NINE OF TEN

Chapter 13: The Tenth Storyteller

The card lay face up in the middle of the table, in the light, black on white with a border printed around it like a warning label on a machine.

LIAR.

Wes had set it down with two fingers and taken his hand back.

The other nine looked at it, and then at him.

He knew that look. He'd been handed it in kitchens and offices and once in a hotel hallway with the ice machine running, and it meant the same thing every time: say it was a joke and we'll let it be a joke. It bought him about six seconds of being liked.

"The word doesn't change if you stare at it," Vance said.

"It doesn't change if you turn it over, either," Wes said.

Whitlock hadn't looked at the card yet. He was looking at Wes. "That's what you drew."

"That's what you drew."

"And you turned it over in front of nine people."

"I did."

"Why."

"Because it isn't the interesting part." Wes put his hands on the table. "Every card at this table says LIAR. Not just mine."

Somebody's chair creaked and stopped.

"You can't know that," Bree said.

"I can't prove it. You can each look at your own card and save me the trouble." He waited. "Nobody's reaching."

Whitlock took his hands off the table and stood up. Nobody else had stood since Wes had, and the room turned.

"Say it's true. For the sake of argument." Whitlock went around them one at a time. "All nine of us lied about how we got here. Then the rules eat themselves. There's one liar in this room and there's nine."

"It doesn't eat itself," Pierce said. He had his elbows on the table and his fingers laced. "It simplifies. If all nine of us are lying, then any name is a correct answer. We don't have to find anything. We don't have to reason. We have to agree."

"On a name," Vance said.

"On one name."

"And the other eight walk out." Whitlock nodded once. "All right. That's the plan. It's not a good plan, but it's a plan. All nine of us write the same name, eight of us go home. Minimum loss."

Nobody shouted. The girl in the apron looked at her hands. Eli made a small sound and covered it with a cough. Bonnie sat very still with her chin up, and then her eyes went around the table, chair to chair, and came back.

Wes said, "Do you enjoy that?"

Whitlock's head came around. "Enjoy what."

"Finishing other people's sentences. Standing up and doing the thinking for the room before the room's had a chance to be wrong out loud." Wes heard his own voice come out flat and unpleasant and left it alone. "Does it make you feel like you're in charge, or does it just feel good?"

"Watch your mouth."

"You said minimum loss fast enough that I don't think you heard yourself. You said eight of us go home. You didn't say one of us doesn't." Wes let that sit. "Your plan kills everybody."

Whitlock's jaw worked. He stayed standing, because sitting down now would have cost him the room, and Wes watched him know it.

"Explain," Whitlock said.

"The rules. Not mine. His."

Wes tipped his head toward the head of the table. The man in the mask hadn't moved since the card went down. His hands were where they'd been all along.

"He said the rules are absolute. He said there's one liar and only one. Everybody here heard both sentences." Wes looked around the table. "So we all write a name because we've decided the cards are the same, and it turns out they aren't. Then we voted wrong. That's the game. But if we write a name because we've decided the rules don't mean anything anymore, we've done something else. We've broken a rule he called absolute, and he never told us the price."

"That isn't—" Pierce started.

"Then tell me the price. Anybody. I'll wait." Wes put his palms down. "Because I don't know it. You don't know it. He didn't say. And I have never in my life seen a rule called absolute that didn't come with a bill."

Nobody offered one.

Whitlock said, slowly, "Then give me something better than a shrug. Because the alternative is we sit here and pick a name the way he wants us to."

"No," Wes said. "The alternative is we find the one liar we can prove. Which is what I've been doing while you were all working out who to kill."

He sat down. It hurt to sit down; his legs didn't want any part of it.

"Nine stories," he said, "counting mine. Nine different places. Different states, different jurisdictions, different systems. Whitlock's got a badge from a department I've never driven through. Pierce's license hung in a building I've never walked past. Vance practices in a courthouse I've never been inside. There isn't one of us who could check another one's paperwork with a phone and a week."

"And?" Vance said.

"And he didn't pick nine people who fit together. He picked nine people who'd go looking for a fit." Wes tapped the scratch sheet. "That's the whole trick, and it's an old one. You don't hand a man a lie. A lie has edges and edges can be picked up. You hand him a shape and let him fill it in, and then he'll defend it for you, and he'll do it for free."

Eli said, "Th-then why the hour? Why make us t-talk at all?"

"I don't know," Wes said. "I know it wasn't for us."

He wrote the name the man in the mask had given them first, before the rules, before the cards, before any of the rest of it, in block capitals on the scratch sheet, and turned it around.

THE RAM.

He let them look at it.

"That's not a story," Whitlock said.

"What did he say before he said anything else? He told us why we're here. He said they make gods." Wes looked down the table. "A man stands up in front of nine strangers and tells them he's going to turn one of them into a god. That's a story. Nobody needs a fire to tell one."

"He said it to us," Vance said. "That's a briefing."

"Was it true?"

She looked at him and didn't answer.

"There is one liar in this room. Exactly one." Wes turned the sheet so it faced the room. "And there's one account of tonight at this table that doesn't start with how somebody got here. It starts with why. Nine strangers in a room with no door, and a man in a mask who says he can make a god. He can't do that with a name written on a slip of paper. If he could, he wouldn't need nine of us to hand it to him."

"That's not proof," Pierce said.

"No. It's the one name in this room I'd stand behind."

Whitlock said, "There's something off about this."

"I know."

"No. About you." His eyes hadn't moved off Wes. "I don't like it. It's too neat."

"It's not neat at all. He's sitting right there. If I'm wrong, he says one word and I'm finished." Wes turned his head. "Go ahead."

The mask didn't move. The hands didn't move.

Wes waited. He counted seconds without a clock, got to the end of what he'd given it, and got nothing back. He didn't know whether that was an answer or the lack of one. He let it go.

"There's a hole in it," Pierce said. "One hole. Everything you've built stands on all nine of us lying. Prove that. Because if only one of us is lying — say, only you — then the rules don't break, the vote is simple, and the rest of us go home."

"Then write my name," Wes said.

Pierce blinked.

"Write it. If I'm the liar, the rules say you live and I don't. That's a better night than you were expecting ten minutes ago." Wes pushed the pen across the table. It stopped in the middle, out of reach of everybody. "You won't do it. You want it to be that I'm a dangerous man making a bad room worse, and that in the morning a doctor is in charge again."

"Careful," Pierce said.

Wes laughed. It came out with nothing in it.

"None of you told the truth," he said. "Not one. I've spent an hour listening to people describe the worst night of their lives and every last one of you left the same thing out."

He stood up. His legs had an opinion about it. He ignored them.

"Bonnie."

Her chin came up. "What."

"You were in the car with your head out the window when the sign came down on the roof."

"That's what happened."

"The sign is bigger than the car. The whole panel. It comes down flat on that roof with you hanging out of the window, and the last thing you remember is nothing."

Bonnie's jaw moved once. Then she pressed her lips together and looked at the table and stayed like that.

"A billboard doesn't put a person to sleep," Wes said. "It takes the roof off, and whatever's under the roof goes with it."

Nothing.

"Tommy."

"Don't." Tommy brought his chair down flat. "Don't do the name thing. Say what you've got to say."

"You fell from high enough to come down on a sign."

"So I hit a sign." He rubbed his arm, where the ink ran from his wrist to his sleeve. "Got lucky."

"People who land on a sign don't get up. They fold." Wes kept his voice level. "You lost consciousness and you woke up on the floor down here with your shoes on."

Tommy looked at him for a while. Then he put both hands flat on the table and left them there, and he didn't look away, and he didn't say anything.

"Bree."

She sat up straighter. "What about me."

"You went off the curb after a kid in the street, and the car came fast enough the driver never touched the brake."

"He didn't."

"And you got there first and you didn't break anything."

"I didn't." Her fingers spread on the table. "The child saw it," she said, and stopped with her mouth still open, and shut it.

Wes waited. She didn't finish.

"Dr. Pierce."

"Yes." Flat, and ready.

"You were in an operating room when the ceiling came down on you."

"I was."

"Operating rooms are built heavy. The lights hang off the ceiling, the gas runs through the walls, all that rig above the table weighs more than a car. That isn't a closet with a bed in it." Wes turned his head. "You're the man here who'd know. Correct me."

Pierce's hands stayed laced. The doctor who had spent an hour telling everyone how fast a car had to be going to do what they said it did, how long a man could go without air, what a fall does to a spine — did not correct him.

He turned his head and looked at the wall.

"Eli."

Eli's head came up. "I— what."

"You told us you don't know what happened to you. Nothing at all."

"I was at my d-desk."

"Nobody walks up behind a man at his desk. You write for a living. You'd hear the chair." It came out ugly, and Wes heard it come out ugly, and he kept going. "You told us you don't know how you got here."

"I don't know what happened." The stutter got into the short words and out again. "I know how that sounds."

Nobody helped him.

"Vance."

Vance folded her arms. "Let me guess. The crack."

"Your car went into a hole in the road. You gave us the depth twice. Down to the inch. You never got to the part where you got out."

She looked at him. She was paid to talk for a living, and she sat there with her arms folded and said nothing, and let him hold the whole sentence by himself.

Wes waited. She gave him nothing.

"Whitlock."

The room turned. Whitlock was still standing, so it was going to be a different kind of question.

"What," he said.

"Your seat went flat. All the way back, in the time it took the man behind you to get his arms over the top of it, and you got your hand free."

"That's what I said."

"What kind of car does that."

"What?"

"A seat that drops flat in half a second with a man's full weight on it, that doesn't break his ribs, and leaves him room to get an arm loose." Wes held his eyes. "What kind of car, Detective."

Whitlock's hand came up to his neck. There was a red mark on the left side under the jaw, and he put two fingers on it the way a man checks his collar without a mirror.

"It's a—" he said, and stopped, and didn't start again.

"Give me the make," Wes said. "Give me the year. Give me anything."

Whitlock took his hand off his neck and said nothing at all.

Wes had heard a sentence die like that before, in other rooms, on other men.

"Dana."

Dana looked up.

"Top floor. The ceiling came down, and then the whole building came down with it."

"That's what I said."

"And you got out of it."

She lowered her eyes to the table. She didn't nod, or shrug, or fill anything in, and she didn't look away either.

"That's eight," Wes said. "Eight stories I can put a thumb through. That doesn't happen by accident, in one room, in one night. Nine people lying about nine separate things, and every lie happens to cover a death. That's not nine liars. That's one table of people who've all done the same thing."

He didn't call the girl in the apron's name. She had never given him a story to put a thumb through.

"Including me," he said. "I lied about how I got here, and so did every one of you, and we all did it for the same reason."

He looked down the length of the table.

"Every one of us at this table is dead."

Nobody spoke.

Nobody jumped up. Nobody laughed at him. The girl in the apron looked at her hands. Eli's mouth was slightly open. Bonnie's chin was still up, and there was something in her face that might have been agreement and might have been grief.

Pierce said, "That's a story too."

"Yes," Wes said.

"It's a very tidy one. Everything we can't check explains everything we can't explain. Nine dead people, one room, one man in a mask who's the only one here allowed to be alive." Pierce's voice hadn't gone up at all. "And the only person in this room who can't answer you is the one with the mask on. Convenient."

"It is convenient." Wes held his eyes. "That doesn't make it wrong."

"That's exactly what makes it wrong."

Whitlock said, "I don't believe it."

"All right."

"I don't believe it. I don't have a better answer and I'm not going to pretend I do, and I want you to hear all of it." He took his hand off his neck. "There's something wrong with this and I can't put my finger on it."

"I know," Wes said.

"Then you know what I'm not going to do."

And that was fair, and Wes didn't have an answer for it.

The man in the mask sat at the head of the table. He hadn't moved. Not when the card went down. Not when his own name came up off the paper. Not when a man he'd promised to deal with personally accused him to his face in front of everyone. Wes had watched a man die in this room, and the mask hadn't moved for that either.

Maybe the stillness was the answer. A man who wasn't pretending might get up and correct the room. Or a man who knew the room had to sit with it, and say the name itself, would sit still and let them do the work.

Wes didn't know. He put it in the pile.

He looked at the clock. One minute to one. It had said one minute to one when he first counted.

The twenty minutes were still going. The number he'd worked out on the second sheet was still his alone, and nobody at the table had asked him for it.

In front of every chair there was a slip of paper the size of a playing card, and every one of them was blank.

Nobody picked up a pen.

The second hand went around.