“What do you think I mean?”
“No. We’re supposed to bring Phil in alive. Love promised me he’d honor True’s deal.”
“Love is on his way to the hospital,” Dixon said. “He had a heart attack—a real one. That puts me in operational command.”
“It doesn’t change the deal! You can’t—”
“You know that bomb you left on the baccarat table? The technician we sent in to defuse it said that the ‘damper switch’ was just a dummy. If it had gone off, it would have killed everyone in the casino.”
“It wasn’t Phil who put me up to that. It was her.”
“It was his plan. This is the sort of thing your brother does for the Troop. This is what he is, now…And I am not going to go in soft and risk letting him escape, just to assuage your guilt about being a bad sister.”
“You prick,” I said. “You’re just doing this to spite me!”
“I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do.” He raised the cell phone to his ear.
I scooped my NC gun off the catwalk.
“Don’t be a fool,” Dixon said.
“Don’t think I won’t…” The dial was still on the MI setting. I tried to switch it back to narcolepsy, but it must have been damaged in the fall. It wouldn’t budge.
A cold smirk formed on Dixon’s lips as he watched me struggle with the dial. “How very convenient,” he said. “To stop me, you’ll have to kill me…And as there are no witnesses, you’ll be free to blame the bad Jane…”
“Shut up!” I banged the dial against the catwalk railing. It still wouldn’t turn. “Put down that goddamned cell phone!”
“No.”
“I’m not going to let you kill my brother, Dixon.”
“And what about all the other people he’ll kill, if he gets away? I suppose you’ll blame their deaths on the bad Jane, too.”
“Dixon—”
“Go ahead,” he said, staring me down. “Pull the trigger. Prove me right.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No…” Relaxing my grip, I let the gun drop. It bounced off the catwalk and vanished into the light.
Behind the pebble glasses, I caught the tiniest flicker of relief. “That’s better,” Dixon said. “Now—”
Before he could finish his sentence, I dipped my hand in my pocket and came out holding the bad Jane’s knife.
“I’m not going to let you kill my brother,” I repeated. “But you’re wrong about the rest of it. I take full responsibility. For everything. For Phil.”
Then I flicked open the blade and stepped towards him.
white room (viii)
“SO YOU KILLED DIXON TO PROTECT your brother.”
“No, I killed Dixon because I didn’t protect my brother…and because I finally realized I couldn’t save him.”
The doctor shakes his head. “I don’t understand. If you thought Phil couldn’t be saved—”
“I didn’t say that. I said I couldn’t save him. The bad Jane was right about that much: I’d missed my one chance, and all I could do now was get him killed…But Phil could still save himself.” She looks the doctor in the eye. “I don’t care what the Troop did to him, what they made him do, I have to believe there’s some part of him that’s not irredeemable. He was a good kid, you know? He deserved better than me for a sister…But I was what he got, and if I wasn’t strong enough to bring him home, I could at least buy him some more time to find his own way back.
“So that’s my story.” She shrugs and sinks back in the chair. “What do you think?”
“I’m not sure what you want me to say, Jane.”