Dawn looked horrified. “Who would do that?” she asked. “How do I know that you’re telling the truth?”
“You do know that I’m telling the truth,” Jonathan said. “I can see it in your eyes. And I can’t get into details.”
“So, you are the government,” LeBron said.
Jonathan surrendered. “Yes,” he said. “Well, not exactly, but essentially, yes. It’s complicated. But I can tell you this: If we don’t help that boy, the consequences will be awful. Not just for him, but for thousands of people.” He paused as the words sank in.
“That’s a really shitty deal, I know,” Jonathan continued. Then, to Dawn, “Forgive my language. Some words are hardwired, but I promise I’ll try.” To the group: “I know I’m asking you to take a leap of faith, but I’m telling you exactly the way it is.”
Sensing a crack in Dawn’s barriers, Jonathan rose, pivoted, and walked three steps to his ruck and pulled out the money satchel. “I have something for you here,” he said. With his back turned to the others, he counted off two banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills.
He turned back to the room. “Here’s two thousand dollars for your troubles,” he said. “Again, you have my word that no harm will come to your house or your children. Consider this payment for your inconvenience.”
Jonathan walked past LeBron and headed for Dawn. “Here you go, ma’am,” he said. “Thank you for your assistance. In advance.”
Dawn’s eyes shifted from the money to Jonathan’s eyes and back again. “Who are you really?” she asked.
“Honestly,” Jonathan said. “If I could tell you, I would. For now, I’ll just have to be Scorpion.” He’d been told by countless others that when he smiled, his eyes flashed in heart-melting ways. He wasn’t sure what that meant, but he’d learned to use the expression to get his way.
Dawn reached out for the cash. “I’m trusting you,” she said. “And I don’t trust nobody.” Her eyes turned steely. “Don’t you dare let me down.”
Jonathan crossed his heart. “Thank you,” he said.
A loud noise drew their attention to the back door in unison.
“Holy shit,” LeBron said. He was the only one in position to see what was going on.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Graham thought he remembered hearing in health class that once hypothermia sets in, the last thing that preceded death was that you stopped shivering. If that was true, then he had a lot of life left in him.
He was beyond shivering. The trembling was near convulsive. He lay on his left side on the floor, back under his table and curled into a fetal ball, his knees drawn up and clutched against his chest. But for his constant, spastic movements, his shirt and his pants would have become part of the ice slick that was the floor.
He couldn’t begin to imagine what the temperature was inside the locker, but he figured it had to be below zero. The cold had turned his skin cherry red. His fingers and toes burned. The nail beds on both looked pure white.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I’m so, so sorry.” Though he had no idea what he was sorry for. Maybe for living. Maybe for dying.
If he could just die, it would all end. The pain would go away. The fear would go away. He could be back together with—
The locker door opened with a whoosh that created a warm breeze. Graham was dimly aware that he hadn’t heard the lock slide open this time. Did that mean he’d fallen asleep? Maybe he had in fact died.
No, he prayed silently. Don’t let me be dead. If he was dead, then this was definitely Hell.
He heard words, but he couldn’t comprehend them. He was aware that the words were in a language he couldn’t understand, but that didn’t fully explain his lack of comprehension. There were no consonants and vowels. He perceived no real words at all, not even foreign ones. The voices existed as part of a fog, like sounds heard from underwater.
Someone placed hands on him, but he didn’t know who. He thought he might have seen a face, but like the noise, the faces appeared through a kind of mental gauze. He was floating now, and the cold was falling away.
Time passed. Minutes perhaps, but certainly seconds. Maybe hours. He was flying and he was getting warmer, and he didn’t care.
Warm became warmer. Warmth rushed up and surrounded him like a hot bath — the same hot bath he’d prayed to God to feel again when he was in the throes of his frigid muscle spasms.
Did an answered prayer mean that he was dead after all? It was all so confusing.
He heard water. More specifically, he heard splashing — but he heard it in the same way he’d heard the voices. All mushy and far away.
There. He heard it again. Definitely water. Definitely warm water, definitely a bath. But was it his—
“Graham, wake up.”
That time, the voice was clear. Couldn’t have been clearer, in fact.
“Wake up now, son.”
Dad? Was that his father’s voice? Was that possible? He might have recognized the voice, but his head was so full of stuff — snot? Cotton? Concrete? — that he couldn’t be sure.
No, that wasn’t possible because his dad was—
“Graham!” The voice was loud this time. Angry. Frightening.
A hand landed on his shoulder. It squeezed him and shook him. Hard.
“What?” That time Graham recognized the voice as his own, and his tone was even louder than that of the man who’d shouted at him. As his eyes opened and consciousness returned, he saw that his fantasy was true. He sat fully clothed in a tub of hot water. It came up nearly to his chin. When he moved, a wave broke over his lower lip.
“Welcome back.”
And he was back. Back in the awful place with the awful people. Graham recognized the voice before he recognized the face it belonged to.
“Life is such a capricious thing, is it not?” Teddy said. “This is among my favorite words, capricious. We have no equivalent in my language. Capricious. One moment we suffer terrible agony, the next we are bathed in comfort and warmth.”
It all came back to Graham in a rush. The cold, the pain. The pleasure Teddy took from inflicting it. With the memories came the fear.
“Please don’t hurt me anymore,” Graham said.
Teddy smiled. “There we go,” he said with a big smile. His teeth were yellow. “Finally, the boy comes to his senses.”
Graham’s tub was not a bathtub, not really. It was a stainless-steel container that was three times the size of an average bathtub. He didn’t want to know what its real use was. Five people stared down on him, all of them armed with rifles, and all of them looking very pissed.
“Why are you doing this?” Graham asked.
“Please do not waste our time by asking questions to which you already know the answers,” Teddy said. “That makes everything so much more difficult. More difficult for me, and much, much more difficult for you.”
Graham started to speak, but then stopped himself. He’d already told them lies, right? At least he thought he had. Before he said anything more, he needed to remember what the previous lies were. He needed to be consistent. He tried to stall.
“I told you I don’t remember anything,” he said.
Graham hadn’t realized that Teddy was squatting to be face-to-face until the man stood up. Teddy folded his arms across his abundant chest, creating a set of man-boobs. “This is why I love my favorite word so much,” he said. “We make choices, we live with the results.”