The Inner Circle

93

"You need to move,” I say to Nico as I try to cut around him to get to the back door of the car.

Nico doesn’t budge. Doesn’t move. But he does see what I’m looking at. In the backseat. The black man covered in blood.

“I know him,” Nico blurts. “He’s the barber.”

“What?”

“He comes to give haircuts. To Griffin. But sometimes when he leaves-I check. Griffin’s hair isn’t cut at all. I told them, but they never-”

“Nico, get out of the way!”

“The barber… for you to do this to him… he was watching me, wasn’t he? I know their eyes are everywhere.”

“Nico…”

“That’s why you came back, isn’t it? To do this. To protect me…”

“Protect you?”

“I see your razor. In the driver’s seat,” he says, his eyes flicking back and forth as he dissects the contents of the car. “I see how you killed him.”

“That’s not-”

“It makes perfect sense,” he adds, nodding feverishly. “It’s what I said. This was your mission… your trial. The test of Benedict Arnold. And you-you-don’t you see? — you finally passed, Benjamin! Instead of betraying George Washington, you were given a chance… a chance to protect him. And you did! You risked your life to protect me!”

Annoyed by the nuttiness, I shove him aside, tear open the back door of the car, and feel for a pulse. Nothing. No heartbeat.

Across the long field that leads back to the medical building, a security guard turns the corner, heading our way.

“You need to go,” Nico says to me, eyeing the guard. “They can’t know you did this.”

“I didn’t do anything!” I say, still staring at the barber.

“There’s no need to mourn him. He’s moved on to his next mission.”

“Will you stop? There is no mission!” I explode, slapping his hand from my shoulder. “There’s no test! There’s no trials! There’s no George Washington-and stop calling me Benedict Arnold! All that matters is this! This, right here,” I hiss, pointing back at the body of the barber. “I know you and she… you caused this! I saw the sign-in sheet! I saw Clementine’s name! And if it’d help you get out of here, I know you’d do anything, including making your daughter blackmail the Pr-!”

“What’d you call her?”

“Don’t tell me you don’t know she’s your daughter,” I challenge.

He takes a half-step back and stands perfectly still. “She told me she was a graduate student. But students… students don’t come to see me. That’s how I knew,” Nico admits, blinking over and over and suddenly looking… he actually looks concerned. He opens his mouth to say something, then closes it just as fast. He’s fitting his own pieces together. But as his eyes stop blinking and the concern on his face slowly turns to pain, I can’t help but think that I have it wrong. Maybe this isn’t the father-daughter operation I just thought it was.

“When I fed the cats, Clementine used to-I saw her one Wednesday. When the barber was cutting hair,” Nico blurts. “She helped him. She told the barber Griffin’s hair looks better when it’s long in front. He listened. It made her smile more.”

On my right, across the field, the security guard is less than fifty yards away. On my left, down by the front gate, the guardhouse’s white-and-orange-striped gate arm rises in the air. A black car pulls up the service road. Someone’s just arrived.

“It made me smile more too,” Nico adds, barely noticing. “But she heard the barber, didn’t she? She heard his confession.”

“Nico, you need to get away from here,” I tell him as the guard picks up his pace, coming right at us.

“She did this… she caused this, didn’t she?” Nico says, motioning to the barber.

On the service road, the black car picks up speed.

“The doctors here… they say I have a sickness,” Nico says. “That’s what put the evil in my body-the sickness did. And so I prayed-I begged God-I begged God since the first day she came to visit… I worried she had it too.”

“Nico, get out of here,” I insist, tempted to jump in the car and take off. But I don’t. The barber’s dead-I can’t take him with me. But if I stay and try to explain, there’s only one place I’m going if they find me with Nico and a bloodied corpse.

“All these years, I knew my fate. I always knew what God chose me for,” Nico adds. “But when Clementine came… when she reached out to me like that… I thought I finally got-I was lucky. Do you know what that means, Benjamin? To be a lucky man?” he asks, his voice cracking.

“Nico, please get out of here,” I beg, grabbing my phone from the front seat.

The black car knifes to the left, heading straight for our parking lot.

The security guard is now running.

“But there is no luck, is there, God?” he asks, talking to the sky. “I knew that! I knew it all along! But when I met her… when I saw her… how could I not hope? How could I not think that I’d finally been blessed-the truest blessing-that despite the sickness inside myself, that You made her different than me.” He stares up at the sky, his eyes swollen with tears. “I begged You, God! I begged You to make her different than me!”

“Nico, back to your building! Now!” the security guard shouts in the distance.

Behind me, the black car speeds up the service road, its engine roaring.

“You! Away from Nico!” the guard yells at me.

There’s a loud screech. The black car skids into the parking lot, punting bits of frozen gravel at us. But it’s not until the passenger door bursts open that I finally see who’s driving.

“Get in! Hurry!” Dallas shouts from behind the steering wheel.

“Nico, don’t you move!” the guard yells as he reaches the parking lot. That’s still his priority.

“Nico, I’ll see you next week!” I call out, trying to make it all sound normal as I dart to the black car, which is already pulling away.

As I hop inside and tug the door shut, Dallas kicks the gas and we’re off. Behind us, the guard grabs Nico by the arm. The guard looks relieved. Problem solved. That’s still the top St. Elizabeths priority. No escapes.

The road isn’t long. Within ten seconds, we’re rolling past the main gate. Dallas offers a casual wave to the man in the guardhouse. The fact that he waves back tells us the guard in the parking lot still hasn’t found the barber’s body. Word’s not out yet.

“That guy with the knife… the barber-” I say.

“I know. I could hear,” Dallas says, holding up his phone as we pull out of the gate and reach the main street. “I think I was able to get most of it on tape.”

“Then we should-”

“No,” Dallas says, twisting the wheel as we speed toward the highway. “Right now, there’s only one place we need to go.”