His name was Tommy according to the news. Tommy. How harmless did that sound? A kid playing in the yard and riding his bike around the neighborhood. Not an overgrown, muscle bound drunk hopping on one foot while he tried to pull his pants leg over the shoe he was too stupid or in too much of a hurry to take off before raping some girl.
Monica swallowed the bile forming in her stomach. She didn't understand how they could not see her and Sarah standing in the doorway but she knew they had to move back. She already had shots of all their faces except the one standing with his back to her. She'd have to wait until he was...finished. She fought down the revulsion, gripped Sarah by the arm and started to pull her back into the hall.
Sarah turned at the pressure and when Monica saw her face she knew it wasn't going to happen that way. She tightened her grip but Sarah'd already wrenched her arm away and bent for something by the door. Monica's heart leapt into her throat when Sarah came up swinging a baseball bat over her shoulder. Monica ducked and felt the breeze on her scalp as it bounced against the doorjamb over her head.
The one at the head of the bed looked up blankly as the soaked synapses in his brain tried to process the sight of a tiny woman swinging a baseball bat at his friend. Tommy must've seen the look because he was turning when Sarah made contact, which probably saved his life. The bat came down on his shoulder and Tommy looked at it as if he were trying to figure out what'd happened. He was at least twice Sarah's size and drunk and it probably hadn't hurt much, but Sarah's second swing put it into the end zone. No. That wasn't right. Anyway she hit him hard enough to make Monica cringe.
Tommy half turned while his three friends let go of Sharon and watched dumbly. He tried to get both feet on the floor but they were twisted in his pants legs. He swiveled around to face Sarah as she swung the bat in an upper cut and connected with his crotch hard enough for a pair of home runs.
Tommy let out a howl that Monica heard clearly over the music. He stared wildly at them, teetered back, his arms turning windmills that knocked a lamp off a dresser as he tried to get his balance. Planted one big foot back, but his pants pulled his other foot out from under him and he went down like a tree. The guy on the other side of the bed let go of Sharon's leg and snatched at him. Tommy's momentum took them both into the dresser and onto the floor with a crash that would've shaken the house if it weren't already shaking with the pounding music.
The bat hit the end of its arc and Sarah twisted to swing at the guy holding Sharon's other leg. Maybe this one wasn't as drunk because he dodged it, but tripped over his own feet doing it and fell back, grabbing at the fourth guy in the room to try to get his balance. Sarah dropped the bat as they fell into a flailing heap. She reached down and grabbed Sharon by the ankles. Monica jumped out of the way as Sharon thumped off the bed. She shot a last look at the four gorillas stumbling around the room before reaching in and yanking the door closed. Sarah was already at the top of the stairs dragging Sharon by the waist. Monica ran down the hall, trying not to think about what was behind them, or worse, what was in front of them.
"Dammit Sarah," Monica hissed as she bent over to help her lift Sharon and carry her down the stairs. "What were you thinking?" But she could've shouted and Sarah wouldn't have heard her over the music. She swore again to herself as they half carried, half dragged the unconscious girl down the stairs and into the crowded living room.
No one in the room seemed to notice the half-naked girl being carried past them. They got to the door and stepped out into the night.
"She'll freeze," Monica said, shivering. Cold? Or fear at what awaited them when they got back?
Sarah steered them to a knot of girls standing in front of the house, staring wide-eyed at them. Sarah shoved the now semi-conscious girl into them.
"Take her."
They looked blankly at Sharon, then at Sarah.
"Anywhere," Sarah said. She turned and strode toward the woods. "Before she freezes to death," she called over her shoulder.
Monica watched them shuffle away into the dark, Sharon in their midst.
"This is bad," Monica said to herself. She took a deep breath and started after Sarah. "This is very bad," she called to Sarah's back.
"And what were we supposed to do?" Sarah snapped over her shoulder. "Stand there and watch her get raped?"
"Do you have any idea what you've done?" Monica said as she half-trotted to keep up with Sarah's stride.
"I kept a girl from being raped," Sarah said. She stopped and spun around. Stared defiantly into Monica's face, but Monica could already see the panic behind the anger as the adrenaline started to drain. "What have you done today that you're proud of? Followed the rules? Santa Monica?" She turned and strode away.
"That's not fair," Monica hissed after her, blood rushing to her face. "There're reasons for those rules." She glanced back over her shoulder as Sarah reached the departure point and stopped. She could still hear the music but couldn't see the house. She took a deep breath. "What happens now?" What would Pruitt say?
"What happens now," Sarah snorted, but Monica could hear her voice starting to break. "The same thing that always happens to animals like that. Nothing."
"Oh Sarah," Monica sighed. She reached out and took her hand. They were both shaking. "Oh Sarah, Sarah, Sarah."
Something, it sounded like a voice, drifted into the cloudy reaches of Britt's brain. Cold air. The thought that he was waking up floated past. The voice. It was the voice of an angel. What was it saying? Was it talking to him? He forced one sticky eye open, then the other. Look. They're there. They're real. He hadn't imagined it. His eyes followed them, two of them, as they stopped in front of him. Opened his mouth. Something. Say something, but he only managed a small groan. Britt reached down deep. Pressed his palms into the dirt. Tried to get up. Managed to straighten his back but his ass was frozen to the ground. Wouldn't move. One of them, the tall one, stared directly at him. His heart stopped. He forgot to breathe. He locked onto her eyes. Tried with all the meager will he possessed to hold them. For the rest of his life he'd swear that they were the last thing to disappear. Still there when the rest of her was gone. Like the cat in Alice in Wonderland. No. That wasn't right. That was its mouth wasn't it?
Monica's eyes darted into the gloom. What was that? Damn. She'd forgotten all about him. The drunk kid against the tree. His eyes were open and staring directly into hers. The crowning event on this debacle.
"Shit."
"YES." Britt shouted. Tried to shout. But all that came out was kind of a twisted groan. "Britt. I'm Britt. You know my name. How'd'you know my name?" She knew who he was. Was calling to him. He cleared his throat, determined to get up but only managed to lean farther forward. Swallowed to keep from puking all over himself. Reached a hand out to her. But she was gone. He closed his eyes and counted to three. Still gone. Britt stared at the empty woods. He suddenly couldn't hear the music anymore. She'd been sent by God. Had to be. The Virgin Mary. God'd sent his sister. Sister? Maybe it was his mother. What the hell difference did it make? He'd sent her. To Britt. He'd done it before. God. Sent relatives to earth. Jesus was his son, right? But if she was the Virgin Mary, who was the other one? Britt shook off the thought. God sends you a vision he doesn't want you asking a bunch of questions about it. Probably an aide or something. Britt slumped back against the tree. Tried to hold the vision in his mind. He filled his lungs with air and let out a long sigh.
He closed his eyes tight and tried to see the statues of the Virgin Mary from church. She was always standing there with her hands out, palms up, like Britt's mother when he was little and she'd said things like, "how many times am I going to have to tell you...?" or, "how can you be so goddamn stupid?" He opened his eyes and tried to see her again. She'd looked just like those statues. Hadn't she? Hard to tell. In church the Virgin Mary was all wrapped up in some kind of sheet or robes. Britt wagged his head. Too bad.
With legs like that.
2
Mike's foot pressed against the floor as the car slowed and stopped at the gate, a habit that'd only die with his generation, like looking at his wrist to see what time it was. The guard looked at him across the short distance and two panes of darkened glass between them. A shadow behind three inches of glass tinted black to block the sun that beat down more intensely on mankind every year as if God'd decided to make the dope slaps harder until his children finally got it or it killed them. Maybe he'd stopped caring which. The glass and walls of the guard shack were thick enough to block the array of weapons available to modern free Americans, who found it far easier to secure rocket launchers than cigarettes or trans fat, public health being more concerned with the damage people can do to themselves individually than with what they can inflict on large numbers of the broader population.
The door opened and the guard stepped out, adjusting the tinted goggles that made him look like a giant insect. He glanced up first, everyone glanced up first, as if they couldn't believe the sun could be so hot. The black lenses stared at Mike, who stared back through his own tinted window. Technology rules the world. It drives us, flies us, teaches our children, and performs surgery. The only thing society doesn't trust it to do is keep the dangerous people away from the rest of us. For that sacred duty we still depend on the tried and true, fences, bars, and underpaid guards. Locking transgressors in cages with sociopaths and lunatics. How many thousands of years failing at rehabilitation without learning anything? What does that say about man? Too depressing to contemplate.
The car window lowered at the guard's approach. Mike hadn't asked it to. The guard? Or was the car smarter than both of them? The outside heat forced the cool air out with a speed that took Mike's breath away, although the years seemed to be doing that without any help from the sun. Mike pulled on his sunglasses. The guard nodded without saying anything, scanned the screen that Mike projected, it took him a few seconds in the sun, gave another nod and sauntered back through the door into the guard house. A few seconds after he disappeared the ten-foot tall gate gave a lurch and began sliding to the side.
"Cmon, cmon," Mike muttered, but he knew the car would wait until the gate'd come to a complete stop, then wait another second just to irritate him, before sliding smoothly forward. Whatever else it is, technology's infinitely more patient than man. It didn't speed, cut people off in traffic, or run red lights. Police cars didn't chase suspects with lights flashing and sirens blaring anymore. The police car computer spoke with some other computer somewhere, which spoke with the suspect's car, and everyone stopped safely out of traffic, locking the subject inside for good measure, ready to start blasting with the guns it was his God-given right to carry as soon as the doors slid open. Riding in these things was about as much fun as kissing your sister and half as exciting. Thank God for the occasional hacker who figured out how to tell a car what to do. It gave you someone to root for.
The car passed through the open gate, idled silently in front of the inner gate with its swirl of barbed wire like a bristling pompadour until the outer gate had lurched fully closed and the one in front of him slid fully open, then followed the single road through the countryside to the cluster of cement buildings that sat inside another double row of fencing, this one with guard towers spaced along its length. Fences. That's the business to be in. You'll never go broke in this country building fences. The air conditioning pumped cold air into the car but seemed to've ceded the battle to nature once the window'd been opened. Sweat plastered his back to the seat. The flag hung like a wet rag at the top of the pole in front of the administration building off to his left. The only sign of the approaching Fourth of July weekend. No noticeable celebration going on. Freedom from the British probably seemed a fairly abstract concept when viewed from behind bars. The car pulled into a space, equidistant from the white line on either side. Mike focused all his senses, but he still couldn't tell exactly when the damn thing stopped. Bad enough it drove him everywhere. Doing it better than he could've added insult to injury.
"We've reached our destination Mike."
"Thanks car," he mumbled. Still hadn't given the damn thing a name. Who the hell wanted to name a car anyway? You have an accident and it's like a death in the family. Had any of the engineers thought about how stupid talking cars would make Catholic kids who'd had guilt beaten into them feel? Engineers never thought of things like that. The thought of engineers reminded Mike of his son but out of long habit he shook off the thought without acknowledging it. The door slid open and he got out, stood and let the full power of the sun beat down on him for several seconds. He tried to shade his eyes and glance up, no birds, none he could see anyway. What bird would even try to fly in heat like this? He turned to the door where another uniformed guard already waited for him. He walked over, projected a screen for scanning.
Inside he took a deep breath. Waited for the spigots of his pores to open up the way they always did when he stepped from the heat into air conditioning. He was too old for this. And what the hell did it matter anyway? That crime and this criminal were ancient history, just like him. He stepped to the counter and emptied his pockets into the bin while he mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, stepped through a scanner as old as he was, and followed the guard down corridors like square, concrete shafts cut into a square, concrete mountain, propelled by the clang of the bars closing behind him. If finality had a sound, that clanging was it. Mike sweated so much his feet squished inside his shoes as they passed through the medical wing to the visiting area. He glanced through an open door to several men sitting and staring at a screen projected on a wall while they waited.
"They get older every year."
The guard glanced into the room as they passed. Shrugged thick shoulders. Most of the men in this place were in prison before the guard'd been born. The medical wing was a small hospital. The prison an old folks' home with bars. The guards didn't need guns. The inmates couldn't run, only shuffle. They passed through another set of bars and stopped in front of a doorway. The guard projected a screen onto the scanner and stepped aside.
The man sitting behind the table looked up, then stood as Mike stepped into the room. He was about half Mike's sixty years and wore a suit that cost about ten times as much as the one the former detective'd pulled out of his meager wardrobe for this little field trip.
The man stuck out a hand. "Thanks for coming Detective Michaels. I'm Lorne Honeycutt. Mr. Ansari's lawyer."
"Mike," he said, taking the hand. "And I haven't been a detective for ten years."
"Ten years? You must've retired young."
"When they nationalized the police forces."
Honeycutt raised an eyebrow as he lowered himself back into his chair. "Didn't like the idea of working for Homeland Security? You could've gone private."
"I liked that idea even less," Mike answered. He glanced around the tiny room. "What happened to Ronson?"
Honeycutt shrugged. "Retired," he answered, his inflection somewhere in the no man's land between a statement and a question. Honeycutt leaned the straight-backed chair onto its back legs. The thing creaked under him, as old as some of the prisoners. Mike pulled the one across from it away from the table. He peeled off his jacket and hung it over the back before slumping into it and rubbing his face in his hands.
"Hot out there?"
Mike nodded. "Always hot out there. Except when it's freezing." He took a deep breath. "So Ronson retired. And your firm what, felt an obligation to stick with this guy even after they'd drained him of the publicity value?"
"Something like that."
"Must be a very public spirited place."
Honeycutt flashed the crocodile smile of a man who knows he isn't worth two thousand dollars an hour but can bill it anyway. "Doesn't take much to be his lawyer. These are the first words Mr. Ansari's uttered since two thousand twelve. At least two thousand twelve. Who knows if he talked before that? We were starting to think maybe he can't talk."
"Twenty-f
ive years. If more people hadn't talked in twenty-five years the divorce rate'd be cut in half."
"Twenty-four years," Honeycutt corrected. If two thousand dollars an hour paid for anything it was precision. "How can someone not talk for twenty-four years?" He shook his head in amazement. If there's one thing a lawyer can't understand it's not talking.
"It was a strange day." Mike shook his head at the memory. Strange didn't do it justice. The alley. His car and the van gone. The realization he'd left the keys in both. Wondered how he could be so stupid. Based on the conversations he'd had with the brass he wasn't the only one who'd wondered. "One of the victims was never even identified. It was back in the days when people weren't bar coded like boxes of nails in a home improvement store."
"And one of them got away."
"Probably two. Two vehicles disappeared. Neither of them was ever found." That may've been the strangest thing of all. That his cruiser and the van were never found. That and the young woman. The one he'd pulled over the day before and who'd been there at the scene when he'd arrived. But that's one fact that'd never made it into his report. In fact, he'd never told anyone. He'd almost begun to think he'd imagined her. He'd spent twenty-five, twenty-four, years dragging around the question of whether she'd been involved somehow. Whether he could've stopped the whole thing before it'd happened.
"One of them was your car." Couldn't blame the man for the trace of a smile around his lips.
Mike nodded.
"Well if he'd said something he'd probably be out of here now," Honeycutt mercifully changed the subject. "He never even fired his weapon after all."
Soul Source: Back and There Again Page 6