Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(5)

“I was there.”

All of them, even Doobie, even Jerry, who had the exact same thought in his head, turn to look at B.S., who uttered it aloud.

B.S. is small and dark and antsy, with a twitch in his eye that makes him look like he’s winking—like he’s kidding around. But he’s not. He told Jerry that he always means what he says, even when everyone else claims he’s lying.

“I don’t care what they say, because I know I’m telling the truth,” he told Jerry one night after lights-out. “You do, too, don’t you?”

“I do what?”

“You know I’m telling the truth, right, Slow Boy?”

That’s what they call him. Slow Boy. It’s just a nickname, like B.S. and Doobie.

Doobie says nicknames are fun. Jerry doesn’t think they are, but of course, he doesn’t ever want to tell Doobie that.

As nicknames go, that’s not the worst Jerry has had. Back in New York, a lot of people called him Retard. And in the courtroom, during his trial, everyone called him The Defendant.

“That’s a big ol’ pile of bull,” Doobie tells B.S. now. “Just like your name.”

“No!” B.S. protests. “I was. I was there. I was a fireman.”

“You wasn’t no fireman in New York City,” Rollins tells him. “Sheee-it. You from Delaware. Everyone know dat.”

B.S. is shaking his head so rapidly Jerry thinks his brains must be rattling around in his head. “I climbed up miles of stairs dragging my fire hose, and—”

“Your fire hose was miles long?”

“Yeah, yeah, it was long, like miles long, and I got to the top floor right before the building collapsed—”

“If you were up there,” one of the other inmates cuts in, “then how the hell are you sitting here right now? How’d you get out alive, you lying mother—?”

“I jumped. That’s how. I jumped, yeah, and the other firemen, they caught me in one of those big nets.”

Jerry regards him with interest as the others shake their heads and roll their eyes because they’re thinking B.S. makes things up all the time.

Jerry usually doesn’t know if B.S. is telling the truth or not, and he doesn’t really care. He talks all the time, especially at night, and Jerry usually has no choice but to listen. Like Doobie, B.S. lives in the cell next to Jerry’s, but on the opposite side.

But this time, for a change, he’s interested in what B.S. is saying.

“I was there, too,” Jerry says, and they all turn to him. “When the terrorist attack happened.”

“Yeah? Did you jump out the window too, Slow Boy?” someone asks.

“I wasn’t in the building. But I was near it. I saw it burning. I saw . . .” Jerry’s voice breaks and he swallows hard.

He squeezes his eyes closed and there are the red-orange flames shooting out of white buildings, gray smoke reaching into a deep blue sky, black specks with flailing limbs, falling, falling, falling . . .

There are some terrible things that, despite his brain injury, he has no problem remembering.

September 11 is one of them.

That was the day before he killed Kristina Haines, the other lawyer, the one who didn’t like Jerry, said at the trial.

“On the morning of September eleventh, The Defendant was teetering on the edge . . .”

At first, Jerry thought the lawyer was confused. He tried to speak up and tell everyone that he wasn’t in the towers on that morning. A lot of people were teetering on the edge up there, but he wasn’t one of them.

But he found out that you aren’t allowed to just talk in the middle of a trial, even if you’re The Defendant and what they’re saying about you is wrong.

Anyway, Jerry soon discovered that the lawyer wasn’t talking about teetering on the edge of a building.

Sanity: that’s the word he kept saying. Teetering on the edge of sanity.

“When those towers fell,” he told the courtroom, “a lot of people lost their already tenuous grip on sanity. Jerry Thompson was one of them.”

He told everyone that Jerry stabbed Kristina Haines to death in her own bed because he was angry with her for turning him down when he asked her out.

The lawyer was right about that.

Jerry did ask Kristina to go eat cake with him.

He was angry with her when she said no, especially because she gave him the finger as she walked away, and—

“Tell us more, Slow Boy.”

Doobie’s voice shoves the memory of Kristina from Jerry’s mind. “What?”

“Tell us what happened in New York that day.”

He doesn’t want to look at Doobie, or at anyone else, either. He can feel their eyes on him, burning into him, and he turns away, toward the television. He stares at the pictures of the mess the bad guys made when they flew the planes into the buildings. He takes a deep breath and his nose is full of the smell of burning rubber and smoke and death.

Jerry shakes his head. “I don’t know why they did that.”

“Why who did what?”

“Why the bad guys made that mess. Why they killed all those people. They even killed themselves. Why would they do that?”

“Because they knew the secret, Slow Boy,” Doobie says, leaning closer so that the only way Jerry won’t be able to look at him is to close his eyes. He doesn’t do that, though, because he thinks it might make Doobie mad.