by Edward Lee
Now Calabrice’s Steak-Diane-and-lobster-flan gut actually jiggled at a titter. Lawyers, after all, were just actors in nice suits. They were good. They made Sir Laurence Olivier look like high school casting call.
“Really, Mr. Garrett,” Calabrice assured, “that’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard, not to mention its clear potential for several crimes that you may have heard of called libel and character defamation, and doubly not to mention that any, um…findings you might publish would hardly have any credibility amongst what our founding fathers described as the public trust.”
Detective Demeter laughed through a hoarse smoker’s cough that sounded like someone trying to start a faulty gas-powered weed-whacker. “How do you like this busted loser? Bet’choo gotta couple of Pulitzers for that fine respectable journalism of yours, huh? Bet’choo hang out with Woodward and Bernstein at the friggin’ Capital Hill cocktail parties. Shit, Garrett, you act like the National Enquirer is the same as the friggin’ Washington Post. “
“That’s real funny, Dirty Harry,” Garrett came back. “And for one thing, half the writers on the Post are on the White House pad, and for another, I don’t write for the Enquirer. I write for legitimate—”
Calabrice subtly burped; the burped smelled like Merlot and Duck Confit. “Yes, Mr. Garrett, as you’ve already been kind enough to enlighten us, you write only for legitimate alternate investigative journals, seven of which you’ve been fired from for the same infractions that have landed you here. Nevertheless, the fact remains: you illegally impersonated a Nevatek employee, you unlawfully entered secured and sensitive private property, you infiltrated a Nevetek data processing unit, and you stole confidential corporate files.”
Demeter stepped closer, blooming his shadow more broadly across Garrett’s face. “Garrett, these guys have every right to prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law, and I wish they would. They’d bury you so deep you’d need a mile-long snorkel just to suck air. Why they’re not going to do that is beyond me.”
“I’ll tell you why, Dick Tracy,” Garrett explained. “They don’t want the public to know they’re testing electro-magnetic pulse weapons on unsuspecting citizens in Northern Virginia , and that U.S. tax dollars are paying for it. It’s called a ‘triple-cloak-scheme,’ same as the pyramid shams that multi-millionaires use to shelter money in off-shore accounts. The National Security Counsel uses its own CIA operatives to hire phony subcontractors who in turn hire high-tech companies like Nevatek to start up field labs for clandestine research. This stuffed-shirt here will tell you that all Nevatek does is manufacture plastic and fiberglass at their well-known production facility in Arlington, Virginia. But what he won’t tell you is that the Nevatek created a second production facility in Bowensville, Maryland, where they’ve got an operational atomic clock, an operational tri-rack cyclotron, and a dozen one-gigawatt EM-pulse generators. Tell me that, Mr. Hot-Shot Lawyer? What business does a fucking plastic factory have with a billion-dollar cyclotron?”
“Do you take narcotics, Mr. Garrett? Are you delusional?” Calabrice suggested.
Garrett sniffed. “What’s the smell you keep burping? I like it. You have lunch at The Occidental or was it Ruth’s Chris? I’ll bet you were billing your client five hundred bucks an hour for the whole time you were stuffing your face with a meal that cost more than most Americans make in a week. Oh, and then I’ll bet you billed your client for the meal too, huh?”
Calabrice’s jaw set. “I’d think you’d be a little more cordial, considering my client’s generosity. Your fine tally adds up to a minimum of fifteen years in prison. We don’t have to drop charges but have elected to simply in the interests of saving unnecessary legal costs.”
Garrett nodded briskly, in hilarity. “Okay, okay, I get it. You drop charges if keep my mouth shut. Fine. It’s shut.”
“That’s not what I meant at all, Mr. Garrett,” Calabrice bid, “but that’s a moot point now. Have a good day.”
Calabrice took his finely suited bulk out of the dim interrogation room. This left Garrett alone with the Detective Demeter.
Garrett shrugged at the policeman. “Hell, I can’t afford to go to jail again, and everybody knows his firm pays off the public defenders to deliberately blow the case.”
“You’re something, Garrett, a real pride to humanity.”
“I agree. And I can leave now, right?” Garrett said. “He’s dropping charges.”
“He is, but we aren’t,” Demeter was happy to say. “You’ll still be charged criminally by the District of Columbia for—”
Garrett vocally exploded. “For what! If they’re not going to prosecute, the Nevatek files aren’t admissible as evidence!”
Demeter nodded with a long smile. “When you were on your way home from your little caper the other night, you were observed failing to stop at the traffic signal at 14th and U Streets, exceeding the speed limit, negligent driving—oh, and for operating an unsafe vehicle. The tag light was out on that boat anchor you call a car.”
“And you’re incarcerating me for that nickel-dime crap!”
“Under the law, it’s our right to refuse to release you pending court summons.””You’re just doing that to jerk me around!” Garrett stared fiercely at the detective. “I’ll bet Perry Mason out there is padding you, just to warn me off! His firm’s got more money than Bill Gates!”
Demeter’s rock face stared right back. “Just get out of here, asshole. Your girlfriend posted your bail. See you in court.”
Disgusted, Garrett got up, was about to leave, but then he stopped short and twirled around at the door. “All right, Dick, I admit it. I broke into Nevatek and stole some of their R&D files. But no one, and I mean no one, knew that I was going to make the heist, but you guys were waiting for me at my apartment. How did you know? Come on. I won’t tell, and who’d believe me anyway?”
“The good fairies tipped us off,” Demeter’s voice grated. “Now get out of here before I misplace your bail release and put you back in the tank. Shit, I’ll over-night you to the city general-pop. A skinny, good-looking guy like you? You’d be considered prime relationship material.” Demeter winked. “And those guys in there? They’ll change your name to Mary Jean in less time than it takes you to bend over. Shit, Garrett, they’ll be trading you back and forth for cigarettes and cell-block cookies every night.”
Garrett’s stomach turned at the thought. It was no joke. He got up from the table and left the smoky room as fast as his rotten sneakers could propel him.
“See ya later…Mary Jean…”
««—»»
Jessica was radiant, kind, considerate, and—moreover—beautiful. In all the bad things about Garrett’s life, there was always Jessica, to add something good. She was always there for him.
She’ll understand, Garrett felt sure.
“Goddamn you, Harlan, you goddamn bastard!” Jessica shouted at him the minute custody sergeant let him out of the tank and into the exit corridor.
Garrett, in his inept misinterpretation of her reaction, almost wanted to turn right around and go back to jail.
“Honey, I’m sorry,” he pleaded.
“Oh? Whose fault was it then?” she bellowed back, more irate than he’d ever seen her. “What, you’re possessed by some devil that makes you get arrested every time?”
Garrett ground his teeth. “They’re tapping my phones again, I know it,” he explained. “And I’ll bet DARPA or NSA is intercepting my e-mail. That’s the only way anyone could’ve known in advance that I was going to pull the Nevatek job.”
It was all Jessica could do to walk next to him toward the exit doors. She didn’t say a word for the entire trek.
“So what is this?” Garrett said, glancing at her. “The silent treatment?”
“Don’t talk to me, Harlan. Don’t say anything,” she hissed back. “I’m just too pissed off at you right now.”
“I just spent a day and a night in that medieval penal colony. The last thing I
need is a stiff upper lip.”
“What you need is a busted lip, and a head to go with it!”
Garrett was appalled by her insensitivity. “I guess you didn’t hear me. D.C. Jail? Me—in it? It’s not for human beings, honey, believe me. It’s like that Oz show on cable. Christ, you should see the creatures in there. One of them tried to—”
Jessica stopped and briskly spun around, her shiny red hair aswirl. “Stop trying to make me feel sorry for you ’cos you had to spend the night in jail!” she shouted, fire in her jade-green eyes. She grabbed Garrett’s shoulders and shook him like a baby rattle. “What am I? Your personal bail bondman? Damn it, Harlan! This is the second time I’ve had to bail you out of jail. It cost me $500 this time!”
“I’ll pay you back,” Garrett peeped.
“That’s what you said last time, Harlan! I’ve got bills too, and half of them are yours anyway!”
Garrett caught his composure, calming down. He tried to see it from her point of view…and began to see her point. Whenever he was unemployed, it was always Jessica who helped him out. And I’m unemployed a lot, he admitted. He sighed and gently touched her cheek.
“This time I will pay you back, baby, I promise. Things could be worse, you know. At least I still got my job with the Psi-Com Journal…”
««—»»
The letter felt like a sheet of dead skin in his hands:
THE PSI-COM JOURNAL
A Subsidiary of the Wentner Publishing Group
200 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Dear Mr. Garrett:
Per our conversation, your complete lack of ethics while under our employ have been deemed wholly unacceptable. Therefore, you may consider this letter an official notification of your termination.
Glen Boyd
Editor and Chief
Aw, man, Garrett thought, staring at the letter he’d just opened in his apartment. Wearing only his boxer shorts, he walked back from the mailshot and fell back into his disheveled bed. Kick me some more, God, will Ya? Why not?
He crumpled up the letter, and when he tossed it at the waste basket…it missed. The shower hissed behind him from his mop-closet-sized bathroom.
“Who need the friggin’ Psi-Com Journal anyway?” he voiced aloud to himself. “I’m too good for those stuck-up jive neckbones.”
When he reached up for his cigarettes, his hand padded across his computer-laden desk and a clogged ashtray; finally, it knocked over several empty beers cans. Eventually he found his pack of generics but when he tried to light one, the lighter wouldn’t work.
Disgusted, Garret got back out of bed, hunting for matches amongst the piles of books on his desk. Roswell Dead Witnesses, KGB Citations of Spontaneous Human Combustion, MK-ULTRA Then And Now, Crash Perimeters and Grids: Classified! and the like. Here, in the midst of Garrett’s professional bibles, he found a matchbook from the 1720 Club, his favorite strip bar.
The matchbook was empty.
Can’t pay my bills, can’t keep a job…can’t even light a friggin’ cigarette…
He stretched before the wide balcony window, scratching his butocks through the blue boxer shorts. He didn’t hear the bathroom door click open.
“Doing what you do best, I see.”
Garrett’s gaze snapped around, and there stood Jessica, wet-haired from the shower, a towel draped around her.
“What?”
“Standing in your shorts, scratching your ass.”
Garrett slipped his hands out of his boxers. He winked at her. “Yeah, but you like my ass. You’ve told me so.”
“You don’t get it, do you? A relationship is a two-way street, Harlan. It just seems the more I put into this, the less I get.” Jessica huffed, brazenly dropping the towel, then pulling her clothes back on. “I can’t hack it anymore, Harlan. Every time
you get something good in your life, you blow it. Christ, I’m surprised you still have the freelance job with The Psi-Com Journal.
Garrett felt like a toddler caught with full pants. But he couldn’t lie to her. “I just got fired…”
“What! When?”
“Just now,” he admitted. “When I got the mail.”
Jessica momentarily froze in disbelief, one stocking dangling from her hand. “You’re serious, aren’t you? My God, Harlan! It just gets worse and worse!”
Garrett tossed a nonchalant hand. “What, Psi-Com fires me? So what? I can do better than that tabloid roll of toilet paper any day.”
Jessica, still half naked, looked fit to explode. “Harlan, you just lost your job and you act like it’s nothing! Jeeze, you’ve been fired from MUFON, The SETI Sentinel, The Watchman—”
“Rags, all rags—”
“You’ve been arrested seven times—”
“Six times, thank you, and they were all bum raps, just like last night. All I was doing was what investigative journalists are supposed to do. I was investigating.”
“You call it investigating, but the police call it something else—breaking and entering!” Jessica railed. Now she’d at least gotten her stockings and skirt back on. “I mean, for God’s sake, Harlan, I’ve tried my best to support you through all this but I can’t take anymore! You’ve got to join the real world, get a real job, and get off all this UFO paranormal psychic phenomena trance-channeling spontaneous combustion past-life regressive hypnosis Uri Geller spoon-bending bullshit!”
“Hey, Uri Geller really can bend spoons,” Garrett defended. “I saw him do it at the Seattle Convention Center in ‘93. He also blanked some floppy disks just by looking at them; I positively verified the erasures with my laptop. He says the Russians hired him to do it to D-O-D couriers on commercial air flights. I believe him.”
Jessica stormed about the unkempt apartment, fully dressed now, but looking for her shoes. “Everything’s a joke to you, isn’t it? It almost seems like you go out of your way to make things worse for yourself! You get a scholarship to MIT grad school and quit! You get job offers from IBM, Compaq, Packard Bell, and Microsoft—and you turn them down! Then you get a chance at a solid career in the Air Force, and you get kicked out!”
Garrett finally found a Bic and lit his cigarette. He shrugged at Jessica’s rather loud observations. It was all true, but what did that matter. “Can I help it they can’t take a joke?”
“A joke? Reading classified security files is a joke? You’re lucky they didn’t throw you in a military prison for twenty years!”
“Hey, no prison on earth can hold me, baby,” he tried to make light of it.
Jessica wasn’t hearing it. “I work my tail off at the hospital, swing-shifts, double-shifts, thinking it’s all for something, for us, for our life together—and all you do is drink beer, smoke cigarettes, and make jokes!”
“All right,” Garrett agreed. “I’ll cut down on the jokes—”
Jessica, now dressed and her shoes on, snatched up her purse in an escalating rage. “No wonder your wife divorced you! She ought to get a medal for putting up with you for that long! Well, I’m sure as hell not going to make the same mistake she did—”
Next, Jessica stared Garrett down, glaring. Then she—
“No!” Garrett yelled.
—took her engagement ring off her finger and threw it at him.
“Jessica! Come on!” Garrett exclaimed. “Let’s not get carried away here. Look, I’m really sorry about you having to bail me out of jail. But don’t you understand? I got set up. Some government entity is bugging me again!”
The ring bounced across the dingy carpet and wound up under the couch. “Oh, give me a break. Every time you screw up you blame it on some ridiculous government conspiracy!”
Garrett roused to take exception. “Come on, honey. You remember when I found these…” He removed a small cuff-link box from his desk. I’ll show her, he thought with a sly smile. He flipped open the cheaply hinged, patent-leather-covered box which once housed a set of dime-store cufflink.
Now it housed something
that looked like four tiny pinheads.
“They’re pinheads, Harlan,” Jessica insisted. “Are you too dim to remember? You’ve shown me that crock of crap before.”
“They’re not pinheads, baby. I had them tested at the Harrison Lab at University of Maryland. They’re quarter-wavelength 400-512 megahertz wireless audio sensors. Discreet microphones by any other name.” Garrett nodded in assurance, displaying the small box. “This is high-tech stuff. The guy at U of M told me they look just like the latest CIA models that cost thirty grand apiece.”
“They’re pinheads, and that’s what you’re becoming in this Big Brother fantasy
land of yours!” she yelled looking for her keys.
“No, no, you don’t understand. They’re bi-passive microphones, honey, planted in here to keep tabs on me. Look how small they are! Can you imagine the advanced state of technology?” Garrett, oblivious, went on to explain, “See, baby, a VLF signal from a remote listening post is the actual power source for the mikes. Then the signal produces what’s called a carrier-current loop which cycles the voice transmissions back to the eavesdroppers. See, once the mikes are no longer passive, an oscillographic sensor detects the magnetic field in their pick-up elements and—”
“SHUT UP!” Jessica shouted, bug-eyed.
Silence collapsed onto the room.
“I’m through—get it?” Jessica railed. “I’ve got no more time to invest in a relationship that hasn’t been going anywhere since the first day it started!”
Garrett forgot about the microphones. “Honey, please. Look, I promise that from
now on—”
“Save it. I’m not buying that line of bullshit ever again.” Jessica’s ample bosom rose and fell as she caught her breath. “Read my lips, Harlan. It’s over. I’m out of here—forever. Goodbye!”