The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “I suppose the fact that I didn’t kill Lenny doesn’t have a damned thing to do with anything?” Kicky demanded bitterly.

  “No, of course it doesn’t,” responded Lainie with another sigh.

  “What about justice?” cried Kicky.

  “This is a legal matter. Justice has nothing to do with it,” explained Lainie irritably, irked at the girl’s stubborn stupidity. “I can’t believe you’ve been on the streets as long as you have, and you still don’t know how it works.”

  “Yeah, I know how it works. Maybe I can give you something,” suggested Kicky tentatively. “I mean, I know all kinds of stuff about Lenny’s scams and the shit he was doing at the Den.”

  “So do we. And what are we supposed to do with it?” asked Lainie in exasperation. “Arrest and indict a dead man? Who gives a damn about prostitution and drugs anyway? They’re the basis of most urban economies these days. Come on, Kristin. Yes or no? In view of the, ah, special circumstances surrounding this case, I can arrange for a quick arraignment in front of Judge Feinstein tomorrow sometime. Maybe even tonight. Plead guilty like a good girl and take your twelve to twenty, and when you get out you’ll still be young enough to have some kind of a life yet.”

  Kicky’s self-control finally snapped. “No!” she screamed in uncontrollable rage. “Fuck you! Fuck both of you! I didn’t do anything, God damn you both to hell! I didn’t do anything! I didn’t kill Lenny, that nigger standing there did! You know it! I didn’t do anything!”

  Martinez stood up and slapped Kicky across the face again, but more or less pro forma, without anger or enthusiasm. “Suit yourself, you stupid little twist,” she said in disgust. “Don’t you ever say I didn’t try and help you. First-degree murder and a life sentence it is. I suggest you watch your language in Judge Feinstein’s court. He’s not going to believe any wild stories you come up with about a respected and decorated police officer killing your pimp, and if you keep on using racial slurs and try to offer perjured testimony against an African American officer, you need to remember that hatecrime carries life without parole. So go ahead, jump up in court and yell out your stupid lies, and really fuck yourself over forever. Hell, maybe it’s for the best. Wealthy and decent couples all over the U.S.A are going to be lining up around the block for that little girl of yours. Maybe you’re doing the right thing after all by permanently taking yourself out of the picture.” She and Jarvis turned and opened the door to leave.

  Kicky stared in horror. She knew that the door wasn’t just closing on the interrogation room. It was closing on her, her whole life, on her daughter. They were going to take Ellie now. She had lost. They were going to take Ellie.

  As the door closed, Kicky jumped up and screamed at the top of her lungs, “I can give you the NVA! Fucking spic bitch, you hear me? I can give you NVA! I know where they are! I can give you that sniper, that guy they call the Cat! I can give you two the NVA, you bitch, you baboon! Just let me go! Please, God, I didn’t do anything, please let me go, please don’t take my baby!” She collapsed onto the table top, weeping hysterically.

  The door opened.

  VII

  Someone Who Knows Who They Are

  Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars,

  Shall bitterly begin his fearful date

  With this night’s revels, and expire the term

  Of a despisèd life, closed in my breast,

  By some vile forfeit of untimely death . . .

  Romeo and Juliet—Act I, Scene 4

  The door opened, and then almost immediately closed again as Jamal Jarvis dragged Lainie Martinez back out into the corridor. “Oh, come on now, Lainie!” the gigantic negro protested in alarm, seeing his convenient patsy for the Gillis murder about to slither out of his grasp. “Don’t even tell me you believe dat ho’ for one muthafukkin’ second! You know she’s just lying to save her own skank ass!”

  “Most likely, yes,” agreed Martinez. “But what if she’s not lying, Jamal?” Her excitement showed in her voice, and she grabbed Jarvis shoulders and shook him. “What if she’s not? Christ, man, do you realize what an opportunity we might let slip here? For almost a year now, there has been a full-blown armed insurrection against the United States going on here in the Northwest. Never mind the fact that those morons in Washington and our own bosses are too damned stupid to see it for what it is, or too blind and stubborn to admit the fact if they do! So what the hell have we got by way of information on these people? I mean real inside information, proper intelligence? What has the FBI got? The BATFE? What has the Department of Homeland Security got? We’re supposed to be the Portland police hatecrime unit, for God’s sake, and what have we got by way of bona fide intel on this series of hatecrimes in our own city? Fuck all! Zip! Nada! Zilch!”

  “It was a lot easier to ID these ofays when dey dressed up like Natsie Stormtroopers from the 1930s and ran around in public, or had all those big meetings in public parks where we could come in and get all their information and roust ’em,” complained Jarvis.

  “Yeah, I know,” agreed Martinez. “Then that fat old bastard sitting all alone in some flophouse with nothing but a computer somehow was able to persuade them to start using their heads for something besides hat-racks and think before they did something. God knows how he pulled that off.”

  “From what I’ve read in our intel reports, I don’t think he ever understood how he pulled it off either,” commented Jarvis.

  “Yeah. They call it the Awakening. At some point, after almost forty years of banging his head against a wall, all of a sudden they started listening to him. I still don’t get what the attraction was there,” sighed Lainie. “But the fact is that we don’t really know a damned thing about the NVA. Oh, sure, we know in a general way who some of these murdering bastards are, from the Coeur d’Alene uprising, and from old pre-10/22 files and thanks to the arrogance of some of their hitters who so kindly leave us their calling cards, literally so in the case of Lockhart. We even think we know the identities of a couple of Army Council members, like Henry Morehouse. But what do we really know about them? Not just who they are and where to find them, but how are they organized? What’s their command structure? Who’s who and who’s where in their pecking order? How do they manage to escape surveillance and capture when we’re throwing everything we’ve got at them? How do they select targets, how do they hunt them down, and who’s next on their death list? Where are they getting weapons and supplies and money? Foreign contacts? Sympathizers here in the Northwest? Professional gunrunners and criminals? How do they move people and arms and funds from place to place? Who are their bomb-makers and where are their bomb factories? Where do they lay their heads at night? Where do they take their wounded for medical care? Who are their intelligence sources, their spies and agents, some of whom we both know damned well are in this very building with us as we speak?

  “This is the kind of thing we have to know to get a few steps ahead of them and beat them, Jamal, and why don’t we know it? Because not one single law enforcement agency has ever been able to get anybody on the inside with the NVA! We’ve tried, the FBI has tried, military intelligence and the CIA have tried. All we have to show for it is a few dead bodies lying in ditches with plastic bags over their heads when somebody got too close, and when we try to follow up on where those operatives were going and what they were doing when they ran into a bullet, the trail is stone cold and all the evidence and the people concerned have disappeared like Houdini made it all vanish in a puff of smoke! Okay, I’ll grant you, this McGee bitch is probably doing just what you say she is, yelling out some lie she thinks we want to hear, trying to talk her way out of her prison stretch. I understand that, and after I hear what she has to say, if I think she’s full of shit, then she’s yours. But we need to listen first. Don’t you get it? This is pure career gold! Suppose we’re the first law enforcement team to get somebody inside the NVA? Suppose we can get into the humintel driver’s seat on this and we can manage to stay there? Th
e sky is the limit, man!” Lainie’s eyes were shining brightly and her voice animated as visions of Cabinet posts danced in her head.

  The visions dancing in Jamal’s head were more of the folding green variety, but he got it. “Yeah, yeah, I see whutcha tawkin’ about,” he admitted reluctantly. “But what about de Gillis homicide? Me and Roscoe gots to be clear on dat.”

  “Don’t worry, even if she pans out as a CI, you and Roscoe are clear for sure,” Lainie assured him. “You’ve got to be, because Lenny Gillis’s corpse is our leverage on the bitch, that and her kid. Hey, if it turns out she’s yanking our chain, we can go back to the original plan. She goes inside for a nice long vacation and her kid goes to It Takes A Village for half a million and we get our finder’s fee. But first, let’s hear what she has to say.”

  “Awright, less do dis thang!” agreed Jarvis, the prospects unfolding before him very pleasing indeed.

  Lainie pushed the door back open, literally ran inside the interrogation room, ran around the table, grabbed Kicky by the hair with her left hand and took her by the throat with her right, and slammed Kicky’s head back into the wall, making her scream from the pain in her scalp wound. “Listen now and listen good, you slut!” she hissed viciously into Kicky’s ear. “Don’t you dare make statements like that to me and Sergeant Jarvis unless you can back up every fucking syllable! Don’t you so much as dare to think that you are going to bullshit your way out of your just punishment on a murder charge and string us along with some cock and bull story about the NVA! Don’t you dare start talking about some deal and trying to take control of this situation. You are not in control of anything, Kicky. You are a turd, and you are floating in our toilet. You will tell me everything, right now! No holding back and no bullshit! And afterwards, Sergeant Jarvis and I will make the decision as to whether or not to flush you. You try to spin us a fairy tale or string us along, and I’ll make sure you do your time in the worst hole I can find, with bull dykes who will make sure you spend a lot of your long, long sentence with a broom handle up your twat. Do you get this picture, girl? Do you really get it?”

  “Yeah, I get it,” sniffled Kicky, for the time being totally overwhelmed and crushed.

  “Lemme give you some advice, ho’,” said Jarvis, leaning over her menacingly. “You think I’m a bad muthafukka? Lemme tell you, you don’t even want to get Sergeant Martinez pissed off at you. Compared to her, I am Rebecca of Sunnybrook fuckin’ Farm.”

  “Now you start talking, and you don’t stop until you have told it all,” commanded Lainie.

  Kicky told them what she knew. It wasn’t much, and it didn’t take long. They left the room with one final warning from Lainie: “If a large lady in orange comes in here carrying a mop and a smile of anticipation on her face, you’ll know we didn’t buy it, and I suggest you do what she tells you to do and save yourself a beatdown.” Outside in the hall they halted, making sure the door was closed. “I think she’s telling the truth,” said Martinez excitedly.

  “Yeah,” said Jarvis, nodding slowly in agreement. “Yeah, so do I. She too scared to lie. Okay, so we stake out that crib of Lenny’s and wait for de goots to show? Hopefully Lockhart with ’em as well?”

  “You still don’t get it, Jamal,” said Martinez, shaking her head. “I’m not talking about just one good bust. I’m thinking long-term project here. We’ve got this bitch by the tits with the murder rap and the little girl. We need to squeeze her. We send her in deep undercover, as far in as we can get her, and we make sure she’s wired every step of the way. We know they have women members. Okay, we see if we can actually get Kicky enlisted in this terrorist army of theirs. We get as much information as we can on the whole NVA structure in this city and anywhere else, ID as many of the sons of bitches as we can, find out everything we can, every safe house, every car they use, every arms dump, build up a whole picture. Then we take down the whole enchilada at once and make Portland the only city in the Northwest that’s a hundred per cent racist free. Once we do that, we can write our own tickets. We can go federal. The Bureau will be on their knees begging for our expertise. Once we’ve beaten this scum here in the Northwest, we’re on our way. Ever want to live in Washington, D.C., Jamal?”

  “I gots family in de District,” chuckled Jarvis. “But how do we work dis meet tonight?”

  “We don’t do anything tonight. Tonight we just send in our girl and let her make some new friends,” said Martinez.

  “We’re gonna need backup bodies and techs to handle the wire, and Captain Rawlinson’s gonna want to know whut de fuck we doing.”

  “Screw Rawlinson,” said Martinez. “The first rule of Project Kicky has to be absolute secrecy. I know a techno-nerd in the Electronic Surveillance Division who’s a whiz at everything we’ll need, both location and personal wiring, Andy McCafferty. He will need to be brought on board for all the technical stuff, now and in the future, and he’ll have to keep quiet about it all. If it comes to that, I can get him to keep his mouth shut by throwing him an occasional fuck. For tonight it will be just him and us two. And Kicky, of course.”

  “No other backup? Uh, dat don’t sound too smart,” asked Jamal nervously. “No offense, Lainie, I mean you one bad-ass tamale and all, but I don’t dig the idea of going up against dat Cat-Eyed muthafukka and maybe some more of his crew wid just you and some geek from ESD. Dis nigger ain’t getting’ shot in de ass fo’ nobody’s career, mine included. Besides, okay, I get de part about not taking ’em down tonight, giving ’em some rope, but wid no backup how we gonna tail ’em after the meet?”

  “We don’t,” said Martinez again. “We let them go. I say again, the purpose of tonight is to get our girl known to them and make them want to recruit her. For that, they need to like what they see, to start trusting her. If they’re followed from the scene and they make the tail, that will blow the whole game. They’ll never trust her and probably try to play her back on us, if they don’t simply whack her.”

  “And what’s to keep her from ratting us out to them?” asked Jarvis. “Or just plain rabbiting on us when we let her out the door?”

  Lainie smiled wickedly. “We’ll have her daughter, right here in the Justice Center, and after today we hang onto her. Kicky plays her part tonight and from now on, or else the kid goes straight to It Takes A Village.”

  “Okay, and after tonight?” asked Jarvis. “We gonna be running a long term undercover like dis, Rawlinson will have to be brought in on it, and a lot of other people as well.”

  “I know there will have to be others,” said Martinez, “We’ll need a whole task force. But we need to keep them to a minimum and compartmentalize everything, especially her identity. I don’t trust Rawlinson. He’s white and male and heterosexual, and by definition that means he’s politically unreliable. His definition of hatecrime has always been a little too lenient for my taste, especially when it comes to hatespeech. He doesn’t seem to understand that hatespeech is a dead giveaway for thoughts and attitudes that lead to hatecrime, and that once we know that hate is in a white male’s mind we need to nip him in the bud before he can act on those thoughts. It’s the only way to protect women and minorities. I don’t want him in on this, and I don’t want him knowing who Kicky is. And I don’t want Roscoe or any of your compadres in corruption knowing what’s going on, either. You just tell Roscoe it’s all taken care of and you leave it at that, got it? I’m going to move Ms. McGee into a conference room upstairs now, and get her paperwork on this murder charge off the computers and out of the system now, before it gets too complicated.”

  “Uh, how we gonna run a major gig like this without the head of the unit knowing anything about it?” inquired Jamal.

  “If this meet tonight goes smooth, then I’m taking it right to the Chief,” said Lainie. “She’ll want in on this in the worst way and she’ll pull us right out from under Rawlinson and give us everything we need.”

  As incompetent overall as the United States and its enforcement arms were, there were
still elements and individuals within the system who were capable of acting with speed and ruthless efficiency when the occasion demanded. Kicky McGee got a living demonstration of this now. Within an hour she had been taken to a police doctor. Her head wound was sterilized and stitched and bandaged, although at Lainie’s direction none of her hair was shaved. She was given a series of injections including antibiotics and a mild painkiller, and she was then locked in a plush upstairs conference room with the shackles and cuffs removed along with a stern warning that any attempt at escape would be dealt with mercilessly. While all this was going on, a team of undercover Portland detectives moved in swiftly on her trailer. They dragged a still drunken and comatose May McGee into a wagon, removed baby Mary Ellen from her crib, and took a list of items from the trailer, after which they departed silently, unnoticed. There was in fact a man living in the trailer park, not an actual Volunteer yet but a candidate member, who acted as a spotter for the NVA, but since he had to leave for work at six in the morning, he missed the brief flurry of activity around Kicky’s trailer.

  Two hours after Detective Sergeant Martinez had slammed Kicky’s head into the wall, her daughter was brought to her in the conference room. Someone had changed Ellie’s Pamper and dressed her in one of her own cheap cotton pajama suits. Kicky was provided with a Styrofoam plate of fruit salad from the cafeteria, a small box of cereal and a plastic bowl, a carton of milk, and a plastic spoon, and permitted to feed her child. After her breakfast Ellie wanted to play, and she ran around the conference room chattering and yelling, jumping up and down on the chairs and throwing pencils and papers around in perfect glee, her mother drinking in every sound and gesture in an agony of love and fear. About ten o’clock Lainie Martinez came into the room, accompanied by a woman in civilian clothes whom Kicky assumed was from Child Protective Services or some other state bureaucracy. This woman picked up Ellie and said, “Come on, honey, let’s go watch some cartoons, okay? This lady wants to talk to your mommy.”