by R. A. McGee
Porter looked around the space. Not so different from all the ones he’d been in before, back when he was a federal agent. A large circular desk toward the front, and metal cell doors, each with a small trapdoor to see and pass food through.
The people surrounding Porter on the other chairs varied greatly. Tall and short, young and old—handcuffs had no preference. The intake waiting room smelled of urine, sweat, and a tinge of alcohol. From somewhere behind Porter came a rhythmic banging on a cell door.
Porter kept to himself until a man stumbled over. Dressed in suit pants but missing a jacket, the man sat next to Porter.
“Too close,” Porter said, and moved two seats away.
The man didn’t follow. “What they get you for, buddy?”
Porter ignored the man, instead focusing on the newest episode of Cops.
“Hey. Buddy. Why you here?”
Porter turned his head to get away from the smell of beer wafting over from the man’s mouth. “Sex. I’m here for the sex.”
The man had a puzzled look on his face. Porter went back to Cops.
“You’re just playing with me, man. That’s funny. You’re really funny.”
Porter didn’t look at the man.
“Ain’t you gonna ask me what I’m in for?”
“No.”
“Why the hell not?”
“It’s not hard to tell. You’re some kind of professional.” Porter turned and looked at the man. “No, you’re a salesman, right? Sales? Party a little too hard after work and now you’re here.”
The man looked at Porter like he was on fire.
“DUI, right? Let me guess—Honda Accord?”
“Camry.”
“Eh. Same thing,” Porter said, and looked back up at the television.
The man rose unsteadily to his feet and raised his voice. “Top salesman, that’s what my boss says. The least these assholes can do is let me celebrate.”
“You should go talk to them about that,” Porter said. “Go ask them at the desk.”
“Hey, you’re trying to get rid of me,” the man slurred.
“Yes,” Porter said. “But don’t you deserve some answers? Why won’t they let you celebrate?”
The man looked confused.
“And why do I have this comfortable jumpsuit and you still have your work clothes? Does that make any sense?” Porter said.
The man looked down as if noticing his clothing for the first time. “Hey, that’s right. You even got shoes. Where the hell are my shoes?”
Porter knew good and well they were dressed differently because they were in different stages of the intake process. “You need to go find out. The guards are taking advantage of you.”
The man stood, grasping the backs of the bolted-down rubber chairs for balance. He raised his voice and stumbled away. “Hey, you bastards. Hey!”
Porter went back to watching Cops. Around the time two female officers were beating the tar out of some guy in a bar, the fat man in the maroon scrubs called his name. “Porter?”
“Yeah?”
“Follow me, please.”
Porter followed the man through a labyrinth of hallways with shiny poured-concrete floors and dingy metal walls with paint flaking off them. The man stood outside a doorway that led to little more than a glorified closet, and pointed Porter in. He sat on a hard chair. In front of him was an array of medical equipment.
The nametag on the man’s scrubs read Bryan with the title RN at the end.
“Mr. Porter, I’m going to ask you a series of questions. Some may sound strange to you, but we’re just trying to ensure your safety while you’re in our facility. Understand?”
“Yep.”
“Good. I’ll try to knock them out so you can move on. Full name and date of birth.”
Porter answered.
“Height and weight.”
Again, Porter answered.
“Are you gay or transgender?”
“Are you hitting on me, Bryan?”
“It’s so we put you in the right housing pod. Just answer the question.”
Porter did.
“Have you used drugs today?”
“No, but this would be more fun if I had,” Porter said.
“How about your mental status? Do you want to kill yourself? Do you feel useless or sinful?”
“Sinful?” Porter laughed.
Bryan from Medical didn’t crack a smile. “I’ll take that as a no. Any chronic medical conditions I need to be aware of? AIDS, lupus, diabetes, things of the like.”
“Negative.”
“What happened to your head?”
“Not sure, but be honest,” Porter said, pointing to Badway’s staple job. “Does this look like good work to you?”
“Stellar,” Bryan said, his face deadpan. “Married?”
“Divorced.”
“Any children?”
Porter hesitated. A memory flashed in his head. He pushed it down. “None that I know of, but who can be sure?”
“That’s about all I have for you.”
“I feel like we’re pretty close now, Bryan,” Porter said.
“I get that a lot,” the nurse said. “Follow me.”
Bryan the nurse took Porter down another hallway and waited while the door hissed open. Inside was a bank of telephones, bolted to the wall. “You have time to make a call. Someone will be by to get you in a few minutes.”
Porter was the only one in the room. Attached to the wall above the phones was a wall clock, enclosed in a thick metal cage. It was almost eleven p.m. Porter picked up the phone and dialed the code for a collect call, then input a number well burned into his memory.
The automated response told him to leave his name at the beep. “Your daddy.”
The phone clicked and whirred and then was picked up.
“No way you’re my daddy,” Ross Gianullo said, no trace of sleep in his voice. “I’m older than you.”
“I’ve seen the way your mom looks at me when I’m around. I might be your daddy,” Porter said.
“You would have to master time travel to make that happen. If you manage that, let me know.”
“I’m gonna have some time on my hands. I’ll work on it,” Porter said.
“I know I’m supposed to ask you why you’re calling me collect from jail, but nothing surprises me anymore.”
“Better to just roll with it,” Porter said.
“What do you need?”
“Can you call Steven Ajo? Tell him I’m locked up and I don’t really want to be and ask him what he can do to get me out of here.”
“Done. Bobby with you?” Ross said.
“Of course. This is his fault,” Porter said.
“Nobody makes you do anything you don’t want to. I know, I’ve tried.”
“What? I’m easy to deal with,” Porter said.
Ross laughed. “You haven’t listened to me since we were in junior high. Did you even read that investment stuff I sent you last week? I have some ideas to put your money in, but you won’t even reply to the email.”
“Why do I pay you? I trust you to handle things,” Porter said.
“You don’t pay me.”
“I call you from jail and this is all you want to talk about?”
“Fine,” Ross said. “Besides being locked up. How’s Virginia?”
“I’m not sure,” Porter admitted. “I think there’s a guy in some trouble. I’m gonna help out.”
“How much is the reward? I can pencil it into my calculations for your money. You’ve done pretty well this year.”
“I don’t think there’s a reward on this one. I’m just doing the right thing,” Porter said.
“Be still, my beating heart. You doing something for free? Say it isn’t so,” Ross said.
“I seem to recall you calling in a favor not too long ago,” Porter said.
In recent months, Ross had come to Porter asking him to help find a lost girl. Porter did. The girl’s family had no money,
and there wasn’t a reward. Porter had done it because it was the right thing to do.
And because Ross had asked.
“You always gonna throw that in my face? One time I ask you for help, and now I have to hear about it forever.”
“I got shot. You owe me,” Porter said.
“It grazed you. Stop being so dramatic.”
“Shot is shot. I could show you what it feels like sometime.”
“Fine. If you’re always going to be a bitch about it, tell me how I can make it up to you.”
“Call Ajo.”
“If you’ll ever shut up, I will,” Ross said.
“Hey, Ross?”
“Yeah?”
Porter hung up the phone and laughed to himself.
Gets him every time.
Fourteen
A tall woman with glasses knocked on the window to the room Porter was in. “Time’s up.”
Porter was already on his feet and waiting by the door. The officer’s uniform shirt was partially untucked, faded from the wash, and had a large stain of something that looked like pasta sauce. The pneumatics hissed as the door opened and he stepped out. “Now where?”
“Holding cell, until we see what’s going to happen with your case,” said the woman, whose nametag read Benson. “If you’re going to get a bond, there’s no sense in putting you all the way in the back.”
“Any clue where my cousin is?”
“Cute guy with the mustache?” Benson said.
“If you say so…”
“In his own cell.”
“Can we bunk together?” Porter asked.
“No. We separate people who come in together.”
So co-conspirators can't talk and get their stories straight, Porter didn’t say.
“Give me a little love here, Benson. It’ll be the quietest cell all night.”
She stopped and pushed up her glasses. “I’m not supposed to.”
“I’ll put in a good word with my cousin. He likes big girls…”
Her laugh was a petite thing, belying her frame. “I can’t go out with an inmate. That’s how people end up on the news.”
“But if we don’t get convicted, what then?” Porter said.
Benson stopped walking again and looked down at her feet for a second. “Quietest cell all night?”
“Not a peep,” Porter said.
“Oh, all right.” Benson walked Porter around the U-shaped cluster of cells behind the waiting area he had been in earlier.
Porter saw two officers dragging the drunk salesman out of the room. “What about my shoes? Where are my shoes?” the man was screaming.
Benson motioned for Porter to stand in front of a cell. She pressed the microphone receiver on her lapel, and called for the central control booth to pop the cell door.
The door hissed and slid open. Badway was sitting on the only bed in the cell.
“You two play nice,” Benson said. She winked at Badway as the cell door slid shut.
“What was that about?” Badway said.
Porter smiled. “Nothing. Did you get your call?”
“Made two. Called Cat, and she’s pissed. She can’t believe we were brought in. Someone’s going to get their ass chewed.”
“At least it’s not me this time,” Porter said. “You call Kevon, too?”
Badway nodded.
Graffiti covered the inside of the cell, scratched into the thick, bland, tan paint. There was an all-metal toilet with a sink built into the top, and a green floppy mattress on the metal bed that the men sat on.
Nothing else.
“How is he?” Porter said.
“Said he’s all right, but he thought a black car was following him,” Badway said.
“What’d you tell him?”
“Keep moving. If things get bad, head to a police station. Parabellum can’t get to him there.”
“Smart,” Porter said.
Badway stretched out on the floor and started doing pushups.
“You haven’t even been here that long and you’re already doing the convict workout?”
“Nervous energy. I’m thinking about Trey. What if something happens to Kevon? What kind of life will he have with his batshit crazy mom?”
Porter didn’t say anything.
“Hell, I’m worried about us. I don’t want to go to prison over Petrosian.” Badway spoke in between pushups.
“We’ll be okay. I would be worried if we were in California or Oregon or one of those places out west that’s terrified of guns. We aren’t getting locked up for shooting a couple of armed intruders in your house. Trust me,” Porter said.
“I do.”
They were silent for a time. In his head, Porter counted Badway’s pushups. The man stopped at two hundred and thirty-two. “That’s a lot of pushups, Sarge.”
“I’m out of shape,” Badway confessed.
More silence between the men. The cell was cold, and neither had a blanket. The jumpsuits afforded little warmth.
Porter paced around the cell to generate body heat.
“You gonna tell me?” Badway said, breaking the silence.
“What?”
“Why you quit the feds. A couple days ago, you said it was a long story. Nothing but time now,” Badway said.
Porter kept pacing.
“Come on.”
Porter made a pained face and stretched his arms out. “I was working a case against a guy who was producing kiddie porn.”
“Gross,” Badway said.
“Grown men don’t say ‘gross.’”
“They do when they’re talking about kiddie porn. That shit’s gross.”
“Yeah, it is. It was the worst part of my old job. The images…” Porter trailed off.
There was silence in the cell for several minutes.
“So what, you think that was it? You just lead with kiddie porn and don’t finish? Keep going.”
Porter sighed. “Normally, when we caught guys with that shit, they were trading it back and forth over the internet like digital baseball cards. Images, movies, that kind of stuff. Super pervert, sure, but it was easy to deal with them. Get a warrant, kick their door off the hinges, and seize their computers. Long stay in federal prison, case closed.”
Porter stopped pacing for a moment, the bile rising up in his stomach. “This guy was different. He was a big-time producer.”
“He wasn’t trading cards, he was making cards?”
“See? You’re not so dumb for an Army guy.”
“What did you do?”
“I found him after I traced the threads of a dozen other perverts back to him. He was the worst I’d ever seen. He had it all: kids touching kids, adults touching kids, people tied up. So, I went after him,” Porter said.
“You kicked his ass?”
“I mean legally. I wanted him to rot in prison. But he was smart. He had proxy IP addresses. His computer’s signal bounced around the planet so many times, we couldn’t prove it was him. When we seized the computers and tried to analyze them, he had a bleach virus that ate his whole PC. There was no data left, no way we could prove it was him.”
“Damn.”
“The thing is… I’d already seen the images. I had seized a laptop from one of the guys he sold a movie to. I’ll never forget it—it was this little boy and he… he just… they made him…” Porter stopped and looked down, rubbing his hands together, the chilly cell having grown colder.
“That sounds rough,” Badway said.
Porter kept pacing. “It’s the worst. I’d rather kick in a door and deal with a dozen Armenian mobsters with guns than remember the look in that little kid’s eyes.”
“What did you do? The evidence was gone, right? So you’re screwed,” Badway asked.
Porter hesitated. “I… planted some evidence.”
Badway stared at Porter.
“Don’t look at me like that. You asked, I’m telling you. If you’re gonna be an asshole—”
“I’m not, I’m ju
st trying to wrap my head around everything. How?”
Porter resumed pacing. “I went back and found an old case that never went to trial. The scumbag pleaded out. So, I took the images from that case and said they belonged to my guy. Set him up.”
Badway was silent.
“I said don’t look at me like that. When I arrested him, before we accidentally bleached his computer, he admitted everything. He laughed, told me he paid the parents so he could use the kids. Bragged that he was too good to get caught. He knew we were screwed when we checked his computer and he played it up. He laughed in my face, Bobby. I couldn’t let him off.”
“How did they find out the images didn’t belong to your guy?”
“One of our computer forensic guys was the one who analyzed the old computer, the one I planted. There were a few specific details that he remembered, even ten years later. See? The shit just stays with you. He told the court the computer didn’t belong to my guy, that he knew the images from another case. He was just doing his job, he didn’t know I was the reason for the mix-up,” Porter said.
“Did everybody know it was you?”
Porter shook his head. “I think everybody suspected, but no one could prove it. I told them I made a clerical error and tagged the wrong computer for the case. Honest mistake. The judge had to throw the case out and the guy got off.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. My boss tried to have the Department of Justice prosecute me for it, but it didn’t work. Most of the federal prosecutors liked me and nobody would take the case. There wasn’t any proof, so what could they do?”
“You got off? So why quit if you didn’t have to?”
“They didn’t prosecute me, but that didn’t mean they would work with me anymore. I could never bring them a case because they wouldn’t believe I was telling the truth. Internally, my agency cleared me of any wrongdoing, but they would have stuck me in a corner somewhere and had me shuffling papers for the rest of my career.”
“So you left,” Badway said.
“Yep.”
“What happened to your bad guy?”
Porter paused for a moment, opened his mouth, then shut it. “Another time. Scoot over.”
Badway made room and Porter joined him on the jail bed.
The only noise was the banging of a cell door elsewhere in the holding area.