“Look, Dax wouldn’t cooperate,” Emmit started to explain.
“I predicted that. Fine, we move on,” Jamison said. “Where is he?” Jamison tried to get past Emmit, into the back room where the guys usually took the girls and pledges.
“Stop!” Emmit warned. “It wasn’t that simple. He threatened my guy. Said he’d seen him before. Said he knew who he was.”
Jamison fell into the wall. His heart ran hot. He felt like he was underwater.
There was a scream from the back room. Both men turned to look. There was threatening silence.
“I said this was a bad idea. I knew this was a bad idea,” Jamison said. He’d made the phone call to Emmit in the car out of fury, out of anger. He’d wanted Dax stopped and he’d known he could do it. That was the power he had. The power Emmit had told him he’d have to fight to keep at some point. Getting power. Keeping power. Maintaining it. Wasn’t the way it looked in movies. It wasn’t about handshakes and cutting scholarship checks. Votes. It was about striking. Cutting off. Hoarding. Being hard. He couldn’t be afraid. This was how it was done.
“Don’t be a pussy,” Emmit spat. “You knew what this was. What it is.”
“No! No!” Jamison tried to catch breaths he didn’t know he was losing.
They stood there for a while listening to whimpers. The sounds of men’s feet moving around on a concrete floor.
“He’s in the room?” Jamison asked.
“Been in there about an hour.”
“Any information?”
The tone of the exchange at this point had lowered to sober revelation, the sound of a doctor revealing a prognosis of cancer. The patient wanted to know how long; the doctor said two months. The patient didn’t cry; he asked what his odds were of survival.
“Nothing from him yet,” Emmit answered Jamison. “We’re working on him.”
“Can I see him?”
“Not a good idea. He’s beat up pretty bad.”
“What?” Jamison tried to push past Emmit again.
This time, Emmit stopped him with his whole body.
“Don’t be stupid. He’ll see your face.”
Jamison tried again, but Emmit pushed him back into the wall.
“Wait! Wait!” Emmit held Jamison back. He could feel his muscles tighten. “I’ll be right back.” He made sure Jamison wouldn’t move and went into the room of whispers and whimpers.
Alone in the hallway, Jamison was still trying to keep up with his breath, with his reality. Most people couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be in a place like that, at a time like that, but there he was, body shaking to numbness, so many questions he couldn’t keep up. Somehow, his thoughts kept going back to Tyrian. He’d see his face and then Dax’s. Tyrian had a red ball. Dax had a microphone. Both were smiling.
Emmit came out of the room in a rush.
“He’s blindfolded,” he said. “You come in and go right into the corner. Don’t say a word.”
Jamison was still. He looked at Emmit like he was a character on a life-sized television screen. Not real. Pixels come together to express some alternate existence.
“You hear me?” Emmit asked. He grabbed Jamison’s arms and pulled him into the dark place.
There were four brothers in the room. All were in black. Jamison knew two of them—Scoot and Emmit. Dax was sitting in a chair beside a king-sized waterbed with dirty crumpled sheets all a mess in the middle. He was falling over in the seat. A rope held his back in place. His head was hanging to the side. A black slither of fabric covered his eyes, but Jamison could see a gash on the side of his face, blood dripping from his mouth.
Emmit pushed Jamison into the corner farthest from the bed where darkness fell over him like a solid form.
The brothers nodded at him and turned back to their business with Dax.
One of the brothers Jamison didn’t know was sitting in a chair in front of Dax. The chair was turned backward and he was sitting casually with his legs wide on the back of the seat. The other one was standing over Dax with his fists balled for action.