Balloon Boy, Drifting 'Downwind From Gettysburg'

"It never happened, Mr. Booth. Tell your story, but we'll deny it. You were never here, no gun, no shot, no computer data-processed assassination, no outrage, no panic, no mob. Why now, look at your face. Why are you falling back? Why are you sitting down? Why do you shake? Is it the disappointment? Have I turned your fun the wrong way? Good," he nodded at the aisle. "And now, Mr. Booth, get out."

"You can't make –"

"Sorry you said that, Mr. Booth." Bayes took a soft step in, reached down, took hold of the man's tie and slowly pulled him to his feet so he was breathing full in his face.

"If you ever tell your wife, any friend, employer, child, man, woman, stranger, uncle, aunt, cousin. Or if you ever tell even yourself out loud going to sleep some night about this thing you did, do you know what I am going to do to you, Mr. Booth? If I hear one whisper, one word, one breath, I shall stalk you. I shall follow you for a dozen or a hundred or two hundred days, you'll never know what day, what night, what noon, where, when or how but suddenly I'll be there when you least expect it and then do you know what I'll do to you, Mr. Booth? I won't say, Mr. Booth, I can't tell. But it will be awful and it will be terrible and you'll wish you had never been born, that's how awful and terrible it will be."

Booth's pale face shook, his head bobbed, his eyes peeled wide, his mouth open like one who walks in a heavy rain.

"What did I just say, Mr. Booth? Tell me!"

"You'll kill me?"

"Say it again!"

He shook Booth until the words fell out of his chattered teeth:

"Kill me!"

He held tight, shaking and shaking the man firmly and steadily and massaging the shirt and the flesh beneath the shirt, stirring up the panic beneath the cloth.

So long, Mr. Nobody, and no magazine stories and no fun and no TV, no celebrity, an unmarked grave and you not in the history books, no, now get out of here, run, run before I kill you.