The room reeks: hydrochlorides, ammonia, burnt salt. There is a background noise, a low chug-chug of the gas generator keeping the room alive with neon: beer-brand signs, a gaudy colored-glass Captain Morgan figurine, strings of Christmas lights. The armchair that Cortez saw, plus a piece of a sectional sofa and an ugly lamp, all crammed in here. It’s like the man has re-created his natural habitat below the world, a scumbag terrarium.
I am jerking my head back and forth between the two of them, doing rapid calculations, understanding things in reverse order as they happened, unspooling the film backward. Cortez peeked in this room yesterday and saw a man with his eyes aced out and his legs kicked up and assumed that he was dead. But Astronaut wasn’t dead, he was just riding the waves of whatever substance or combination of substances he’s been riding the waves of for the past week. Cooking and consuming, steeping himself in fumes, happy as a clam in this one-room infuser of hot chemical smoke. At some point, though, he came back to life, took a turn around his subterranean dominions and found Cortez squatting among his mac and cheese and shot him in the face.
I have to keep my eyes in the present—the story is proceeding in front of me—the parts are still moving—Jean is stepping forward with her gun leveled, ready to kill DeCarlo—just as she wanted to do yesterday when she asked if she could come with us.
“You monster,” she whispers, and he ignores her, replies cheerily: “You did it!” Like he’s proud of her. Like she just bowled a perfect game. “You’re back! I’m so proud of you, baby.”
“No, you’re not,” she says to him.
“Sure I am, little sister.”
“Stop.”
“Okay, I’ll stop,” he says, and he smiles at her and licks his lips. “I’m stopping. But I’m so proud of you.”
“You’re a liar.”
I look at him, smirking and naked. A liar is the very least of what he is. He killed them all. Not just Cortez, and not just Nico. There was no suicide pact—he poisoned the lot of them. It was his plan B. Just his.
Jean can’t shoot him—she’s working on it—she’s gathering the nerve. DeCarlo moves his non-gun hand down casually to scratch his ass. Comfortable, easy in his skin, high out of his mind. I’m trying to get the details right, thinking as fast as I can. What is he proud of her for? It’s a lie, she is calling him a liar, but what is the nature of the lie?
She’s getting ready, charming monster or not, she’s going to shoot him. He tried to kill her, and now she’s going to shoot him and the rest of the answers will be dead.
“Jean,” I say, but she doesn’t even hear me.
“Look at me,” Jean says to Astronaut, running her finger across the line of her scar, like I saw her do over and over during her interrogation. “Look.”
“You look beautiful, little sister,” he says. “You look amazing.”
“Look what you made me.”
I glance behind me at Agent Kessler and I can tell that he’s as confused as I am by this dialog, but I can also tell that he doesn’t care, the details don’t matter to him anymore. All he knows is that Astronaut killed Nico, whom he loved, and now he is bringing up his own weapon, trying to get around me to get his shot, even as I say “Jean,” sharply, loudly, to draw her attention and keep her from pulling the trigger.
Everybody needs to hold on—everybody needs to just hold on. Because nothing yet has explained Nico. I have no explanation for why he chased down my sister and cut her throat and left her gasping, breathing blood, to die alone in the mud.
“Mr. DeCarlo,” I say. “Why did you kill Nico Palace?”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Why did you kill the girl you called Isis?”
“Sorry, man, it’s not ringing a bell.”
He snorts laughter, and Jean’s eyes sharpen with anger, and I feel Kessler’s wrathful breath behind me. Astronaut grins at the girl tauntingly, radiating wickedness, standing in his louche bathrobe in a tiny room full of people who want to kill him. I feel the gun in my hand, the knife in my belt, I feel the Earth itself screaming for the death of this man, poisoner and conman and thief, but I need nobody to die right now. I need stasis, I need time to stop until I can claw the last pieces of truth out of this acrid little room.
“Nico told you she disagreed with the decision to go underground, Mr. DeCarlo,” I say. “She left. She posed no further threat to you, she was going to take no share of your space or your water or narcotics.”
“Or pasta sauce,” he says, giggling. “Don’t forget about my pasta sauce.”
“Mr. DeCarlo, why did you kill her?”
“Shit, man, it’s a question for the philosophers,” he says.
“Why does anyone kill anyone, right? Isn’t that right, little sister?”
Jean’s hand goes back to her scar, and there is some slippery truth in Astronaut’s malevolent leer, in the terror on Jean’s small face, and I am trying to knit it all together when Kessler behind me says “Enough” and pushes past me into the room, and Astronaut’s eyes sharpen with recognition.
“Hey—” he says. “Jordan?”
“It’s Agent Kessler, actually, you prick.”
“Agent? Huh,” and he moves to one knee and fires his pistol straight into Kessler’s chest, and Kessler’s whole body flies back into the wall, and I shout “damn it” and then “no” because Jean has opened fire, she jerks the trigger of her handgun and misses Astronaut by a mile—but a spark flies off the wall and catches the flammable atmosphere and explodes.
For a long minute the world is just fire. The sound of exploding bottles and the smell of burning, and the air is on fire and Kessler is and I am, blue and yellow fire is all around us, and I am batting at our bodies, slapping down the flames, while across the tiny room Astronaut’s whole chemical-smoked body catches and bursts, and before he can react or move he becomes a pillar of fire, spiraling and falling. I get Kessler out of there with a few big heaves, cover his body with my body until we’re both extinguished.
It’s mostly our clothes, after all, Kessler’s clothing is badly burned, as mine is—the real problem is the hole in his chest, a golf-ball-sized gunshot entrance wound geysering blood, and so with the heat still pouring out of the small room, the stench of burn and death, I am hunched over Kessler panting in the hallway, covering his chest with two flat hands, blood from his heart and chest flooding out around my fingers.
“Don’t do that,” he says, bleary, peering up. “No, please.”
Blood bubbles up out of his mouth with the words, and in the glow of the fire behind me the blood looks black.
“Try not to talk,” I say. “I’m putting pressure on the wound.” I lean forward, flattening one hand over the other hand, flattening both hands over his gaping chest.
“Don’t put pressure on the wound.” He reaches up with surprising strength, pushes my hands off him. “Don’t do that.”
“Please remain quiet and still,” I say, “until I can staunch the bleeding.”
“I am going to bleed out and die.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I want to bleed out and die. Palace! This is so much better than a—fucking—I don’t know—tsunami or something.” He laughs, coughing, blood spraying out. “This is the best-case scenario.”
I don’t like it. I shake my head. The idea of just leaving him here. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. God, yes. Did we get the monster?”