“We know you injected my friend here,” Hans says, and flashes the cell phone light in Jerry’s direction for a second. Now Eric looks even more confused. Hans carries on. “We know you snuck him out of the nursing home. Now, I’m going to take the tape off your mouth and you’re going to answer me—if you don’t tell us what we want to know, we’re going to drop you. Okay?”

Eric, who is shaking his head through the last bit of Hans’s speech, now starts nodding. Hans removes the tape, and the moment he does Eric draws in a deep breath and starts to cough. A few seconds later he gets himself under control.

“I don’t,” he says, and then coughs a little bit more. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Are you sure?” Hans asks.

“I’m positive.”

“I mean are you sure that’s the way you want to play it? We know you set up Jerry here.”

“You injected me,” Jerry says.

“Of course I injected you! You were getting out of control. We had to calm you down!”

“You’ve injected me more than once,” Jerry says.

“We often have to inject you.”

“Then how does he escape if he’s been sedated?” Hans asks.

“I don’t know,” Eric says, his voice breaking a little. “Nobody knows. But the days he escapes he’s not sedated, and last night, well, it must have worn off.”

“You hear that?” Hans asks.

“Hear what?” both Eric and Jerry say at the same time.

“A reason to toss you out the window,” Hans says. He spins Eric around so he’s facing the view outside again.

“But—”

Eric doesn’t get to finish the sentence, because right then Hans punches him in the side of the face, a fast, hard jab that rocks Eric’s head sideways and knocks his glasses off, the hit echoing through the room, bringing an extra layer of reality to a day that has been unbelievable and way too real for Jerry all at the same time. Blood flows from Eric’s nose. Jerry wants to say something, but isn’t sure what. He wants his friend to dial it back, but this is the way things get done. This is how you get the facts from bad people, and those who don’t stay committed only get lies and half-truths. He crouches down and grabs Eric’s glasses and puts them back on for him.

Hans puts the duct tape back over Eric’s mouth then pushes his head through the open window. Eric struggles at first, then relaxes as more of his body is pushed through, a struggle at this point only doing him more harm than good. His face bangs against the building as they lower him, his body dragging over the windowsill, bumping and slowing as different body parts grip against it. Then he’s all the way out, Eric holding one leg, Jerry the other, both of them straining at the effort required.

“He’s facing the wrong damn way,” Hans says.

“I’m sure he still gets the point,” Jerry says, struggling for breath.

“We should try and turn him.”

“How?”

“How about—” Hans says, but it’s how about nothing, because Jerry loses his grip on Eric, then with all that extra weight Hans loses his grip too, and then Eric is falling, the distance covered so quickly he reaches the concrete before Jerry is even aware of what’s just happened. Eric’s sudden fall ended by his sudden stop, and Jerry wonders if this is one more death that will be filed away on his things-to-forget list, whether tomorrow he’ll be denying this to himself, perhaps the same way he’s been denying everything else.

DAY TWO WITHOUT SANDRA

You slept upstairs last night. It felt like a betrayal leaving Sandra downstairs, but you couldn’t spend another night on the floor next to her. You just couldn’t. You didn’t sleep well, just in fits and starts, and you lost count of how many times you reached across the bed, needing to find Sandra asleep and okay and not being able to. When you went into the office this morning, you went with the hope she wouldn’t be there, that she would be cooking breakfast or reading a book. But of course she was there, she’s still here. You sat on the floor next to her and spun the chamber in the gun around and around, thinking about putting it to your head and pulling the trigger, but never getting close.

The alarm guys came to the house yesterday. At least you think it was them. There was knocking from the front door a few times that you ignored. They eventually went away. Last night you called Eva and gave her the We’re busy looking at nursing homes line, and she wished you the best of luck. The moment you call the police you will lose her.

You are in limbo now, just spending the hours imagining your life without Sandra. But that was your future anyway, wasn’t it? So here’s what’s going to happen, Madness Journal. This will be Past Jerry’s final entry before being shipped off to jail, his final few lines before calling the police later today. Or tomorrow. The longer the wait, the more time Eva can have thinking the world is okay.

So, what to say to the police? Say nothing. Don’t tell them anything. If this is all you remember, Future Jerry, then remember this: don’t tell them about Belinda, about the shirt, the knife, about Hans. It’s their job to figure out what happened, and if you lay all the evidence out there for them, they won’t look beyond it. You’ll go from Jerry Grey Crime Writer to Jerry Grey Death Row Inmate. You’ll be a scapegoat. They’re not going to believe you had nothing to do with Belinda Murray’s death, and they’ll shape the evidence around Nurse Mae’s statement. They’ll say the timeline was off, that you were there earlier or Belinda died later. You’ve written about this world long enough to know how it works.

Say nothing, Future Jerry. Say nothing.

Who knows, in another month or two maybe you’ll have forgotten all about this.

Final words?

Stop writing what you know.

And fake the rest.

They run downstairs, each of them stumbling, Jerry tripping into Hans, Hans tripping into Jerry, more good luck than anything else keeping them upright as Hans’s cell phone lights the way. When they get to the bottom they don’t actually know where to turn. They don’t know the layout of the place. Hans makes the decision and Jerry follows. They head into what turns out to be the dining room, then the lounge, no furniture to bang their knees into. From the lounge there’s a sliding door to the backyard. Both men are breathing heavily. Neither has said a word. They stick to that tradition as Hans twists the lock and opens the door.

Because Eric’s hands were tied behind him, he never had the chance to try to use his arms to break his fall. There is no need to check for a pulse. Jerry can feel something rise up in his stomach.

“Hold it in, Jerry,” Hans says.

Jerry takes a deep breath. He tries to hold it in. But he can’t. He turns and vomits against the side of the house. He can still hear the sound Eric’s head made when it hit the pavement, can feel that sound vibrating around the bones in his body, like biting heavily on a ball bearing and cracking a tooth. He wipes his sleeve over his mouth. His hands are shaking, and then he realizes his legs are shaking. His arms too. Everything is shaking. This is what it is like to have killed a person. If he’s done this before, surely he’d recognize the feeling. This is new to him.

“Why the hell did you let him go?” Hans asks.

“Don’t put this on me,” Jerry says. “It’s not like I have experience at this kind of thing. This is why in movies the guys doing the holding look like bodybuilders.”

“All you had to do was hold on.”