Pines

of nausea spreading in the pit of his stomach.
    Blood poured down his face, dripping off his chin into a tiny pool on the concrete.
    “I’m leaving,” Ethan said, motioning to the door behind the sheriff. “Open it.”
    Pope didn’t move. Said, “You go on and sit back down now before you get yourself really hurt.” Said it with the confidence of a man who had many times done the thing he was threatening, who would gladly do it again.
    Ethan stepped around the table, moving past the sheriff to the door.
    Tugged on the handle.
    Locked.
    “Sit your ass back down. We ain’t even started yet.”
    “Open the door.”
    Pope rose slowly to his feet, turned, and crowded into Ethan’s airspace. Close enough now to smell the coffee on his breath. See the stains on his teeth. He had four inches on Ethan and probably forty pounds.
    “Do you think I
can’t
make you sit down, Ethan? That it’s beyond my ability to do such a thing?”
    “This is an illegal detainment.”
    Pope smiled. “You’re thinking all wrong, boy. There’s no such thing as law or government inside this room. It’s just you and me. I am the one and only authority in your little world, whose borders are these walls. I could kill you right now if I wanted to.”
    Ethan let the tension knots in his shoulders relax, lifting both hands, palms open, in what he hoped Pope would mistake for a sign of deference and defeat.
    He drew his head back, dipped his chin, said, “OK, you’re right. We should keep talk—”
    —and came off the balls of his feet like they’d been spring-loaded, driving the plate of his forehead straight into Pope’s nose.
    Cartilage crunched, and Ethan felt blood gushing down into his hair as he scooped Pope by his cedar-plank thighs, lifting with his legs, the sheriff struggling to catch Ethan’s neck between his biceps and forearm, but too late.
    The heels of Pope’s boots slipped out from under him, greased with some blood that had slicked the floor, and Ethan felt the man’s substantial weight go airborne.
    He dug his shoulder into the man’s stomach and drove him down hard onto the concrete.
    A burst of air exploded out of Pope’s lungs, and Ethan sat up, straddling the sheriff as he cocked back his right arm for a palm-heel strike.
    Pope torqued his hips and drove Ethan’s face into the leg of the wooden table with enough velocity to split open his cheek.
    Ethan fought to get up amid the motes of excruciating light that starred his vision, but as he got his legs underneath him and struggled to stand, he saw that he’d righted himself a second too late.
    Ethan might’ve parried the haymaker if his head was clear, his reflexes primed, but in his current state, he reacted at half speed.
    The force behind the blow made Ethan’s head swivel far enough that he felt his thoracic spine pop.
    Found himself dazed and prone on the surface of that wooden table, staring up through his one good eye at the maniacal sheriff descending for another blow, his broken nose mushroomed across his face like something that had detonated.
    Ethan raised his arms in an effort to protect his face, but the sheriff’s fist ripped easily through his hands and crashed into Ethan’s nose.
    Tears streamed out of his eyes, blood into Ethan’s mouth.
    “Who are you?”
the sheriff roared.
    Ethan couldn’t have answered if he’d wanted to, his consciousness slipping, what he could see of the interrogation room beginning to spin, interspersed with snapshots of another...
    He is back in that brown-walled room with a dirt floor in the Golan slum, watching a bare lightbulb swinging over his head as Aashif stares at him through a hood of black cloth that reveals only a pair of brown, malevolent eyes and a mouthfulof smiling teeth too white and perfect to be a product of any fourth-world, Middle-Eastern shithole.
    Ethan dangles by his wrists from a chain bolted into the ceiling, his feet just close enough to the floor to ease the circulation-destroying pressure by rising up on his big toes. But he can manage this for only seconds at a time before his phalanges collapse under his weight. When they finally break, he will have no means by which to stop the loss of blood flow to his hands.
    Aashif stands inches from Ethan’s face, their noses almost touching.
    “Let’s try a question you should have no problem answering...What part of America are you from, Chief Warrant Officer Ethan Burke?” the man asks in excellent English that is tinged with