You send the biggest liar in the universe out to Highway 45 to cover an accident.

You play Auto Tag with him on a desert road.

You send a doctor on a house call to a dead town.

You make sure a dreamy-looking girl named anagram bats her eyes at him in the parking lot of Muhammed Alley.

You direct him to Fifth Street, just off the promenade.

You goad.

You needle.

You prod.

You steal his gun and shoot someone with it.

You lock him in a mental ward and throw away the key.

But just for a while-just long enough to blacken his veracity that much more.

Then you put that key in poor Dennis’s hands and you set him free.

Now do you understand?

Now do you see?

Sometimes it doesn’t matter if a secret comes out.

It does not matter.

As long as you control how.

FIFTY-SIX

I turned my cell phone back on two weeks ago.

Emitted its signal to those tireless satellites spinning slowly in space that would’ve bounced it back to earth, where some exhausted tech in the NSA or the FBI or maybe just the DOE would’ve triangulated, diagrammed, and computed it, then sent it on up to the interested parties.

Two weeks ago, when I first arrived in room four.

What did people do before Microsoft Word?

Before laptops, cursors, delete keys, desktops-before backing up, dragging things in, and dragging things out?

Before you could make one document two. Drag it onto the desktop and rearrange it, pare it down, edit it just so.

This is Document One.

Which either will or won’t make it to where it needs to go.

I have no such fears about Document Two, which is the only one left on my computer.

It reads remarkably like this one-minus a few things. Minus the insights, conclusions, and connective tissue. To go back to what must by now be a tiresome and overused analogy-think of it as a connect-the-dots drawing minus the connections.

The dots are there.

The entire cast of characters.

Miss Anagram and Sam Savage and Doctor Death himself.

Benjy and Bronson and Bailey et al.

It is the story the way they wanted it written.

Why they kept leading me on and putting a cork in me at the same time. Letting the leash out, then jerking it back. Why they tainted me, incarcerated me, and then set me free.

For this.

Another saying comes to mind-courtesy of Stalin or one of his minions, orchestrators of the first Karabolka.

Forgive me it if I get it wrong. Something about history. It’s not what happens in history that matters, he said.

It’s who writes it.

Me.

That’s who’s writing it.

Tom Valle.

I was meant to tell the story that was never meant to be told.

Before someone else told it.

Because once a story’s been discredited-once it’s been ridiculed, ripped apart, and indicted-it forever loses its claim to legitimacy. It passes into urban legend, to the canon of conspiracy theorists, onto the refuse pile of hack history. Remember that story about a certain president’s discharge from the National Guard? By the time handwriting experts had discredited the documents, by the time a national anchor had resigned and a nationally respected producer was fired-by then, it didn’t matter if the basic truth of the story remained unchallenged. It was trash. It was a tissue of lies. It was garbage.

The very fate awaiting Document Two.

It will be dissected for the amusement of the public-those who give a crap. It will be snickered at, railed at, and ultimately reviled. It will be held up in journalism classes at serious-minded universities across the country as an example of what not to do, a cautionary tale for every cub reporter about to enter the fray.

It will belong to the LBJ-killed-Kennedy crowd, to the Area 51 cabal, to the Bailey Kindlons of the world.

Because even if you bought the anagrams, the hired actors-even if you did, you would have to consider the source.

Enough said.

That’s what they wanted.

That’s what I’ll give them.

I’ve left it here on my computer-right at page 1.

I am writing this as fast as I can.

I, myself, am going for a stroll now.

I’ve already called the front desk and asked them to send Luiza in to clean the room again. I told the manager that I’ll be taking a walk to get out of her hair. Behind the motel, maybe, where I’ve seen a path leading out to the dusty flats.

When I hear her knock at my door, I’m already up and on my way.

Half an hour maybe, I think.

At least that.

Enough time for them to come in, put that Evelyn Wood speed-reading course to good use, and get the gist of it.

I’m leaving an offering at the altar and hoping to mollify the gods. Vengeance might be theirs, but if you proffer the proper sacrifice, might you still be spared?

Luiza wordlessly passes me on her way into the room, and suddenly I’m standing on the deck in the full glare of afternoon. The deserted parking lot. The dead air.

I descend the stairs one rickety wooden step at a time.

I look neither right or left. Certainly not behind. I’ve been there, done that. It’s eyes forward now.

I lope across the parking lot, dead man walking.

Because that’s what I am.

One way or another.

I said this is my last will and testament, and it is. I’ve said you are its executor, and you are.

It sits in my pocket, this story, on a shiny CD.

It is next to a forged license, courtesy of Luiza, who slipped it under my door some time ago, after our conversation about illegal documentation. After I slipped her five hundred dollars.

It’s only a license, but it’s a start.

Tom Valle will be dead.

One way or another.

Dead.

In my other pocket is the Smith amp; Wesson.

In case the sacrifice isn’t enough. In case it’s better to have the author dead than alive. The crazy reporter who must’ve shot himself out in the desert behind a ratty motel. The last refuge of a liar.

I don’t know.

I’m not a mind reader.

I will walk and walk and I will not come back, and I will not turn around until I hear the sound of their boots, and then I’ll know.

It’s hot out here behind the motel, where the desert stretches all the way to Nevada. But it seems like I’ve been enveloped in chill for years. I am warm for the first time in forever.

This story’s in my pocket. On a shiny CD.

I will take it with me and we’ll see.

I walk and walk and walk.

I’m aware of the time passing, but it’s all time. It’s not minutes; it’s years. It’s then to now. It’s the Acropolis Diner and Queens, New York, and the night of the blizzard and what happened, Tommy and someone standing behind my right shoulder to read my faltering copy. It’s bratwurst sandwiches and walks in Bryant Park and that terrible day when I didn’t have the guts to go into his office and say something. Anything. Like another day when the truth refused to come out of me.

When I finally hear them, it’s not their boots.

It’s their tires.

Their engines.

Two Jeeps, I think.

Don’t worry.

I have one last secret.

One.

I have appointed another executor.

I have heeded the rules of Wren and protected the story.

My editor. He is shuttered away in his mountain house in Putnam County, New York. Faded, sure, but still faintly glowing, still a beacon for those who believe that we can do good and necessary things in this world. There’s a reputation in tatters there that can still, even now, be mended. There’s an injustice there that can still be rectified. There’s a fearsome debt that can still be repaid.

By now, Sam would’ve sent it to him.