‘How are you feeling?’
‘Look, okay, all right?’ Rather a nervous voice, actually.
‘Ready to answer some questions?’
‘Anything, okay? Just let me outa here!’
‘Okay, good.’ Kelly lifted a clipboard. ‘Have you ever been arrested, Billy?’
‘No.’ A littl? pride in that one, Kelly noted. Good.
‘Been in the service?’
‘No.’ Such a stupid question.
‘So you’ve never been in jail, never been fingerprinted, nothing like that?’
‘Never.’ The head shook inside the window.
‘How do I know you’re telling the truth?’
‘I am, man! I am!’
‘Yeah, you probably are, but I have to make sure, okay?’ Kelly reached with his left hand and twisted the spigot valve. Air hissed loudly out of the chamber while he watched the pressure gauges.
Billy didn’t know what to expect, and it all came as a disagreeable surprise. In the preceding hour, he had been surrounded by four times the normal amount of air for the space he was in. His body had adapted to that. The air taken in through his lungs, also pressurized, had found its way into his bloodstream, and now his entire body was at 58.8 pounds per square inch of ambient pressure. Various gas bubbles, mainly nitrogen, were dissolved into his bloodstream, and when Kelly bled the air out of the chamber, those bubbles started to expand. Tissues around the bubbles resisted the force, but not well, and almost at once cell walls started first to stretch, and then, in some cases, to rupture. The pain started in his extremities, first as a dull but widespread ache and rapidly evolving into the most intense and unpleasant sensation Billy had ever experienced. It came in waves, timed exactly with the now-rapid beating of his heart. Kelly listened to the moan that turned into a scream, and the air pressure was only that of sixty feet. He twisted the release valve shut and re-engaged the pressurization one. In another two minutes the pressure was back to that of four bar. The restored pressure eased the pain almost completely, leaving behind the sort of ache associated with strenuous exercise. That was not something to which Billy was accustomed, and for him the pain was not the welcome sort that athletes know. More to the point, the wide and terrified eyes told Kelly that his guest was thoroughly cowed. They didn’t look like human eyes now, and that was good.
Kelly switched on the intercom. ‘That’s the penalty for a lie. I thought you should know. Now. Ever been arrested, Billy?’
‘Jesus, man, no!’
‘Never been in jail, fingerprinted -‘
‘No, man, like speeding tickets, I ain’t never been busted.’
‘In the service?’
‘No, I told you that!’
‘Good, thank you.’ Kelly checked off the first group of questions. ‘Now let’s talk about Henry and his organization.’ There was one other thing happening that Billy did not expect. Beginning at about three bar, the nitrogen gas that constituted the majority of what humans call air has a narcotic effect not unlike that of alcohol or barbiturates. As afraid as Billy was, there was also a whiplash feeling of euphoria, along with which came impaired judgment. It was just one more bonus effect from the interrogation technique that Kelly had selected mainly for the magnitude of the injury it could inflict.
‘Left the money?’ Tucker asked.
‘More than fifty thousand. They were still counting when I left,’ Mark Charon said. They were back in the theater, the only two people in the balcony. By this time Henry wasn’t eating any popcorn, the detective saw. It wasn’t often that he saw Tucker agitated.
‘I need to know what’s going on. Tell m? what you know.’
‘We’ve had a few pushers whacked in the past week or ten days -‘
‘Ju-Ju, Bandanna, two others I don’t know. Yeah, I know that. You think they’re connected?’
‘It’s all we got, Henry. Was it Billy who disappeared?’
‘Yeah. Rick’s dead. Knife?’
‘Somebody cut his fuckin’ heart out,’ Charon exaggerated. ‘One of your girls there, too?’
‘Doris,’ Henry confirmed with a nod. ‘Left the money … why?’
‘It could have been a robbery that went wrong somehow, but I don’t know what would have screwed that up. Ju-Ju and Bandanna were both robbed – hell, maybe those cases are unrelated. Maybe what happened last night was, well, something else.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like maybe a direct attack on your organization, Henry,’ Charon answered patiently. ‘Who do you know who would want to do that? You don’t have to be a cop to understand motive, right?’ Part of him – a large part, in fact – enjoyed having the upper hand on Tucker, however briefly. ‘How much does Billy know?’
‘A lot – shit, I just started taking him to -‘ Tucker stopped.
‘That’s okay. I don’t need to know and I don’t want to know. But somebody else does, and you’d better think about that.’ A little late, Mark Charon was beginning to appreciate how closely his well-being was associated with that of Henry Tucker.
‘Why not at least make it look like a robbery?’ Tucker demanded, eyes locked unseeingly on the screen.
‘Somebody’s sending you a message, Henry. Not taking the money is a sign of contempt. Who do you know who doesn’t need money?’
* * *
The screams were getting louder. Billy had just taken another excursion to sixty feet, staying there for a couple of minutes. It was useful to be able to watch his face. Kelly saw him claw at his ears when both tympanic membranes ruptured, not a second apart. Then his eyes and sinuses had been affected. It would be attacking his teeth, too, if he had any cavities – which he probably did, Kelly thought, but he didn’t want to hurt him too much, not yet.
‘Billy,’ he said, after restoring the pressure and eliminating most of the pain. ‘I’m not sure I believe that one.’
‘You motherfucker!’ the person inside the chamber screamed at the microphone. ‘I fixed her, you know? I watched your little babydoll die with Henry’s dick in her, slinging her cunt for him, and I seen you cry like a fucking baby about it, you fucking pussy!’
Kelly made sure his face was at the window when his hand opened the release valve again, bringing Billy back to eighty feet, just enough for a good taste. There would be bleeding in the major joints now, because the nitrogen bubbles tended to collect there for one reason or another, and the instinctive reaction of decompression sickness was to curl up in a ball, from which had come the original name for the malady, ‘the bends.’ But Billy couldn’t fold up inside the chamber, much as he tried to. His central nervous system was being affected now, too, the gossamer fibers being squeezed, and the pain was multi-faceted now, crushing aches in the joints and extremities, and searing, fiery threads throughout his body. Nerve spasms started as the tiny electrical fibers rebelled against what was happening to them, and his body jerked randomly as though being stung with electric shocks. The neurological involvement was a little disquieting this early on. That was enough for now. Kelly restored the pressure, watching the spasms slow down.
‘Now, Billy, do you know how it was for Pam?’ he asked, just to remind himself, really.
‘Hurts.’ He was crying now. He’d gotten his arms up, his hands were over his face, but for all that he couldn’t conceal his agony.
‘Billy,’ Kelly said patiently. ‘You see how it works? If I think you’re lying, it hurts. If I don’t like what you say, it hurts. You want me to hurt you some more?’
‘Jesus – no, please!’ The hands came away, and their eyes weren’t so much as eighteen inches apart.
‘Let’s try to be a little bit more polite, okay?’
‘… sorry …’
‘I’m sorry, too, Billy, but you have to do what I tell you, okay?’ He got a nod. Kelly reached for a glass of water. He checked the interlocks on the pass-through system before opening the door and setting the glass inside. ‘Okay, if you open the door next to your head, you can have something to drink.’
Billy did as he was told and was soon sipping water through a straw.
‘Now let’s get back to business, okay? Tell me more about Henry. Where does he live?’
‘I don’t know,’ he gasped.
‘Wrong answer!’ Kelly snarled.
‘Please, no! I don’t know, we meet at a place off Route 40, he doesn’t let us know where -‘
‘You have to do better than that or the elevator goes back to the sixth floor. Ready?’
‘Nooooo!’ The scream was so loud that it came right through the inch-thick steel. ‘Please, no! I don’t know – 1 really don’t.’
‘Billy, I don’t have much reason to be nice to you,’ Kelly reminded him. ‘You killed Pam, remember? You tortured her to death. You got your rocks off using pliers on her. How many hours, Billy, how long did you and your friends work on her? Ten? Twelve? Hell, Billy, we’ve only been talking for seven hours. You’re telling me you’ve worked for this guy for almost two years and you don’t even know where he lives? I have trouble believing that. Going up,’ Kelly announced in a mechanical voice, reaching for the valve. All he had to do was crack it. The first hiss of pressurized air bore with it such terror that Billy was screaming before any real pain had a chance to start.