The Dead Pools

by Michael Hesse

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Two of the guards nearly dislocated my shoulders hauling me off the ground. They set me unsteadily on my feet and held me up. The guard with the chalk got right up in my face and it under my nose. “Not so funny now that I’ve found this,” he spat.

  “He’s the funny one,” I nodded towards Ramirez, “I’m just along for the ride.”

  “You’re a God-damned witch and this proves you hexed that bastard down the hall.”

  “Chalk proves it?” I snapped. I should have held my tongue, but I was pissed. My Sergeant had hidden his plan to infiltrate the jail from me and my best friend hadn’t let me in on it. I’d been banged around, arrested, molested, and now this ten-watt bulb was accusing me of black magick and murder. Mundanes might throw the terms around, but hexes and curses are deadly serious issues for us.

  “Where’s your evidence or didn’t you learn about that before you dropped out of third grade?”

  “Oh, there’s evidence,” he said before turning to the other guards, “Take these two to interrogation, the Sheriff wants a chat. The rest of you, tear this place apart and find some ev-E-dence,” he smirked. This was all a joke to him, but I already knew the punch line. It wasn’t funny.

  When you’re a witch you expect a certain amount of planted evidence. That crap’s been going on since Salem. There aren’t any more burnings, at least in the civilized states. Even the hangings are a rarity, but I think that’s mostly because the vast majority of us are locked away in the internment camps.

  Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of high-handed talk about dialogue and understanding, but its bullshit. It’s theater. It’s easier to talk about the need for solutions than rolling up your sleeves and doing anything. Meanwhile the camps grow more and more permanent, Hollywood paints us as villains, and politicians get reelected in order to keep your children safe.

  Two more guards picked Ramirez off the floor and we were frog marched out of our cell. I should have known that I’d have a surprise meeting with the doorjamb. The guards were awfully apologetic; they should have been paying attention and been more careful. They’d get a doctor to treat my gash as soon as one was available. It looked like a nasty cut.

  Chapter 4

  Atlanta, Sunday 02:00

  Fulton County Jail

  Interrogation rooms look exactly the same, no matter where you are. They’re cold featureless boxes with a table bolted to the middle of the room and a couple of chairs just as securely fastened to the floor. They’re cold to keep you awake and on edge and featureless to keep you disoriented. Usually there’s a two-way mirror set up on the wall facing you so that you know someone’s watching, but you can’t see who it is. It kicks the paranoia level up a couple of notches, even when you know the game.

  Human psychology is either so basic that it crosses all cultures or all governments have the same soulless psychiatrists at their disposal. It’s probably a little of both. Once you’ve been in a couple of these boxes you can predict what’s going to happen next.

  First, you’re going to wait. How long depends upon what’s happening behind the scenes, but you’re going to wait long enough for your nerves to start gnawing at you. There’s probably a formula or a Stanford study outlining how long the wait should be. The Doughnut Rangers behind the glass couldn’t have figured all this out on their own.

  Usually you’re alone. Isolation fuels paranoia and paranoia is an interrogator’s best friend. If they do leave you with your partner, the room’s wired and they expect that you’re too stupid to figure it out. I have no idea how many people admit their crimes while constructing a defense with their partner, but it must be enough. Most criminals aren’t too high on the intelligence meter or they wouldn’t have been caught in the first place.

  Ramirez and I didn’t need to speak to communicate. The Company has its own finger-talk; a shorthand sign language that we use in the field when communications aren’t secure and silence is a must. Luckily, the guards had re-cuffed our hands to a pair of manacles threaded through a bolt set in the table. Anyone watching with a degree of intelligence would figure out that we weren’t moving our hands in bored circles, but unless they were Company, they’d have no idea of what we said.

  As soon as the guards left the room Ramirez signed to shut up and keep quiet. That pissed me off; did he truly think I was too stupid to know any better? Maybe he’d never read my file and had no idea how much time I’d spent in rooms exactly like this one. I doubt when he was vetted for the Company that he was treated like an enemy of the State, but that’s exactly how my clearances went.

  Witches or Wiccans, if you strive for accuracy, don’t get tested for the Gift. Every other kid in a public school is tested at puberty. If you’re mundane that’s all there is; a friendly chat with a government bureaucrat and you’re back in class ten minutes later.

  If you show signs of the Gift you’re brought in for further testing. Those with just a dusting of the Gift are quickly released without any formal training or ability to use what talents they might have. They become the fortune tellers and palm readers you see, the grifters and hokum-sellers you don’t. They wave around the green bracelets the government binds to their wrists and generally give the entire community a bad name.

  Those with any real talent are taken into the government academies for evaluation and training. Second-tier kids usually end up in government jobs, training and testing others like themselves, encrypting documents, or spying on the community. Most witch hunters are second tier. It depends upon their individual talents. Upon graduation each is bound with a deep blue bracelet and report to their handlers once a month like they’re on parole.

  Very few are categorized as third tier and wear the black band. Everyone enlisted in the Company wears the black, except me. Wiccans are the only group whose blood provides the path. Our talent flows from one generation to the next as long as we keep our faith. We have similar designations, first through third circles, but we don’t willingly submit to government control. Even first circle Wiccans can work serious magick in a group, which is why we’re locked up in camps to keep the mundane population safe.

  I don’t take well to confinement. I broke out and ran when I was seventeen. Two years later the witch hunters caught me trying to slip across the border. I was given a choice: a life behind bars or a chance to join Shadow Company. It wasn’t much of a choice.

  I spent more than a year locked in rooms like this while psychologists and sorcerers tried to make sure I wasn’t a threat. I don’t know what they found, but I got the long ticket; ten years of service to the Company and a pardon waiting if I survived. Right now, it seemed like a long eight and a half to go.

  I wagged my fingers across the tabletop hoping Ramirez knew something about what I’d seen last night. Unfortunately, the finger-talk lexicon is fairly limited. It’s designed to convey bursts of information, not conversations. Instead of me asking him what he knew about that crazy-assed bundle of bones I’d seen in the hall it came out like this: //Know/white/night/woman//, which honestly could have meant any number of things in retrospect.

  Ramirez stared at me for a moment, his mouth curling up in a suppressed laugh as he took my comments out of context. His answer was both unhelpful and succinct. //Yes/no/quiet/thinking//.

  Maybe he knew something, maybe he didn’t, but he wasn’t going to tell me anything while we were locked in this room. The Army calls it ‘situational awareness’, I call it ‘knowing what the Hell is going on’ and I didn’t. You can’t make decisions or even factor possibilities when you’re left in the dark, but I couldn’t just sit there and stare at my reflection in the mirror either. I had to do something.

  Closing my eyes, I calmed myself first. You can’t make rational decisions when you’re still thrumming with fight or flight reflexes. I might not have much data, but I did have some, limited as it was. I needed to distill what I knew in order to figure out what I didn’t.

  It sounds easie
r than it is. Try it sometime. Think back to an event that angered you so much that you were ready to kill or scared you so badly that you bolted. Now strip out all the emotions tied to that event. Unwind all the bits wound around your underlying assumptions and lay the incident bare. Once you’ve done that you can process the event as you go, flicking through it like a roll of film. Examine each decision you made and why, looking for alternatives. Don’t get caught up asking if there were better decisions you could’ve made, that’s a different exercise. Look for the why and tie that back to concrete facts.

  It takes practice, but when you’ve spent as much time as I have in cold metal boxes waiting for some bureaucrat to arrive, you’ve had plenty of time to develop the skills. I fast-forwarded the movie reel in my head, passing Leo’s and our arrest. Examining that little gem would come later.

  It was slippery, but I found what I was searching for. I’d been too keyed up from our arrest and too focused on the possible repercussions. I’d missed the first glimmer of what occurred. But our subconscious records everything, locking it away for retrieval at the proper moment. That’s where your gut feelings come from, the intuitive leaps you make when all the unnoticed facts line up, pointing you in the proper direction.

  I realized I’d felt the summoning long before I saw the results, but I’d been too wrapped in my own misery to recognize it. It had started slow and subtle, like a wave teasing the shore or a finger of mist stretching across an empty field. It had softly probed the area until it found its target and then rapidly coalesced. We hadn’t recognized the background hum of magick because we never expected to feel it in jail. Assumptions will bite your ass every time.

  Someone outside the immediate area had been searching for the victim. If it had been a focused search we would have picked up on the intensity and could have traced it back to the source. But a blanket search, like a fog bank, springs up from everywhere at once.

  My second discovery was completely unexpected. It wasn’t a summoning at all, but a calling. It was a subtle distinction and one that I think Ramirez would have missed. Unlike the evocation’s sorcerers use to yoke spirits to their commands, a calling doesn’t attempt to force compliance. Instead it’s quite similar in structure to the quick sort of prayers I offer up to my goddess, Hecate, and I shuddered at the implications.

  There are deep dark aspects to Hecate’s nature that mundanes don’t understand. Even most of the magickal community shies away from the triple-faced goddess. Hecate isn’t a fluffy love aspect of divinity and she ain’t no bunny hugger. She’s the guardian of the doorways and the midnight queen of witchery. Hecate is the lioness protecting her cubs and that might explain why the thing in the hall took an interest in me.

  I pushed back on that thought for a moment, but it made sense. My calling might have gained the things attention, but it wasn’t what brought it into the jail. Whoever was in the cell down the hall from ours had reached out to it. He’d reached out to it for protection, but something had gone horribly wrong.

  I’d received my answer. Now I had to figure out what to do with it. I opened my eyes and faced Ramirez, trying to parse my thoughts into finger-talk. It wasn’t going to be easy. My last attempt hadn’t gone well.

  I tapped Ramirez to get his attention just as the door swung open and a thin man stepped into the room. It was the weaselly looking guy from Leo’s, the one with the funeral director’s tie and the big .38. He looked like he hadn’t slept, his thin hair stuck up in all directions and he stank of stale beer and cigarettes.

  He slammed a thick sheaf of papers down on the table in front of us before moving to the other side of the table. “You two boys are in a Hell of a lot of trouble.”

  Chapter 5

  Atlanta, Sunday 03:30

  Fulton County Jail

  Don’t take the bait. It was a classic cop-move to get someone talking. It’s classic because it works; it feeds upon your insecurities. First there’s the visual: an enormous pile of official looking papers. Next, you’re given the threat of dire consequences. In reality, one has nothing to do with the other, but it’s implied. Your paranoia or fear or guilt is supposed to work against you. See, you’re supposed to look at that bulging file with the official stamps on the cover and the initialed chain of custody flags and think it’s over. The file is bursting with all of the evidence they’ve got on you. It’s thick. It’s huge. They know everything so you might as well try and cut a deal.

  Once you’ve seen this dog and pony show a couple times, you know better. You wait until they bring out the clowns.

  Ramirez leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “Are you going to get a doctor to look at my friend?”

  Sheriff Ratcliff didn’t surprise easily, but he wasn’t ready for Ramirez’s calm. He’d looked at our records, the sanitized version that the Army provided and found nothing. There wouldn’t be any priors in his system, nothing to indicate that we weren’t sterling examples of USDA prime soldiers.

  He expected us to be disoriented and scared. The fact that we weren’t didn’t fit his assumptions. Assumptions will bite you in the ass every time.

  He took a moment to ready his lie. “The doctor’s busy,” he said. “Whatever you boys did, caused a riot in the other wings. When he’s finished patching up the truly wounded, I’ll get him in to look at Mr. Le Mort’s little scrape.”

  “He’ll need stitches,” Ramirez said. “You wouldn’t want his pretty face to scar. The ladies will be disappointed.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that,” Sheriff Ratcliff smirked, “You two won’t be seeing any ladies for a long time.”

  Ramirez glanced up at the clock hanging above the two-way mirror. “It’ll be a couple hours,” he conceded.

  “I don’t know what you boys think is going to happen, but first-degree murder is a substantial charge,” he said tapping the file in front of him.

  I knew the game, but I couldn’t listen to this crap any longer. “We didn’t kill anyone,” I spat.

  “Not yet,” Ramirez hissed.

  I shut up before I said anything else. I had the feeling that Ramirez directed that comment to me.

  Sheriff Ratcliff smiled, sensing his first break. “Juan Ortiz was murdered in his cell a few minutes after midnight. We were holding him for the OSS, but you two hexed him before Washington sent an agent to collect his wetback ass. You two related?” he asked Ramirez.

  I’ve seen Ramirez knock out more than one asshole with a racial slur on his tongue, but this time he didn’t twitch. He looked the Sheriff dead in the eye. I could almost hear him counting off seconds in his head.

  “Just because he’s a witch, doesn’t mean he has the skills.”

  Sheriff Ratcliff smiled. He’d been waiting for just such an opening. “No, but you do,” he said pointing toward the black bracelet Ramirez wore. “That bracelet and that uniform you wore say that you’ve got all the proper skills.”

  He glanced down to the bulging file and slowly unwound the dirty ribbon that held it shut. “Bringing a witch along was smart, I’ll give you that. It guaranteed that you’d be placed in isolation, right next to your target.”

  He waited a moment for Ramirez’s reaction. When he didn’t get one, he flipped open the file and slid a picture across the table. It took me a moment to realize that it was a picture of our cell, but now it was covered in hastily scrawled symbols and shapes; my molester’s ev-E-dence.

  Ramirez took one look at it and laughed. “Tell your deputy that he wouldn’t know a sigil or glyph if it bit him on the ass. That’s crap,” he said and shoved the picture back.

  Sheriff Ratcliff picked the picture up off the table and carefully laid it across the open folder. “I think that it is quite clear—

  “It’s clear that your department is more concerned with finding a scapegoat than the real killer,” Ramirez finished.

  Ratcliff shook his head. “I don’t think a Fulton County jury will see it that way.”

  “A jury’s never going t
o have the chance,” Ramirez smirked.

  “Oh, why is that, Mr. Ramirez?”

  “Unless I’m mistaken, that bellowing coming down the hall is our Sergeant.”

  Mac comes equipped with a pair of Irish lungs that Gabriel would have been proud to own. I almost felt sorry for whoever was on the receiving end of that blast. Almost.

  Moments later the Interrogation room door was flung open and Mac strode through like an avenging god. Stevens followed on his heels.

  This can’t be good. I didn’t know Stevens well. He’d transferred into our unit shortly after the Japanese affair. He was quiet, but carried a fearsome reputation; the only survivor of a failed Mexican operation he wouldn’t talk about. At six foot eight and nearly three hundred, he would have been a linebacker if he weren’t shackled with the bracelet that was nearly invisible against his ebony skin. He was a fucking tank.

  The Sheriff shot up from his chair. “Get out immediately,” he screamed. “This is a police investigation.”

  Mac ignored him, turning instead to the two of us. “Is that true?” he asked. “Are you two Bozos being investigated?”

  “Railroaded, more like,” I said under my breath.

  “What’s that, Private?”

  “I said that the Sheriff is trying to pin a murder charge on us, Sergeant.”

  “You kill anyone?”

  “No Sergeant.”

  “Then shut up until you have something useful to say.” Stevens grinned behind him like a guard dog on a leash. If Mac brought him along, he expected trouble. I wondered where Nunez was, he had to be around somewhere.

  By this time the Sheriff regained his composure. “Sergeant Mackenzie is it?” he said reading the name patch over Mac’s breast. “Kindly remove yourselves from my interrogation room or I’ll be forced to charge you both with obstruction of justice.”