It’s got to be another hallucination. I blink and shake it out but Herk is still there, and so is the cop-mound.

“Are they dead?” I say.

A fist addresses itself violently to my skull. It takes my Nixed brain a beat to comprehend, but then I understand that it couldn’t be the cops, or me, or a new entrant in the room. The process of elimination tells me it’s Herkimer’s fist.

The hit hurts plenty, but it wasn’t meant to hurt. It was meant to shut me up. It does that. It does something else, too. It makes me cry. “What are you doing?” I want to say, but instead a fat gumball of saline beads up in my eye and rolls down my cheek.

Against orders, my nose emits a miserable, gurgling sniffle.

Herk is annoyed. He is muttering under his breath. He should have done this himself in the first fucking place, he says. Fuck the setup. Fuck the Polecat. Dead’s as good as jail.

It’s still as if I’m not in the room.

He breaks out some zip-strips, sees that my wrists are already bound, swears, shoves them back in his pocket, and pulls out a large hypodermic needle.

It smells of sperm whale feces and hamster vomit.

“Herk...”

This time it’s backhanded, open-fisted, a bitchslap that makes tear pellets spray around the room. Then, still not looking at me, Herk peels off a section of duct tape and seals it over my mouth.

“There. That’s much better. I should have done that a long time ago.”

With his banana-finger Herk flicks the hypo, squirts out the leader, then grabs a wad of hair and forces my head backwards, chin-high. I try to grab at him but my hands, zip-stripped, can only perform a useless, lobsterlike scrabble. I thrash my legs. I champ and spit against the sticky tape. I jerk and jive against the restraints. I discharge sweat and tears at him.

None of it matters.

With my chin upturned, my head jacked back into the wall, I cannot see anything except ceiling tiles. I feel a terrible protonostalgia for my toes. I want to watch them wiggle one more time, one last beautiful time, but I can’t see them. Then there is a painful bee sting in my neck and I feel the needle inside my jugular. Nausea and dread rise up in my gorge and push against the tape.

I think: What are you doing, Herk? Why?

I think: Don’t. I need to pay off Deke.

No one else can save Charlie.