by Sean Black
When he had finished his recitation, the cop asked if he understood. Byron told him that he did, throwing in a ‘sir’ to let him know that he wasn’t going to be a problem. The cuffs snapped closed.
For a man on the run from the might of the entire US government, he felt remarkably calm. He doubted that the cop who was pulling him roughly back onto his feet would have been as calm if he’d known who he’d just arrested. Never mind what he’d done to the last cop who had tried to slap cuffs on him.
5
Byron had been wrong about the air-conditioning. The front of the Crown Vic may have been air-conditioned, but the cooling system in the back seat extended only as far as having one of the rear windows cracked less than an inch. The heat raging through the glass had brought the interior to a simmering boil, threatening to cook him from the inside out.
In under sixty seconds his clothes were soaked in sweat, and he was feeling light-headed. Even if he’d had the desire to escape, he now doubted that he’d have the energy. He raked his tongue over dry, cracked lips as the cop who had slapped the cuffs on him took a sip from a bottle of Evian. Byron was debating whether to ask him for some when the cop reached back, pulled open a slot in the Perspex partition, and pushed the bottle through. Thankfully he’d cuffed Byron’s hands in front so that he could reach up and take the water.
Byron made a point of thanking him. He’d seen the man’s partner shoot the cop a look, which he’d greeted with a shrug and a ‘Poor bastard must be dying back there.’ The partner’s look and the cop’s own defensive response suggested some minor breach of protocol.
They edged towards the outskirts of town. It wasn’t what Byron had expected. Not at all. The usual fast-food joints, bars and grimy gas stations were noticeable by their absence. The first proper building he saw was a gleaming white four-story office block. An equally gleaming sign out front read, ‘Kelsen County Corporation’.
Beyond the office building lay a golf course. A number of McMansions were dotted around the plush fairways. The other side of the road revealed another golf course with yet more expensive, executive-style housing. The front lawns were as neatly cut as the greens of the golf courses. The housing developments were gated, with manned security booths to ensure that no one entered without first being properly vetted.
Beyond the golf courses, the landscape got a little more urban. There was a strip mall with a dry cleaner’s, a bookstore, and a small upmarket grocery. The sidewalks were immaculate but empty. The searing heat might have prevented anyone from walking, but Byron guessed that even when it was cooler, people here tended to use their cars.
The cars were something else that stood out. Aside from a couple of battered old pickups being driven by Hispanic men, and laden with gardening equipment, most of the cars they passed were expensive imports of the Germany variety. The drivers and passengers were exclusively white and mostly middle-aged or elderly, with a few glammed-up soccer moms thrown into the mix for a little variety.
He was starting to see why the local police department might not have taken too kindly to someone who looked like he did hitching a ride on the outskirts of their town. The thought cheered him. If they didn’t want someone like him making the police look untidy they’d be happy to see him on his way with the minimum delay.
They turned into what Byron assumed was the town’s main street. He counted two banks, a pet store, three or four cafés and restaurants, and a couple of boutiques. If there was anything as vulgar as a Walmart, it was well hidden.
In the middle of the street he saw a modest courthouse and local government building, and next to that was the police headquarters – a large, muscular, two-story red-brick building that dwarfed everything around it. Maybe there was more crime here than he’d have thought possible, though he couldn’t imagine what.
There was one more feature that appeared to set the town apart from the other towns he’d passed through so far in this part of the state. Almost every single building he’d seen since he’d arrived, from the Kelsen Corporation offices to the boutiques, had at least two cameras mounted on the outside. The cameras themselves were identical, suggesting that they’d been placed there by some central authority rather by individual business owners. Whoever was running the town sure liked to keep an eye on things.
The police driver swung the wheel hard, and they sped down a narrow alleyway. They hung a sharp left and were met by a vast metal gate that slowly inched open, the eye of a camera watching the patrol car as it drove down a ramp and into an underground car park that held row upon row of fresh-off-the-assembly-line police vehicles.
Whatever the hell kind of a place Byron had stumbled into, they had enough hardware for a medium-sized city, never mind a small Texas border town.
6
The cops pulled into a parking spot right next to an elevator. Byron had already counted off over fifty separate vehicles with Kelsen County Sheriff’s Department markings. All the vehicles were either new or a year or two old at most. Another hundred or so unmarked vehicles were also parked there. Presumably they belonged to the cops and support staff. There were a lot of trucks and SUVs, again almost all either new or only a few years old. Byron had even glimpsed a valet stand. A couple of Hispanic men were busy buffing a Ford F150 to a gleaming showroom shine while another couple of cars parked behind the pickup waited their turn.
The cops got out. They opened the rear door and stepped back. Byron hustled his way out, glad to get some air. Not that it was cool, far from it, but it was still ten degrees cooler than the sauna he’d been sitting in. They guided him towards the elevator.
They still hadn’t asked Byron any questions. Not who he was, or where he was going, why he was traveling across their turf, or if he intended sticking around.
The elevator door slid open as they reached it. No buttons pushed. From the corner of his eye Byron noticed yet another camera, which had possibly signaled their arrival. Out of habit he kept his head down so that it wouldn’t capture his face. He was in no doubt that at some point someone in DC would figure out he’d been here, but he planned to be long gone by the time they did.
The scar tissue on his neck itched. As they stepped into the elevator he raised his cuffed hands to scratch it. The smaller of the two cops looked at him. ‘What you do to yourself?’ he asked, with a nod to the scar.
‘Accident,’ Byron told him. ‘Drill bit snapped and caught me.’
By now his lies were well rehearsed. People tended to ask the same questions. His responses had become engrained to the point where the truth took him longer to recall than the alternative he had invented.
The elevator door closed. They began to move up. A few seconds later, it stopped. The doors opened. The three men stepped out into a blessedly air-conditioned corridor. The cop who had been behind him for the short elevator ride stepped in front of Byron and they went down the corridor to a dark blue metal door. Another camera. Byron kept his head down again, hoping that neither cop would notice. There was a buzzing sound as the door was remotely unlocked. The cop in front pulled it open.
They stepped into a lobby area. There was a seated section with a half-dozen metal-framed chairs that had been bolted to the floor. A high reception desk ran along the opposite wall. Behind it and to one side were doors that led, Byron assumed, to the cells and the offices.
A middle-aged white man in civilian clothes sat behind the desk. His hair was black with a streak of white running down the middle. It reminded Byron of Pepe Le Pew, the overly amorous skunk smitten with a cat, which always seemed to encounter a tin of white paint that led to a series of romantic confusions.
Behind Pepe was a picture of Sheriff John Martin standing, in full uniform, complete with Stetson, in front of the police headquarters. Apart from his hairstyle, the man behind the counter bore an uncanny resemblance to his boss ‒ a mixture of permanently angry and chronically constipated.
He ignored Byron. Instead he directed his questions to the taller of the two cops. �
�What we got here, Arlo?’
‘Found him hitching out on the Interstate,’ said Arlo.
Pepe looked Byron up and down, as if he was a lab specimen. ‘He anything to do with Ms Martinez?’
The cops looked at Byron. He had a feeling that, whoever Ms Martinez was, she wasn’t popular. Even if he’d had some connection, he wouldn’t be admitting it.
‘Hey,’ the other cop said to Pepe. ‘Don’t mention Thea in front of Arlo. He’s still sweet on her.’
‘I was just passing through,’ Byron told Pepe. ‘I don’t know anybody called Martinez.’
‘Speak when you’re spoken to,’ Arlo snapped.
Byron had noticed that the centre of Arlo’s head pulsed red with anger when he’d been teased by his partner about this woman. Due to a trans-cranial neural implant placed inside his brain, Byron could sometimes read people’s emotional states just by looking at them. If they were scared, their skull looked yellow, and if they were angry it turned red.
Pepe jabbed a couple of beefy fingers at the computer’s keyboard. ‘Okay, name.’
‘Davis. John Davis,’ Byron said.
Pepe punched the name into his computer. ‘You have any ID?’ he asked.
‘You’re going to have to take my word for it,’ Byron told him.
‘What kind of a person wanders around the country without ID?’ Pepe asked.
‘I didn’t realize it was mandatory, and in any case, I know who I am,’ said Byron.
‘You search him?’ Pepe asked the two cops.
‘When we arrested him.’
Pepe Le Pew sighed. ‘Date of birth?’
Byron gave them a date that was one day and one month off his own. Pepe tapped it into his computer. His pockets were emptied and his rucksack placed on the counter. He watched as they went through everything. There was nothing that confirmed or contradicted what he had told them. Byron’s meagre belongings were placed in a large clear bag and sealed.
‘Okay, put him in Holding,’ Pepe instructed the two cops.
They each grabbed an arm. Byron got the feeling that they would have been happy to let him walk unassisted but that the guy behind the desk demanded some show of force from them. The cop who had arrested him had grown irritated from the moment they had stepped out of the elevator.
They pushed him through the door at the far end of the waiting room. There was a large, open pen with a couple of benches. In the far corner there was a toilet and a sink. If you had to use the toilet you’d be doing it in full view of the pen’s other occupants. Right now there were two. A couple of Hispanic men sat on the benches, staring into space. They made a point of avoiding the cop’s gaze.
The door leading into the holding pen buzzed open. The arresting cop took his cuffs off and clipped them back onto his belt. Byron stepped inside. The door closed behind him.
‘Don’t I get a phone call?’ Byron asked, not that he had anyone in the world to call. But he wanted to get an idea of how far they’d observe the basic Constitutional niceties.
His question went unanswered. ‘What about an attorney?’ he asked.
That question was met with a drawn-out sigh. ‘This your first time in Kelsen County?’
The cops walked back to the door leading to the lobby. The last one out stopped just before he left. ‘Enjoy your time here,’ he said to Byron. ‘This is about as good as it gets.’
Byron sat down on the bench opposite the two men as the cops left. He looked up to see yet another picture of Sheriff Martin. He wore the same scowl he’d had for the election poster. He wasn’t asking anyone in here for their vote. Quite the opposite. The slogan emblazoned beneath the picture read: Criminals Have No Rights.
* * *
An hour later, two people wearing mud-brown uniforms with Kelsen County Jail badges sewn onto their shirts walked in. They had no guns, but they did have pepper spray and a Taser ‒ the weapons of choice for prison guards, something to stun and subdue, but nothing that could be taken off them and used to facilitate an escape. The first guard was a man in his early twenties with a scraggy mustache and bad skin. Behind him waddled a middle-aged woman with brassy blonde hair and an expression that suggested a life full of low-rent disappointment. They had the muscle tone of people better suited to slinging burgers than escorting prisoners.
‘Up on your feet, amigos,’ barked the woman.
Byron’s two companions jumped up. Byron took his time. Even though they hadn’t yet opened the door into the pen, both guards took a step back as he stood up.
7
‘You!’ the male guard barked at him. ‘Turn to face the wall. Hands behind your back.’
Byron did as he was told. He wasn’t about to cause trouble. He had no reason to. He was hoping that he was about to be taken in front of a judge. He planned on making a guilty plea in return for accepting a small fine and a ride to the county line. He’d have lost the best part of the day and a few bucks, but that was no great hardship.
There was something else too. He had been mulling it over as he’d been sitting in the holding pen. He’d had his picture taken, but not his fingerprints. Given the amount of money and personnel available, it didn’t strike Byron as a clerical error. Everything else had seemed well organized. The staff had been blunt but efficient, which made them typical. But not taking his fingerprints? It seemed an odd omission.
The cuffs snapped around his wrists. He turned and felt a hand in his back push him towards the open pen door. They snaked their way out through the lobby and into the elevator, all the way down to the parking lot.
An old yellow school bus with Kelsen County Sheriff Department markings was waiting for them. The door opened with a pneumatic hiss and they got on. The two guards sat behind the three prisoners. The driver gave the guards a piece of paper on a clipboard to sign. The bus door closed. The engine started up. The vehicle pulled forward.
No sooner had it started moving than it stopped again. The doors hissed open. The two guards sitting behind Byron and the two other prisoners rose from their seats. ‘Okay, we’re here,’ they announced. ‘On your feet.’
Byron looked at them. The bus hadn’t travelled much more than fifty feet.
Byron and the other prisoners’ puzzlement was met by two granite stares. One guard grabbed the back of Byron’s shirt and yanked. ‘Get up.’
Byron did so and shuffled forward, still wondering why a fifty-yard journey had involved a bus trip. He stepped down. The bus driver handed the guards the clipboard. They signed for a second time and gave it back to the driver.
Directly in front of them was another blue metal door. One of the guards moved in front of Byron and pressed a buzzer located at the side of the frame. The lock clicked. The guard grabbed the handle and pulled the door open. They stepped back into the self-same corridor they had exited a minute or so ago. It wasn’t even a separate section of the building. They could see the same grey walls, the same posters they had passed before.
Byron was facing a stairwell. The two guards herded them towards it. They took two sets of stairs up to a second floor. There were more buzzers, and more doors, more short stretches of identical corridor.
Finally the little party reached a set of double dark-stained oak doors. A row of chairs ran along the wall opposite. The guards motioned for them to sit down. They sat.
Byron was starting to wonder if the implant in the center of his brain had suffered some kind of malfunction. It was as if he was caught up in a dream in which nothing made any sense but everyone carried on as if it did.
He caught sight of a sign on the right-hand side of the double oak doors. It read: ‘Kelsen County Court. Judge William Kelsen presiding.’ As if the bus ride hadn’t been strange enough, he’d found a place where everyone seemed to share a surname. He knew that was how small towns were, but Kelsen didn’t appear to be that small a town.
The doors opened. A mousy woman with her hair in a bun appeared. She pointed at the Hispanic man sitting next to Byron, and said simply,
‘Him.’
One of the guards hoisted him upright, and pushed him forwards though the doors. Byron caught a glimpse of a barely populated courtroom ‒ wooden-bench seating, tables at the front, a court stenographer, and a raised dais with a Kelsen County seal hanging over an empty leather-backed seat ‒ before the doors closed again.
He settled back into the hard plastic seat and shut his eyes. Barely two seconds had passed before he felt an elbow nudge hard into his side. He opened his eyes and turned his head to look at the guard sitting next to him. ‘Don’t get too comfortable,’ the guard said. ‘This shouldn’t take long.’
The guard hadn’t been kidding. Less than thirty seconds later, the doors opened again. A courtroom guard led the young Hispanic prisoner back out. His eyes darted everywhere. He looked ready to burst into tears. He started to say something in Spanish but was cut off by the guard next to Byron with a curt ‘No talking!’
8
Judge William Kelsen smiled warmly as Byron took a seat behind a desk near the front of the courtroom. He picked up a piece of paper and studied it for a moment, peering at it through wire-rimmed, half-moon glasses. Taking them off and putting them on the desk in front of him, he smiled again at Byron.
‘Mr Davis?’ said the judge.
Byron got to his feet. He allowed his shoulders to slump. He bent a little at the knees to minimize his height. He wanted his body language to reinforce the idea that he wasn’t a threat. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Do you understand what you were arrested for?’ the judge asked him.
The question brought him to a crossroads. By saying no he risked antagonizing the man who would decide immediate his fate. By saying yes he’d be admitting that he understood something he really didn’t, which was rarely a good idea in a court of law.