. Because nothing yet has explained Nico. I have no explanation for why he chased down my sister and cut her throat and left her gasping, breathing blood, to die alone in the mud.

“Mr. DeCarlo,” I say. “Why did you kill Nico Palace?”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Why did you kill the girl you called Isis?”

“Sorry, man, it’s not ringing a bell.”

He snorts laughter, and Jean’s eyes sharpen with anger, and I feel Kessler’s wrathful breath behind me. Astronaut grins at the girl tauntingly, radiating wickedness, standing in his louche bathrobe in a tiny room full of people who want to kill him. I feel the gun in my hand, the knife in my belt, I feel the Earth itself screaming for the death of this man, poisoner and conman and thief, but I need nobody to die right now. I need stasis, I need time to stop until I can claw the last pieces of truth out of this acrid little room.

“Nico told you she disagreed with the decision to go underground, Mr. DeCarlo,” I say. “She left. She posed no further threat to you, she was going to take no share of your space or your water or narcotics.”

“Or pasta sauce,” he says, giggling. “Don’t forget about my pasta sauce.”

“Mr. DeCarlo, why did you kill her?”

“Shit, man, it’s a question for the philosophers,” he says.

“Why does anyone kill anyone, right? Isn’t that right, little sister?”

Jean’s hand goes back to her scar, and there is some slippery truth in Astronaut’s malevolent leer, in the terror on Jean’s small face, and I am trying to knit it all together when Kessler behind me says “Enough” and pushes past me into the room, and Astronaut’s eyes sharpen with recognition.

“Hey—” he says. “Jordan?”

“It’s Agent Kessler, actually, you prick.”

“Agent? Huh,” and he moves to one knee and fires his pistol straight into Kessler’s chest, and Kessler’s whole body flies back into the wall, and I shout “damn it” and then “no” because Jean has opened fire, she jerks the trigger of her handgun and misses Astronaut by a mile—but a spark flies off the wall and catches the flammable atmosphere and explodes.

For a long minute the world is just fire. The sound of exploding bottles and the smell of burning, and the air is on fire and Kessler is and I am, blue and yellow fire is all around us, and I am batting at our bodies, slapping down the flames, while across the tiny room Astronaut’s whole chemical-smoked body catches and bursts, and before he can react or move he becomes a pillar of fire, spiraling and falling. I get Kessler out of there with a few big heaves, cover his body with my body until we’re both extinguished.

It’s mostly our clothes, after all, Kessler’s clothing is badly burned, as mine is—the real problem is the hole in his chest, a golf-ball-sized gunshot entrance wound geysering blood, and so with the heat still pouring out of the small room, the stench of burn and death, I am hunched over Kessler panting in the hallway, covering his chest with two flat hands, blood from his heart and chest flooding out around my fingers.

“Don’t do that,” he says, bleary, peering up. “No, please.”

Blood bubbles up out of his mouth with the words, and in the glow of the fire behind me the blood looks black.

“Try not to talk,” I say. “I’m putting pressure on the wound.” I lean forward, flattening one hand over the other hand, flattening both hands over his gaping chest.

“Don’t put pressure on the wound.” He reaches up with surprising strength, pushes my hands off him. “Don’t do that.”

“Please remain quiet and still,” I say, “until I can staunch the bleeding.”

“I am going to bleed out and die.”

“We don’t know that.”

“I want to bleed out and die. Palace! This is so much better than a—fucking—I don’t know —tsunami or something.” He laughs, coughing, blood spraying out. “This is the best-case scenario.”

I don’t like it. I shake my head. The idea of just leaving him here. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. God, yes. Did we get the monster?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, go get him.”

“Her,” I say.

“What?”

The door to the room behind us is open, and Astronaut I can see in there, melted and smoldering, but it doesn’t matter—it’s Jean, it’s Jean who rushes past in the corner of my vision, hoping I don’t see her, but I do—I do.

I don’t know why it matters, but I know that it does. Getting the rest of the story, hearing a confession, checking off the final details.

Solving a murder is not about serving the victim, because the victim is, after all, dead. Solving a murder serves society by restoring the moral order that has been upset by the gunshot or knife strike or poisoning, and it serves to preserve that moral order by warning others that certain acts cannot be committed with impunity.

But society is dead. Civilization is burning cities, its terrified animals clustered around grain silos, stabbing each other at burned-down convenience stores for the last can of Pringles.

Nevertheless—even so—here I go, I go charging through the darkness toward the stairs, following Jean’s frantic small form.

I don’t yell for her to stop, because she won’t stop. I don’t yell “Police!” because I’m not a policeman anymore, I haven’t been for some time now. I hear her thin feet clanging up the stairs, hear the narrow metal stairwell rattling as she bolts for daylight. I charge across the floor and I follow her, hurling myself up the thin steps for the last time, putting the last of the pieces together, following Jean as she rattles up the stairway toward the clustered shadows at the top.