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I was alone in the “interview” room at the Police Station, the one-way mirror was to my left. In it I saw myself slumped in the chair, the disorganized black hair, the beard stubble that had crept onto my pale face like mildew on white porcelain.

Man, you need to lose some weight.

Morgan Freeman stepped in, laid a manila folder before me. Thick paper. Photos. A white cop followed him.

“I want to thank you for coming down, Mr. Wong,” he said. “I bet it’s been quite a night for you. Been a long night for me, too, as a matter of fact.”

“Okay. Where’s John?”

“He’s fine. He’s talking to another officer just a few rooms from here.”

I actually couldn’t name the actor the black guy reminded me of, so I stuck with Morgan Freeman. Though now that I looked at him he bore almost no resemblance. This man was heavier with round cheeks, a goatee and a shaved head. I couldn’t remember what he said his name was. His white partner had a crew cut with a mustache. Almost a G. Gordon Liddy, a cookie-cutter cop from central casting. I couldn’t help but think how much cooler he would look if he would just shave his head like his partner. Morgan should say something to him about that.

“John is talking?” I asked. “Really?”

“Don’t worry, man. Since you’re both gonna tell the unvarnished truth, you don’t gotta worry about your stories matching, do you? We’re all friendly here. I ain’t here to make you piss in a cup, or to lean on you about all that mess that happened your last year in school with that Hitchcock kid.”

“Hey, I had nothing to do with-“

“-No, no. Don’t even bother. That’s what I’m sayin’, I’m not here to accuse you of nothin’ at all. Just tell me what you did last night.”

“Went to a party out by the lake. I came home just after midnight. I was asleep by two.”

“You sure about that? You sure you didn’t go over to the One Ball Inn down on Grand Avenue for a nightcap?”

“What’s a nightcap?”

“Your buddies were all there.”

Well, officer, I really only have the one friend...

“No, I had work this morning. As you know. I went straight home.”

As I spoke, a strange, jittery energy began to rise up in me, radiating from the chest out. Up until then I had this rancid cocktail of guilt and dread in my gut, my mind dumbly trying to cobble together some story to get me back home. But that changed.

At that moment things began to clarify, to become simple. All of a sudden I was startled to find I could see the cop’s next question coming before he spoke it, word-for-word...

Have you heard the name...

“Have you heard the name Nathan Curry? Guy your age, parents own a body shop here in town?”

“No.”

How about Shelby Winder?

“How about Shelby Winder? Heavy girl, senior at East Side High? Ring a bell?”

“No. Sorry.”

Everything was obvious now, all the walls of the maze turned to glass. I immediately knew two things: this list of people had all been at the party last night and they were all now dead or heading there.

Now how do you know that? How do you know any of this? Magic?

You know damn well why. That black shit John took made blood contact with you. Now you’re getting high, partner.

He asked, “What about Jennifer Lopez?”

“Oh. Yeah. I know her.”

“Not the actress, now, but-”

“-I know. I saw her last night. Is she okay?”

“Arkeym Gibbs?”

“No. Wait, yeah. Big guy, right? Black? I don’t know him, but he was the only black guy in my high school...”

I trailed off, studied the detective’s face. No, this was not another day at the office for this guy. He’s seen things, the kind of things your mind weighs in on you with in the middle of sleepless nights. I saw all through him, just like that.

He’s got two kids, two beautiful daughters. He’s suddenly very, very worried about the world they’ll grow up in. He’s Catholic, wears a gold cross around his neck. But today he’s taken it off, put it in his pocket. He keeps sticking his hand down there and rubbing it between his fingers. He thinks the end of the world is coming.

When I tell people this story, they always think I read the cop’s mind. I didn’t. I just read his face. We all can tell by the look in somebody’s eyes that they don’t think our joke is funny or that they don’t like what they’re eating or whatever. It was just like that. The information was there, presented in the subtle play of facial muscles from microsecond to microsecond.

He read off more names. Justin White, Fred something, a couple others. I didn’t recognize any of them and told him so. The last name on the list was Jim Sullivan.

So Cucumber was right to worry. I didn’t tell Morgan I knew the name.

“You’re not outta school even three years. You went to high school with most of these people, East Side. But you only knew the one girl?”

“I kind of kept to myself.”

“-And then you got shipped off to the other school-”

“-Look, I’m not saying anything else until you tell me whether Jennifer is dead or alive. That ain’t confidential information and I deserve to know.”

Don’t bother. He doesn’t know.

“We don’t know. You see, that’s the problem. That’s why I got four hours of overtime already today. At least nine people were at the One Ball at closing time, twelve hours ago. Four of them are missing. Your friend is here.”

He paused, probably for effect.

“The rest are dead.”

It’s funny. Up until that point, despite all the evidence that had been provided to contrary, it had never hit home how much trouble I was really in. I thought about John, wondered if I had killed him by not rushing him to the ER. I turned and looked at myself in the one-way mirror. The image was distorted, the other cop out of range at the back of the room. What was left was just me and Morgan, the clean-cut protector of the people standing tall over the slumped, unshaven kid in a battered video store T-shirt that looked suspiciously like it had been wadded up in a car floorboard for two days. Good guy and bad guy. Trash man and trash.

“What about Justin Feingold and the guys John was with?” I asked. “Kelly and-“

“-They’re fine. I’ve already talked to ‘em, the whole band. They went home before the party moved on. Which brings us to my next question. Your friend is the only known survivor of the One Ball Nine and—now don’t take offense at this—but he ain’t lookin’ too healthy right about now. Did he say anything this morning at work? Maybe while you guys were putting away the last night’s porno returns?”

The white cop across the room stepped forward, put his hands on his hips. Waiting for an answer. Morgan left his gaze on me, calmly waited for me to fill the tense silence. Old interrogation trick.

“John called me last night, talking crazy, clearly out of it. Paranoia, hallucinations, the whole bit. This would have been around five AM. I came over. He was acting, well, crazy. Seein’ things. But otherwise okay. Conscious, you know. Not, like, puking or convulsing or anything. I calmed him down, we went and got some food. That was that. We went to work.”

“What did he say? Exactly?”

“Monsters in his apartment, said he couldn’t remember how he got where he was, so on.”

“Did he say what he was on?”

“No.”

“You know we can find out anyway, right? We’re not interested in booking a bunch of your raver friends for poppin’ pills. To somebody like me, the dead bodies are what matters. And if somebody’s sellin’ poison, right now, as we talk-“

“-No. I’d tell you if I knew. You’re a cop, you know I’m tellin’ you the truth. So, what, that’s how everybody died? Overdose?”

“This Jennifer Lopez, she was your girlfriend?”

“No.”

I thought about repeating my question, then stopped. Instead I replayed his question in my mind, focused on it, studied every contour of each word, was almost terrified to find I could glean libraries of information from between each syllable. In an instant I learned volumes by what he didn’t say, by the way he breathed, the minute twitch at the corner of his mouth, the slight widening of his left eyelid on the third and fifth word.

This detective last ate seven hours and fifteen minutes ago, two Egg McMuffins and four cups of coffee. You can smell it in the oils seeping through his skin. Check out his posture, he hasn’t slept in nineteen hours. He forces a smoothness into his voice, wants to come across cultured but shrewd. He tells people his hero is Shaft, but it’s really Sean Connery’s James Bond. In his daydreams he sees himself hanging off a helicopter in a tuxedo.

And then, in a blink, I knew everything he knew. I saw the fate of each of the dead kids from the One Ball. Nathan Curry had committed suicide, shot himself in the temple with a little .32 caliber pistol he kept hidden under his bed. Arkeym Gibbs took a swim, fully-clothed, in his family’s swimming pool, they found him floating face-down a few hours later. Shelby Winder and another girl, Carrie Saddleworth, were found together. Each dead of a massive stroke. Shelby was missing her right hand, the wrist a ragged stump wrapped with a blood-soaked shirt.

The rest are nowhere to be found. They all were at the One Ball with John last night. Now, only John remained.

You know all that, but you still can’t remember this cop’s name? You’re teetering on the brink of Crazy Man Bluff overlooking Weird Shit Valley.

“And to answer your next question,” I continued, “I didn’t know Jennifer well enough to know who her friends were or where she may have run off to. I’m sorry.”

Detective Freeman stepped forward and flipped open the manila envelope. He fanned out four photographs. One was a mugshot of a young black guy. Dreadlocks. I knew this was my Fake Jamaican, knew before my eyes focused on the photo. The next three pictures were vivid splashes of crimson.

Once, when I was twelve, I filled a blender with some ice cubes and three cans of maraschino cherries, for reasons that made sense at the time. I didn’t know you had to use a lid on one of those things, so I hit the button and watched the thing erupt. The room in the cop’s photographs looked like the resulting mess in our kitchen that day, everything a red spray with lumps.

He pointed to the mugshot. “What about that guy? You know him?”

“He was there. At the party last night. Whatever John was on, this guy gave it to him. John told me.”

You already knew that, didn’t you, detective?

“That’s Bruce Matthews. Runs an amateur unlicensed pharmaceuticals operation on the corner of 30th and Lexington.”

I nodded toward the red photos.

“What’s that?”

Morgan pointed to the mugshot.

“Before.”

He pointed to the red-drenched pictures.

“After.”

The first picture was just lumps on the floor, on carpet that was probably brown at one time but was now dyed a wet, purplish black. It looked like somebody had tossed down a bucket of raw steaks and chicken bones. The next picture was a close-up of one wall, deep red splatters over half the surface area, occasional bits of meat stuck here and there. The third picture was a close-up of a severed, brown hand in a pool of red, fingers curled loosely, a bandage around the palm.

I turned my eyes away, suddenly sweating heavily. There was that tableau in the mirror again, just me and Morgan, face-to-face. Did he think I had anything to do with this? Was I a suspect? In my panic, I couldn’t read him. He let the silence congeal in the air, stared down on me. He broke me, and I broke the silence.

“What could even do that to a person? A bomb? Some kind of-“

“-Nothing you know how to do, I’m sure of that. Maybe somethin’ not, uh, not within our bounds of familiarity. What I need from you is-“

The door opened and the detective’s words trailed off as a fat Hispanic cop came in and whispered in his ear. Morgan’s eyebrows shot up and the two of them left the room.

I heard a commotion outside, hurried shouts and feet shuffling on floor tile. After about ten minutes Morgan stormed into the room, eyes wide.

No, no, no, no-no-no. No. Don’t say it...

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Copyright © 2008 David Wong and Jason Pargin - All rights reserved. No part of this book or website may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the express written consent of the author and publisher. This online book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidence.