John Dies at the End

room. Everything came into high focus, a high-def signal. I spotted a moth on the opposite wall, and noticed a small tear in one of its wings. I heard a guy talking on his cell, and realized he was on the sidewalk outside the building.

What the fuck?

I looked the detective in the eye. I was startled to find I could see his next question coming before he even spoke it, word-for-word . . .

Have you heard the name . . .

“Have you heard the name Nathan Curry? Guy your age, parents own a body shop here in town?”

My heart was hammering. I muttered, “No.”

How about Shelby Winder?

“How about Shelby Winder? Heavy girl, senior at East Side High? Ring a bell?”

“No. Sorry.”

Clarity lit up my mind like a sunrise. Everything was obvious now, all the walls of the maze turned to glass. I immediately knew two things: this list of people had all been at the party last night . . .

And they were all now dead or heading there.

Now how do I know that? How do I know any of this? Magic?

You know damn well why. That black shit John took made blood contact with you. Now you’re getting high, partner.

He asked, “What about Jennifer Lopez?”

“Oh. Yeah. I know her.”

“Not the actress, now, but—”

“I know. I saw her last night. Is she okay?”

“Arkeym Gibbs?”

“No. Wait, yeah. Big guy, right? Black? I don’t know him, but he was the only black guy in my high school . . .”

I trailed off, studied the detective’s face. No, this was not another day at the office for this guy. He’s seen things, the kind of things that sit in the brain, like a tumor, poisoning everything around it. I saw all through him, just like that.

He’s got two kids, two beautiful daughters. He’s suddenly very, very worried about the world they’ll grow up in. He’s Catholic, wears a gold cross around his neck. But today he’s taken it off, put it in his pocket. He keeps sticking his hand down there and rubbing it between his fingers. He thinks the end of the world is coming.

It’s not that I could read the cop’s mind. I couldn’t. I just read his face. We all can tell by the look in somebody’s eyes that they don’t think our joke is funny or that they don’t like what they’re eating or whatever. It was just like that. The information was there, presented in the subtle play of facial muscles from microsecond to microsecond.

He read off more names. Justin White, Fred something, a couple others. I didn’t recognize any of them and told him so. The last name on the list was Jim Sullivan.

So Cucumber was right to worry.

I didn’t tell Morgan I knew the name. In the years since I’ve wondered how many lives could have been saved if I had.

“You’re not outta school even three years. You went to high school with most of these people, East Side. But you only knew the one girl?”

“I kind of kept to myself.”

“And then you got shipped off to the other school—”

“Look, I’m not saying anything else until you tell me whether Jennifer is dead or alive. That ain’t confidential information and I deserve to know.”

Don’t bother. He doesn’t know.

“We don’t know. You see, that’s the problem. That’s why I got six hours of overtime already today. At least nine people were at the One Ball at closing time, twelve hours ago. Four of them are missing. Your friend is here.”

He paused, probably for effect.

“The rest are dead.”

It’s funny. Up until that point, despite all the evidence that had been provided to the contrary, it had never hit home how much trouble I was really in. I thought about John, again wondering if I had killed him by not rushing him to the ER.

I turned and looked at myself in the one-way mirror. The image was distorted, the other cop out of range at the back of the room. What was left was just me and Morgan, the clean-cut protector of the people, standing tall over the slumped, unshaven kid in a battered video store T-shirt that looked suspiciously like it had been wadded up on a car floorboard for two days. Good guy and bad guy. Trash man and trash.

“What about Justin Feingold and the guys John was with?” I asked. “Kelly and—”

“They’re fine. I’ve already talked to ’em, the whole band. They went home before the party moved on. Which brings us to my next question. Your friend is the only known survivor of the One Ball Inn and—now don’t take offense at this—but he ain’t lookin’ too healthy right about now. Did he say anything this morning at work? Maybe while you guys were putting away the last night’s porno returns?”

The white cop across the room stepped forward, put his hands on his hips. Waiting for an answer. Morgan left his gaze on me, calmly waited for me to fill the tense silence. Old interrogation trick.

“John called me last night, talking crazy, clearly out of it. Paranoia, hallucinations, the whole bit. This would have been around five A.M. I came over. He was acting, well, crazy. Seein’ things. But otherwise okay. Conscious, you know. Not, like, puking or convulsing or anything. I calmed him down, we went and got some food. That was that. We went to work.”

“What did he say? Exactly?”

“Monsters in his apartment, said he couldn’t remember how he got where he was, so on.”

“Did he say what he was on?”

“No.”

“You know we can find out anyway, right? We’re not interested in booking a bunch of your raver friends for poppin’ pills. To somebody like me, the dead bodies are what matters. And if somebody’s sellin’ poison, right now, as we talk—”

“No. I’d tell you if I knew. You’re a cop, you know I’m tellin’ you the truth. So, what, that’s how everybody died? Overdose?”

“This Jennifer Lopez, she was your girlfriend?”

“No.”

I thought about repeating my question, then stopped. Instead I replayed his question in my mind, focused on it, studied every contour of each word, was almost terrified to find I could glean libraries of information from between each syllable. In an instant I learned volumes by what he didn’t say, by the way he breathed, the minute twitch at the corner of his mouth, the slight widening of his left eyelid on the third and fifth word.

This detective last ate seven hours and fifteen minutes ago, two Egg McMuffins and four cups of coffee. You can smell it in the oils seeping through his skin. Check out his posture, he hasn’t slept in twenty hours. He forces a smoothness into his voice, wants to come across cultured but shrewd. He tells people his hero is Shaft, but it’s really Sean Connery’s James Bond. In his daydreams he sees himself hanging off a helicopter in a tuxedo.

And then, in a blink, I knew everything he knew. I saw the fate of each of the dead kids from the One Ball.

Nathan Curry had committed suicide, shot himself in the temple with a little .32 caliber pistol he kept hidden under his bed.

Arkeym Gibbs took a swim, fully clothed, in his family’s swimming pool—they found him floating facedown a few hours later.

Shelby Winder and another girl, Carrie Saddleworth, were found together. Each dead of a massive stroke. Shelby was missing her right hand, the wrist a ragged stump wrapped with a blood-soaked shirt.