The Wrong Man by David Ellis Page B

this over.”
    Dr. Baraniq had also complained to me yesterday that he’d spent an entire day with Tom without gaining any insight whatsoever. My expert was going to be left with nothing more than a hypothesis of what might have happened.
    “It’s going to be over soon, Tom. Whether you look at this witness list or not. Don’t you want it to be over in a way that we win?”
    Tom did what he always did, avoiding eye contact and wiggling his fingers and licking his lips with violent tongue thrusts. The skin aroundhis mouth was chapped so badly that he vaguely resembled Heath Ledger as the Joker.
    “I’m not gonna win,” he said.
    “We
can
win, Tom. Just—”
    “Don’t wanna.”
    “You don’t wanna what? You don’t wanna
win
?”
    Tom looked up at the ceiling and smiled. Then he started laughing. First time I’d seen that emotion from him. Dr. Baraniq had said inappropriate emotional reactions were a symptom of disorganized schizophrenia.
    “Win?
Win?
How’m I supposed to
win
?”
    “You win,” I said, “by showing that you were suffering from your illness when you shot that woman.”
    Tom shook his head furiously. “That’s not… that’s not… winning. No, no, no.” He got up from his seat and started walking toward the door.
    “What
is
winning to you?” I called out. “Tom—”
    “There’s no
winning
. I can’t win.” He stood facing the wall, his head shaking more quickly with each passing minute. “I can’t… It doesn’t go away. It doesn’t go away.”
    “Hey,” I said.
    Just like that, Tom dropped to the floor and began mumbling to himself. The words were inaudible but delivered with violence, with anguish.
    “Tom,” I said.
    But he wasn’t listening. He rocked back and forth on the floor, lost within himself.
    A guard entered the room and looked at me with a question.
    “Go ahead,” I said, and sighed. Tom was gone for now. He was probably gone for good.
    I had to find a way to help him. But I couldn’t do it without him helping me first.
    When I got back out to the registration desk, they handed me my cell phone. I saw three messages from the cell phone of Joel Lightner. When I got out of the elevator, I dialed him up.
    “I found something,” he said to me, breathless. “Get ready to be happy.”

17.
    Take the house, they tell you. It doesn’t matter what happened last week. It doesn’t matter what happened to your best friend. Take the house, they tell you, so you do it.
    It was a tip, you hear, but last week was a tip, too—a bogus one, a setup. Three Rangers and two Marines blown up within thirty seconds of entering.
    That’s what you’re thinking as you’re standing outside the house. It’s just past two in the morning, but you aren’t thinking about how tired you are. You aren’t thinking about how lonely you are. You aren’t thinking about how hot you are, the thickness of the desert air, the burden of the forty pounds of gear you’re wearing. You aren’t thinking about the questions you have about your mission, this whole fucking quandary.
    You’re thinking only about that door, and what’s behind it.
    You look to your left, to your lieutenant. Lew looks more like a robot than a human in his combat fatigues and night-vision goggles and gear, bracing the M-14 rifle. But he is a human being, and you know his heart is hammering against his chest the same as yours.
    The call comes, and you follow Lew through the front door with a rush. There is a back door, too, and simultaneously your team has entered from that direction as well. You call out your orders, but there is nobody in the front room, a parlor room with a couch and two chairs and an overhead light that looks like a cheap lamp upside down and suspended from the ceiling.
    The smell of tobacco smoke is fresh. A cigarette still burns on the small table in front of the couch, smoke lingering in the thick air. You look at Lew. He sees the cigarette, too.
    Only moments ago, somebody was sitting right