Ethan would have answered, but the light beam struck the ground, Ethan realizing a split second before it hit him that the shadow moving toward his head was the stock of the shotgun.
* * *
Ethan’s left eye had been closed by the blow—it felt hot and huge and it throbbed with his pulse. Through his right, he saw the interrogation room. Claustrophobic and sterile. White cinder-block walls. Concrete floor. A bare wood table, on the other side of which sat Pope, sans Stetson and jacket, the sleeves of his hunter-green button-down rolled up to expose his forearms—thick and freckled and knotted with muscle.
Ethan wiped away the fresh line of blood sliding down the side of his face, oozing out of the gash above his left eyebrow.
He stared at the floor. “May I have a towel, please?”
“No. You can sit there and bleed and answer my question.”
“Later, when this is all over, and you’re out of prison, I’m going to invite you over to my house to see your badge. It’ll be behind glass, in a frame, hanging over my mantel.”
This elicited a radiant smile. “Think so, huh?”
“You assaulted a federal agent. That’s a career-ender.”
“Tell me again, Ethan, how exactly you came to know about the body in six-oh-four? And none of this vanishing-bartender bullshit.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The truth.”
“What I told you is the truth.”
“Really? You want to keep heading down that path? Because I went to the pub.” Pope drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “They don’t even have a female bartender on staff, and nobody saw you there four nights ago.”
“Somebody’s lying.”
“So what I’m wondering is...why’d you really come to Wayward Pines?”
“I told you.”
“The”—in air quotes—“investigation?”
Ethan took a deep breath, felt the anger rattling in his chest like sand in a bleached-out skull. His head was killing him again, and he knew it was in part owing to the trauma to his face courtesy of Pope. But it also felt like that old, familiar pounding at the base of his skull that had plagued him ever since he’d woken by the river, not knowing who or where he was. And there was something more—the disconcerting déjà vu surrounding this interrogation.#p#分页标题#e#
“There’s something wrong with this place,” Ethan said, the emotion gathering like black clouds in his chest—accumulation of four days’ worth of pain and confusion and isolation. “I saw my old partner this evening.”
“Who?”
“Kate Hewson. I told you about her. Only she was older. At least twenty years older than she should’ve been. How is that possible? Tell me.”
“It ain’t.”
“And how can I not make contact with anyone on the outside? How is there no road out of town? Is this some kind of experiment?”
“Of course there’s a road out of town. You got any idea how goddamned crazy you sound?”
“There’s something wrong with this place.”
“No, there’s something wrong with you. I have an idea.”
“What?”
“How about I give you a sheet of paper. Let you have some time to write down everything you want to tell me. Perhaps I’ll give you one hour to do it.”
The offer chilled Ethan.
Pope continued. “Or maybe you’d answer my questions faster if I were wearing a black hood? Or if I hung you up by your wrists and cut you. Do you like being cut, Ethan?” Pope dug his hand into his pocket, tossed Ethan something across the table.
Ethan said, “You had it?” He lifted the wallet, flipped it open—Secret Service credentials in the clear plastic sleeve, but they weren’t his.
The badge had been issued to William V. Evans.
“Where’s mine?” Ethan asked.
“Yeah. Where. William Evans. Special Agent. Secret Service. Boise field office. How again did you know it was him in the abandoned house?”
“I told you. I was sent here to find him and Kate Hewson.”
“Oh, that’s right. I keep forgetting. I called your Agent Hassler in Seattle, by the way. He’d never heard of you.”
Ethan wiped more blood out of his face and leaned forward in his chair.
“I don’t know what you’re trying to do, what game—”
“My theory, Agent Evans had been pursuing you, finally caught up with you here in Wayward Pines. So you kill him and kidnap his partner, Agent Stallings, intending to flee town in their car. Only on the way out, a little piece of bad luck catches up with you, and you get into a car accident. Stallings is killed, you take a hard blow to the head. Maybe it jars a screw loose, and when you wake up, you actually start believing you’re this Secret Service agent.”