Chapter 8: No Card to Give

The blood found the seam at the corner of the table, ran it to the edge, and let go. One drop. A pause long enough to be a decision. Then another.

Wes counted thirty-two of them before it occurred to him that counting would not get him anywhere, and then he counted nine more.

The dead man’s hand hung off the end of the table, gone the color of the table. Nobody had moved him. Nobody was going to; after the first quarter hour, not touching him had stopped being a decision and turned into a habit of the room. His pants had gone dark and wet, and the smell had thickened from something sweet at the edge of it into something with weight. They had been in here with him close to an hour.

Bodies let go of themselves before they smell. Wes had known that for years and never once found a use for it. Now he did.

The woman on his left had a hand over her mouth and nose and hadn’t taken it down since the smell turned. She breathed through her fingers. Every so often she looked at the body, and then away, and then back at it, as though she could talk herself into its being something else.

My name is Mark Ellery. I’m from Ohio.

He’d been saying it since the break began, and it had gone thin the way a word goes thin when you say it too often, and then it had gone useless, because Ohio was spent. Tommy Vasquez had spent Ohio in front of the room and there was no getting it back. You could not stand in a room and be from a state somebody else was already from. Not with a man keeping a list.

So: a new one. He turned it over. Dean Mercer. He said it twice in his head, then a third time with a shrug in it, the way he’d say it to a stranger at a bar. It sat in his mouth wrong, which meant nothing. Every name sat wrong for the first hour, and then one day it fit and he answered to it in his sleep.

He needed a state to hang it on. Indiana had come out of him once already, unasked, and he was not going to let that happen again.

“That’s twenty minutes,” the Ram said from the wall, in the same mild voice he’d used to tell them to stretch whatever still worked, arms and necks and shoulders. “Free time’s finished. We’ll start again.”

The woman on his left took her hand off her face. After a moment she put it back.

Wes looked at the clock past the dead man’s elbow. Twelve-fifty. He had been watching it since he woke up on that floor and had never once seen the minute hand move, and the break was over anyway, so it had moved — or it hadn’t, and the Ram kept his own time. Either way he didn’t like it. He left it.

Four people still owed the room a story, and then it would be his.

Whitlock turned his head along the row. “Novak.”

Eli had been sitting with his hands flat on the table, studying them as though they belonged to somebody else. He looked up. “Okay. It’s not — I’m not good at this.”

Nobody helped him.

“Eli Novak.” He said it carefully, like a word in a language he’d had to look up. “I write. Wrote. Novels — serials, mostly, the kind that go up a chapter at a time and get read on a phone.” He stopped. “It’s a living. It was a living.”

The room waited. Wes had the idea that the waiting was the only thing holding him up.

“I was at home. It’s a rental, it doesn’t matter. I was in the back room, working, the last part of the book, and there are a hundred and some people in it and every one of them has to be on stage at the end, so I had my head down and I was — in it. I didn’t hear anything outside. I didn’t feel anything. I don’t know when it happened. I don’t know when I went out, or how I got—“ He shut his mouth. Opened it. “I don’t know.”

“That’s it,” Whitlock said.

“That’s it.”

“You don’t know.”

“I can’t lie.” The stutter went out of his voice, all at once, and what came out was flat and level and not the least bit sorry. “So there’s no reason for me to make something up that you’d all like better.”

Two or three people looked at him. Wes looked at him. A liar would have brought weight — a street, a dog behind a fence, the name of the woman next door — because weight is how a lie asks to be believed. Eli had brought a rented house and a hundred people who weren’t in it, and he hadn’t dressed any of it up. Wes didn’t think the man was lying. He also couldn’t see what good it did the room.

“Where’s the town,” Whitlock said.

“Millvale.”

“Millvale where.”

“Pennsylvania.”

“That where you live, or where the house is?”

“Both.”

“Anything else you’d want in a column.”

“No.”

Whitlock wrote. He had a sheet of the bloodstained paper in front of him and one of the pens, and he wrote in small letters down the left-hand side, and Wes watched him do it because there was nothing else to watch.

Tommy knocked on the table with two knuckles. Three times. “Badge.”

“I heard you the first time.”

“Look at that. A name and a job. That’s not a story, that’s a business card. You gave us two lines and then you started counting us like a man taking inventory.” Tommy put his weight on the table, elbows out, and Wes was reminded again that none of them could stand, that all Tommy had was his upper half, and that he was using every pound of it. “You picked the order. You pick who’s next. You decide when an answer is an answer and when it goes in the book anyway. And nobody in here knows you.”

“Ask your question.”

“I already asked it. Say it out loud. ‘I’m not the liar.’ Right now. It’s free.”

The room went still in a way that had nothing to do with the dead man.

“No,” Whitlock said.

“No.”

“He told us he won’t rule on what counts as a lie. Free time’s over.” Whitlock’s voice hadn’t come up, and wasn’t going to. “So I say it and I’ve ruled on myself. That’s his job, and he’s already told us he won’t do it in the dark. And suppose I’m wrong. Suppose it’s free, suppose a sentence in free time doesn’t count for anything.” He let that sit exactly as long as it needed to. “Eight people would still hear it. And eight people would remember it when the pens come out. No.”

“Convenient.”

“It’s not convenient. It’s the only careful thing anybody’s said in here.”

Tommy sat back. “You know what I think?”

“I expect you’ll tell me.”

“I think a man walks into a room where everybody’s supposed to say what they do, and everybody just says it, and one man takes a breath first. Looks at the clock.” Tommy turned one hand over. “I think you looked at that clock before you gave us your name.”

Whitlock didn’t answer it. Wes watched him not answer it, and watched Tommy watch him not answer it, and understood that a hook had gone into the floor whether or not it held.

“Somebody in here has to be believed,” Whitlock said at last. “That isn’t a small thing. That’s the whole thing. You’re a loan shark.” He let it sit. “I’m a detective. Who do you think they’ll believe?”

“Allegedly.”

“What?”

“Allegedly a loan shark.” Tommy shrugged. “And you’re allegedly a detective. See how that works? All of a sudden everybody’s walking around with a word in front of them.”

“Both of you,” the woman in the gray suit said. “Stop.”

She hadn’t moved. Her arms had been crossed for the whole break, and she said it the way a person says a thing she decided ten minutes ago and has been waiting for a gap to put it in.

They stopped.

“You’re arguing about who gets to run a room that’s deciding who dies,” she said. “That’s the part that should worry you. Whoever’s name goes on eight of those papers — say it means what all of you have already decided it means. Then when it’s done, eight of us will have sat in a circle and written a name, and a man will be dead, and every one of us will have done it. Politely. With pens they gave us. That’s not a thing you win. That’s a thing you carry out of here.”

Nobody said anything.

What “out” meant had never been said. Wes had decided for himself, before the break, that it meant the body, and he had no standing to say so.

He had one thing he was good at. It was talking a room into a shape. He could feel the shape available to him now, four sentences long: that a vote wasn’t a sentence; that they were doing arithmetic on a rule they’d heard once; that the smart move was to stop calling each other murderers and start comparing what could be checked. Four sentences. Thirty seconds. The truest thing anybody would say in that room all day.

And then every word out of his mouth, for the rest of his life in that room, would be a word a liar would have said, and sooner or later somebody was going to get there.

He kept his mouth shut. His hand was on the card. He didn’t move it.

“Meredith Vance,” the woman said. “I’m a lawyer.”

She said it without being asked, which was itself an answer to something.

“Before I got here I was in my office, taking apart a file for a hearing. I represent a man who was defrauded of two million dollars.” She said the number the way she’d have said a case citation. “It isn’t a complicated fraud. They never are. The hard part is the eighteen months between the indictment and the plea, and in the middle of those eighteen months my client’s wages stop, and his wife has a job that pays for the car, and there are two children in a school district they moved for. So he did what people do. He borrowed. Not from a bank. From a man who doesn’t need paperwork. That’s a separate matter and it isn’t mine, and I want to be clear about that, because I’ve been doing this eleven years and I know exactly how much of it is mine.”

She uncrossed her arms and laid her hands flat on the table. It was the first time Wes had seen her hands.

“Two million,” Tommy said. “Say that again.”

Vance looked at him. “Two million dollars.”

“Two million.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Who was the client?”

“No.”

“It’s a room with no doors. There’s no—“

“There’s no exception in it for rooms with no doors.” She said it without heat. “I don’t hand out client names. Ask me something else.”

Tommy didn’t ask anything else. He sat back with his hands in his lap and looked at the table a second longer than a man looks at a table, and then he looked up again and his face was doing what it had been doing before.

Wes saw it. He didn’t do anything with it.

“The parkway,” Vance said. “I was on the parkway, going to see him. Four lanes, nothing on it, five-thirty in the afternoon and light enough to read a file at a red light, and the ground in front of me opened. Not a crack. A seam, like somebody had taken a knife to a cake. I braked. I stopped six feet short of it and I had time to think good, which is a stupid thing to think, and that’s the last thing I remember thinking. The car behind me hadn’t braked. Then the car behind that one hadn’t, and they came in one after another. I heard it before I felt it. Two hits, and then the third one took the back end up and pushed the whole car forward into the seam, and I was still holding the wheel.” She paused. “Otherwise I’d have handed you my card. I’ve got four hundred of them in a box in the trunk.”

Nobody laughed. She hadn’t been waiting for anybody to.

“The parkway,” Pierce said.

“The parkway.”

“Which city?”

“Omaha.”

“Nebraska.” Pierce said it back slowly, to himself, the way a man reads a number off a page twice. “The Missouri’s on the east side of that city.”

“Yes.”

He nodded and said nothing else. It was the way he’d nodded at the tumor and the bone flap — a thing checked and found to hold.

Wes added Nebraska to the others. Arizona, Ohio, Florida, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, and one more that nobody had said out loud and that he was not going to. Seven states, one afternoon, one room without a door in it.

He had spent the morning trying to work out what kind of thing could put nine strangers in a room like this, and he had been working on the wrong end of it, the way you work on the lock when the walls are the interesting part. Whatever had happened outside had happened to all of them at once, in seven states, and then somebody had gone and collected them.

That was not a smaller thought than the room. It was a bigger one, and he had nowhere to put it.

Whitlock turned the sheet around and looked at it, then laid the pen across the top of the page. Wes could see it from where he sat: names down the left-hand side with a line or two after most of them, one with nothing after it at all, and clean white at the bottom for the ones still owing.

“Three,” Whitlock said. “Me. Him.” He didn’t point, and there was no need; everybody in the room knew who hadn’t opened his mouth since he woke up on that floor. Then his eyes came along the row and stopped on Wes, and stayed there a beat longer than they had on anybody else. “And you.”

The clock past the dead man’s elbow read twelve fifty-three.

Whitlock put both hands flat on the table. “All right,” he said. “Mine.”