Fuentes kicked back suddenly, almost toppling backward, letting loose a stream of rapid-fire Spanish swear words. I jumped at the sudden movement, ruining my statue imitation. Hennessey just looked at him, as if faintly curious, like watching the movements of ants on a park bench.
The man didn’t look like Santa anymore. His eyes rolled around, landing on nothing. He panted, the wild hair like foam at the mouth. “You can’t make me say nothing. You can’t fucking make me. I’m not going to die.”
His fear was infectious; it filled the room, an airborne pathogen. I caught it, breathed it in. My pulse raced, my palms sweated. Even the unmovable Hennessey shifted in his seat, as if he felt a fourth presence in the room, a ghost standing beside the table. Carlos Laguardia.
“You’re safe here,” Hennessey said. “I can protect you.”
“Fuck you,” Fuentes spat. “You fucking hijo de puta motherfucker with your fucking badge, thinking you own everyone. Thinking you control everyone. Well, you don’t control me, and you can’t make me talk.”
“I can protect you,” Hennessey repeated. “But only if you help me. Otherwise you’re just another inmate. What can I do about that?” He turned to me, then, as if he expected me to answer. I stared back, wide-eyed. He continued, “I can’t do anything to help a man charged with your crimes, a guilty man. But if you helped me, right now, I would make a call—”
“No.” Anxiety thickened Fuentes’s voice. “No calls. No calls.”
I couldn’t even blame him. Carlos had friends in supposedly safe places. Cops. Security guards. Who’s to say he didn’t have a friend in the Witness Protection Program?
But his fear proved one thing: he knew something. Something useful, something he wasn’t telling us. Hennessey knew it too. His gray eyes glinted with renewed purpose.
Hennessey’s voice lowered, soothing and almost seductive. “Fuentes, I want to help you. But I need to know you’re on my side. I have to know that I can trust you.”
Fuentes moaned, rocking slightly in his chair. Animal sounds filled the room. His chair clattered against the concrete floor. My heart crawled up into my throat. This was real fear, like the shadow of a memory, something I’d been running from for a long time.
I’d been frozen the first time I’d seen blood on my father’s hands, the first time he’d touched it to my cheek and wished me goodnight. What do you remember? I was broken inside, a psychotic break at age six that I’d been so careful to hide from the world. I never knew emotions the way other people did. I didn’t have morals, and I found his fear so cold, so alluring. I wanted to touch it, to place my palm against the frosted glass and leave a handprint behind.
I’d only ever wanted to be normal, prayed for it, but it had always been too late for me. While other children had backed away from white vans, I’d looked at them with longing. I wanted to be special enough to be taken. I wanted to matter that much.
“Just give us something, a show of faith,” Hennessey continued, relentless.
“Why don’t you ask Carlos’s puta, huh? The bitch lives here, right? Married one of your fucking badges, didn’t she?”
I remembered reading about the woman Carlos had kept around for obvious reasons. She’d turned on him and managed to escape alive.
So it was possible.
Hennessey was inexorable. “I’m asking you. Or I might let it slip that you did tell us something. I bet some people wouldn’t be happy about that.”
His threat rang in the air, shocking me. Did we do that? Did we threaten to do something that would have an inmate killed? Would he follow through with it?
Fuentes shook his head, muttering nonsense words, a tie-dye language of English and Spanish and stilted ghetto slang I knew from my childhood.
It was too late for him. He was blind and broken and locked in one of the tightest security holds that existed. He had a hundred charges against him. If he got out, he would have to face Laguardia. He had no hope, but if there was one thing he could do, if there was one man who had the power to change this man’s fate…
“Tell him,” I said. My voice came out rusty, as if it had been hours since I’d last spoken instead of minutes. “Please, give him some information. About the shipment, anything. Maybe it won’t even matter. They’ll change it anyway, now that they know you’re caught. It doesn’t have to be useful to get you into the program. It just has to be the truth. Something you heard.”
Hennessey looked fit to kill. Me, to be exact. His glare accused me. I told you to stay quiet. You said you would. I shrugged slightly, not sorry. Even if it didn’t help, it couldn’t hurt.
Except Fuentes’s gaze narrowed on me as if he could see my face. In his pale flat eyes I saw a flicker of recognition. A chill went down my spine, and I wondered for a terrifying moment if his blindness was faked. The doctors in prison had ways of checking that, didn’t they? I had no idea, but God, that would be a pretty slick way to get information when people didn’t think you could.