Jerry isn’t sure what to say. It all seemed like a good plan back when Hans and Henry were bouncing around ideas the same way Henry would bounce around ideas with his editor. It all seemed possible at the time, but seeing Eric unconscious in the backseat changes the game in a similar way it would if Jerry walked into his publisher’s office dragging in a dead prostitute and a serial killer and pitched the plot for his next book. There is a world of difference, Jerry thinks, between making shit up and making shit happen.

“Jerry? Earth to Jerry?”

“Yeah, I’m still here,” Jerry says.

“You zoned out.”

“I’m okay.”

“He’s guilty, right?” Hans asks.

“Is he?”

“He’s the one who told the police you confessed to him. And somebody drugged you, right? It’s either that—or you really did sneak out of the home and walk twenty miles to single out a woman you had never met. Plus he knew. The moment he looked at me, he knew he’d been found out.”

“What if he wakes up?”

“He won’t,” Hans says. “Not yet.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I just know.”

“So where are we going?”

“I know a place,” Hans says, and of course he does.

The day is getting darker. Even though he doesn’t like Mrs. Smith, he hopes somebody has found her already. At the end of the month daylight saving time will kick in and the days will get longer, but right now there isn’t much light past six thirty. Hans has to turn on the headlights. Traffic isn’t too bad because rush hour was over an hour ago. The quality of the neighborhoods degrades the further they go, until they enter one in which every fence is tagged and the sidewalks have cracks with more weeds pushing through than there is grass on front lawns. They park out front of a two-story house that has no front garden, just a huge slab of concrete taking up the entire yard, patches of oil scattered across it, a hopscotch layout created by duct tape in the center. There’s a For Sale sign nailed to the fence that must be fresh since there’s no graffiti on it, or maybe there’s an amnesty on For Sale signs. The amnesty doesn’t stretch to the rag doll that has been nailed beneath the sign, a roofing nail going through the middle of the doll’s face, giving her a metal nose the size of a quarter.

“Wait here,” Hans says, and he turns off the headlights before getting out of the car. Then he leans back in. “I mean it, Jerry. I’m only going to be gone a minute, but don’t wander off, okay?”

“Is that meant to be a joke?”

“It was meant to be, but halfway through it stopped being funny.”

Hans walks up to the front door reaching into his pocket along the way, then he’s in the dark and Jerry can’t see what he’s doing, but he knows his friend is most likely picking the lock, something he’s always thought is a cool trick for his characters, but something he’d never be able to do in real life.

You can do it, Henry says, and Jerry decides it’s neither here nor there.

A minute later Hans is heading back. He’s wearing a pair of thin leather gloves. He glances at the doll on the fence, and Jerry wonders if he’s conjuring up the same kind of images that Horror Book Henry would have thought back in the days when fiction and nonfiction were two completely different things. In another universe, that doll could pull the nail out of its own face and carry on doing what it was doing before somebody assaulted it.

It’s awkward getting Eric out of the back of the car. He’s heavier than Mrs. Smith, and Jerry is sure he’ll have a sore back tomorrow from all this lifting. But they get Eric upright, and then they get him up the driveway and past the wide open door and into a hallway. Before lifting him, Jerry took Eric’s glasses off and put them into his pocket for safekeeping. It’s dark inside and Hans manages to point his cell phone light ahead as they walk, giving Jerry a brief rundown along the way.

“Used to be a drug house,” he says. “It was just small-time stuff, mostly just a couple of guys selling weed to partying teenagers, but the guys were informants for the police, so the police let them do their thing as long as their thing didn’t go beyond that, but of course it went beyond that because they got into some beef with another couple of guys a few blocks away, and next thing you know the average life expectancy in the neighborhood drops substantially. Nobody wants to buy in this neighborhood, and nobody wants to buy a house where a couple of dealers got themselves nailed to a wall, and the cops never did find their dicks.” Jerry looks concerned, and Hans laughs. “Don’t worry, I’m kidding. They did find them. Anyway, that shit was months ago, and nobody ever comes by here, and the police have no reason to. Not while it’s empty. Come on, let’s get this guy upstairs.”

There is no furniture in the house, nothing to try and avoid, no rug to trip on. They get to the stairs and it’s a tight squeeze and Jerry’s not sure what the difference is going to be upstairs compared to downstairs when it comes to questioning somebody, but there must be something significant to be going through all of this. He thought by now they’d have Eric strapped into a chair with a knife to his throat, but there are no chairs and no knives.

Upstairs smells like cat piss and the air is stale. Every wall he looks at he can imagine two men nailed to it. They dump Eric on the landing because they’re both too exhausted to drag him further. Jerry starts to wonder if this is one of those moments when he’s actually in the off position, Functioning Jerry who can’t seem to store any memories, Functioning Henry who is calling the shots.

“You okay, buddy?” Hans asks, puffing a little.

“No,” Jerry says. “None of this is okay. Now what?”

“Now we get him to talk.”

“And just how are we going to mange that?”

“We hang him out the window.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“It’s the easiest way.”

“You’ve done it before?”

“I’ve seen it done,” Hans says.

“In real life?”

“In movies,” Hans says. “It always works.”

“But won’t he just tell us what we want to hear if we do that? It won’t count, right? I’d confess to anything if it’d stop me from getting dropped on my head.”

“Then we make him tell us something only the killer would know.”

“And what if he isn’t the killer? What if I really am?”

“Then if you’re a killer, you shouldn’t be feeling too bad about this, right?”

Jerry hates how that statement makes perfect sense.

“Look at where we are, Jerry. Look at the situation we’re in. You’re lucky the taxi driver earlier didn’t figure out who you were. You’re a wanted man who is running out of time, and if you’re to be believed, an innocent man. If you don’t want to do this, then fine, we take Eric back home and drop you off with the police and you won’t get to look for your journal and you’ll plead guilty and Eva will continue to never want to speak to you, and the police will blame you for every unsolved crime over the last thirty years. Or we trust your gut, and we question him.”

Jerry doesn’t know what to say.

“The clock is ticking,” Hans says. “Are we doing this or not?”

Jerry nods. The decision made.

They drag Eric into the nearest bedroom. Houses always look sad when they’re empty, Jerry thinks, and this house looks so sad he feels like they ought to put it out of its misery by torching it when they leave. There is wallpaper hanging from the walls and large stains in the carpets and funny-shaped circles of mold on the ceiling. He can’t imagine what a real estate agent would say as a selling point—unless they listed it as an ideal home for the budding pyromaniac. The bedroom is facing south, over the backyard, where there is very little in the way of light, but just enough to see the backyard has been paved in concrete too. Jerry guesses the previous owner hated gardening. Hans unlocks the window, then has to shoulder it upwards because it’s swollen in the damp air. Eric is still unconscious, and he’s still wearing his orderly clothes from the home. Seeing him here is so out of context but not enough to jar Jerry back into the world of rational thought, because surely he can’t be there now.