I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

by Jason Pargin

Abbott thought she’d either been recently smoking weed or recently crying, though he knew from personal experience that it was possible to do both simultaneously.

Real

When she came back around, she was holding two thick folds of cash, each bound with rubber bands. He physically recoiled at the sight of it, mainly because not a single reasonable person has ever carried money that way.

As Patrick used to say, we’re all just babies trapped in God’s hot parked car.

What she had discovered was that Gary Sokolov was an almost embarrassingly boring man. That, of course, didn’t eliminate him as a suspect—most of history’s atrocities were committed by embarrassingly boring men.