The Witness

roll cautiously to his hands and knees. He stayed there another moment, wondering if he’d complete the cycle and puke. He’d made it to sitting on the floor, stomach contents intact, when Abigail rushed back in with the cold pack and a glass of water.
    “Don’t you put that on my balls. It’s bad enough.” He took the water, and though the first couple of sips ripped like drinking broken razor blades, the rawness slowly eased. “What the fuck?” he said again.
    “It was reflex. I’m so sorry. You’re so pale. I’m so sorry. I fell asleep, and I was back there, at Alexi’s. Ilya found me, and … I think you touched me, and I thought it was Ilya, so I reacted.”
    “I’ll say. God help him if he tries for you. We may never have kids now.”
    “A minor insult of this kind to the genitalia doesn’t affect fertility,” she began, then looked away. She went considerably pale herself. “I’m very sorry,” she repeated.
    “I’ll live. Next time I start to carry you up to bed, I’ll wear a cup. Now you may have to carry me.”
    “I’ll help you.” She kissed him gently on the cheek.
    “I’d say that’s not where it hurts, but if you kiss me where it does and I have the normal reaction, it may kill me.” He waved her away, pushed to his feet. “It’s not so bad.” He cleared his throat, winced.
    “I’ll help you upstairs.”
    “I’ve got it. I’m just going to … check things out. For my own peace of mind.”
    “All right. I’ll let Bert out before I come up.”
    When she came up, he’d stripped down to his boxers but stood by her monitor, studying it.
    “Is everything … um.”
    “Yeah. That’s some aim you’ve got, killer.”
    “It’s a particularly vulnerable area in a man.”
    “I can attest. I’m going to want you to show me how this system works sometime soon. How you switch from view to view, zoom in, pan out and so on.”
    “It’s very simple. Do you want me to show you now?”
    “Tomorrow’s soon enough. I figure you’ve got plenty of data on the Volkovs, and the agents in their pocket. I’m going to want to review that.”
    “Yes.”
    He caught the tone. “What?”
    “I haven’t told you everything.”
    “Now would be a good time for that.”
    “I’d like to clean up first.”
    “Okay.” And get her thoughts together, he concluded.
    She took a nightshirt from the drawer. “I’ll just be a minute,” she told him, and went into the bathroom.
    He wondered how much more there could be as he heard the water running, and decided there was no point in speculating. Instead, he turned down the bed, lowered the lights.
    When she came out, she got two bottles of water out of her cold box. She offered him one, then sat on the side of the bed. “I think, if I were you, I’d wonder why I’d never tried to go to the authorities, tell everything that happened.”
    “You didn’t know who to trust.”
    “That’s true, at least initially. And I was afraid. For a long time I had nightmares and flashbacks, panic attacks. I still have occasional anxiety attacks. Well, you’ve seen. And even above that—though it took me timeto understand it, I believed I had to do what John told me. He died protecting me. It all happened so quickly, so violently, and was so urgent, so insistent. I realize now we were both very much in the moment. And in that moment, my survival hinged on escape.”
    “If you hadn’t run, you’d be dead. That’s clear.”
    “Yes, I’ve never questioned that. In those first day, weeks, it was all panic. Get away, stay away, stay concealed. If the Volkovs found me, they’d kill me. If the authorities found me, and they were involved with the Volkovs, they’d kill me. If they weren’t involved, they might arrest me for murder. So I ran, and I hid, the way I told you.”
    “No one could blame you for that.”
    “Maybe not. I was young and traumatized. No matter what the intellect, seventeen is still immature, undeveloped. But after some time had passed, I began to think more clearly, think beyond the moment. There had to be others like John and Terry. Others who’d believe me, who’d listen, do whatever they could to protect me. How could I keep running, hiding? How could I do nothing when I was the only one who’d seen Julie’s murder, who knew the truth of how John and Terry had died?
    “So I hacked into the FBI’s and U.S. Marshals’ databases.”
    “You—you can do that?”
    “I do it routinely, but I learned a