He tried to keep himself calm. He had been in there for over an hour already, according to his watch, but he wasn't out of air yet. There seemed to be a little fan whirring away outside his box.

Nick was sure his friends were coming for him soon. They would find him, and this would be fine. No big deal.

He bit down hard on his lip, determined not to start screaming again. He was done with that.

'What if I die?' No, it wasn't time to think about that. They were coming for him. They were. That was all there was to it.

He closed his eyes, determined to wait it out. All of a sudden, his eyes were burning, his retinas being scorched though his eyes were closed. He opened his eyes and squinted toward his feet, putting up a hand to shield himself from the light.

A bulb in the bottom of his box blinded him. 'That's just great.'

He lay back again, still holding up his hands to avoid the light. Funny how right now, he would love to be above ground in the light, but down here he was trying to avoid it.

Things were mixed up down here.

'Fair is foul and foul is fair,' he thought to himself. Things were not as they seemed.

Maybe that meant he wasn't buried, wasn't waiting to be rescued. Maybe he was just home in bed, having a dream.

He could only hope.

Warrick watched Nick cough weakly, wishing there was something he could do, but knowing there wasn't. The helplessness washed over him, a cold wave of despair.

He wanted some high-tech gadget that would get them out of here, make Nick better, and let them forget all of this. Even Grissom would approve of a gadget like that.

"What if I die?" Nick whispered, staring straight at Warrick. Warrick started, surprised that Nick seemed to be aware of him.

"You won't. How do you feel?" he asked, moving closer to take Nick's pulse. Nick continued to stare at the place Warrick had been. "Damn," he said sadly. "You weren't talking to me, were ya?"

"That's just great." Nick mumbled. Yeah. My thoughts exactly.

"He's maxed out about ten different cards," Brass reported. "I have guys going through the records, but it's taking a while."

Grissom didn't say anything, just kept walking toward his office. Brass walked next to him, equally silent.

"Grissom!" Greg bellowed from a layout room. Grissom stopped and stuck his head in.

"Did you find something?"

"I've been going through Parras' history, looking for anything that might help. Dude had a run-in with the police before, just to be questioned, file says he only speaks Spanish."

"And that means what, exactly?" Brass asked, impatiently.

"That we can rule out a lot of places." Grissom looked at Brass.

"Where can a guy go if he can't understand English?" Greg asked.

"There's a whole Spanish-speaking part of Vegas, though," Brass pointed out.

"Sometimes it isn't about finding the right answer, but about eliminating all the others."

In books, no one just dies. They really, really die, in a big, dramatic way. Romeo and Juliet didn't just die, they tragically committed suicide because of a mistake. Macbeth didn't just die, he was brutally murdered as a result of a twisted, complex scheme. People get blown up, they get shot, they drive cars off bridges.

Before starting work as a CSI, Nick had thought that people didn't really die that way. People had heart attacks, died of old age, got cancer. It wasn't an easier death, by any means, but it wasn't so dramatic.

He remembered one of his first cases. A man had been cooking crystal methamphetamine, and it had exploded. Half of the guy's face had been gone. He remembered standing in that kitchen, staring at the blood and the smoke, thinking that people really did die in crazy ways. It kept him from thinking about the actual death part of it.

His perceptions changed over the years, to the point where shooting or an overdose was a calm, quiet death, relatively. He hated that he thought that way.

He supposed that, if he died, they would consider it a really quiet death. He would probably just run out of air. It would be like going to sleep, or so they said. He wondered how they could know that, when the people who said it had never died of suffocation.

Maybe it was only a quiet death because they wouldn't hear him screaming.

Grissom sat at his desk, quietly staring at the map of Vegas. He crossed off large sections of it already. He didn't know where to look next.

"Grissom," Catherine said, walking into his office without knocking. "I can't trace Warrick's cell. It isn't turned on, or it's out of range."

He glared at the map even more. "Damn it," he said softly. "Damn it!" He looked up at Catherine. "It's our job to outsmart the bad guys. What do we do when they are smarter than us?"

She shook her head. "I don't know." She looked at his map, too.

Grissom thought for a moment. "We make ourselves smarter," he said, answering his own question, before jumping up, leaving his office and a confused Catherine in his wake.

The air was hot, heavy, pressing down on him and crushing his lungs. That damn light was making it all worse.

It clicked off and the fan finally whirred on. He turned and relished the cooler air.

Clunk. The fan stopped and the light came on. 'Damn light.'

He moved around, trying to get the light out of his eyes, and his hand landing on the weight of the gun. 'Perfect.'

He reached into his pocket and grabbed a piece of bubble gum, stuffing it into his mouth and chewing rapidly. He split it in half and pressed it into his ears.

The sticky mess was irksome, but necessary. He lifted the gun, setting it on his chest. He stared into the barrel for a minute. 'No. Not going there.'

He spun the gun around, and closed one eye. 'Damn light.'

Bang bang bang! He smelled the burning of gunpowder, but he didn't care. 'Yes!'

Nick laughed, feeling a strange joy, taken from defeating the light. He cracked another glow stick and shook it up. He stared at the walls of his box, happily noting that the glow stick didn't show everything outside his box. 'Now I can pretend it's not there.'

He stopped. He didn't mean that, did he? No, of course not. He meant that he wanted to pretend he wasn't in here. That was what he meant. It just wasn't how it sounded.

'I'm not here. Leave a message after the beep, 'cause I am not here. Not here. Not here.'