Page 92 of Captured By the Pakhan

I have given him nothing, which isn't brave; it's arithmetic. The moment I answer the last one, there is no reason for me to be alive.

But nobody has hurt me.

Sixty hours, and not one person has laid a hand on me since the apartment. I have been fed twice a day, there is a blanket, and somebody brought a second bottle of water without being asked.

Don't mark her face.

I have been turning that sentence over for three days, and it only goes one way. You don't preserve the face of somebody you're going to bury in a landfill. You preserve the face of somebody who is going to be found — in a house, in a basement, in a photograph, by people with cameras, and identified quickly and without ambiguity.

He's not keeping me. He's storing me.

I am a body he hasn't placed yet.

On the third morning the door opens, and it isn't the man with the crate.

I know before I see his face, because I know the walk. Nine years, four field offices, a hundred stairwells — I know the specific arrogant unhurried way Louis Mendez comes down a set of stairs.

He stops six feet away with a bottle of water in one hand and stands there so I can look at him.

So I look at him.

The bridge of his nose is a mess. It's been reset by somebody who either didn't care or didn't know how, and it sits about four millimeters to the left of where it used to, and there's a flattening across the right cheekbone under the eye that has healed with a dip.

I did that.

I did that in a corridor in March with one punch, and I didn't know whose face I was hitting, and I have carried that not-knowing for eleven weeks, and here it is standing in front of me holding a bottle of water.

"There it is," Louis says. "There's the look. I've been waiting three days for the look."

"Hello, Louis."

"You broke my face, Raven."

"I broke a masked man's face who had just fired on a child," I say. "The rest of it's an administrative detail."

He laughs. He actually laughs, and comes over and puts the water down where I can reach it, which is the first genuinely frightening thing he does, because a man who is careful about your hydration on day three has been told how long you're going to be here.

He sits on the crate.

"Six years," he says. "That's what you're doing the arithmetic on, right? I can see you doing it. Six years."

"Since Newark."

"Since Newark." He looks delighted. "God, you're good. Yeah. Since Newark, since the thing with the storage facility that went nowhere, which went nowhere because I made it go nowhere, and there's a man who noticed that I could make things go nowhere and asked me to dinner."

"Danesi."

"I'm not going to say his name, and you can't make me." He grins. "But yeah."

"Why the house?"

"You know why the house."

"I know he wanted the routing file. I know your job was to take it and mine was to be in the building when it happened." I keep my voice flat. "What I don't know is why a ten-year-old boy."

And here it comes. Here is the thing I have been waiting three days for, and weeks before that, and I do not move a muscle.

Louis shrugs.