“Fuck you. And that is fuck you with a capital F. You understand?”

I had to smile. Lawton was doing his best to stand up to him. The bullet had taken away his body but not his spine and not his balls.

On the screen Parenting Today moved away from the chair and to the left. The camera caught his face and I could see the anger in his eyes. He leaned against the bureau, just out of the reach of Cross’s view.

“Your hero, Harry Bosch, is gone and he might not be coming back,” he said. “The question is, do you want to go where he’s gone? A guy like you, in your condition, I don’t know. You know what they do to guys like you in lockup? They wheel them into the corner and make them give blow jobs all day. Nothing they can do about it but sit there and take it. You into that, Cross? That what you want?”

Cross closed his eyes for a moment but then came back strong.

“You think you can pull that off, then take your best shot, Big Man.”

“Yeah?”

Parenting Today came off the bureau and up behind Cross. He leaned over his right shoulder as if to whisper in his ear. But he didn’t.

“What if I take my shot here? Huh? How would that be?”

The agent brought his hands up on both sides of Cross’s face. He took hold of the plastic breathing tubes that were attached to Cross’s nostrils. With his fingers he crimped the tubes closed, cutting off the air supply.

“Hey, Milton . . . ,” the other agent said.

“Shut up, Carney. This guy thinks he’s smart. Thinks he doesn’t have to cooperate with the federal government.”

Cross’s eyes grew wide and he opened his mouth to gulp for air. He wasn’t getting any.

“Motherfucker,” Burnett Biggar said. “Who is this guy?”

I said nothing. I watched silently, the anger rising in me. Biggar had it right, though. In the lexicon of cop talk “motherfucker” was the ultimate expletive, the one reserved for the worst offender, the worst enemy. I felt like saying it but my voice wouldn’t come. I was too consumed by what I saw on the screen. What they had done to me was nothing compared to the humiliation and scarring they were putting on Lawton Cross.

On the screen Cross was trying to speak but couldn’t get the words out with no air in his lungs. There was a sneer on the face of the agent I now knew was named Milton.

“What?” he asked. “What’s that? You want to talk to me?”

Cross tried again to talk but couldn’t.

“Nod your head if you want to tell me something. Oh, that’s right, you can’t nod your head, can you?”

He finally let go of the tubes and Cross began to pull in air like a man coming up out of the water from fifty feet down. His chest heaved and his nostrils flared as he tried to recover.