Book Read Free

When the Light Lay Still

Page 8

by Charles J. Eskew


  Poet’s background file indicated high emotional intelligence; it mentioned a former medical career. It suggested a man who could use a colder set of hands, to do the things his own conscience couldn’t bear, but Jones revised that opinion as they carted the severely beaten men away from interrogation rooms 1 and 2.

  “Is Officer Wilson back yet?” Judge Poet asked the desk worker, who never seemed quite comfortable when addressed by a Judge.

  “Y—Yes, sir, told him you’d need some help with some old tech. He said he’d be in until 8,” the officer said, turning away before Judge Poet could acknowledge the reply.

  Judge Poet brought Ezekiel to the back room, where Officer Wilson had returned from his forty-five-minute lunch. “My new partner here hasn’t seen the footage of Aaliyah Monroe’s interrogation yet. We need to take a look,” he said.

  Officer Wilson nodded and led them to the back room. Dust filled everything, floating in the air to land in the grooves of their helmets.

  “Yeah, anything that’ll help take them down,” Wilson said, digging up an honest-to-god VHS tape. “The Brotherhood needs to go down, anything I can do to help you Judges to do that, I’m happy to.” He took a moment longer staring at Judge Jones than Judge Poet. The two of them nodded in unison: it was something Judges tended to do, and more comforting than Ezekiel expected. “’Course, the real problem is his little nappy-headed hashtag-starter,” Officer Wilson added, snorting a gumball-sized lump of mucus to the back of his throat and swallowing it. Aaliyah Monroe, Ezekiel recognised, remembering Marisa’s warning: don’t get distracted.

  “I think she has a name,” Judge Poet remarked, and Ezekiel felt a kind of lightness at not having to say it himself.

  “Don’t get all PC on me now, you know what ah mean.”

  “Yes, we do. You can play the footage now, officer,” Judge Jones said in a neutral tone. Under his composure, he was shaking, fingers trembling by way of a chemical heat. Ignorance rattled across his bones in the same tune it had years ago.

  Officer Wilson leaned in, and pushed the tape in with a grunt, evidence of a lard-heavy lunch.

  “Never seen one of those in person before,” Judge Jones said, staring at the black brick.

  Wilson shrugged. “It’s an old piece of crap, but we haven’t got much in the way of funding since, well, you all. The interrogation room we had to use for Monroe was never updated. Maybe you boys can put in a word for us sometime?” He sounded more pleading than Ezekiel thought he intended. After a long moment of dust and silence, the officer shrugged it off. “The Judges have complete control over CLEAR, though, don’t they? You greedy bastards are just digging your nails into everything, now,” the officer said with a huff of something beneath it that Ezekiel couldn’t quite read and didn’t quite care to. He knew when he was being baited, though. The CLEAR biometrics database, and other systems like it, were held on to so tightly by those who formerly had them that they’d been too close to see what they had. When Fargo claimed the system as his own, they took it as more personal than the Chief Judge was capable of being; as a slap on the hand to put them in line. The truth of it was, as it is most times, much simpler.

  It didn’t work.

  A computer was only as good as the data it received, as far as Fargo was concerned, and the people entering the data were only human. The trick was to fix the humans.

  “Aaliyah Monroe, now that’s a hell of a woman there. Hope you give her what’s coming to her. She oughtta rot, not trend.” Wilson laughed.

  Judge Jones had seen and heard all he’d needed to know of Aaliyah Monroe. Her first act of protest, swallowing a bullet while even her fellow social justice whiners called for her to stop. That riled them up for a while.

  Her true nature was revealed later, in a college arrest report. After an officer had dared to ask her for an ID, she stood, cheering, as the thug accompanying her cracked two officers’ skulls wide open and urinated over their prone bodies. Without their courage and suffering, the thug she’d been with may never have been added to the CLEAR system.

  Of course, there was this latest incident, the one that had brought her under interest to the Judges in relation to Thurgood.

  Officer Wilson popped in the tape and let it play.

  “So, you can let me go, or we keep going on in this until you say, or maybe even do something stupid, and very indictable? The choice is—”

  The video cut out for a moment, and Judge Jones fixed his eyes on the time stamp, the minute clock not skipping forward.

  “I want you to bring all of them in here, I want to look them in the eye and tell them I’m not afraid of their bullshit.”

  “Play that bit back,” Judge Jones asked the officer, who rolled his eyes but complied. Judge Jones called for it to rewind again, and once more before they finally let it play on.

  “You’re not going to tell us? What will you say then, hm? If you’re not going to ask for a lawyer, if you’re just going to throw out slanderous accusations to distract from your own screw-ups, why waste the taxpayers’ dollar?” the detective asked, taking a sip of his coffee.

  “You can go to hell,” Aaliyah said, but the resolve, the heat in her eyes from a moment earlier had faded.

  “I guess we’ll just see, won’t we…?” the detective asked, turning away from Aaliyah. Before he could reach the door, though, Aaliyah opened her mouth and gave the officer exactly what he’d been looking for.

  “You can’t stop him. Thurgood can’t be stopped, he… he is… he is the true voice of the underprivileged and overkilled, he is the only judge that matters in today’s world. You think you’ll stop us? You think I’d do anything to give away the whereabouts of my… love? I think you need to—oh, come on.”

  “We need to what, Ms. Monroe?”

  “You need to leave me and my love alone, let me go or we’ll… we’ll go straight Bonnie-and-Clyde on yo’ ass,” Aaliyah said, finally raising her head back up to the detective, who nodded slowly.

  Her face crinkled. Play it back. Her face crinkled. Play it back. Her face crinkled. Okay, keep going. Her face crinkled, and then the door burst open from the hinges. The detective spilled over to the ground, clutching at his chest when a smoke bomb erupted.

  Then, they came. Five hooded individuals swarmed into the interrogation room, slipping a mask over Aaliyah’s face before helping her to her feet. One of them kicked the detective and would have likely kept going if Aaliyah hadn’t shoved them off and screamed something. Play it back. She screamed, No time for that.

  She somehow found time before leaving to snatch a seat, stand on it near the camera, and briefly remove her mask.

  “You brought this war, pigs are going to die, if we all are going to fry. Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesises them,” she said, eyes teary from the gas and a cruel smile painted over her face.

  “Stop it here.”

  Officer Wilson obeyed, quickly hitting Stop on the tape, and watching as Judge Jones leaned in to view it.

  “Might help if you don’t wear a tinted visor indoors,” the officer scoffed, and Judge Poet laughed for a moment, before leaning in to Wilson.

  “Just for clarification, I’m laughing at you,” he said, in a near-whisper. “Figured I would spell that bit out for you. We aren’t wearing sunglasses, Officer Wilson; you honestly think Fargo would arm us with something that didn’t allow us to see better than you lot?”

  The officer groaned, scooting up clumsily from his seat and storming out of the room.

  “So, what do you see with your elven eyes, Judge Jones?”

  “What?”

  “Not a Tolkien fan, then, noted. What is your analysis, Judge Jones?” Judge Poet clarified, scooting into the seat beside Ezekiel.

  “Well, I see why Pellegrino didn’t want us too concerned about Aaliyah,” Judge Jones started, rewinding the tape back before the glitch. “This is such sloppy work. I don’t know how she thought I’d buy it, even with that BS about old equipment.” He playe
d the tape back.

  “Good eye, Marisa wasn’t being too gracious with her praise of you I see. It took me a few more watches to catch it myself.”

  “Really? Well, I guess they didn’t do too bad, but someone should teach them how long a second lasts…” Judge Jones smirked. “There’s also the quote.”

  Judge Poet crossed his arms, leaning back in the chair with a raised brow. “Oh?”

  “Part of what she said: it was a bit too performed, too detached from the rest. Her voice is trembling, but through it she’s trying to remain cold, stone. She’s no actress. It just… it doesn’t fit like it should.”

  “Doesn’t it, though? You read the file, about her case against the CPD? She posted a video of… Well, you’ve seen it, haven’t you? Imagine you’re Aaliyah Monroe, bleeding heart and what were there, six children in that video? You don’t think there was something there that could have snapped? That made her stop hiding the fact that she was an associate of Thurgood’s? She mentions him by name, calls him her lover.”

  Judge Jones leaned back with a sigh. He ejected the tape and stuffed it under his belt. It wasn’t worth much more than what he’d already seen, but it didn’t belong to the police any more. He thought of all the arrests, of all the accolades his new partner had acquired in a bullet-bolstered life, chosen by Fargo himself. Maybe he’d been digging too deep for something he hoped was there, and Aaliyah Monroe, for all her pacifist proclamations, was just as bloody as the rest of them.

  “Where are you going?” Poet asked as Ezekiel started walking out the room.

  “Review old reports, see if I can dig up anything on The Brotherhood, or any connection to Aaliyah Monroe.”

  “You mean the gang database? Thing is a fucking maze drawn by a three-year-old, good luck.” Judge Poet waved him off.

  “SO, ARE YOU going to just act like I don’t exist, or are you going to have the balls to spend more than thirty words on me?” Officer Ocasio stood at the door of Chief Chalmers’s office, where Judge Jones had decided to work. Ezekiel’s eyes tightened on the computer screen for a moment, not sure if he could answer how he’d like, but decided it was owed and detached his helmet, setting it beside him on the desk.

  “I think this is the first time I’ve seen your face since you got here,” Ocasio said with a laugh, walking to one of the empty seats across the desk and settling in.

  “Part of the job, remember?” Ezekiel said, immediately wincing. Like there was any chance he could forget one moment of Academy.

  “Right. How else are we supposed to respect you if you’re not walking around like a BDSM biker at all times, right?” Ocasio said in mock-earnest, and Ezekiel couldn’t quite stop a laugh.

  “Officer Ocasio, I don’t quite know what you’re expecting me to say here…”

  “I think that has to be a first for you, Ezekiel: not knowing what to say, what to do. It’s freeing, though, no?” He spoke lightly, but not so lightly as was probably intended.

  It was a first, but saying that would take Ezekiel back to what they’d burned away, he decided.

  “It’s problematic, Officer Ocasio.”

  Ocasio sighed low and long. “We’re not at the Academy, Ezekiel. There aren’t boogeymen monitoring your every move, this isn’t some psychological test to measure your—well, fuck, I don’t know, your inability to go above the emotional range of a robot?” He laughed, this time all by his lonesome.

  Ezekiel scooted the chair back to see Ocasio better, with enough of the desk still in his line of sight to obscure his old bunkmate’s left hand.

  “So, what? You want to throw insults at me, talk about what we could have had until I get all weepy?” Jones said. He thought he’d score a point, but Ocasio only gazed at Ezekiel with an unsettling chill.

  “I’m sorry about your mother, Tank. I never got the chance to tell you that in person, I thought I’d see you again after I caught wind of the funeral…”

  “You ‘caught wind’ of it?”

  “Well, I may have kept tabs. Don’t get all Sherlock about it or anything, I was just concerned. Why weren’t you there?”

  Ezekiel wanted to tell him there wasn’t any reason to be there. He wanted to tell him that if he saw her there, frozen from rot by the fluids and the makeup and the desperate ways they tried to make her corpse exquisite… that it all felt a bit grotesque.

  “I was on a case,” he said thickly.

  “Ah, right. Okay, well, while we’re being chatty, then, why haven’t I heard a single word from you since I left the Academy?” The question had clearly been tucked away, folded and frayed, in Ocasio’s pocket for some time. Ezekiel’s answer had the same crinkles and tears.

  I was going to leave. I was going to tell them all to go to hell and find you and I was also going to make a Big. Fucking. Mistake. We BOTH were.

  I was going to resent you. You were going to try and convince me, and yourself, that we’d be okay with a consolation prize that would have made for a few good nights and a few good mornings until eventually it wouldn’t. Until we realised that the only real thing we had in common was everything we lost.

  I was going to choose you, until I was reminded it was never really a choice.

  “I didn’t get your number,” he said weakly.

  “Says the Judge with every conceivable access of public and private data to the lowly citizen.” Ocasio was void of beats or bullshit.

  “Officer Ocasio, as I’m sure you’re aware, Judge Poet and I are here for a very specific reason: the leader of The Brotherhood, and his accomplice. If you don’t have anything to say regarding the matter—a case, if I’m not mistaken, you have no connection to whatsoever—I’d request you give us the appropriate space to complete our directive,” Jones said then, reaching for his helmet, sliding it on.

  Ocasio didn’t break eye contact; he flashed a genial smile, heaved himself to his feet, leaned over the desk, and reached out to shake Jones goodbye with his left hand.

  The Judge took the hand, shook it firmly, and turned his attention back to the computer screen, which took an alarmingly long amount of time to boot back up from sleep.

  “Listen,” Ocasio said, standing near the door, “I didn’t mean anything by coming by like this. I just wanted to say, what happened was excessive; it wasn’t a part of a grand plan, or some Mr. Miyagi shit, it was just wrong. You know it was wrong, and despite whatever they scramble your brains with, I hope you know that it wasn’t on you.”

  He left, and Jones continued to watch the black screen as it reluctantly lit up. He stared at it unmoving for minutes, though he was unsure how long exactly. He never expected to be so thrilled to see, reflected in his own visor, Poet standing in the doorway.

  Frost Dog had folded. Unexpected, perhaps, but neither were inclined to kick a gift gang-banger in the face. Another mission, another trip on the Lawranger, another way to snuff out whatever it was Ocasio was so hell-bent on finding.

  AALIYAH

  “ARE YOU TRYING to be a superhero or something?” I asked Colin, who’d been using three chairs to do push-ups in the small living room. He laughed, slouching a bit and nearly losing the thick Textbooks stacked on his back.

  “Nah, just staying prepared,” he said, easing back onto his feet.

  I’d been rereading Assata for the third time. I usually ended up on his couch on Thursday nights. We were two months into dating, almost at the point of making the one thing I’ll always live for.

  There would be times I read aloud, for his benefit and mine. For me, it meant practising my speech reading, while Colin, as he put it, was able to hear what weighed on me most, what gave me peace and what gave me pain, what built me.

  That night, he’d spent the bulk of his time doing push-ups as I read. I kept losing my place while he grunted out his count—keeping his voice low, but not so it fooled me into thinking he didn’t want me to hear.

  “So, I think I want to tell you I… I want to tell you something I’m supposed to, but I can’t without
letting you know the truth.” I wasn’t ready, not to hope, not yet.

  “What do you want to tell me?” I asked.

  Colin opened his mouth as if I’d somehow summoned the words from his gut, leaping through his small intestines and out through his throat.

  “I think I love you,” he spat out.

  We sat there, blank in the silence like it we could hide from it.

  “…So what are you so afraid of?” I weakly sung.

  We both, as if on a sitcom, let loose on the Partridges for a few bars. It was a good moment, and I can’t take that away from us.

  “I’m afraid, of—I want to show you something, Aaliyah. Can you follow me?” He was nearly pleading.

  I set my book down and rolled up slowly, nodding at first like a moron who hadn’t been dating a blind man. “Yeah,” I added weakly.

  When he took me to the back room, a small part of me expected a grey-shaded shitshow I’d need fifty ways to escape from.

  “Just… let me explain before you leave, okay?” he said when we reached the door; his hand over the handle. I stared, unwilling even to blink.

  All men, all women, all everyone had shit stored in the darkness, things they feared both to lose and to be found. In your case, Colin, this turned out to be more literal than most.

  I thought of all those things I’d yet to open for you—for anyone, really. I’ll at least give you that: you turned on those things most of us don’t care to see.

  “So, this is me, Pot,” you said, almost an apology, weaker than promised by the fifty or so firearms hung over the walls. The smells I’d both known too well and understood so little stagnated in the air. I didn’t expect to feel, of all things, regret; at least whips and chains would have made for a conversation with Reb over tea the next day.

  “So… ” he started, and trailed off, shrunken and still.

  “This is… something,” I said. I found myself laughing.

  He sighed, making his way to a workbench in the middle of the room, sitting behind the only surface not covered in weapons.

 

‹ Prev