| |
––––––––
THE OLD JAILER AND his Robocop pals led me to a sterile white interrogation room containing a battle-scarred table and two straight-back chairs. The A/V recording equipment was discreetly hidden, high in opposite corners of the room, two tiny bulbs the size of scarab beetles, as white as the surrounding walls. I only noticed because I notice things like that. It gives me an illusion of control.
“Will you be serving lunch while I wait?” I asked. “I have low blood sugar issues.”
“Fuck you.” Ledbetter didn’t bother looking up from the vid playing on his reader.
“No thanks, but a hand job would be nice.”
The guards used a teeny-tiny bit more force than absolutely necessary to get me in the prisoner’s chair and snap a shock collar around my neck. They removed the wrist cuffs and left the room without speaking, though the sergeant communicated a warm sense of human compassion with a single-digit salute. I was A-number-1, according to him.
Interrogation rooms were something else that hadn’t changed in hundreds of years, except now they had a video terminal on the prisoner’s side of the table. If you had a substantial bank balance, you could plug your bit-stick into the terminal’s port and have an attorney present via web conference. If you had a medium bank balance, you could use the terminal to access one of a hundred automated services that dispensed legal advice in a series of yes-no questions. (Have you been charged with a crime? For Yes, click here. For No, click here. Was this a felony? Do you wish to plea bargain at this time?) They claimed they had a legally binding response programmed for every possible situation and could present advice in multiple languages and countless dialects. My close brushes with the law had given me some insight into the legal system—that and I watched a lot of vid.
If you had no bank balance—and time on your hands—you could hold out for a public defender. May God rest your soul. I’d met PDs who might have slept with a law book under their pillow once, but the rest had as much chance in a real courtroom as I would winning at blindfolded grenade catching.
The door opened to admit a hobbit in a shimmery gray satin suit, polished black shoes, and a bloodred cravat. This guy should get together with Chelle’s doctor and play racquetball; they could use a curb as a backstop.
“Hey,” I said before he took his seat, “if you hook up with John the Giant back there in holding, you could sit on his knee and make a great ventriloquist act.”
“I am Agent Ramirez,” he intoned. “You may call me Agent Ramirez.”
“See, you already talk like he does.”
Ramirez studied me the way a surgeon examines colon polyps. He had a smooth face, hooded eyes, and slick jet-black hair. And a nice suit, or did I mention that already? He carried a handheld reader—must be department issue, to sergeants and above—and consulted it while giving me a chilled shoulder to not cry on.
Do his feet touch the floor? I held back my impulse to check under the table.
“Warren, Joseph Adam,” Ramirez began. “Born 14 July—”
“Not this again? Coach Rogair already told me who I am, do you have to do it too?”
Ramirez plowed over my outburst, reading off my vital statistics with the enthusiasm of a corpse. He raised his hooded eyes to me when he finished.
“Will there be a test later?” I wondered.
Ramirez said nothing. He made a production out of unwrapping a piece of Doc Smith’s THC chewing gum and popping it in his mouth. No wonder he had sleepy eyes; chewing cannabis gum will tend to do that. He offered me the pack.
“No, thanks. It makes me ill.”
After he got his gum settled, Ramirez said, “How long have you been associated with the Children of Liberty, Mr. Warren?”
“Whoa. Hold on there, Agent. I’m not with those people. I was applying for benefits when your goons snagged me. See this? This knot on the side of my head? I’m seriously thinking about bringing some kind of formal complaint for excessive force and false arrest. However... if you let me go now, I’ll consider that an apology, and we’ll be square.” I leaned back and crossed my arms.
“When did you first join the Children of Liberty?” The expression on the detective’s face could have been cast in bronze. The man never seemed to blink. Maybe he was a new-model Revivant—one that didn’t smell and chewed pot-laced gum.
“I’m telling you, I’m not one of them. Never have been. I hate politics of any form.”
“Do you hate the government, Mr. Warren?”
“No! Well... I’m a little pissed at it right this minute, but overall, no. I think the government does a great job.” I started ticking things off with my fingers. “I live in a HUD project apartment, I draw unemployment, SNAP, free health care... I live in a safe and secure community thanks to dedicated officers such as yourself.” That last may have been spreading the icing too thick, so I leaned back and threw up my hands. “I mean, shit, think about it. I could be living in Russia, or Venezuela, or some other communist hellhole and be ten times worse off. No, Agent Ramirez, I love America, just the way it is.”
Other than his jaw working his gum, the stubby cop didn’t twitch a muscle. A cold bead of sweat ran down my spine, and a whopping-hard pulse thumped my neck. Every beat stabbed a painful shock through my head. Fuck what Literal John said, my brain had nerve endings, and they were all singing the same hymn, “Oh Woe is Me.”
“Who recruited you to join the CoL?” Ramirez asked without inflection.
Seriously? Was this guy from a different planet?
“I was an innocent... by... stander. I was coming out of the OBW on Roosevelt when I ran into the parade. I tried to tell the motherf—the riot control officers, but they wouldn’t listen.”
“The OBW?”
“Yes, the Office of Benefits and Welfare.”
“You said you were coming out?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Who did you see?”
“Excuse me?”
“Who did you meet with at the OBW?”
Oh, fuckadoodle. Rogair would confirm I was there, but would he feed the cops his attempted fraud fantasy? Would he jam me up for something else I didn’t do? The answer: Yes, in a heartbeat. And when he did, how long until all that got sorted out?
Forever.
“I, uh... I don’t remember his name.” I touched my scalp and winced. “Head injury, you know. It’s all fuzzy, that time there in the actual office.”
“Fuzzy.”
“Yeah. Hazy, y’know.” Inspiration struck. “Hey, don’t I get to have an attorney present? Isn’t that in the Constitution somewhere?”
“Mr. Warren.” The agent’s face locked down, tightening to a latex skin mask like it was heat-sealed. “I got back from an assignment in Texas late last night. I’m not in the mood for flippancy. You have been arrested pursuant to an investigation of a known domestic terrorist group. Under the Homeland Protection Act of 2024, all your Miranda rights have been suspended until such time as you are cleared of any crimes against the state.” Ramirez leaned forward and put his face as close to mine as his stubby body would allow. The sickly-sweet smell of THC gum puffed from his mouth as he spoke. He never raised his voice above a monotone when he said, “In short, Mr. Warren, I can throw you in a deep, dark hole and have six guys with batons do unspeakable things to you for as long as I want. Your skank girlfriend will die of a brain tumor long before you ever see the light of day, and your asshole will be as big as a freeway tunnel when you do. I will fuck you over until you die if you don’t stop fucking with me right fucking now. Am I making myself perfectly clear, Mr. Joseph Adam Warren?”
Which was worse? That I could be subject to this guy’s homosexual fantasies, or that he knew Chelle had a terminal disease? We only got that diagnosis yesterday! How was that poss—?
“Am I clear, Mr. Warren?”
“Crystal,” I rasped through a sandpaper-dry throat. “Ah, very crystal. Sir.”
He leaned back, gum grinding with regular, measured flexes of his jaw. “Good. Now, start from the top and tell me your bullshit story. But remember... if you waste one tiny fraction of a second of my time, I will bury you in the basement of this building, and rats will eat you down to the bone.”
“Uh... sure. No problem. Could I, uh... could I get some water, please?”
***
THE CHUBBY SERGEANT and his twin satellites escorted me through the booking process. I got the full spa treatment—strip search, delousing shampoo, cold shower, quick medical check, and a stiff, chemical-smelling orange jumpsuit to wear. I was so numb, I tottered through each stage like a wind-up toy with a bad spring. Every so often, a guard would need to shove me to get me moving again.
They didn’t seem to mind. The shoving, I mean.
Ramirez had wrung me out so thoroughly, a dead man’s dick had more spunk. I told him everything from that day, including a vivid description of Thong-Woman’s butt. I started with what I had for breakfast, segued to what I said to Rogair, the IRS mess I was in, what I felt about the Cubs’ shot at repeating as world champs this year, and how often I clipped my toenails. He never wrote a note, nor did he comment beyond asking for an occasional clarification. When I ran out of things to talk about, the agent spit his gum into a trash can, got up, and left. I slumped in my chair until the three amigos showed up for my trip through Jailhouse Funland.
A long corridor of cell doors waited at the end of the ride. Somewhere along the way, Sergeant Ledbetter had dropped out of the procession and left me to the tender mercy of Frick and Frack. They, at least, seemed more ambivalent than hostile and only got worked up if I moved too slowly or didn’t understand the instructions they recited in monotone without punctuation.
They stopped me in front of a cell midway in the row on the left and waited. A buzzer blared, the lock snicked, and the door grumbled open. With a flourish, Frack invited me to my new room, wished me a pleasant stay, and said to call the front desk if I needed more towels.
Inside I found a four-person cell with two bunk beds on each side, a toilet, and a sink with a steel mirror. Three of the four beds were occupied, leaving only the cot on the lower left available. I guessed that was mine.
My enormous buddy from holding owned the top right bunk.
“Hey, Literal John, how’s it hanging?”
John’s legs stuck off the end of the bunk all the way to the knee. With his hands locked behind his neck, he reclined on a pillow two sizes too small for his head. A twinkle lit his eye, but he said with a straight face, “They’re hanging off the edge, thank you very much.”
“Har-har.”
A blonde pixie popped up from the bottom right bunk and regarded me with bruised, narrow eyes. “Who’re you?” she demanded. She worried a thumbnail between her two front teeth.
“What? You don’t have all my vital statistics too?”
Her eyebrows drew together. The pixie had a bobbed haircut with bangs and diamond-blue eyes, a button nose, and full lips. She was a dozen donuts shy of being too heavy—not stocky but not skinny either. Sturdy.
“Watch out, Millie,” said the other bunk-dweller with a laugh in his voice. “He could be a government plant.”
“That’s what I’m thinking.” Millie crossed her arms and scowled. It failed to make me quiver since the pair of shiners and the split across the bridge of her dinky nose gave her the face of a ferocious raccoon.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I moaned. “You guys think I’m with the cops, and the cops think I’m with you. Listen, do me a solid. If you see Agent Ramirez, tell him I’m not one of you. Can you do that for me? You can recognize Ramirez by the bloody chunks of my ass hanging from his teeth.”
Millie’s glare eased up a notch. She pursed her lips, cocked her head and studied me as if she were a triage nurse trying to decide if I was worth saving or should go out with the trash. “All right, guys,” she admitted with a sigh, “nothing we can do about it one way or the other. Just watch what you say. The place is bugged anyway.”
“Yes, Mom,” they chorused.
The man in the upper left bunk sat up on his elbows, and I got my first real look at him. Normal height (for a change) and medium build, he flashed a happy smile through split and bruised lips. I suspect he was model-handsome before he took his lumps, with wavy black hair and dark eyes that matched his tan complexion.
“I’m Alex de Galvez,” he said. “The little fireball is Millie, and I gather you’ve met the big fellow over there.”
“In holding, yeah,” I said. “Hey, John, how come you aren’t beat to shit like the rest of us?”
“I don’t fight,” he informed me. “At my size, if they think I’m resisting arrest, they’ll just shoot me, so when the cops come, I drop to the ground and surrender.”
You’re a giant vagina, is what I thought. “Makes sense,” is what I said.
My bunk invited me to collapse. I fell into it with a sigh like air escaping a balloon. Millie resumed her position on the bed across from me, sitting on the edge and chewing a thumbnail. The weight of her scrutiny washed over me at regular intervals, as if her eyes were searchlights, and when they turned in my direction, invisible heat waves shot out and pinged off my cheek.
Alex loomed over from the top bunk and said, “I don’t like to fight either.” He grinned with puffy, bruised lips. “But I haven’t learned to surrender as fast as John.”
“Sometimes it doesn’t matter how fast you surrender,” I told him. “If it’s your day for a beating, there’s not much you can do about it. That sums up my week so far.”
As sure as they made super-hot tacos in hell, I did not—most emphatically did not—want anything to do with these people ever again. All I wanted was to get out. Chelle needed a hospital bed and a fighting chance to survive. Being locked up did nothing to advance the cause.
Hospitals and clinics once existed on practically every street corner, with hordes of trained nurses, doctors, and medical techs. My impression was only the well-to-do had easy access to those facilities, while everybody else had to mortgage their lives for the same level of treatment. At least today healthcare was free for everyone; no more of that bullshit double standard. They wanted government out of our lives, right? What did they think would happen if the feds walked away from healthcare? The system would collapse and millions of people would die, that’s what would happen.
Idiots.
Of course, Alex had a lecture for any anti-government topic in the New Revolutionary’s Handbook. Chapter Seven: Revivants are Like Undocumented Workers.
“One,” he said, “the feds get a surcharge on Revivant labor for social security and healthcare—that they never have to pay out to the quote-unquote worker, because Revivants don’t retire. They’re already dead. Two, it means less drain on resources like schools, hospitals, and jails. As each successive generation of Revivants gets better programming, they can do higher-order tasks. Gen Four Revivants are almost fully functional as humans, and we think they’re not even dead before the conversion these days. Our source tells us one day soon—”
“Alex,” Millie warned. Her eyes said shut up in front of strangers.
“Whatever.” I shook my head to let everyone see my disgust and rolled over to cut off further bullshit. “Conspiracy nuts,” I muttered. “They’re all the same. Stale and salty.”
I shifted to get away from a dip in the mattress that hurt my back. My bunk creaked worse than Rogair’s office chair. Millie and John spoke to each other in a low murmur. I couldn’t hear what they said, nor did I try to listen any harder. I let them fade into the background noise of other jail sounds.
There was no way these guys would keep me long.
They couldn’t, right?