He says nothing to the policemen—Nurse Hamilton was very specific about that. Say nothing. Ask for a drink if you’re thirsty, ask for the bathroom if you need to go, but that’s all. Now say it back to me. He said it back to her. They spoke in front of the two detectives, Detective Mayor and Detective Something Else, and then she told them not to engage Jerry in conversation until his lawyer arrived.

We know our jobs, Mayor said, but Jerry knew their jobs too. He knew they would try.

That trying begins five miles closer to town, Mayor adjusting himself in the passenger seat and tilting the mirror so he can look at Jerry. “So you’re a writer, huh?”

Jerry doesn’t answer. He’s thinking about Sandra, and whether Nurse Hamilton has called her already. No doubt Sandra will want to come down, either to support him, or to prove divorcing him was the best decision she’s made of late.

“Must be a pretty good gig,” Mayor says.

He can see Mayor’s eyes and nose in the mirror, but nothing else. There’s nothing between the front and the backseat to stop Jerry from tousling the man’s hair. Or trying to strangle him.

“Come on, this is us just shooting the breeze,” Mayor says, “ain’t that right, Chris?”

“Gotta do something on the ride back,” Chris says, “otherwise it’s a pretty boring trip.”

“We’re just chitchatting here,” Mayor says. “Think of it like we’re meeting for the first time at a barbecue and we’re having a couple of beers. You must get that all the time, right? Mr. Bigshot writer? You must love talking about it. So pretend we’re at that barbecue. You write crime fiction, right? You written anything I would have read?”

“Maybe,” Jerry says.

“Maybe. I like a good crime novel, you know? I like a good mystery. I like unlocking a puzzle. Your novels, are they like that?”

“I’m not . . . I’m not sure,” Jerry says, and he isn’t sure.

“He’s not sure, you hear that, Chris?”

“I heard it. It’s the dementia. Guy can’t even remember his own stories.”

“But you remember the characters, right?” Mayor asks. “You remember killing them. Is that why you write? You write about these things because it’s an outlet for you, you figure writing is better than doing the actual crimes? I’ve always wondered that about you guys.”

Jerry doesn’t answer him.

“The way I see it, I’ve always figured a guy who writes the kind of books you write, well, there must be something wrong with him, something sick and twisted inside. Why else come up with all that stuff?”

Jerry doesn’t answer him.

“The shit we see every day, and we see a lot of shit, don’t we, Chris?”

“Sure we do,” Chris says.

“We wade through it,” Mayor says.

“It’s deep,” Chris says, “and it’s never going away.”

“It’s never going away,” Mayor agrees. “If you saw what we saw, I mean, how does a guy like you take what slowly kills us on the inside and turn it into entertainment? Do you turn on the radio and hear about some poor kid tossed into a dumpster with her throat and panties all torn and you think to yourself, well now, that’ll make a good story?”

Jerry wants to say nothing, but he can’t help himself. “It’s not like that,” he says, getting angry. He knows writing isn’t like that. He knows it because of the moving car, the swirling brain chemistry, like silt in a stream.

Mayor twists around in his seat so he can look right at him. “Do you get off on it? You’re just sitting by the TV, waiting for the news to come on every day, sitting with your notepad waiting to be inspired by somebody else’s tragedy?”

“Of course not.”

“Do the messier ones give you better ideas?”

Jerry doesn’t answer him. There’s nothing you can say to somebody who already has their mind made up.

“You make your money by selling crime,” Mayor says. “Make more than we do by solving it.”

“And without crime you’d be out of a job,” Jerry says. “The suit you’re wearing, the house you live in, the food you give your children, all of that is bought and paid for on the back of other people’s suffering.”

“Ooh, you hear that, Chris?” Mayor asks, and he keeps looking at Jerry. “Our buddy here is making a point.”

“It’s social commentary,” Chris says.

“So tell us, Jerry,” Mayor says. “Tell us how much real-life sad stories inspire you.”

Jerry looks between the two men at the road ahead, staring out at a logging truck they’re following, the load swaying side to side as it races down the motorway at sixty miles an hour. “Like I said, it’s not like that.”

“No? Then what is it like?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“You hear that, Chris?” Mayor asks, and Jerry hates how he keeps doing that, how he keeps running everything past his partner. “He doesn’t think I can understand.”

“I think you can understand,” Chris says. “Our friend back there just needs to give you a chance.”

“I think you’re right,” Mayor says. “What do you say, Jerry? Want to give me a chance? I’m no crime writer, and I hear the cops in your books don’t do much other than scratch their asses and sniff their fingers, but how about you explain it to me?”

It’s something he used to get a lot. He remembers that—it was a question journalists always used to throw his way. So you’re fascinated by crime. No, he’s not—he likes crime writing, but not crime, and how many times has he pointed out the two are very different animals? It’s like thinking people who watch war movies must love war. Over the years he’s turned down interviews for TV and radio where reporters have wanted his perspective on a current homicide, always feeling how inappropriate it would be, how hurtful it would be for the family, having an author throw in his two cents just for some publicity.

“They’re just stories,” he tells them. “Stories have been around forever, and without them the human race never would have evolved.”

“Crime has been around forever too,” Mayor says.

“But I’ve never used a real crime in any of my books,” he says, and he can hear himself getting closer to whining. “The things I come up with—they are all make-believe. All of it. I’ve never used a real person’s tragedy. I make a real point of that.”

“You don’t think what you write inspires people to kill? You don’t think there are people out there who read about one of your killers and think to themselves, I can do better?”

“It doesn’t work that way, and people who think it does don’t know what the hell they’re talking about,” Jerry says, and right now he is very switched on. Right now he feels like the man he used to be. Not all the details are there, and he still can’t figure out what he did to make Sandra divorce him, but there’s more there than what there’s been of late, he’s sure of that.

“Then tell me how it works,” Mayor says.

“People don’t read my books and think, Hey, that’s a great idea, let me try that,” he says, and then he realizes that Mayor probably knows all this already and is just trying to bait him into slipping up. Or Mayor doesn’t know this, in which case he’s never going to convince him of anything different. He should shut up, he knows that, but he carries on. “People don’t wake up and become killers because of a piece of fiction. People have to be messed up first. By the time our books come along there’s already something seriously wrong with them.”

“So you don’t mind your books lighting that fuse?”

Jerry takes a deep breath the same way he used to when people would ask this during an interview. Then he stares at Mayor. “Let’s blame the writer. Let’s not blame society, the justice system, the mental health system, the economy, let’s not try to shorten the gap between the rich and the poor, let’s not blame education and people slipping through the cracks, and minimum wage not covering the cost of living and forcing people to do things they normally wouldn’t, let’s not blame the twenty-four-hour news cycle instilling fear into everybody, or how easy it is to get a gun, let’s blame the author, it’s his fault, lock all the authors up and there’s your world peace,” he says, and he can feel his heart rate climbing, can feel something pulsing in his forehead, can feel the old Jerry returning.