I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2

by Mike Bogin

  Bishop moved close enough to Spencer’s head that he thought he could whisper. “Work with me. It makes sense for both of us.”

  The blow snapped Bishop’s head, a neat head butt that caught Bishop sharply just above his left temple, their two skulls clacking like bricks slammed together. Bishop dropped momentarily down onto one knee before he came up again with blood flowing freely out from both his nostrils.

  Spencer could feel the warm drips along with the angry hostility coming off the other man, but he wasn’t pleased. He became angry with himself for displaying fight, for losing control. There was no upside to showing capacity for resistance. You don’t give up the element of surprise for nothing, for emotion. Dummy!

  Pressure thumped out from the bridge of Bishop’s nose, causing both his eyes to tear up and numbing the middle of his face out to his cheekbones. His head twisted in reaction, his jaws clenched against the pain throbbing through his brain from both temples. Bishop swiftly raised the electric prod like a club then stopped himself in mid-air, kept himself from delivering a killing blow through the crown of Spencer’s hooded head. Instead, he looked back at the camera’s ever-present green light and waited for his breathing and hands to steady.

  The end of the rod touched below Spencer’s chin, then jabbed beneath his jaw and liftedback Spencer’s head. Bishop squeezed it until the metal fillings inside Spencer’s molars were sizzling.

  Bishop internalized the bloody reminder to stay out of Spencer’s striking range. He should not have reacted to Spencer. He knew better. No. 1: set the pace, never counter. But he could live with what he was doing. He could handle it just fine. The head-butting bastard under the hood had also shot two dozen men and women down in cold blood.

  He composed himself, then calmly instructed on the facts of life. “Rules of engagement. You touch me, you pay.” Using the electric prod, he pushed upward beneath Spencer’s chin until his neck could not rise further.

  “I’m going to count to ten,” he told Spencer. Then he switched on the voltage and observed as Spencer’s neck stiffened. “One one thousand.”

  Both of Spencer’s temples trembled.

  “Two one thousand.”

  By six, Spencer’s toes were dancing out of the ends of both leg casts.

  At ten, tiny blood vessels burst inside both nostrils.

  “Let’s begin again,” Bishop suggested enthusiastically. “Call it even and put acrimony behind. What’s the favorite car you ever had?” he continued.

  Number two, mix and blend, make them guess at what has value.

  Spencer thought about that. It wasn’t the minivans his mom drove when he was little and she was alive. Not Jack’s white work vans. Not cars at all. Nothing on four wheels. Easy answer. Yamaha YX600S Radian that he rebuilt from a wreck in 1990. Even better than the Harley.

  Bishop pried open Spencer’s fingers and felt the inside of his left palm. Warm and moist. Spencer was responsive; at least, he could be if he wanted to be.

  “You used several weapons with equal effectiveness, Jonathan. Tell me about them. Do you have a favorite?”

  “You want to talk to me; you call me ‘Sergeant’ or ‘Master Sergeant.’ I earned the rank.”

  Bishop leaned down again beside Spencer’s ear, taking care this time to keep beyond range. “Can’t do that. We all have to salute somebody.”

  Spencer caught on. There was an audience watching. That made him happier about the head butt.

  “I’m an American soldier!” Spencer shouted. “I fought for my country!”

  “You shot down innocent American civilians in their homes, doing their jobs, just living,” Bishop corrected. “Anything you earned, you forfeited.”

  “Rich people,” Spencer said aloud, as much to himself as to the interrogator. “You’re working for them right now, what you’re doing. Are you rich? No. But you put out to keep them in control. They destroyed the economy and still they got richer. They hold everyone else down and keep getting richer. But you don’t want to stop them. You’ll snap up whatever bone they toss your way, right? Follow along, business as usual.”

  This was no canned response. Spencer’s outburst confirmed what Bishop already knew in his gut. This guy was no hired gun. These attacks were not about anyone making money. If Jeffers couldn’t get his mind around any other motivation, the problem was Jeffers’ lack of imagination.

  Bishop pulled on clean new plastic gloves and shook the hood out, then pulled it down across Spencer’s face and pulled the lanyard tight. When Spencer shook his head side to side, Bishop added a strap that dug across Spencer’s forehead so that he could not shift or squirm.

  The spigot squeaked open, the plunging water filled into the plastic bucket.

  Next question: Had Spencer acted alone?

  Spencer’s head dropped backward as the side lever released the chair back into a reverse incline. He saw the back of his right hand. He was sighting down a Leupold scope for the first time just as the water splashed at his mouth and up his nose into his sinuses.

  He was back in Ft Benning, Georgia. Harmony Church. Math before weaponry. Geometry before ballistics.

  He had always aced math in school. The ASVAB, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, pointed to independent functional capabilities. Leadership, too, but he was never looking to run a company. What was his favorite weapon? It was right there in his hands, bipod kicked open, wind-motion target weaving its red dot against white surround on the motion arm.

  “Spotters call distances! Shooters will modify settings!” Crosswind 6 to 8 mph SW to NE, target due north.

  “Five hundred yards.”

  “Meters?”

  “457.2 meters, Sergeant!”

  BRASS, Spencer told himself. Breathe. Relax. Aim. He failed to get through the sequence; cold water rushed down his throat and up inside his skull. His world went black as Bishop continued pouring.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  If captured, it won’t be pretty. You will have been killing the friends and brothers of the same men who captured you. Most prisoners won’t survive the first twenty-four hours. If you do survive, your captors will want to sell you, bargain with you, or extract information from you. Possibly all of these. Their belief that you hold information of value to them may be all that is keeping you alive. Your ability to utilize that impression, whether or not it may be true, can take you far beyond survivable condition standards. You will be on the greatest journey of your lifetime. Every resistance is a success and successes build upon themselves. But there will also be moments of weakness.

  Support from the prisoners around you and the support you give to others is critical. But camaraderie won’t always be possible. You survive because you train your brain and your senses to take you someplace else. Prisoners have reported being able to smell and taste and feel from memories. Replay missions down to the smallest detail. Think about every play or every inning of a ballgame. But never drift. Plan your thinking and vary it. Control your mind. Don’t ever replay a continuous repeating tape. Rumination is a form of depression. Planning, thinking ahead, and controlling your own mind keep you the master in any situation.

  He had to do much more, had to think much more, press himself. Boredom and isolation could take him down. Time. Absolute and formless, pierced intermittently by shrieking air horns then crushed and thin-spread beneath the ten-thousand-pound weight of boredom.

  After each interrogation session finished he shook for more than an hour. When they dropped the temperature down to 40 degrees, he never stopped shaking. He struggled to regulate his breathing, fought to gauge time, as if grasping the measure of time was anchoring his sanity. The plates and staples in his right thigh pinched on the surface beneath the leg cast. Every tremor ached down to the core of his being. But in the absence of movement and sensory input, time also became the
enemy.

  Couldn’t he just die? Instead of resisting, breathe the water into his lungs? What was the point of living? Hadn’t he done enough?

  *****

  “Al, Owen is doing more than ruffling feathers,” Major Gonzalez confided, calling Al Hurwitz to mentor the younger detective-lieutenant. “This is not going to turn out well. Get Owen to shut his mouth and let it go. Once they decide to clean house, they won’t stop at Owen. Every one of us is exposed.” Gonzalez sounded scared. Al had never heard him anything but confident.

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  “You don’t ask questions! You listen! Get to Owen, Al, now. Make this go away.” Gonzalez hung up.

  Al drove to the North Corona address. His mind drifted momentarily to picturing the Big Man, Owen’s father Eamonn Cullen. Al had to shake it off before thinking about his old friend drove him to tears.

  The boys, Liam and Casey, were shuffling inside the house when Al knocked on the front door. Callie answered the door. Her face was rigid. Beyond the narrow entry, the stairwell was stacked with cardboard moving boxes and suitcases. Al’s eyes shifted to the crack on the hinge-side; he could see that there was no furniture inside the living room.

  “I’ve tried calling,” Al explained apologetically, “But I keep getting a message saying the voicemail box is full.”

  Callie caught Al’s eyes fixed on the suitcases. “Owen isn’t here,” she told him, answering before he could get out the question.

  “Do you know where I can find him?”

  “I’ll get my purse,” she replied.

  Al saw Casey’s face. The boy had stretched to see who was at the door and waved, seeing Al, who wiggled his fingers in return. Al put his foot in over the threshold then stepped back again. Liam was somewhere inside but nowhere in sight.

  “Here,” Callie told him, handing over the Brooklyn address written on a torn slip of paper. “He’s staying at Tremaine’s. We’re working some things out.”

  “Is everything OK?” Al asked.

  “It is what it is,” Callie told him with a shrug. “Go talk to him. He’ll be glad to see you.” She moved her hand onto the door edge. Al opened his mouth but no words came out. He nodded and turned back down the porch steps.

  It took him nearly an hour to travel the eight miles south through Elmhurst and Brooklyn Heights on surface streets to the Flatlands address.

  “What do you want, Al?” Owen challenged when he came to the door. His eyelids drooped and he needed a shave. “You and Callie cooking up an intervention? Am I messing up the suburban ‘happily ever after’ plan?”

  “You going to ask me inside or make me stand outside?” Al asked him. Callie hadn’t mentioned any of this. Al wished that she had.

  Inside, the house was scattered with empty tallboy beer cans and pizza boxes. “I didn’t come here about this,” Al told Owen as he looked over the mess. “Callie didn’t say anything. Owen, I’m here because I got a call. From Eduardo Gonzalez.”

  “Well, you can tell Gonzalez to mind his own business and you can do the same, too. I’m not an alky, Al. There’s no Step One and no other steps, either. I’m going through some stuff. That’s all. I can handle it. OK? I can handle it,” Owen said.

  “I wish your Old Man was here to slap you silly.” Al swept the beer cans off the table and leaned into Owen’s face. “You say you can handle it, handle it! You think Eduardo Gonzalez called me about drinking? You really think that’s why I’m here? Get your head straight, Owen. Callie and the boys are moving out, you’re not with them, and look at you. You think you’re a picture of health? So I don’t think you’re doing such a great job. Do you? But that is not why I’m here.”

  Al had made some inquiries of his own before driving to North Corona; discretely, not like Owen’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach. He stopped fast after looked no further than the file dates shown beside the entries. He never opened the actual files. He didn’t have to open them. ‘Dimitri Vosilych’ first appeared in the system after Mamaroneck. Blood samples cannot match DNA with a person who didn’t exist in the system before the DNA was analyzed. Owen had the little picture correct; whatever the big picture was, it was too big for any of them.

  “Owen, are you sober?” Al pressed. “You know where I stand on alcohol, but right now I don’t particularly care about your drinking habits. Focus. You need to focus!”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” He scraped his tongue against his upper front teeth then tried unsuccessfully to swallow the gunk. “Let me get a glass of water.” Owen stood up, looked at the cupboard, and then realized it was all moved out. He found a red plastic party cup, looked inside, and then put it under the tap to rinse it out. Nothing came out when he turned the faucet before remembering that the water had been shut off. He had a jug inside the refrigerator; he rinsed the cup and filled it again, then gulped it down.

  “Owen, this is bigger than you and me and Tremaine.” Al’s voice came across firm, unequivocal. “You need to stop pressing buttons.”

  “It’s shite,” Owen grumbled. “Fecking bollocks. I’m going to find Master Sergeant Jonathan Spencer, I’m going to interview him, and I’m going to see what is really going on.”

  “No!” Al slapped the table and recoiled from the sting. “Owen, I believe you. Best guess is Major Gonzalez believes you. OK? I’m not sure who this Dimitri Vosilych is or if he ever existed at all. But NYPD, the Bureau, and every other agency have stopped allocating resources. If the shooter was still out there, they wouldn’t do that, would they? No, they wouldn’t! You have to let this go. Case closed. You have a family, a career. Case closed! Do you get that? Case closed!”

  *****

  No day, no night, only the uninterrupted single fluorescent bulb. Sleep and waking blended into a psychedelic parfait swirl that distorted the surroundings like a fun-house mirror while he lay there 24/7 with that tiny green bulb blinking down at him like a crazed housefly readying to descend.

  His body rhythms were confused under the GE bulb’s constant dull glare. Only foods distinguished mornings from evenings and days from nights. Oatmeal. Day. Day, sunlight and movement, purpose. Night. Meals: toasted cheese sandwich, potato chips, chocolate chip cookie; fish sticks and peas, buttermilk donut; Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, Snickers bar; spaghetti with tomato sauce, iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing, tapioca pudding cup; chicken nuggets with honey mustard dip, creamed corn, fruit cup; beef stew, steamed carrots, chocolate cake; real roast chicken, red beans and rice, fresh fruit, a can of Tree Top apple juice. Turkey and gravy. Start again. But he salivated like Pavlov’s dog waiting for the institutional food to slip along the floor.

  On chicken fingers and apple juice day there were no interrogations. Sunday? Chicken fingers. He took to peeling off the breading in tiny bits, then leaving it to dissolve on his tongue. When the breading was gone, he tore the white chicken meat into minute threads and nibbled at them with his front teeth, squirrel-like, elongating the meal to kill time.

  The monotony within the segregated cell was worse than torture; he would take the extremes over sensory deprivation any time. No contest. The 24/7 silences punctuated by the shocking metallic slam like a Chinese gong when they opened the food slot had him looking forward to interrogation. He understood how fucked up that was, but the challenge of resisting was sustaining him through, one day at a time. BPM and breathing could measure minutes. Minutes, with discipline, could be aggregated into hours. Hold onto the measures, he reminded himself. He practiced counting breaths into minutes, minutes into hours; he got as far as eight hours before cracking. Just knowing the time and filling it made him stronger. His exercises made him stronger. Every day the baritone Texas voice failed to beat him made Spencer stronger.

  Irregular intervals between meals, but always between nine point five to ten point five hours between breakfast and dinner, thirteen point five to fourt
een hours between dinner and breakfast, he thought to himself.

  Two meals each day, ten hours apart, or very close to it. Dinners rotating on seven-day cycles. Even the interrogator took a day off, like this was routine for him, too. Apple juice day. Stocky and Slim were replaced by “the Twins” for two days, the day before and apple juice day, then came back dragging themselves like it was Monday morning. Interrogation was run between meals.

  Spencer counted time on his toes and fingers between breakfast and then again when the cell door opened then again between his return to the cell and dinner. The interval gave him a gauge on the duration. He had learned quickly that it was beyond him to try to measure time during interrogation; what seemed like hours could have been several minutes; he just could not know.

  Nobody brought charges against him. He never saw a cop, never was read his Miranda rights. No lawyer, no phone call. Their voices were American, but this wasn’t America. In America, nobody chills a prison cell to twenty degrees one day and blazes it to 130 degrees the next day. Nobody straps you down, blindfolded, and then shoots you with narcotic cocktails that compress cognition into smells that you can feel entering through every pore in your body.

  Clarity. The assemblage of rational thought without input, without contrast. Get it together!

  The attacks had done damage. He hit them where they lived. You’d be in a regular prison and represented by lawyers if they were confident, not in this place, wherever this is. You’re important, he told himself. The proof was all around him. Let them think you’re working with others, that they’re all still targets. Having billions isn’t worth a lot if you’re too afraid to be enjoying them.