"Don't you care how he died?"
"No."
"His neck was broken."
I made a noncommittal sound. Sherbet interlaced his fingers and formed a sort of human cup with the palms of his hands. He tapped the tips of his thumbs together. Nearby, somebody was kicking a heavy bag with a lot of power.
"It happened last night, in his cell."
I kept saying nothing. Sweat continued to drip, and I continued to mop my brow. I didn't look at Sherbet.
The detective said, "There was an explosion of some type, which blasted a hole into his cell. Crazy, I know, but someone broke into his cell."
"You're not making sense, Detective."
"None of it makes sense, Sam. Whatever broke into his cell appears to have killed him, as well. Nearly ripped his head clean off."
I listened to a woman hi-yah-ing! with her trainer, grunting the word with each kick or punch. I wanted to hi-yah her face.
"Prison officials don't know what to make of it. The explosion rocked the whole building. Everyone felt it, even those a few buildings away felt it. But there was no evidence of an explosion. It was as if a massive cannonball had been launched at the wall."
"Detective, if I didn't know better, I would say you've been sneaking in some of the hard stuff during your lunch breaks."
He mostly ignored me, although he might have cracked a smile. "They're keeping it out of the press. They have to. Something like this can't get out. Besides, what do they report?"
"So Ira is really dead?"
"Yes."
"And this story of yours is real?"
"So far, it's not much of a story. The warden and his men have no clue what happened."
"And there were no witnesses?"
"Oh, there was a witness."
"What did he see?"
"A guard working the tower heard the explosion. Everyone did. He started looking for the source and found the gaping hole in the Death Row wing. A moment later, he sees what he claims is a naked woman jump from the opening." I burst out laughing, but Sherbet ignored me and continued on. "The guard had been in the process of reporting the hole to the warden when the woman jumped out of Ira's cell. The guard was a fraction of a second too late getting back to his light. The woman disappeared and the last he reports is something quite large and black flew directly over the tower. The woman was never found."
"Was she seen on video?"
"The video they have shows the wall caving in from an unknown impact. An invisible impact. Nothing else can be seen. Nothing inside, since the angle was wrong. And not the woman or whatever the guard had seen flying overhead."
"Did he say what the woman looked like?" I asked.
"He did. Slender. Long black hair. Pale skin. Did a swan dive out of the hole in the wall."
"Any DNA evidence left behind at the scene?"
"None so far, but they're working on it."
I nodded. "And how do you know all of this?"
"Warden is a friend of mine. Ira was my business. And I'm an acquaintance of yours, a woman who had physically assaulted Ira just a week and a half earlier."
"I'm just an acquaintance? I'm hurt."
Sherbet had been watching me closely during this whole exchange. I had been watching two women sparring in the center ring. Both women looked like they would have trouble punching through a wet paper towel. One of them actually turned and ran, squealing.
"There was something else on the video."
Uh, oh. "Please tell me you didn't bring another portable DVD player," I said.
Sherbet chuckled. "No. I learned my lesson with that damned thing. I'll summarize for you. Just after the explosion, the video captured something else. Granted, the camera was only partially facing the wall - and at this time, the spotlight wasn't yet on the hole in the wall - but we can see what appears to be broken bricks and rocks rising in the air and falling on their own."
"Maybe the prison is haunted," I said.
"If I had to guess, I would say it looked like someone - or something - was getting up from the floor. And the chunks of wall were falling away from the body."
"An invisible body," I reminded.
That stopped him. He ducked his head and rubbed his face and groaned a little. He turned and looked at me a moment later, and the poor guy looked truly tortured. The confident detective was gone, replaced by a man who was truly searching for answers.
"What do you make of all that, Sam?" he asked.
"I think someone invisible might have killed Ira," I said.
"Maybe. Is there anything else you would like to add?"
"It's a wild story, Detective," I said, standing. "You boys might want to keep it to yourselves. You wouldn't want the rest of the world thinking that invisible assassins are killing prisoners at Chino State Prison."
I hated lying to the detective, but I had been lying for so long now about my condition it truly came as second nature for me. Still, I hated to see the confused anguish on his face.
Sherbet nodded and looked at his empty hands. I think he was wishing a big fat donut was in one of those hands. Or both hands. The detective nodded some more, this time to himself, I think, and then stood. As he stood, his knees popped so loudly that a girl walking by snapped her head around and looked at us.
The detective looked down at me and said, "I still have questions for you, Sam."
"And I'm still here, Detective."
He nodded and left, limping slightly.
Chapter Forty-seven
Monica and I were in my hotel room, sitting crossed-legged in the center of the bed, holding hands. I had just told her that her husband of thirteen years, a husband who had twice tried to kill her and who, in fact, succeeded in killing her father, was dead. I left out the facts of his death. I told her only that her ex-husband had died suddenly.
Very suddenly, I thought.
Amazingly, Monica broke down. She cried hard for a long, long time. Sometimes I wondered if she even knew why she was crying. I suspected that emotions - many different emotions - were sweeping through her, purging her, one set of emotions blending into another, causing more and more tears, until at last she had cried herself out, and now we sat holding hands in the center of the bed.
"So there's no one trying to hurt me anymore?" she finally asked.
"No one's trying to hurt you," I promised. In fact, Detective Sherbet had just sent me a very choppy and error-filled text message (I could just see his thick sausage fingers hunting and pecking over his cell's tiny keyboard) that he had had a heart-to-heart with the accused hitman. The hitman, currently awaiting arraignment for conspiracy to attempt murder, understood that his employer - in this case Ira Lang - was dead.