He has nowhere to go. Nowhere to stay. A few dollars to spend on a cheap room but he’s reluctant to use it for that.

In different circumstances, he could crash with Joey. He thinks about that. If the cops watching Joey see Zack go in there, so what? It’ll seem strange to them, it’ll certainly unnerve them, if they know who Zack is, but it won’t be illegal. It will only mean they’ll keep an even closer eye on Joey.

But he and Joey can’t risk Will or Karloff somehow learning that Joey and Zack have connected, or that Joey has reached out to Zack for help. It would signal to them that Joey probably understands more about his phone and his final assignment than he’s let on.

Zack realizes how alike they are right now, he and Joey. How weirdly alike and how weirdly allied.

Both alone. Both with no place to go.

But Joey has an excuse. Good reasons. Joey has a desperate life, a broken home, an upbringing on the streets.

What is Zack’s excuse? None. His own stupidity. His own aimlessness. His own carelessness.

Of course, Zack is not truly alone. He can take his cheap disposable out of his pocket and dial his parents at any moment. He can be rescued. They can send money or anything he wants. But something in him won’t permit him to involve them. Won’t even entertain it. It’s the same impulse that won’t let him abandon Joey. Some deep, weird sense of responsibility and commitment that must have been learned from his parents although nothing was ever explicitly said.

It’s the same sense of responsibility and commitment he feels to dozens of innocent people in an imagined courtroom. Imagined people, after all. Fantasized people. Faceless dozens, for whom he has betrayed and abandoned his girlfriend and then his best friend, both of whom are all too real. Right now, this sense of responsibility and commitment is clearly ruining his life. But it’s apparently part of who he is.

So it’s not that they’re alike, exactly, he and Joey. It’s just that Zack has managed to sink to Joey’s level from the lofty perch of local hero, and he’s pulled off his descent all by himself, with no one else to blame.

They can’t be seen in each other’s presence. They can only text. And there’s a text he needs to send to Joey. He needs to alert him. But he doesn’t have it in him to admit it to Joey and he can barely admit it to himself.

I’ve found nothing.

70.

70.