“That’s why I need your help. It’s why I’m here.”

“Who am I? Kojak? Columbo?”

“Screw those TV guys. You’re the smartest person I know.”

“All right, that part’s true. So what? You want to brainstorm this thing?”

“I do, yeah.”

“Dude, we don’t need to brainstorm anything. There’s nothing to talk about. You can’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because you haven’t thought this through. You want to save your brother. Fine. Fair enough. But what’s on the other side of that coin? You need to prove he’s innocent. Straightforward, right? So you find the guy who killed her. You go out in this big, bad world, in the black of night, and you find whatever sadistic, soulless, murderous son of a bitch decided, at some point in life, that torturing women to death is what he really wants to do with his time. To find that guy, you’ll have to ask questions and get up in his business, up in the place he lives, where he eats and hunts and sleeps, and that, my friend”—Chance used a finger to jab me in the chest—“that is some serious, scary, crazy-dangerous business.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“You should.”

“After dinner,” I said. “After dinner, we figure this thing out.”

In the subbasement beneath death row, X ate and drank, but tasted little beyond the salt of disappointment and the sweetness of his pride. He saw so much of himself in Jason. Did that make his feelings venal in some way? It felt profounder than that. There was compassion in Jason’s fierceness, and pity, even when he loathed. Such contradictions were rare in fighters so attuned, and X struggled to understand how Jason could be so vicious and tactically brilliant, yet remain a man of such deep feeling. Pushing away his plate, X replayed the first time he’d forced Jason to fight. He’d not expected much. Jason had appeared more or less as they all had. He’d been leaner perhaps, and sad somehow, though X admitted the impression of sadness might be revisionist.

Why? he’d asked.

Why are we doing this?

Why me?

Had X cared enough to explain, he might have used words like dominion, distraction, mechanical release. But there’d been so many fights and fighters, so many conflicts that left him empty.

Jason’s skill had been obvious in the first seconds, and X remembered feeling mild interest. There was some talent. He saw no fear. True understanding came later, as X stood bloodied and awed and nearly beaten. Even now, he could feel that sense of near-religious awakening. Fighting Jason made X want to be more, and X had not wished to be more for a very long time.