You may have gathered I don’t want to spend much time here, on the blood of your knuckles and cane. The hunger you had to defend your item, the affront that is Black and mouthy, and the transfiguration into the blue-and-red-and-lackluster narcissism of a nigga to stay it. I’m done reliving it, and that’s okay. There was a slap on my backside, there was Colin, using those push-ups of his in the worst possible way. There were the officers just doing their job. There was just woefully and wilfully driven to the fatal preoccupation to not be wrong. When they broke you away from me, when they let the wrong man go to tell you your rights after a fist flung too much to the left clipped a government paid chin, maybe you could have apologised. Maybe you could have bit back something I attributed more to rebellion at the moment than rage. It wasn’t your fault, Colin. What comes next, after your name was added as a potential gang associate? Well, that shit’s on you.
“YOU KNOW I deserve this, andI’m taking what I deserve. You can’t hate the player—”
I take a step forward with the gun. “You think something about this—This isn’t funny. People, Colin, fucking people are going to—have died for this. For you. You think they would do the same if they knew the truth about you? If they knew how you use them when it is most convenient for you?”
He won’t wipe that fucking smile off of his face.
“You know,” he said, unfazed as he hopped up from the bed, and walked to the blinds, tugging them up by the string to let light into the room.
“I am just doing what you wanted me to do, Kettle. I’m just—how did you put it, in that BuzzFeed clickbait you did? Not the one where you bravely took on the task of trying multiple hot sauces: Hot Sauce In Her Bag, if I remember the thumbnail correctly. The other one.” He turned back to me. Yeah, I was clout-chasing, fucking sue me, I wanted to say, but instead let the steel fill the space between us.
“Right, right, I remember now, The cost of being in a country that constantly taxes your body, is only as much as you’re willing to pay. You know, I’ve never been a fan of leftist propaganda behind a chill-hop tune, but I have to say, that part, that resonated, Kettle,” he said, and as sarcastic a prick as he was I can’t say I didn’t believe him.
“I am done paying, Kettle, I’m done being taxed for their mistakes. I am ready to take back what’s mine.”
“So this is, once again, about you. It’s about what Colin needs, and Colin’s little ego, and Colin’s little sob story. You got off easy, Colin. You are alive. You could have fought back, got your scholarship and grants back. I told you we should appeal the school, we should use my platform to—I tried. I’m not going to feel sorry for you when you didn’t lift a fucking finger to save yourself.” The words stunk from the expired carton I’d stored them in.
Colinshook his head and laughed.
“Yeah, and then what? Do you think I’d have found a job, even if all your fighting paid off, even if, somehow, your way had worked? What do you think would have happened if I tried the fair way under the circumstances?”
I’d seen enough, lived enough to know the answer, but I gave him one anyway, if only to cut.
“You would have had us, Pot.”
CHAPTER FOUR
THE TRUTH OF pain is at the end of every fire.
There is the cost for an unbearable kind of light. Pain that pilfers all thought and leaves something resembling your favourite pop song on the fifth listen, and a string of profanity you hadn’t realised you’d ever learned. There is the ash. The great unifier, black and grey and bled of hope.
There is the inescapable. There is the moment when we’re all judged the same.
There is, also, a senior dude named Braden who can’t seem to understand that the obsolete analogue television set in your shared hospital room can’t connect to his BlueFang auditory implant but yeah, sure, Braden, go ahead and turn the volume up to twenty-holy-hell-man-can’t-you-turn-off-those-old-ass-syndicated-episodes-of-Bum-Brawls-and-get-some-sleep-it’s-three-in-the-morning-oh-okay-let’s-just-turn-it-up-more-instead.
In an older time, it would take months to heal from a third-degree burn that enveloped 18% of the body: at least that’s what the thinly-skinned doctor with more crust than clairvoyance in his eyes had told Ezekiel while he stared more at a chart than at his patient.
It was a game they both knew they were playing as soon as Ezekiel said the word Judge. It would have been so much easier if they just accepted the truth of their reality, but maybe it wasn’t their fault, maybe it was just the natural ebb that hadn’t yet flowed from the hands that once clutched the steering wheel. He’d seen it his first time in the hospital with a Judge’s badge, though Ezekiel had been too green to realise it. What had it been? A bullet to the cheek? No, a knife wound? Yeah, probably. Whatever it was that’d put him in an oh-so-dignified hospital gown also meant the cherry faces of every medical professional assigned to him telling him he was wrong at every turn about how long it was going to take him to leave. He was able to fire off a round at the temple of a man while still in cadet clothes, but telling a doctor that, as a Judge, he had access to medical care beyond that of a civilian irked him in every wrong way.
Maybe the world was fucking insane after all.
This time, though, he’d been around and around more times than they could know. He’d learned how to pull rank, how to demand primary care, and how to expedite a recovery plan for a flame-broiled leg down to three weeks.
The skin grafts rubbed in a gritted drag. He had thrown on the triple-weave Kevlar tunic, but the pants tickled across the freshly false skin like half a million icicles that never learned how to melt. He made his report, and the pain migrated from ice to fire as he rode to the local precinct in Chicago. While healing, he’d received a summons, and as the Judges hadn’t yet got their own bases in the same quantity, Fargo had mandated that the already-outdated law enforcement make room for them whenever required.
It wasn’t the first place he wanted to be, but the rules are the rules are the ridiculous things that kept him from hunting down that unique tech. The question of what the hell was that gun had rustled around his head for the entire stay in the hospital. It was so slim, and chimed in a bizarre way when the word burn was whispered to it.
He arrived at the precinct, knowing the eyes to expect. The officers, formerly fraternal, now seemed so far away.
Judges weren’t new to Chicago, but no matter where Judge Jones parked his Lawranger, they gawked, and sneered, and did anything that they didn’t realise Ezekiel had endured for years as a queer black beat cop in a world constantly promising to progress past, well, the fucking past. He bit back at the idea of taking his helmet off. It was childish, or worse, civilian; it was the part of him that died in a street, that lost his cable bill in a poker game, that took a few twisted flats filled with scentless bud to the Snoop-Dogg concert and added to the haze. Parts of him that believed too hard and too long that people are only that; sum of zero and welcome to the seeds of indiscretion.
He decided to keep the helmet on while approaching the front desk. They needed to see, instead of eyes, the dark tint of his visor that reflected the hope etched into their faces and left in the lines a gravelled fork in the road separating them from what they could never be.
“Judge Ezekiel Jones. Your superior is expecting me. I’m thirty-seven seconds early, I can wait if you’d prefer.” The officer at the desk didn’t perk his eyes from the magazine laid in front of him until he’d heard the word Judge. When he did, he surveyed Judge Jones from head to holy-fuck-that’s-a-big-gun before stuttering out directions to the chief’s office. Judge Jones nodded and made his way to meet the man on high as yet another pair of eyes latched onto him.
He counted while he walked, slowing his pace to meet the door one second prior to their scheduled meeting, and twisted it open, letting himself in.
“Shit.” From behind his desk, Chief Chalmers had been stolen from his conversation with a woman sitting across from his desk, half his ass hanging
from his cracked leather chair.
“I take it they ain’t teach none of you how to knock on a goddamned door in Fuhergo’s little summer camp?” the chief said, his brow furrowed. No, they hadn’t, Ezekiel would have told him if he cared to waste his valuable time on the man. He could, of course, have explained that if anything they are taught the opposite: that a Judge’s presence should be expected any and everywhere it needed to be. It wasn’t worth it, though—and then Jones saw Marisa Pellegrino, sitting with her back to him across from the chief, and nearly put the man out of his mind completely.
“You can leave us, Chief Chalmers,” Pellegrino said. “I’d like to speak with Judge Jones privately.”
Ezekiel almost broke the stone crusted over his face. It’d been over a year, and of all the places he’d thought to see her next, a Chicago police chief’s office was among the last.
Her eyes stayed narrowed until the door clicked close behind the chief, at which she rose and embraced him: not for long, but long enough to say what was needed, before she walked back to her chair, nodding for Judge Jones to sit in the empty one beside her.
“You’ve had a busy week, haven’t you, Jones? What was it, Saturday that you rescued the Mayor’s son from an attempted kidnapping? Good PR right there. Then not even two days later you executed three founding members of the Crimson Dragons in a raid—that hurt the bastards. Lastly, we have the sixth shooting this year at one of the last remaining 2A schools, but I guess we can’t call that one a total victory, now can we?” Marisa glanced down at his leg with a smirk.
Ezekiel remembered when Marisa’s knowledge of his ins and outs was still a shock. There was something innocent in not knowing just how far and deep and rooted Fargo’s—and by extension Marisa’s—access to information went.
“Yes, ma’am, I failed. They escaped custody and are undoubtedly terrorising more innocent citizens. Are you here to reprimand me?” Judge Jones asked, and felt silly after Marisa’s chuckle.
“You’re so—no, Tank, I’m not here to reprimand you. As quick as you usually are, I’m surprised your assumption is that I of all people would be sent to slap you on the wrist. No, I’m here for something else.” She pulled a handful of folders from beneath her chair and watched Ezekiel sit. “How’s the leg, Judge?”
“Well, what’s left of it is fine, and what isn’t is getting better by the moment,” Judge Jones said, and Marisa nodded lightly.
“You think you’re ready to get back to work, Judge Jones?” she asked, and Ezekiel found himself thankful for the helmet and its power to obscure eye rolls.
“Yes, ma’am. You running field assessments now? Seems a bit beneath you.”
“You say it as if you know what the hell is above or beneath me, Tank,” she said with a smile. Then, “Judge Jones, we have a new mission for you, and it involves what happened at the 2A school.”
Ezekiel cocked his head. “The 2A school? It was routine, wasn’t it? Hell, there’s a reason we call ’em shop class, ma’am. Too many accidents, not enough steady hands.”
“No, I’m talking about the pint-sized flame thrower,” she said, and Jones was suddenly back to the pain. It never left him, really.
That type of power in the hands of some do-nothing street gang held the potential to tip the balance. Of course, it was just a street gang: place enough pressure on them and they always fold. “They seemed a bit more organised than some, but also… detached. They’d been trained together, a little; there was familiarity between them. What are we dealing with, ma’am?”
Marisa leaned back, looking tired. “They call themselves The Brotherhood. Why can’t we go back to the world of single syllable shitheads? Thing is, they’ve been growing, and not through competition. From everything I’ve gathered, members range from your run-of-the-mill sob story to long-time known lowlifes, and even otherwise squeaky-clean citizens with a few too many visits to the Huffington Post website. We also know, those weapons? All in-house. Make ’em themselves. The information we’ve collected points to a figurehead, which is the only good thing about all this. If they have a head…”
“Then we have a bullet,” Judge Jones said. It was one of the sayings back from his Academy days.
“Exactly. Thing is, week to week we’re seeing more and more of these designs in the hands of thugs; they are growing, and more and more, we are fucking dying. By the numbers it’s not much of a loss, but you know how thin we really are.”
Ezekiel nodded. “So, we do what we always do: hit ’em in the pockets, they get sloppy, we get back the order.”
Marisa shrugged. “That’s just it. Their motive isn’t something so simple as that. The tangibility, or lack thereof, is their greatest weapon.” She paused for a moment, before picking up the coat from her chair and the four manila folders. She slapped them on the chief’s desk, save for one, and nodded for Ezekiel to look through them.
“What am I looking at?” Ezekiel asked, and fought a wince as he moved towards them, his pants prickling at the bandage.
“Everything. We haven’t been this blind before, if I’m being honest. They operate so sporadically. In New York they helped take down a hate group, skinheads—will those fuckers just die already? They aided a local gang—trumping up their numbers and arming them to the tits. In LA, a month ago, an annual benefit put on by the industry titans, the Kach brothers, was decimated. Again, a local gang, augmented like no one has seen before, robbed the guests and gave a glorified TED talk about the victims’ ‘declining morals.’ Then—”
“I think I get it,” Ezekiel chimed in weakly. Anyone else may have registered it as rude, but Marisa saw how fast Ezekiel picked through the folders, faster than she’d been able to tell him, and nodded.
“So, what can we do, then? Radical group, fighting the Man. Sounds a bit tedious, for the Judges anyway. Why not tap into the FBI? Dust off COINTELPRO, is that still a thing? They’re more meant for the espionage stuff. Subterfuge isn’t practical when you’re running around looking like a comic book character.”
“Listen,” said Marisa, “we’re tapping into our… law enforcement brethren, for help with this. It’s recent, though, they closed ranks on us pretty hard in ’33. What we’ve gathered, or at least can piece together, is there is something more tangible, even if most of them don’t realise it. See, their leader—”
“Thurgood? That can’t be a real name,” Ezekiel said, holding one of the folders open.
“It’s what we have. A Judge recently apprehended someone with one of The Brotherhood’s firearms, but for the first time the perp wasn’t one of the zealots choosing incarceration over betraying, as they say, the righteous justice of their leader. The perp talked. He hadn’t stolen the weapons, but bought them…”
“So, if he’s slipping up so bad, why haven’t we caught him yet?”
“I didn’t say he slipped up. He isn’t an idiot, at least from what we’ve gathered so far. The sales are slow and sporadic. The only real way to get in on one is either be a member of The Brotherhood, or high up enough on the shit-eater chain to get word of a sale.”
While Ezekiel listened, he combed through the folder, gleaning what details he could that Marisa didn’t have time to touch on.
“He’s not alone.” The next folder she handed Ezekiel had a familiar name in the indent: Aaliyah Monroe. He didn’t know her personally, but it was hard to see any footage, any picture of a protest against police brutality, without her standing with a fist raised.
She would have still been a grad student when he’d seen her in person, back at the indictment hearing when Dushane’s family let her in to sit and watch his failure play out with them. He remembered seeing in her something like paradox, something like fire, everything like not having a choice but to try and do something. At least in that, Ezekiel couldn’t help but respect her.
Ezekiel scanned through the pages of her life. She was a mother, though the boy’s father hadn’t taken the time to pen his name on the birth certificate. She now worked a
s a civil rights attorney out of Chicago, and aided, quite openly, a social action community which had over the years had multiple name changes.
“What does Aaliyah Monroe have to do with this? She’s a pain in the ass, but she’s not a criminal.” Judge Jones closed the folder.
“I would have said the same thing, until two nights ago. She was brought in for questioning after they’d found one of The Brotherhood’s weapons on her person. She wasn’t exactly… cooperative with the authorities.” Marisa sighed.
“She’s a notable member of Black Lives Are Important But Not MORE Than White Lives Or Anyone’s For That Matter,” Judge Jones said, pausing to draw a breath. “They aren’t exactly known for their great relationship with the justice system.”
“Yeah, and her reason for having the weapon wasn’t so unbelievable either. But none of that mattered after Thurgoodsent a group of his lackeys to bust her out of an interrogation room the other night. Listen, the CPD is focused on her, they’ve got pins in their dicks about her most recent stunt, but don’t get distracted by it, Thurgood is who we’re after. If we get Monroe too, then hey, woohoo for us, but stay the course.”
Everything always came back to Chicago. Aaliyah, and the bubbling tension of class and race threatening to call home the clucks. Of course, that last one may be less a city-wide epidemic and more sewn into the fabric of the very flag.
“Just curious…” Ezekiel started to ask and thought to stop. Thought that his answer was given in Marisa’s sad, sad smile.
“Yeah?”
“Am I the first of the twelve you came to?” He asked it slowly, trying to pick any glass from it before it reached her.
Ezekiel was one of twelve Judges of a separate but equal nature. While the Judges program was possibly the only enforcement bureau that had been fully inclusive from day one, there was inevitably an imbalance of white male officers, who were a clear majority over, well, everyone else. It should have been expected, at least Ezekiel thought as much. Women, minorities, LGBTQIA, anyone with a qualifier affixed to their name wouldn’t exactly rush in droves to the building burning brightly, that promised so many times over to light them all away.
When the Light Lay Still Page 6