“Stop playing stupid,” my interrogator demands. They all have the most forgettable faces I can describe. I wonder if they’ve hadplastic surgery to make their features so average. I’m not sure I would be able to pick this guy out of a lineup of other faintly irritable middle-aged men. His hair is brown and thinning a little. His face is just starting to let go, entering its jowly era. He’s clean shaven in the way that men who can’t grow beards often are. There’s not even a hint of evening stubble. It’s just sallow and soft. Like an old baby.
That reminds me of the shadow of a beard that Sam already has just from being in my apartment overnight. If he were here right now, he would outclass every single one of these clowns. The closer I look at these suited men, the more I see the little signs that they’re not really as in control as they’d like to think. Their suits aren’t well tailored. They’re off the rack. The shoulders are a little too wide, sleeves a little too long, and the fit overall is too narrow in places and too wide in others.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” I reply, sounding confused. “I’m alive. If he were a killer… I would be dead?”
“For the moment, that may be true,” the man says. “But it is unlikely to be true for all that much longer. He will tire of his games with you, and he will kill you.”
“Just for the fun of it?”
“Yes. He’s a psychopath.”
“Sounds like someone should arrest him, in that case.”
“We would, but we don’t have any physical evidence.”
“Oh. Okay. What do you want from me, then?”
“We want to take you away, but we can’t do that until we put him away. So we’re going to surveil you. That means we’re going to put a very small camera on you.”
“Where can you possibly put a camera on me that someone who is intimate with me won’t see?”
“So you admit you’ve been sleeping with him?”
“Oh, you tricked me into an answer,” I reply, mostly annoyed. “And now what?”
“Now we know you’re involved.”
I sit back in the chair and just shrug. “I don’t know what you want. I know I don’t trust you now you started playing fucking mind games and trying to tell me that my life is in danger. Is it? Who are you? Do you have any kind of ID? Are you law enforcement? Are you a gang with no tailoring skills to speak of?”
“Don’t worry about who we are,” the agent says. “Worry about who you’re in bed with.”
“I still don’t know what you want. And you don’t know what the fuck is going on with me, so…” I shrug. “This is going worse than I thought by a very long way.”
“That’s enough attitude. You’re sleeping with the enemy, and if you don’t want to be taken down with him, you need to cooperate with us.”
“So he’s not a serial killer.”
“He’s worse.”
“What’s worse?”
“You don’t need to worry about that. You need to worry about doing what you’re told.”
That’s almost word for word something Sam would say. Oddly enough, hearing it from the mouth of a stranger with zero charisma does not have the same effect on me that it would have if Sam said it.
“Or what? You’ll take me to a fake train station?”
“Or we will make sure you disappear and nobody ever sees you again.”
“That sounds like a threat,” I say.
“It is.”
“Okay.”
We stare at each other. I really don’t like him and obviously he doesn’t like me either. He thinks I’m a stupid girl fucking a bad guy. The disdain is evident in the almost perpetual curl of his upper lip.
“Are you going to do what we need you to do?”
