While the cops hassled her through the bureaucracy, Angel tried to isolate the moment at which her life started going wrong. It was an unprofitable pursuit because her thoughts traveled back from the current disaster in an unbroken chain of events that began two decades ago when her mom visited a Bensheim clinic to get inseminated.
That was depressing.
No, she thought, what’s depressing is the fact I still need to find out who killed Byron, and the guy was an asshole, a con artist, and God knows what else—
If their positions had been reversed, Angel was pretty sure that Byron wouldn’t be overly upset about her death. In fact, she had a morbid fantasy about what her funeral would be like. She could see Byron picking up Lei at the wake.
It was upsetting that that half-blind lion, Balthazar, saw Byron clearer than she ever did.
Her mind continued in its self-destructive spiral as she got more and more irritated with the cops.
At least, for once, she actually had a lawyer to call when they gave her access to a comm. That screwed with their program a bit. Moreys weren’t supposed to have bail, or lawyers. When she called DeGarmo and told the cops to engage in some experimental hermaphroditism, they shuffled her away into a holding cell.
With a bald human.
From a logistical point of view, it had to be intentional on the cop’s part. The stainless steel gate on the cell slid aside and they tossed her into the bare concrete, and she knew they wanted some sort of incident so they could continue to hold her after her lawyer showed.
Even though she knew it was what the cops wanted, she couldn’t help but saying, “Hey, it’s the firebug.”
The small white human looked up at her for the first time.
“Shit!” The female pink stood up and went over to the gate, giving Angel a wide berth, and began yelling, “You can’t put it in here with me—I’ve got rights!”
“Pleased to see you, too, shithead.”
“That rodent, it tried to kill me, you can’t—”
“If you don’t watch your effing pronouns, I will kill you.”
It soon became obvious to the pink that the cops weren’t particularly interested in her dilemma. She turned around to Angel, who had taken her spot on the one cot in the three-meter-square cell.
“Stay away from me,” she said.
Angel never realized how sleazy the smell of human fear could be. The fact that she’d touched this hairless wonder at one point made her want to wash her hands.
“Ain’t moving, pinky.” Angel smiled. “But I hope you have a lot of self-control.” She looked at the john next to the cot.
Pinky slid down, along the bars, until she was sitting on the ground. “You don’t touch me.”
“Don’t worry, I don’t feel like spending an hour picking shit from my claws.”
Pinky winced, even though rabbit claws weren’t much to worry about. “You just don’t touch me. I got friends.”
“Yeah, I know. A bunch of screaming freakazoids with so much heat conduction from the head that they suffer brain damage. If you’re the best and the brightest, I don’t have much to worry about.”
Pinky just sat there, glaring.
Angel continued, “Stood outside the bar grinning until they picked you up, didn’t you? Scary example of the master race indeed. Kinda drafty up there, ain’t it?”
Pinky was getting real pissed. It was getting damn close to the incident the cops wanted, and Angel was about at the point where she wouldn’t care. If the twitch jumped her, she could kick her through the bars and there’d be one less scumbag in the city. By all rights they should give her a medal for something like that.
Pinky glared at her, but she was into self-preservation. “You keep talking. When we have the power, your kind will be swept aside.”
“The Knights? You must be kidding!”
“I’m not talking about . . .”
It was amazing how quiet it could get down here. It was a new block of cells that smelled of machine oil and fresh concrete and only slightly of urine. Their nearest neighbors were two cells away.
The near-silence—bullshit continued elsewhere in the block—was filled by the realization that Pinky had said something significant.
It was like slow motion, as Angel swung her feet to the floor and Pinky pushed up to her feet.
“Who are you talking about?”
“Don’t come near me.”
For the first time in a long time, Angel was aware of the new scar on her cheek. It was nearly invisible now, and she only felt it as a slight tightness on her face. She realized she felt it because she was grinning like a maniac. Angel could feel her heart pounding in her ears, and she hoped the smell of blood was from the scar opening up on her cheek.
“You can tell.” She was approaching Pinky slowly, but she could feel the muscles in her legs tightening. “Just between you, me, and the hookers three cells down.”
“You can’t.”
“Who’s going to stop me, you freak? You’re so proud of your friends in high places. Why don’t you tell me who they are?”
She backed Pinky up. It was beginning to hit her how silly the scene must look. After all, in the looking-fierce competition between moreaus, a lepus would come dead last.
Even so, the bald twitch had a right to be scared. Angel was beginning to feel a real strong desire to tear something apart. Angel could feel the anger ratcheting her nerves tighter and tighter.
Pinky found a corner and stuck. Angel closed on her. “Come on,” Angel said, “impress me with these friends.”
“Don’t touch me.”
“Must be a good reason they’re letting you all twist in the wind.”
“Get away.”
“Tell me—” Angel was now as close as she could get. Her toes were touching Pinky’s boots. She slowly raised her heels and tilted forward until she had raised her muzzle level with Pinky’s face. “Tell me these people and I’ll leave you alone. Roll over. Looks like something you’d be good at.”
Angel stood there staring at the twitch. Pinky stayed quiet.
“No? Do you want a description?” Angel leaned in. Her smile still hurt. She was shaking with the restrained desire to go fully off on Pinky’s bald little head. Angel was reminded of the scene with Igalez. Never mind, she could handle it. “First, I eat your nose.” She dragged her tongue across Pinky’s face, tasting sweat and fear.
As Angel licked across the bridge of her nose, Pinky’s eyes rolled up and she emitted an inarticulate moan. She shoved Angel away and threw herself at the bars. “Get me out of here! Just get me out of here! I’ll admit to anything, just get me away from that animal!”
Angel was about to say something more—perhaps even jump Pinky and show the twitch a real animal—but at that moment all hell broke loose in the cell block. All the empty cells opened simultaneously, and cops in riot gear started pushing in a mass of moreaus of both sexes. The cops lined themselves up against the wall, holding up stun rods—a sort of glorified cattle prod—as a wall of fur washed past the cell.
Damn, Angel thought, these weren’t gang members, or the kind of folks she expected to see in such a roust. For one thing, the moreys wore too much clothing. There was a definite linear equation that related income level with the amount of pink clothing a morey wore. Angel actually saw a few ties.
Most of the moreys looked to have been through some rough treatment. A few were bleeding, and one or two had to be helped along. The smell of urine was being overpowered by the smell of wet fur and blood.
Angel’s body stopped screaming for combat, and the tension started to leak away from her muscles.
Pinky freaked, especially when the passing moreaus began to notice her.
“Oh, God, I’m gonna die.” She crawled into a fetal position under the cot.
“I suppose,” Angel said, as she rubbed an ache in her thigh. “If you’re lucky.”
The tide of moreaus let up for a few minutes, and a pair of cops pushed through to the door of their cell. The door slid open.
“My lawyer here?” Angel wanted to get the hell out of this place.
“I know fuck about your lawyer, rabbit,” said one of the cops. “This just became a segregated cell block.”
The other cop reached in and got his arm around the firebug’s chest. “Come on, Berkeley. You’re getting transferred in with some of your friends.”
Pinky began kicking and screaming. “You aren’t going to take me out there!” One kick landed in the other officer’s crotch. The cop was in full riot gear and it only pissed him off.
“Cuff her!” he told the other cop as he grabbed both legs. They left the cell in less than five minutes, Pinky trussed up between them like a Christmas present.
They barely cleared the cell door before Angel’s cell began filling up with more wet moreaus. Angel immediately lost sight of the big picture, suddenly being surrounded by taller people. All she had a chance to do was claim the section of cot next to the john before the place got too full to move.
Though she couldn’t see her progress, Angel could hear the firebug make her exit. Pinky left on a crest of moreau growls and insults and a buzz or two from the cop stunners—apparently when someone wasn’t quite satisfied with verbal abuse.
There was a rush into the cell, then Angel’s world stabilized somewhat. She was surrounded by a mixed group of canines plus one of the occasional exotic breeds that she hadn’t seen before.
The exotic was the closest to her height, shorter and looking like a cross between a rabbit and a rat, so she addressed him.
“Raining out there?”
He shook his head. “No, they’re using fire hoses.”
Apparently, two conflicting demonstrations, pink and morey, happened to meet in front of City Hall. Predictably, bad things happened. From the description, a melee erupted in the lobby of City Hall itself, causing a shitload of damage from the fight and more so from the firehoses they used to quell the violence.
The cops ended up busting everyone in a five block radius.
The exotic, a chinchilla, hadn’t even been a part of the demonstration. He’d just been driving down Van Ness when the cops stopped him. Angel just had the dumb luck to get embedded in what must be a logistic nightmare for the Frisco legal system. A tidal wave of moreaus washed in, only to leave by an anemic trickle.
The cops called names out of the cell block by some equation that must have involved species, the first letter of your last name, and a dart board somewhere. It seemed to Angel that they called a name every ten or fifteen minutes, and it caused no lessening of the crowding whatsoever.
Hourly, rumors spread back from the cell nearest the door. First that they were all going to be set free. Next, that they were all going to be prosecuted with a two-year minimum sentence. Then, everyone they found with a record was going to be shipped to Oakland. There were rumors that there were two dead, ten dead, fifteen dead. They said that no one really died even though the newsvids said so.
Rumors that Father Alvarez De Collor was coming, that Sylvia Harper was coming, that the media was coming, that no one was coming because the cops were keeping everything a secret. They let the humans go. The Fed was already involved . . .
As time passed and Angel felt more and more isolated from the outside world, it became harder and harder to segregate out even the obvious bullshit. When she’d been there ten hours and the rumor passed by that the cops were going to shoot all the moreys and dump them in a mass grave in the Presidio with the help of the Army Corps of Engineers, Angel felt unreasonably nervous.
The last rumor Angel heard was something about President Merideth’s aliens from Alpha Centauri. She never caught all of it because that was when her name was finally called.
The population density had lessened to the point where she could make it to the door of the cell without actually climbing over people. In the previous hours she had actually seen people literally passed over the heads of fellow inmates.
When she reached the door, there was the lean form of DeGarmo, looking like he had gotten about as much sleep as she had. He was accompanied by a cop in riot gear who held the remainder of the cell at bay as the gate opened.
“Finally,” Angel said as she walked out of the place that had been her home for a good fourteen hours.
DeGarmo shrugged. “For the record, bail was posted ten hours ago. But the city is suffering a bureaucratic meltdown. System wasn’t designed to handle this many people.”
As they walked to the cell block entrance, the door before them opened, letting in another two cops. One was holding a wallet computer and reading off of it. “Jesus Montoya.”
As Angel left, she distinctly heard two different moreau voices say, “Over here!”
One cop shook his head and put a hand up to a helmeted forehead. “Shit. Now what?”
When Angel made it outside, she was blinded by the unexpected intensity of daylight. She turned to her lawyer. “What day is it?”
“Wednesday, close to noon.”
“Thanks for getting me out of there. I thought it would never end.”
“A feeling affecting many people in that building. Something you should be thankful for.” DeGarmo walked her a distance to the curb, where the BMW was waiting.
“Don’t the cops want this for evidence or something?”
DeGarmo smiled. “All they ever really had you for was leaving the scene of the accident. The injured parties never pressed, especially when I informed them of the possible assault charges they were facing.”
“What about the city?”
DeGarmo ran a hand through his black crew cut. “That’s what you should be thankful for. They’re so overwhelmed with cases that it was fairly easy to get them to drop what was essentially a nuisance. Especially when I pointed out I could shoot down the charges in front of any judge in the state.”
Angel shook her head. “Damn, again, what do I owe you?”
“You’ll receive a bill.”
“Yeah, right.” Angel punched the combination and opened the BMW. “Did I thank you?”
DeGarmo nodded.
It was a measure of how strange Angel’s universe had become, the fact she was regarding a lawyer as a person and not as some hypothetical amoral construct to be lumped in with cops and politicians.
“One last thing,” he added as she got behind the wheel. “I’ve gotten St. Luke’s to release Mr. Dorset’s ashes. They’ve gone as far as offering to pay for the funeral arrangements—”
Angel yawned. “Look, can you hold that thought?”
“All right, but arrangements should be finalized.”
“Tomorrow, okay? When my biological clock has reset. And after I’ve gotten some sleep.”
“Tomorrow.” DeGarmo extended his hand and Angel shook it.
Yes, Angel thought, before this week is out, that bastard Byron should be put to final rest.
She rode the accelerator all the way home.