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Lynne felt like her legs were shaking, but she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just her imagination. She would’ve like to sit down and make sure—maybe make sure she wasn’t about to fall over, too—but there weren’t a lot of chairs in the Justice Minister’s office.
It was actually kind of interesting, the way Jowd and Sissel were talking in urgent and confused tones with the Justice Minister about the phone call that he just hung up, because she could only hear Sissel. The voices of living people rang in her ears and didn’t seem to make it all the way to her brain (maybe her mind wasn’t taking calls right now in order to let her think) but she could hear Sissel clear as day, his voice skipping her ears entirely and going straight to her soul.
He was calling from the junkyard, Sissel said. I’ll go check it out! (There must be something else going on here. Would Inspector Cabanela really…?)
But even Lynne couldn’t hear everything, because the end of that sentence disappeared down the phone line with Sissel, and Lynne was left with just her ringing ears and the swooping feeling in her stomach like she’d fallen down an elevator shaft.
If she did fall down an elevator shaft Sissel would come save her. That was what he’d been doing all night. Sissel, whose name wasn’t really Sissel, who was apparently the man who pointed a gun at her ten years ago and left her with an inability to be tapped on the back without freaking out or the courage to ever go back to Temsik Park again without someone’s life being on the line.
Could he really have done that to her? Sissel? The man so kind that he saved her life even after seeing a tape of her killing him?
…Did Sissel have any defense to offer her better than Lynne’s pathetic insistence that she didn’t shoot him because she couldn’t remember shooting him?
Jowd and the Justice Minister were still talking, noise buzzing around Lynne. She’d shot Sissel. Sissel had, technically, tried to shoot her first.
He must be feeling the same way now that she’d felt then, in the restaurant, when he confronted her. Sick, convinced it couldn’t be true, caught off-guard at the sudden turn things had taken in their partnership. And without a single memory to conclusively offer for an alibi, to prove that it couldn’t have been him, with Jowd’s eyewitness statement as damning as any security camera.
The windowsill had a wide-ish edge. Lynne sat on it and hit the sill harder than she meant to. Ow. Okay, her legs actually had been shaky, then.
“Lynne?” She didn’t hear Jowd until he came over, right in front of her, and jolted to look up at him. “Are you okay?”
Lynne almost started tearing up again. Jowd was here, in the room with her, and she’d gotten everything she ever wanted because of Sissel, and she’d shot him and he’d betrayed her, and those things both had to be lies, right?
“Sissel went to the junkyard,” she said, “right? We’ve…we’ve got to do something to help him. How fast can we get there?”
“Great minds think alike,” Jowd said. “I already asked. The Justice Minister says we can borrow that prison van outside. …Though, my license is a little out of date, not to mention not in my possession. You might need to drive us.”
Sissel needed her to be his backup. Her legs weren’t really that shaky. “Let’s go,” Lynne said firmly. “There’s still a chance to find out the truth!”