Man of Wax (Man of Wax Trilogy) (23 page)

“Well?” he said, but I kept my attention forward, didn’t nod or shake my head. I’d had no ID on me when they brought me in, so they didn’t know who I was. They had taken my picture and scanned my fingerprints, but I knew nothing would come up. Like Simon had said, I had never once been arrested, so I wouldn’t be on some database, and even if I was I was pretty confident Simon would take care of that on his end. The only thing on me was the cell phone, which Simon had told me to bring (he’d told me to ditch everything else) and which was probably stored away as evidence somewhere. I didn’t even have Jen’s wedding ring anymore, or the black and white photograph of my wife and daughter gagged and crying—I’d left them behind because they were just another part of Simon’s instructions, and another way I felt like less of a man.
 

“To hell with you,” the detective said finally, and left the room, leaving me sitting there and staring down at the table.
 

I didn’t touch any of the pictures. The detective had laid them out for me, facing up so I had no choice but to look. And I did look. I couldn’t help myself. James Henley was a young guy, not much younger than myself, and while his wife was blonde and looked nothing like Jen, I began to see the both of us replaced in those pictures. The years we’d dated, then our wedding day; the ritual of cutting the wedding cake and feeding each other a piece.
 

I wondered what would have happened had I been used just as James Henley had been used, a simple pawn in a game constructed by those who wished to entertain only a select few. Except James hadn’t even been a pawn; no, he’d been so much less. He’d been a throwaway, just a man unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have happened to anybody, and thinking this, I wondered about all the other people gunned down in the streets, the fatal accidents on the highways, the women raped by men. How many of those had been true accounted incidents of a world gone mad, and how many had been simply designed to fulfill the dark desires of only a few?

•
   
•
   
•

A
ROUND
WHAT
MAY
have been the fifth or sixth hour—again, I’d lost my sense of time, and when Detective Rotten Tooth came in he wasn’t wearing a watch—the need to move my bowels became very strong. So strong, in fact, I felt that any moment my body might start pissing without the express written consent of my mind. But that was probably what they wanted anyway, the cops and Simon. To see me wet myself, to force me to soak in the stink of my own piss.
 

But what if Simon was gone?
 

It was a question that had been in the back of my mind this entire time, even while I was taking my cab ride to Navy Pier. What if Jen and Casey were really dead and Simon had no use for me anymore, wanted me to just take the fall for the murder one of his own people had committed? This would be the perfect ending in a way, wouldn’t it?
 

Except I refused to believe that. I thought of what the fox had told the little prince, his secret—“One sees clearly only with the heart”—and I knew Jen and Casey were still alive. I knew it in my heart, in my soul, and I wasn’t going to give up the slightest bit of hope that Carver was wrong. I wanted to believe Jen would do the same in my position. Besides, it had been my job to save her and Casey from their nightmares, from those monsters chasing them. Now that I’d failed them I needed to make up for it, I needed to prove that even though those monsters had turned out to be real, they could still be defeated. Wasn’t that the reason for all the fairy tales told throughout time—to remind children that not only do monsters exist, but they can also be beaten? Wasn’t that the real reason Casey loved the
Shrek
movies so much, that in the end love conquers all?

•
   
•
   
•

T
IME
WORKED
OVERTIME
to stretch itself out. I was hungry, cold, and I needed to take a piss. I’d even begun nodding off but managed to stay awake. I kept referring to the pictures set before me, sometimes leaning close and squinting so I could make out every detail, and I wondered how Detective Rotten Tooth had gone about getting them. He’d no doubt had to contact James Henley’s widow, explain the situation. Had she been hesitant about providing pictures from her beloved albums? Had she really wanted the man who’d killed her husband to witness snapshots of the two of them when they were happy? Wouldn’t that have just sunk the nail in deeper to the fact that all those happy times were what I’d viciously taken away?
 

Maybe she was standing on the other side of the two-way mirror right now. I’d barely even acknowledged it since I was brought in here, made to sit down at the table. I hadn’t even stood up. I’d just been sitting in my chair, staring forward, hoping that Simon would take care of his end. Otherwise I didn’t know what I was going to do. Could I really try explaining my story to Detective Rotten Tooth? It was almost too unbelievable to believe myself, and I’d been playing the game for close to a week now.
 

But it wouldn’t matter what I said, and I knew it. To all these people I was just a cop killer. In their minds I’d taken away one of their own, a man everyone seemed to have liked, even if they’d never met him before, and they wanted to make sure I got what was coming to me. They all wanted me dead, and I couldn’t say I blamed them.

•
   
•
   
•

A
T
WHAT
MAY
have been six days later—but was in reality only nine hours—Detective Rotten Tooth made his fourth visit. While he’d looked angry before, now he looked livid. So much so I could see the red in his face, could almost feel the heat radiating off him. He came and leaned down beside me, his shirtsleeves now rolled up, and stuck his mouth only an inch away from my ear.
 

“Looks like you’re more than just a cop killer,” he whispered, his putrid breath warming my neck. “The FBI contacted us hours ago. Seems they suspect you were involved in that explosion down in Ryder. They say now it was a bombing. Is that right, you piece of shit? You get off killing old people too?”
 

He leaned back and slammed his fist down on the tabletop. A few of the pictures jumped.
 

“You want me to bring in pictures of them old people too?” he shouted. “You want me to bring in pictures of all of them?”
 

I remained silent. I was waiting for him to hit me, to slap me across the face. He’d probably told those people behind the two-way mirror to take a walk, go get themselves coffee. Maybe he’d asked James Henley’s widow to stay behind. If they had a camera set up, he’d no doubt had it turned off. He could just say I’d fallen off my chair, broke my arms and nose that way. Nobody would ever call him on it, even if I did suddenly start talking and accused him.
 

But Detective Rotten Tooth didn’t hit me. He just leaned over me a few seconds more, staring down at the pictures.
 

“You’ve been looking at these? You see what you took away from those unborn twins? Now they’re going to grow up without their daddy around. He won’t be there to hear their first words. He won’t be there to rock them to sleep. He won’t be there to see their first steps. He won’t be there to pick them back up when they fall. I hope you can live with that, you sick fuck. I hope you can sleep at night with what you’ve done.”
 

A part of me wanted to break down right there. It had nothing to do with what he was telling me, but from the simple fact I was tired. Tired of this entire game I’d been forced into, tired of everything these people had done to me and my family and everyone else. I wanted to tell him I had nothing to do with James Henley, that I had never killed and would never kill a person a day in my life.
 

Except Simon, I thought. If it came down to it, I could probably bring myself to kill him.
 

“When the FBI gets this all straightened out,” Detective Rotten Tooth whispered, his breath still warm on my neck, “you’ll be coming back here. I can’t wait to see you again. I can’t wait to show you more pictures. You’re going to get what’s coming to you, believe me. I’ll get you to talk.”
 

He leaned back and slammed his fist down on the table again. This time more of the pictures jumped.
 

“You understand that?” Detective Rotten Tooth said. “I’ll get you to talk. That’s a promise.”

43

There were two FBI agents, a man and a woman. They both wore suits and had long stolid faces. They looked at me, a supposed cop killer, just as they would have looked at a five-year-old child with a lollipop in her hand and ribbons in her hair. They gave nothing away with their eyes, with their faces, and when they took me into custody it was with professionalism and grace not many people have the patience to learn.
 

My arms and legs were shackled. I was still wearing the clothes I’d put on that morning. I still had no glasses and couldn’t see much as I was led through the police station, got in an elevator with the two agents who hadn’t even said a single word to me yet. I watched the numbers glow as we descended. For some reason I expected us to stop on the first floor but we kept going down.
 

Then the doors opened and we entered the basement garage, a cold and murky place that smelled of rubber and oil. I was loaded in the back of a black sedan. A few police officers waited by the cars, their arms crossed, watching us. Some had cigarettes in their mouths, making me crave one. They looked angry, pissed off, disgusted. I glanced at them briefly before the car started moving and then I stared down at my lap, my wrists bound in tight metal. This was the second time in less than twenty-four hours I’d been handcuffed. I’d never thought it could feel this humiliating.
 

The agents in the front continued their silent treatment. The driver brought the car up out of the garage and into the city street. It was close to eleven o’clock and the streetlights were lit up.
 

The sedan moved through the streets for another minute or two before it slowed and stopped and the back door opened and someone slid in beside me.
 

“How’s it hanging, Ben?”
 

The voice was familiar but the face was not. This was because half of the face was covered in bandages.
 

“I’ve got to hand it to Carver,” the man said. “He’s building himself quite an army and it’s starting to really piss us off.”
 

The eye not covered by the bandage glowered back at me.
 

“As you can see,” the man said, “I managed to survive that little incident back on the highway. The other two with me were not so fortunate.”
 

This man was my one escort from Reno. He had been the one who initially “saved” me from Carver and his people and cleaned me up and dropped me back at the Sundown Saloon. He was the one who had been waiting for me on the other side of the door at Juliet’s place when I tried to walk out. Shit, he had been the cop who had pulled up behind me on that highway after I’d thrown up because I thought my daughter’s remains were inside the trunk.
 

The man said, “You can talk now, by the way. Really, Ben, you’ve fulfilled your task. Feel free to talk. Say whatever you want.”
 

The sedan had started moving again, driving us through the city streets. I stared back at the man for a long time, then glanced at the two agents up front.
 

“Are they really with the FBI?”
 

“They are,” the man said. “Does that really surprise you by now?”
 

It didn’t. And I didn’t know what scared me more at that moment—the fact that these were corrupt federal agents who had managed to get me out of police custody, or the fact that this was all being done for the sake of entertainment. And not just normal entertainment, where anybody’s free to enjoy the fun, but only a handful, maybe fifty, one hundred, two hundred viewers who had the money and the resources. Carver had said whoever was doing this was well connected and this just proved it. Because the Chicago Police Department would not have given up their only suspect in a murder involving one of their own, even if it was for questioning. They’d probably refused at first, had kicked and screamed, but when it became clear they had no choice there was nothing left to do. No wonder Detective Rotten Tooth was in such a state the last time he came in to see me.
 

We left the city streets and got onto the expressway. I squinted at the signs as we passed them. As much as I didn’t want to speak—it was my only form of defiance—I finally found I could no longer help myself.
 

“Where are we going?”
 

The man beside me simply said, “You’ll see.”
 

Twenty minutes later we stopped just outside of O’Hare, in what looked to be a deserted parking lot. The driver parked between two long rows of cars. The man in the back turned toward me, a thin key suddenly in his bandaged right hand, and started undoing my shackles. Once the cuffs loosened I released a breath, began massaging my wrists.
 

“Now what?”
 

“Now you continue the game.” The thin key had disappeared and he was now holding another one. He motioned to a car parked just outside my door, a white Chevy Impala. “And no more fucking around, Ben. Got it?”
 

“You don’t seriously expect me to drive without my glasses, do you? I can barely see anything as it is.”
 

“Don’t worry. You will soon.”