The Evolution of an Idea
I don't even remember their names.
I'm not sure that I even remembered their names after I typed them into the computer, but their story has stayed with me ever since.
See, once upon a time back in the 1980's, I worked as a dispatcher for the local Sheriff's Office in the small Wyoming town where I lived. I loved the job. It appealed to the idealist in me, and I got to work with cops, sending teletypes across the country, answering 911 calls, sending out the ambulance and the fire brigade. I'd still be there if the job hadn't given me ulcers and started making me crazy with a nervous tic that I kept to this day. After all, how many people can say they told a cop where to go and what do do after he got there - and didn't end up in jail?
One evening in 1985 I answered the regular line and found myself speaking to parents who were more annoyed than upset. They said they had just found a note from their underage daughter, and she was running off with her underage boyfriend. They were in love and they were headed to Texas. I took their information and sent a deputy over.
Before long I was sending a teletype out. On TV they would have called it an APB (All Points Bulletin), but we didn't use that term. We called it a BOLO (Be On the Look Out), and usually put something like
across the top to get the attention of the dispatchers in other places who would pull them off of the teletype. The deputies trusted me to know my job and asked me to send it out to states the kids might go through on their way to Texas. I chose Nebraska, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, and Oklahoma (we could send to up to five states at a time), with a sixth individual teletype to Texas in case they got that far. And that should have been the end of it.
Except I found myself rooting for the kids. I secretly hoped they made it to Texas and made a successful life together. There, I said it. I've never even told my wife that.
I don't know why I felt that way. Was it that I got the distinct feeling from the girl's parents that they saw this as more of an inconvenience for them than a potential catastrophe for their young daughter? It could have been that, through junior high, I loved books about troubled kids running off and finding their own way or starting their own societies, however spectacularly they failed. I was always rereading Lord of the Flies, The Butterfly Revolution, and Bless the Beasts and Children. Maybe it was that I hadn't been married all that long myself, five years with one young child at that point, and still fresh in memory was the drive to our honeymoon destination, with me thinking what a big adventure life was going to be (and I never told my wife that, either. Must be the time for confession).
Or perhaps I was just an incurable romantic, and running away like that sounded incurably romantic. It was brash and stupid and juvenile, yes. But these kids seemed to have big plans, according to the deputy on the case.
Little did I know this would be the beginning of a lifelong obsession. Well, from that point in my life forward, at least. I've conjectured that it stayed with me for so long because I never knew what became of them. I read the deputy's IR (Incident Report) the next day, but they hadn't yet turned up, so their story has been in a state of unsettledness for 23 years now.
But you know what? That's no excuse. I think it's possible that the story would have become stuck in my head regardless of whether or not I knew if they were caught and returned home. These were troubled teens, after all, trying to remake the world on their own terms. Just like the novels I loved reading, only in real life. Who knows? If they'd been caught, it might have ground the story even deeper into my psyche, and I may have struggled even harder to give them a happy ending.
All I know is that it wasn't long before I started giving them the ending I thought they should have had. On a slow night one evening, I typed strings of words stream-of-consciousness
style into the teletype, which I discovered I could use as a crude word processor, and printed it out. I weeded it into coherent sections, and my first poem about the subject, Leaving For Texas, was born.
Even then some of the tropes I would revisit for the story showed up - my memory of the violent yet beautiful thunderstorms in that part of the country, witnessed when I was a college student in Oklahoma City; the detached nature of the parents; the presence of puppies in the successful household; and the notion that, while not all of the outcomes were good, there was a remote chance for happiness, however slim.
It showed up in a compressed form a couple of months later in the form of a haiku-like short poem. That's where the title solidified as Going to Texas, modified parenthetically.
I'd like to say it left me alone for a long time after that, but it didn't. The idea continued to haunt me even after I moved from Wyoming to Ohio. Shortly after that move, the runaways met someone else who would haunt me - Amy Mihaljevic, who was kidnapped and murdered in a suburb of Cleveland just two months before her eleventh birthday. As the hunt for Amy's killer dragged on (it still is unsolved), she ran into a couple of friends of mine, Boy and Girl Doe from Gillette, Wyoming.
It wasn't long before they appeared together in Going to Texas (Extradition Version), a 10,000 word novelette that witnessed a pair of runaways who had fallen into the machinery of The Mihaljevic Act, a futuristic child protection law being manipulated by the girl's parents to permanently do away with her underage love interest. The thunderstorms and Cocker Spaniels made an appearance, and the possibility of a successful life together was given an SF twist, and there was also some business dealing with travel under the threat of terrorism that proved eerily prescient, as we would learn on 9/11/01. I think the story is probably my best ever, and there was some agreement: it was published by Amazing Stories, and apparently a small faction of people tried (without success) to get it nominated for a Hugo award.
(The Mihaljevic Act still turns up in my writing, incidentally - check the Pembroke Hall novels. It's my way of continuing to light a candle for Amy.)
Then the story went dormant again... until I learned how to play the guitar. I had written only a few songs before I realized I needed something with a really meaty subject that I would write about... and what do you know, a certain boy and girl came knocking. The song, Going to Texas #4 (no parenthetical comment) came together rather quickly, disposing of the thunderstorms and dogs to concentrate on the story of what it was like inside the car with the couple as they drove all night toward their goal. It was a little unwieldy in the beginning - an early attempt at recording it netted a song that was almost seven minutes long. I did some rearranging and cut out the equivalent of an entire verse to get it where it is now.
All was quiet for a couple of years. Then in 2006 I started writing a series of 100 Word short stories for my blog. On one particular day I needed a subject, and guess who waved at me? Now keeping things down to that many words is a challenge (which is why I did it), so I focused on one incident during the drive, which was mentioned during the third verse of the song. I still managed to get the endless possibilities theme in - quick and dirty. Dirty as in sloppy. At the time I wrote and posted the story, I was confused as to how many versions of the tale there had been. I thought there was one more than actually existed. Or perhaps it's an omen.
Well, that's basically it. I think I've exhausted the story.
But then, it's only been two years.
Am I done with it? I'd like to think so...
Unless I write it into a novel.
Or a play. Or a comic book. Another poem, maybe.
Wait. Maybe a screenplay...
In the meantime: Boy and Girl Doe - if you're reading this, I hope you made it. You'd be celebrating your 23rd wedding anniversary by now. Your kids are getting ready to head for college, perhaps some are already there. Are you still raising Cocker Spaniels? And do you still wander to the window during those spectacular Tornado Belt thunderstorms and remember when the two of you broke the law and drove away from it all? If you did, well, fair play to you.
And if you didn't, take comfort in this one thing.
In the deepest part of my heart, you made it.
Joe Clifford Faust
Centerbook Farm, Ohio
August 2008
Leaving For Texas
-1- (The Parents' Song)
he and she, he and she
they're leaving for Texas, he and she
-2- (Their side of it)
their bags are all packed and they're running away
they've been ready to do this since late yesterday
he says that he loves her she says she does too
and her parents refuse to believe this is true
so they're leaving for Texas they're taking his car
with a phone call to mom so she'll know they've gone far
she thinks and she thinks that she's happy with him
and that she's now the happiest she's ever been
and he says that he'll love her, take care of her, too
he's young and he's healthy, there's lots he can do
he's heard that there's work there in cement and in oil
and he still believes that a dream doesn't spoil
a dream doesn't tarnish, a dream doesn't rust
he'll work to the end of his life if he must
-3- (The Officer's Report)
So he says if he has to pump gas, if he has to wash cars
or maybe he'll join the military.
Between me and you maybe it'll all end in Dallas or Houston,
maybe somewhere smaller.
Perhaps they'll never marry.
Maybe she'll leave him for brighter lights and maybe he'll beat her
maybe he won't.
Maybe they'll live in a small mobile home
on the outskirts of town
and have lots of children
and he'll raise cocker spaniels.
They'll have pups underfoot and maybe
on those great dark days
when the sky runs black with rain from the gulf
and the flash of electric--
--and with four kids in the house who crayola the walls,
she'll look back at this day
and think to herself,
"He and I, he and I, we left for Texas.
Our bags were packed and we ran away."
Or maybe they'll really be happy.
Going To Texas (The Runaways)
Maybe he'll bed her and beat her and leave her
Maybe she'll quietly never be faithful
-- they won't get good jobs
-- never make ends meet
Or maybe they'll really, truly
Live happily ever after.
The guard was nervous as I checked my gun through onto the airplane. I'd shown him my badge and credentials, but holding the lump of metal in his hand clearly made him nervous.
You should be grateful, I thought, that I'm on this flight. I'm not stupid, I've been trained how to use that thing. And if someone shouting "Jihad!" stands up in the cabin, I'm not going to fill it with twenty flying 9 millimeter projectiles in less than three seconds. I've been trained. I'll know what to do.
Still, the guard was uneasy as he pulled the clip to check the parallel loads, then jammed it back in, gingerly handing it to me with two fingers, like it was some sort of contaminant.
I wondered if he'd had Insight.
I dreamed about Manny on the flight down to Dallas. It was an honest dream, unenhanced, no echoes or smacks of Insight. We were driving down Gratiot Boulevard when
we saw the Pig Sisters trying to do some john right in the middle of the street. But when we flicked on the lights and pulled up to the car, we saw it wasn't really the Pig Sisters.
It was the runaways.
And the john wasn't a john, but was the girl's father.
And suddenly Manny looked like Boris Karloff as the mummy, eyes swollen shut and wrapped head-to-toe in decaying bandages.
Dallas/Fort Worth airport was insane. The aisles were crowded with servicemen, indigents, and security personnel. The smell was worse than any airport I had ever been in, from heat, from the crowds, from the dozens of kiosks selling ethnic foods from every corner of the world and cooking it right there while you watched.
I felt something swipe across my left buttock and pivoted fast, hand darting under my coat, bumping where my wallet really was and grabbing the handle of my Smith and Wesson. I don't know if I would have drawn and fired in that crowded a place, but it was nice to know I had the reflex.
It was no matter. I was staring into the dark eyes of a dirty little boy with bad teeth and a straightblade in his hand. The sight caused me to freeze for a moment. Suppose I had drawn? Suppose I had actually fired? The end result would surely be ironic -- me being tried under the very act that I had come to Texas to uphold.
The boy started to inch away from me. I stopped him by growling, "What are you doing?" in my best bad cop voice.
He dropped the blade. "Lo siento, senor, but there was. . . I was just. . ."
I patted my back pocket with my left hand. He'd made a clean slit right across the bottom of the pocket. Had I carried my wallet there, he would have had it and been long gone.
"Go!" I said through clenched teeth. I pulled my gun out enough to give him a glimpse of the handle, and he turned and vanished into the crowd.
I let the weapon fall back into the shoulder holster and sighed in relief. When I left they had warned me that going through the DFW terminal would be like scaling one of the lower levels of hell itself, and if I got through unscathed, it would be nothing short of a miracle. Everything happened at DFW. Everything and too much of it.
I went into the men's room to urinate. As I was finishing, something hard poked into my back and I felt hot breath on my neck.
"The wallet," said a thin voice. "Gimme it. Now."
"You're too late," I laughed. "Some little kid--"
He pushed me into the wall. I heard a click.
"All right. You've convinced me. Take it."
"You get it for me. No tricks either, cowboy."
If that was the way he wanted it. I slowly put my hand under my jacket and grabbed my gun.
"Hurry it up!" he shouted.
"If you insist." I spun hard, throwing my arm out and letting the weight of the weapon carry me. The barrel caught my assailant in the temple and raked across his cheek. He spilled back onto the floor, something small and black spinning away from him, and when he looked up, he saw the twin barrels of the 9mm staring right back at him.
"Give me a reason!" I shouted, cocking the hammer. "Do it! Give me a reason!"
With blood pouring out of the gash on his face, he scrambled out the door on all fours. I wiped off the barrel of my gun, then retrieved the object he had dropped.
It was a gun, a hardpoint plastic model. It was inaccurate and only good for about a dozen shots, but still lethal at point blank range. I flushed the three rounds down a toilet and crushed the gun under my heel, throwing the bigger pieces away.
They were right. Everything, and too much of it.
From Dallas I had to catch a puddle jumper flight into Temple on one of those rickety, pre-terrorist death traps. It was bad, but I was glad to be out of DFW. I still didn't relish the thought of being on this plane, so I pulled the bottle of Insight out of my pocket, measured out three pills -- enough for thirty minutes -- and slipped the tabs under my tongue. Bitterness welled up in the back of my throat as the warning to get ready. My mouth puckered from the sensation. I closed my eyes and concentrated.
Manny.
This time he'd never made it into law enforcement. He washed out of the Marines when he yielded to temptation and slugged the DI who had singled him out for torment. Manny had told me the story many times before. The DI was right in his face, shouting and spitting and slobbering. Manny knew that this was it, the point of no return, make or break.
He closed his eyes and let the man yell.
Only this time he didn't close his eyes. He slugged the DI, breaking his nose. Then Manny slugged him again, shattering the orbital of his left eye. The other recruits had to pull Manny away.
They court-martialed Manny. He was a wreck. The one chance he had to turn his life around, and it was gone.
He drifted into drugs. Selling. Then using.
They found him dead of an overdose. They were never sure if was accidental, intentional, or inflicted by someone else. It could have gone any one of those ways, and it had been known that he'd incurred the wrath of his supplier by shooting all of the profits into his arm.
Dead at twenty-three.
He never had a chance.
I was disappointed that the Texas cop who met me at the airport wasn't one of those classic redneck types that you always hear about. He was a rather handsome Hispanic man of Sergeant's rank named Rico. I was grateful for the ride because the Insight had given me a thick feeling head and gluey eyes. Rico smiled pleasantly and greeted me with a firm handshake that I had to work to return.
"So," he smiled, after we had introduced ourselves, "you're here to take the young lovers home."
"Yeah," I said, wiping sticky matter from the corners of my eyes. "Touching, isn't it? Young love."
"Makes me sick," said Rico.
I shrugged. "You can't blame them for trying. The boy's father is a skaghead. The kid was just trying to get away to something better."
Rico laughed. "Some improvement. He took a young nubile across a couple of state lines, now he's looking at a stretch in the Men's Club, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars."
I shook my head as we boarded the escalator to baggage claim. "He should be so lucky."
Rico cocked his head at me.
"There's always something that makes the extradition stink," I continued. "In this case it's the fathers. His wouldn't give a damn if the kid never showed up again--"
"And hers is asking for the kid's gonads on a stick, I suppose."
"Hers has filed for prosecution under the Mihaljevic Act."
Rico looked away and shook his head. "Not for something like this."
"He's adamant. Of course, there's the possibility of finding a judge who is generous to a fault."
"No. Not with the Mihaljevic Act." Rico gave a sad shrug. "Maybe it's our penance, Lieutenant Hill. Did you ever stop to think of that?"
"What's our penance?"
"The Mihaljevic act. It's our punishment for being a nation that eats its young. Through neglect or through oversight, our children keep falling through the cracks, we lose them to gangs and chickenhawks and serial killers. We're damned but we can't stop it. So we pass this hot law that lets the courts speak for the dead ones and keeps the survivors out of the legal machinery, and we prosecute killers and kidnappers and molesters without heavy testimony or hard evidence, because nothing else seems to work.
"Only we're still damned, Hill. Because now people are taking that law we made to protect the kids and they're using it as a weapon. A perfectly acceptable, perfectly legal murder weapon. It's our penance, all right. God Almighty is mad at us because we can't think of a better way to save our kids."
Kids, I thought, like that one in the airport. It could have easily been me facing justice under the Mihaljevic act
.
Mercifully, our conversation turned to shop talk -- the latest phase of the endless Columbian Interdiction, the pros and cons of the Smith and Wesson 9mm Multifires, and we compared notes on busts involving home-made Polaroid pornography. It lasted until we had loaded my luggage into Rico's cruiser and were on the way into Temple Metro. After pointing out the sight of a landmark bust he'd made, Rico grew quiet.
Then, rather suddenly, he said, "So what do you Detroiters think of all this Insight business?"
It startled me. Had he been able to tell I'd been Looking when I came off of the plane?
I managed a contemptuous snort. "It's illegal and it's probably going to stay that way. But I do think it's interesting that Insight has no political borders. Not even the political factions can make up their mind about it."
"What do you think?"
"Me?" I laughed. "I'm no scientist."
"You think it's really a time travel drug like they say? You think it really opens up some kind of window so you can look and see--"
"One expert on CNN said that time travels both ways, if you can handle that," I said, trying to steer the subject away from my opinion. "And another expert said that it was just another hallucinogen."
Rico chuckled. "We've got one judge in Houston, he says this stuff is transcendental. Better than peyote, he says, and he's practically admitted to Looking before passing judgment."
"Supposedly it's got enough of a success rate to make the scoffers take notice."
"How about those side effects," Rico asked.
I gave him a curious glance.
"I heard that if you take it over and over, it builds up in your system and you start Looking at the way things could have turned out. Only you're actually Looking at what happened on another Earth somewhere, because there's this infinite number of Earths stacked next to each other like stations on an FM dial. Like this stuff builds up so you can switch channels. Weird."
"Was this guy for or against Insight?"
Rico shrugged. "All I know is, if that's the case, every writer in Hollywood is going to save up his jones money for a couple of bottles of that stuff. Can you imagine that somewhere out there, Hitler won the Second World War?"
"Who'd want to Look at something like that?" I asked.
Indeed, why waste your time? Why waste it on something so mind-bogglingly big and depressing? Why bother when there were plenty of other things to Look at?
In spite of protests that my day had been long even before I had left Detroit, Rico insisted on taking me to a steak house where the meat was cut before your eyes and grilled over a mesquite fire. This was his way of introducing me to an Australian beer that came in huge cans. He discovered it, he said, when arresting a drunk driver who insisted he'd only had three beers.
"Only three beers," Rico laughed. "They were equal to a six pack and a half."
Inside the motel room, I didn't even bother to unpack. I tossed my luggage on the floor, peeled off my clothes, and laid down with forty minutes worth of Insight under my tongue.
Manny.
He's riding a motorcycle through town. A car full of kids on a beer drunk peels out of the parking lot of a local tavern. They broadside the cycle.
Manny's leg is smashed and is broken in six places. He'd lose the leg except his pelvis is crushed, too. He'd never walk again except there are tire marks across his chest and half of his ribs are flailed. He'd have suffocated except his neck was also snapped. He'd have been a quadriplegic except that his skull was pulverized.
At twenty-six, Manny is reduced to so much oozing meat on a busy stretch of road.
He didn't have a chance.
Rico came to my room early the next morning. I was in much better shape, having put ten hours sleep between myself and the last Insight. This was a good thing because the Sergeant was in particularly rare form, regaling me with sordid tales of his hitch in the Navy and the lengths to which one of his buddies had gone to win the affections of a woman in the Philippines.
"And now," Rico laughed, "she makes more money than he does with this restaurant of hers in Houston. She even speaks better English than he does, without the trace of a strange accent."
"Filipino?" I asked.
"No," Rico answered loudly. "Texan!" He roared with mirth.
At the detention center they gave me a clip on pass with my photo and a verification bar-code. After meeting with the Lieutenant in charge, I asked to be taken to see the runaways.
"Who do you want to see first?" Rico asked, taking me down the long concrete corridor. The place had recently been painted and had a sickly sweet aroma. "He or she?"
"He or she. He or she." I shrugged. "Surprise me."
Rico stopped suddenly. "All right. We'll do it this way." He pulled the badge off of his clip and slid it through the optical reader on a door to his left. "This one's closest."
Gears in the door groaned and it loosened in it's housing. Rico grabbed the handle and swung it open. "Louie, Louie, oh-oh," he sang. "You got a visitor." Rico extended his hand to me like a country gentleman bidding me to enter the cell. I stepped up to the door and peered in.
"Louis Havermeyer?" I asked.
The boy in the cell looked up. That was him, all right. I recognized him from the holo I'd been given by the girl's father. The kid wore glasses with octagonal wire rims that had gone out of style when the musiker who wore them met with an untimely demise some three years ago. The fluorescent orange jumpsuit that the jail had provided him didn't do much for his looks. He was skinny and drawn, pale with jet black hair, his face bony and his eyes scared.
He stammered at me, "Y-y-yes sir?"
I held out my hand and shook with him. His palm was sweaty and he didn't grip my hand at all. Like holding a dead carp, Manny would've said. Manny wouldn't have liked this kid because of that. Maybe in prison they'll teach him to shake hands like a man, he'd have said. Perhaps it was good that Manny wasn't here.
"Lieutenant Hill," I said. "Detroit PD. I'm the one who'll be taking you back."
Louis looked away and bit his lip. "Oh." His arms crept up from his side and he hugged himself.
"Well," Rico said with a gloating tone that I really couldn't stand, "I see you two have some catching up to do, so I'll leave you to it." He tipped his fingers to the brim of his ball cap. "Lieutenant, when you want out, card the inner lock. I'll confirm it."
"Thank you, Sergeant," I said curtly, then waited for the door to close.
I stood for a moment and stared at Louis. If I gave him long enough, he might open up a little. He did. It took about two minutes.
"I didn't. . .we didn't think we were doing anything wrong," he said.
I shook my head. "That doesn't wash, Louis. You know that."
Louis swore bitterly. He shook his head and a tangle of black hair fell down over his glasses. He swept it back with his hand.
"I know about your father, Louis. If there's anything I can do to help--"
Louis jumped to his feet. "If you want to help, Lieutenant, you'll get 'lissa and me out of here and then leave us alone. We were doing fine."
"You took her father's car--"
"It was her car."
"You stole gasoline in Oklahoma and groceries in Missouri--"
"Did they show you my notebook, Lieutenant? We had every intention of paying those places back. I had a job in Houston. . ."
"Alissa's father has taken care of the money."
Louis snorted. "He would."
"You don't seem to understand." I let my voice rise, just a little. "Alissa is a minor and you took her across the state line. Now I don't know if you two had some sort of pseudo-spiritual pact or a friend registered to a Neochurch who bonded you, or even if you
both kept your hands to yourselves. It looks bad--"
"You're the one who doesn't understand, Lieutenant Hill. Alissa and I have kept each other alive--"
"Don't give me that young love stuff," I said, too loudly this time. "Louis, I can't even count the cases I've run through juvenile systems that started because two kids got a bad case of hormonal swelling--"
"That's not us--"
"--but it's not fun and games anymore. In the last ten years the stakes have gotten deadly, Mister Havermeyer. According to files, you're also underage. That may be a blessing. It may be all that stands between you and enforcement of the Mihaljevic Act."
Like I said, Louis Havermeyer was a pale kid. He couldn't have turned any whiter, so he turned grey.
"You didn't even have to cross the state line, Louis. It quit being a game the minute Alissa went with you without her father's permission."
I let him stew. I could hear him trying to regain control of his breathing.
"You didn't know, did you?"
"It was 'lissa's father, wasn't it?"
I nodded.
"He can't make it fly. He won't."
"A kidnapped minor is a kidnapped minor, Louis--"
"But she came with me! And she'll testify--"
"Don't bet on it," I said. "The Mihaljevic Act can be enforced without testimony from the victim because they usually end up dead. Alissa's father has you in his sights. If he doesn't have you needled for this, it'll be because of your minor status."
Louis sat down hard on his bed. "Why are you telling me all of this, Lieutenant?" he asked in a thin voice.
"Because I'm going to need your help."
He looked at me.
"I believe you, Louis. I believe that you had a job in Houston and I believe that you were going to pay for what you took. I don't even have to look at your notebook."
He hung his head down and laughed bitterly.
"I've met Alissa's father," I said. "I can see what kind of a game he's playing. It's wrong, but he's got the law on his side. And now he's taken your wrong and he's going to use it to put you away, for good if he can."
"Where do I fit in? Do I make your bust rate look good?"
"You've got to cooperate with me, Louis," I said. "You can't fight the extradition. And you've got to talk to Alissa and make it easy for her to go back. If you're going to come out of this alive, you're going to need her, and we'll need her to cooperate with us."
"And if I come out of it with MaxSentence--"
"Then you'll still be alive to fight the conviction. Listen, this relationship you have with Alissa, I don't know if it's on the level or whether your gonads are thinking for you. But if it is on the level, you're going to have to put her first. Your survival depends on it."
"But with MaxSentence--"
"If it's on the level," I said, "she'll wait for you. No matter how long it takes."
Louis didn't move. "I'll think about it."
"Do it fast," I said. "If you're going back, you'll have to sign the papers no later than four o'clock today." I pulled the card off of my tag and slotted it into the reader. After a moment Rico confirmed and the door squealed open.
"Lieutenant Hill," he said as I started out. "I'll help you."
"Thank you, Louis." I smiled.
I stepped out of the cell and closed the door, leaning against it as it latched.
"Hey," Rico said, replacing the card in his badge. "How'd it go?"
I closed my eyes and kept leaning. "He's not going to fight."
Rico raised a fist in salute. "Outstanding," he said. "How'd you convince him?"
"I lied about his chances," I said quickly. "Let's go see Alissa."
If I'd never seen the holos of Alissa, I could have given a description of her based solely on what Louis was like. I've been doing this that long.
It wasn't any surprise that she had a long tangle of peroxide blonde hair that showed mouse brown at the roots. She was fat faced and a little on the chunky side, not repulsively so, but enough to make boys ignore her and enough to make her cling when someone like Louis showed her attention. She wore the same type jumpsuit that Louis had, but I could easily see her dressed in long, flowing paisley prints and her hair tied up in a scarf, the approximation of the gypsy looks of Deena Roth, a second generation musiker whose illegitimacy had made her a star.
Nope. No surprises here. And the interview went pretty much the same way. She was sitting on her bed, hands maternally folded over her belly when I walked in, and her face didn't react. To her, I represented the inevitable.
"You're from Detroit," she said, before I had the chance to speak.
"Lieutenant Hill," I said.
"I'm not going back," she informed me. "I don't have to and you can't make me. I want to stay here. With Louis."
"Miss Weir," I said, "If you don't mind, I'd like to explain a couple of things to you."
She crossed her arms and set her nose at an upward tilt. "Forget it. I know what you're going to say. You're going to tell me that I'm a minor and that my father still holds will over me. You're going to tell me that he never signed or acknowledged the emancipation papers I filed. And you're going to tell me that it would be in my best interest to ride this whole thing out at home.
"I'm not stupid, officer. I know my rights. I studied in school, got plus marks in American Civics. I know about Show of Intent, and that's what I got when I filed those papers. So whether Daddy wants me to come home or not, I can fight going back with Show of Intent. I think I can win, too.
"You can talk all you want, officer, but you're not going to get me to go home. Louis needs me."
"He loves you, I suppose."
"He does. And I love him."
How many times, I thought. How many times had I heard this before? In the decade I'd been doing this, you'd think the stories would change, just a little.
"You'd give up a lot for Louis, wouldn't you?"
"You're trying to trick me. It's not going to work."
"If something happened, if he had to go away, would you wait for him? Or what if you had the choice between his life or his death, but life would keep him away from you for a long time. Have you given that any thought, Alissa?"
"He's away from me now."
"Not like he would be. Alissa, Louis has agreed not to fight the extradition. He's going back to Detroit with me."
The girl's face burned red. "You tricked him! He was going to fight it! We agreed--"
"There was something you didn't consider. The Mihaljevic act." I reached inside my suit coat for two sets of papers.
"You're lying!" Alissa growled. "I know Daddy and I know he's mad, but--"
"He would," I said, and I unfolded the first set of papers and tossed them down beside her. "It's there if you don't believe me. You should recognize the signature as authentic. You may even recognize the name of the signing notary."
She stared hard at the paper. A tear fell from one eye and hit the page with a loud crack. "His secretary," she said.
"By rights, you don't even have to testify," I said. "All that has to be done is for Louis to appear in court. His appointed attorney will argue against the evidence as best as possible, but with that piece of paper, the evidence doesn't have to be compelling. All it takes is review from a judge trained to handle this kind of case, then Louis goes to prison and waits for his lethal injection."
Alissa tried to talk. She couldn't. She sniffed and wiped tears from her eyes.
"But you could testify."
She looked up at me.
"Your testimony could be enough to keep Louis from being needled. He's probably come out of it with MaxSentence, but that could be fought, reduced. In a sense, you would still have him."
"Daddy wants him dead." She looked back down at the paper.
"That's what he'll get, unless you come home. Don't you see, Alissa
? Your father knows you'll stay away. He also knows that in the end, he'll get you back, and when you go back, you'll find that he's removed the last obstacle that keeps your will from breaking." I stopped to let her think about this. She caught on fast.
"Louis," she said.
I took the second set of papers and held them out to her. "This is your ticket home. First Class. The same flights Louis and I will be going on. I may even bend the rules and let you sit together."
She didn't take the ticket. "But when I get home. . ."
"You go home and be the perfect angel," I said. "You be Daddy's Little Girl. Play the game. Get on your Father's good side and wait it out. Don't mention Louis, don't even act like you're thinking about him. And then, when his case goes to court, that's when you'll get your say."
"And that'll save him?"
"Perhaps. For the time being. It'll go before a Mihaljevic judge. He'll look at the evidence for your case, including the fact that Louis didn't fight extradition and that you voluntarily returned home and were a Good Little Girl. He'll have to consider your testimony. He'll weigh it against what your father has on Louis, and perhaps it'll be enough to commute punishment to MaxSentence."
"And if it isn't?"
"Alissa, you need to take one thing at a time. If you want to get your Perfect World, you're going to have to start by keeping Louis alive.
"Now, you may think I'm wrong. Maybe you think you can show your love for Louis -- or whatever it is you feel for him -- by holding out or not going home, or by disappearing. But if you do, I promise that Louis will fall into the Mihaljevic machinery and you'll never see him again.
"The way I see it, you can get your freedom now, but you'll have to pay for it later. Or you can earn your freedom now, and when you get it, you can enjoy it with a clear conscience."
"But it won't be clear," she said. "Not if Louis gets MaxSentence."
"It'll never be clear," I said, "if you let him die. The choice is yours." I pulled the card from my pocket and slotted it. Rico confirmed and I walked out, leaving her with the court documents and the plane ticket.
"Well?" Rico asked, once the door sealed.
I looked at my watch. "Let's get the paperwork ready," I told him. "She'll fold by noon."
Rico laughed as we started down the hall. "You think so?"
"I know so."
"Well," he said, "as her arresting officer, I say she's a head-strong bitch, and I say now that she's away from Daddy, she's going to let Lover Boy take the prick."
I shook my head. "If it was the other way around -- if she was facing extradition -- yeah, I'd agree. Romeo has a case of hormones, and he doesn't have his heads aligned. But she's been doing some thinking. I've been at this for ten years, Rico. She'll fold."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Well I got a Ronald Reagan that says she stiffs Junior."
He held out his hand. I grabbed it and we shook.
"You're on, Sergeant."
At 11:54, Rico walked up to the desk I was using and handed me a crisp new 25 dollar bill.
"You have my respect," he said. "Or maybe I've been on the street too long. I thought I had that girl pegged."
For lunch, he took me across town to some authentically ethnic restaurant where he dined on strips of rattlesnake and rabbit, and I drank one of those big cans of beer he'd been telling me about while trying to force down a bowl of what they called mild chili. He offered to pay, but I covered it with that new Ronald Reagan.
After a short afternoon spent collecting signatures from Louis and Alissa, shuffling paperwork, and confirming airline reservations, I had Rico take me back to the motel under the pretense of packing for the early morning flight. I threw everything into my suitcase, an act that took all of five minutes, then I took four Insights.
Now Manny had made it through basic training. He made it through his first year in the military, and was sent as part of the ground forces involved in the first Columbian Interdiction. He made it all the way to Bogota as he really had, and he was assigned to stay with the occupational forces. And he and some buddies got a day off and went to check out the local bistros.
Only this time, he followed his better judgment. He never ordered that third beer at that small sidewalk cafe. The waiter never was late in bringing it. He never got up to investigate.
So when the remnants of one of the drug cartels pulled up and riddled the place with Uzi fire, Manny was sitting there, and he took as many bullets as his friends.
The scene started to fade away and I waited to wake up, but it didn't happen. I felt the beginnings of panic, and I was sure that at some motel room in Temple, Texas, I had a death grip on the bed sheets.
Then Manny was on routine patrol, only he was a split second late in looking up from a reading on his radar gun, so he never saw the pickup truck cross the center line, and the two vehicles met head on. The coroner would say that the impact was so great that it exploded Manny's wristwatch.
The driver, whom Manny had actually lived to arrest for drunk driving, walked away from the accident, and served a minimal sentence because of a legal glitch in his arrest. For the rest of his life, he would brag to friends that he had killed a cop and gotten away with it.
In neither case did Manny have a chance.
The Look ended quickly after that, and I found myself sitting up in bed, covered in sweat, gasping for breath. I had never, ever Looked twice before, and I couldn't stop trembling.
I rolled out of bed and staggered to the sink, running cold water over my neck and face. When the shaking stopped, I dried myself off, glancing at the clock as I did.
The sight filled me with dread.
I had been out for over an hour.
I sat down hard. There was no way I could explain it. I had measured out four tabs of Insight. With my metabolism, it should have only kept me out for forty-five minutes at the maximum.
Unless it was the beer. Articles I had read about Insight said that it didn't seem to be affected by alcohol, but they hadn't taken into account the effect alcohol had on the body. As a depressant, perhaps it had slowed my metabolism and kept me away longer. Or maybe the residue that let me see the alternatives had kept me Looking longer than I had intended. The jury was still out on whether or not Insight could do that.
I pulled the bottle out of my suitcase, intending to count the pills left and reconcile that with what I'd taken to see if I'd accidentally overdosed, but the phone rang. I picked up the handset and managed a hoarse "Hello".
"Hill. It's Rico. Listen, brother, you've got to be ready to go in ten minutes. I'll be right over to pick you up."
"Rico? What's going on?"
"It's Louis," he said. "He tried to hang himself in his cell."
Rico hadn't been ready for the news either. He picked me up in his car, wearing faded jeans, an Astros T-shirt, and his PD cap. He was shaking his head and growling, "Typical stupid juvenile thing to do. Trying to cheat the wheels of justice."
"How did he manage to hang himself?" I asked as he threw the car into gear. "I thought he was secure."
"During dinner," Rico said, "he apparently used the butter knife to worry a slit in the cuff of his overalls. When he got back to his cell, he tore the thing into strips and braided them into a rope."
"But there's nothing to dangle from in those cells."
"He fastened one end around the plumbing and put a slip knot around his neck. Then he pushed himself across the floor. Fortunately it's a slow process, and one of the guards found him during the regular rounds."
We pulled up to the jail section and Rico took me straight to the infirmary. A guard and a doctor waited outside of Louis's room, al
ong with a tearful Alissa.
"How's the boy?" I asked.
"He'll live, no problem," the doctor said. "Whether he wants to is another question."
"His condition?"
"Stable. Alert. Angry that he didn't succeed."
"The girl?"
The doctor looked at her. "Scared. I brought her up, thought it'd be good for him, but he won't see her. Says he doesn't want to see anyone."
"He'll see me."
"I don't recommend it."
"I insist." I looked at Alissa. "I'll straighten this out."
The room was dark except for a reading lamp in the corner where another guard sat scanning a newsdisk. Louis was strapped onto a bed, an IV running into his arm. It looked as if he had been sedated. His eyes were half open, trying to burn at me as I walked toward him. Fresh gauze was wrapped around his neck.
I asked the guard to leave, then took his chair and slid it next to the bed.
"Go to hell," Louis rasped.
I shook my head. "Not today. I'm going back to Detroit tomorrow and you're going with me."
He looked away. "Changed mind. I stay 'til I die."
"Think about the stupidity of what you've just said."
"My whole life," he said, a tear spilling down his cheek. "Stupid."
"You were doing this for Alissa, I suppose."
He nodded. "She going back?"
"For you," I said.
Louis shook his head. "Set her free."
"What? You don't want her to go home? You think she should stay here until she's emancipated?"
He nodded.
"You realize if you kill yourself, you're playing right into her father's hands. He wants to get Alissa away from you, forever. Louis, you don't have to hang yourself to do that. All you have to do is tell her to stay."
Louis held up one finger. "She wouldn't." He raised another. "Jail kill me."
"No," I said. "It wouldn't. I've explained that to you, and I've explained it to Alissa. It's a matter of not receiving the death sentence required by the Mihaljevic Act. You end up with a maximum prison term, but at least you're alive to fight it."
He tried to pound on the bed but was held back by the restraints.
"Listen, I can see what you're trying to do for her, but the least you could do is leave her in a position where there's some hope."
His arm jerked against the restraints and the bed rattled. "I have no hope," he rasped. "I go back, get pricked, die. 'lissa loses. I cooperate, go to jail. I wait. There's feeling. . .not knowing. Uncertain future. Never sure what happens. Bad. But. Other things happen in jail, Hill." He looked straight into my eyes and I understood. "Jail will kill me."
"And Alissa loses."
"Yes," he said emphatically. Then he laid his head back and closed his eyes.
"Alissa is waiting outside. Will you see her?"
He shook his head.
"That hurts her."
"She'll hurt anyway. Better now. She can go free."
"Given," I said. "But under those circumstances, she'd probably give up and go home."
He opened his eyes and looked at me.
"If you're gone, she has no reason to stay. She's already free, Louis. You made her that way."
He closed his eyes. Tears lined the rims.
"Well." I stood and carried the chair back to its corner. "I suppose I'd better go talk to Sergeant Rico about rescinding your extradition papers." I had gotten to the door and had my hand on the knob when Louis spoke.
"Hill."
"Yes."
"I'd like to go back."
"That's very wise, Louis. Very wise."
"Hill."
"Yes, Louis?"
"I'd. . ." He stopped. I couldn't tell if it was to swallow or so he could catch his breath. "I'd like to see Alissa."
"I'll send her in."
I walked out into the hall and told Alissa that Louis had asked for her. A howl rose from her throat and she rushed to the door, a guard right behind her. I looked at Rico, who was leaning against the wall, staring out the window.
"Que pasa, Lieutenant?"
I exhaled into a slouch. "You know, I interviewed that kid, talked to him about the girl, and not one -- not once did he mention the word 'love'."
Rico straightened. "Hormones," he laughed. "It's the hormones. They go wild. I'm telling you, Lieutenant, they should take those sex offender grade hormonal suppressants and they should make all boys take them between twelve and twenty one." He gave me an amused look. "Love."
"But that's the problem," I said. "He didn't have to say it. It's the real thing. As much as that kid is able to at his young age, he loves her, Rico. He really does."
It seemed dark -- very dark -- as Rico drove me back to the motel. The sky was covered with black, churning clouds which blotted out the setting sun and made it seem later than it actually was.
Rico, who had been silent in reaction to my silence, suddenly offered a piece of advice. "Keep your television on."
I looked at him. "What?"
He pointed at the sky. "The weather. Maybe a tornado. Turn your television to a local station, because if one comes, they'll send out a tone to wake you so you can take cover. Nights like this, some stations run those old Warner Brothers cartoons between weather bulletins. Great stuff."
"Thanks." I stared out the windshield, almost hypnotized by the wipers pushing away the sheets of rain. "Did you ever wonder about the law, Rico? Did it ever strike you that sometimes, no matter how carefully the lines are drawn, it doesn't cover everything? And that despite all of the acts and accords drawn up since the turn of the century, things can still be manipulated by the right person? I mean, I lost my partner and the ones who killed him walked. And the reasons why they got off were ridiculous. Three consecutive miscarriages of justice. What's a person supposed to make of all that?"
Rico didn't take his eyes from the road. "I don't think about that. I try not to. Thinking like that will get a man in trouble. The way I see it, this is my job. I'm like the banker or the tortilla man or the construction worker, only I wear a gun. And when I've put in my time, I punch the clock and go home."
I nodded. "Wouldn't it be nice."
"You do what you can to survive, Lieutenant." He pulled into the motel parking lot and glided to a stop by my door. "If we don't keep our wits about us, there'll be nobody left to do our job."
"Right," I said, getting out of the car. "Thanks, Rico. See you bright and early."
He gave me a thumbs up. "Five-thirty."
I walked through a puddle to my door and got the key into the lock when Rico called.
"Don't lose any sleep over those kids," he said. "They may have been right, but what they did was wrong. The original statue of justice -- she was never blindfolded."
"Thanks," I said, and let myself in.
The room was dark and cold. I preferred it that way. I took a long, hot shower and then flipped through the television channels. Each local station and the cable distributor had added words and symbols to the screen to indicate the severity of the weather.
By nine o'clock I could see that nothing threatened the immediate area, so I turned the set off and called room service for a five A.M. wake-up. Then I crawled into bed with a single tab of Insight to knock me out.
Nothing happened. The tablet dissolved under my tongue and I laid in bed, listening to the hiss of traffic on the wet streets and trying to concentrate on Manny.
I fished two more out of the bottle and tried again. Still nothing. I laid in the dark, waiting for the familiar sensation to hit. It never came. I pulled the bottle off of the night stand and shook it, listening to the glassy rattle.
Maybe they were going bad.
A few minutes later, I swallowed three more. I laid there with my eyes closed until a flash of bright light came through my eyelids and a percussive clap made me sit up in bed.
Rain
was pelting hard against the windows. The storm was hitting full force. There was another flash of lightning, another shot of thunder. I bolted out of bed and turned the television on.
I stopped on a channel that was showing the time.
It was 12:21.
Over three hours had passed, and I hadn't slept. I hadn't been Looking, either. If I had, there had been nothing to see.
Perhaps I had been looking at nothing.
There was another thunderclap. I twisted the dial until I found a Warner Brothers cartoon, which was followed by a tired looking news anchor. The anchor gave the weather, which he said would bark worse than bite, then he handed things over to a fresher looking woman who gave local headlines.
I had calmed down and was about to turn the set off when a graphic appeared behind the woman that read Runaways. I brought up the volume.
"--Police reports that two runaways who left I.O.U.'s at stores that they robbed will be returning to Detroit early this morning. Sergeant John Rico of the juvenile division says that the boy, who was going with his girlfriend to seek work in the Houston area, will face charges under the Mihaljevic Act."
I slumped back in the chair. The kids. Rico was right. I had to do my job and let the law handle the rest. But sometimes there was no justness in justice -- I knew that well enough. Even so, the wheels had to turn.
I closed my eyes and shook my head. "Louis, Louis," I said aloud. "What am I going to do with you?"
Then the Insight hit me. Hard.
Louis got a job in a town between Temple and Houston, working as a roughneck on an oil rig. It was hard work, but without a degree, it was all Louis could get to support the woman he passed off as his young bride and the child she was carrying. There weren't that many jobs left where an employer wouldn't look too deeply into someone's past without asking questions that would be hard for Louis to answer.
Accounts of what happened next varied.
In spite of precautions, a stupid and immature mistake cost Louis his life when he was overcome by hydrogen sulfide gas.
Or he was barbecued in a rig explosion that also killed two veterans of the trade.
In another version, he was killed in an accident after turning in coworkers for substance abuse. Or he was shot to death when he stopped with the boys for a beer and a jealous patron took offense at the way his wife looked at the lad. Sometimes it was simply a senseless car accident.
Every time Louis was killed, Alissa went home. Sometimes she tried to stick it out in Texas. Sometimes she immediately retreated. Every time, her father turned her away at the door.
Louis was also blown up or burned or broken by the oil patch. He survived, physically destroyed. Alissa went to work, but all she ever found were jobs in all night convenience stores or motels or factories.
And because Louis was paralyzed, she had affairs -- most of the time.
A lot of the time, she disappeared, leaving Louis in a hospital, a child at the babysitter's, and a trail of unpaid bills. Sometimes she stayed, but she usually ended up kidnapped, raped, and killed.
Once, Louis made it. He managed to get through college over a harrowing seven year stretch. He became a software designer twice and an accountant once. Each time, he ended up in Chicago. After the money came, he started to hate Alissa and their children. He divorced her. She went back to Detroit. Her father rejected her. She killed herself.
Or, Louis beat her. She took the kids and vanished. One by one, the kids turned up with her relatives. She ended up on the streets of L.A., dead of AIDS or worse.
He beat her again. She wouldn't give him a divorce. He arranged her murder and got away with it, squeezing between the wheels.
Sometimes Louis went the other way, emotionally and geographically. He loved her so much that on a number of occasions, he let her go. That never did wash with her father. Louis faded away or died of his own hand or as another statistic of the Mihaljevic Act.
Or he ended up in Florida, loving her so much that he was running drugs or guns or bioparts, and he usually ended up jailed or dead or brainwiped, and she ended up with the kids being taken away from her, by her father or by the government.
None of it was pretty.
Then there was the thunderstorm.
It was breaking over a section of badlands, over a valley that held a small mobile home. There was a chain link fence, a stone driveway, a yard with a swing-set, and a lawn that had not seen enough water during that Texas summer.
A truck rounded the corner, one with tool boxes and ladders and cable loaded on the back. On the sides were painted SOUTH TEXAS POWER AND LIGHT.
The truck pulled up in a cloud of dust and stopped next to a faded blue Chevy. An older Louis, ripened, wrinkled, and aged by hard work, got out, dressed in a faded uniform.
He slipped through the gate, and there came a commotion from inside the trailer. A door opened, and a black and white cocker spaniel bitch scrambled out of the house, five matching puppies behind her. Louis closed the gate and met the dogs, scratching their ears and patting them.
A four year-old girl and a boy still in diapers came next. They threw themselves on his neck. He wrapped his arms around them and stood in one smooth motion, stepping lightly toward the trailer, trying not to step on the pups.
Alissa appeared at the door, stirring a bowl of cookie dough. She was older and heavier, and delivering two children had put lines on her face. But she was smiling, and her eyes gleamed when she saw Louis.
Louis stopped when he saw her. He put the children down. She took a hesitant step onto the porch.
"I need to buy some neckties," he said. "I got the promotion."
The bowl exploded on the porch and she ran to meet him as the pups scampered to lick the sweet batter off of the ground.
The storm hit, and they stood in the rain, watching their children and their dogs, and the sky full of black, churning clouds.
Then, as vivid as that moment was, it began to fade.
I felt the rain, and it chilled me to the bone. I coughed and started to shake it off, when something caught me by the shirt and lifted me up.
"Damn you, Hill! Wake up!"
I was airborne, but only for a moment. I landed on something soft and bounced. I opened my eyes to see Rico, standing over me with a dripping ice bucket in his hand. I croaked his name.
He threw the bucket aside and grabbed me by the shoulders, lifting me off of the bed. "Get up, you stoned son of a bitch."
I shook my head. It started to clear.
"What's wrong?"
"What's wrong? You were late! I thought you were dead! I had them call the room, you didn't answer. I thought the Hispanic Liberation Front had gotten in and cut your throat!" He threw me into the chair by the television. "I wish I had found you dead!" He fished my bottle of Insight out of his pocket and shook it in my face. The glassy rattle mocked me. "I don't know how you guys play the game in Detroit, Lieutenant Hill, and if this is any indication, I don't want to know. But I do know that we play it clean and straight here in Texas."
"The hell with the game," I said, groggily. "There are times when you can't win it. You know that, don't you, Rico?"
"I don't want to hear your excuses--"
"I don't have an excuse," I shouted. "I'm talking about something different. One way or the other, Rico, if Louis goes to jail, he dies. You know that, don't you?"
He looked at me in disbelief. "Not those damned kids. Is that why you're doing this?"
"The law doesn't work. Not in this case."
Rico turned away. "Look," he said, "I know you've lost your partner. You're hurting from that. I've never been in that position, and I hope I never will, b
ut I can tell you one thing. I'll never resort to something like this."
He turned the bottle over in his hand and studied it. "I can't tell you how disappointed I am with you. And of course you know--" He tossed the bottle up and snatched it out of the air. "I have every right to arrest you."
I coughed and wiped away the last of the water he had thrown on me. "Maybe you should," I said. "But I'd appreciate it if you didn't."
"Don't tell me you're only a month from retirement," he snapped.
"No. I'm nowhere near retirement. You can pop me and ruin my career, but I'll come back, Sergeant. I'll come back as a car salesman or a security consultant or a private investigator. Who knows? Maybe you'd be doing me a favor by getting me out of this business.
"But if you pop me now, you're going to screw up any chance we have to help those two kids."
Rico's eyes narrowed. "What are you talking about? Do I want to know about this?"
"No," I assured him. "But I'll tell you if I must."
He looked at the bottle of pills in his hand.
"You're right about one thing, Sergeant. We need to do our jobs and damn the consequences and let the law do its work. But sometimes you can't help it. Sometimes you think, even when you don't want to. If it hasn't happened to you yet, don't worry. It will."
Rico didn't say anything. But he looked at me, and the look told me that he knew I was right.
"There were these two hookers who used to hang out on Gratiot Avenue in Detroit," I said. "One's a girl, the other's a transvestite. They look so much alike and they were both so dog ugly that we called them the Pig Sisters.
"My partner Manny and I, working juvenile division, were supposed to patrol and keep our eyes out for runaways, bust bars for serving to kids, that kind of stuff. It was never our job to pay attention to the likes of the Pig Sisters, but we did anyway. You know, trying to make Detroit a little bit better place to live. The usual idealistic rot.
"Anyway, Manny and I had shook them loose from the avenue a hundred, maybe a thousand times. You know, move it elsewhere, there are respectable people here, all of that. And they'd go.
"So one day, we shake them, we come back, they're still there. The teevee and the girl are arguing. They were pretty pilled up, on stuff a lot worse than Insight. So we shook them again. I'm leading the teevee away, and as we go, the girl pulls a .25 auto from under her breast and puts one right behind Manny's left ear. I can still see it, Rico, in slow motion. I look back as Manny starts to say something, and the gun comes up--"
I stopped. I heard the Insight rattle in Rico's hand.
"That's. . .that's still no reason for you to resort to this. The way it happened, you played it right. Nobody was to blame. Your partner never had a chance."
I looked at the pills. "I know. I know without a shadow of a doubt that he literally never had a chance."
Rico closed his hand around the Insight.
"But does that mean we deny someone a chance if they've got it, no matter how slight the odds, when every other option is death or separation? Even if the odds of things working out are one in a thousand? One in ten thousand? A million? Do you believe justice is a working legal machine, or is the concept that everyone gets a chance to make their lives good?"
He looked up at me again, sad and understanding.
"Rico. Do you believe in fairness, even if the machinery you're sworn to uphold is not the way to make it happen? Even in the most singularly unexceptional case?"
He took a breath and closed his eyes. "If we hurry, we can still get you on your flight."
I stood. "Of course."
He shook his fist. The pills sang inside the tiny bottle. "I don't know what you have in mind, Lieutenant. I don't want to know, either. All I can say is that whatever happens had better not happen in my jurisdiction, or I swear by my badge that I'll ruin you."
"Understood." I turned and hurried to gather my things.
"Lieutenant."
Rico held out the bottle of Insight.
I shook my head. "I've seen enough."
Louis was very cooperative. He came out of the jail dressed like a modern teen, and I fastened a controller collar around his neck, waving a small box in his face.
"This is the trigger to that collar," I said. "The only way to get it off is with this little box." I slipped the box into my pants pocket. "Make sure you cooperate, and pray I don't have to scratch myself. If I hit the trigger, it's fifty thousand volts to stun. You'll wake up with such a headache."
He paled at this.
I laughed. "Don't worry. I don't scratch myself that often -- at least, not in public. Don't try anything stupid like casually walking away, either. This has an effective range of a hundred meters. Not that you could walk out of here without someone noticing that pretty thing to begin with." I fingered the fluorescent orange material to make sure it was loose enough over the gauze on his throat.
Airport security let me board the commuter with Louis first. Alissa, as a passenger, was one of the last to get on. The hostess seated her toward the front of the plane.
"You'll have to watch yourself and make sure you stay in line at the Dallas/Fort Worth air terminal," I said. "It's a crazy place. Anything can happen there. Everything, and too much of it."
He stared out the window, a blank look on his face. "Yeah. Right."
"I don't want anything to happen to you."
Louis waited until the plane was airborne before saying anything else. "Lieutenant?" he asked softly. "You did promise that Alissa and I could sit together."
"I promise that the two of you will be together after Dallas," I said. "But for this flight, let's keep up appearances. All right?"
He nodded and fingered the gauze wrap.
"Do you trust me, Louis?"
He gave a noncommittal shrug. "Yeah."
"Good," I said. "Now I want you to remember something."
He was rolling his eyes. I could tell from the motion of his head.
"When you've got something precious, you want to keep it. And if you lose it, you fight like hell to get it back, and then you do everything in your power to keep it. Right?"
Nothing.
"Whatever it takes, Louis. Remember that. Whatever it takes, even if it takes everything out of you, even if you think you're exhausted and can't give any more."
"Whatever it takes," he said in an annoyed whisper.
"That's right. Make sure you don't lose it again. Something worth having is something worth fighting to keep. Whatever it takes."
"Yeah."
"One other thing, Louis."
"What now?"
"How would you feel about working for a public utility? Nothing glamorous, mind you. Maybe start off in a menial job and work your way up over the course of a lifetime."
Louis folded his arms and winced as the plane rocked under a pocket of turbulence. "Lieutenant," he said, "are you living in the same reality that I am?"
I punched the button on my seat and let it back. "Not right now," I said, closing my eyes. "But I will be. You wait. Wait and see."
Going to Texas #4
Blue white headlights race down the road
chasing the darkness into dawn
your seat belt's undone, asleep on my arm
this is a mission that we're on
I wonder if they've found us missing yet
did they find out before the sun had set
I wonder if they found the note we left
are we in trouble now, wanna bet?
We're going to a place
where we can make a stand
you'll cook and raise the kids
and I will work the land
so take the wheel and steer
and dream about our plans
while I get down on my knees
and work the pedals with my hands
We've got your suitca
se, my duffel bag
a few more hours then we're free
we got this map to the edge of the world
nobody loves you like me
They shouldn't have told us to call it off
They shouldn't have threatened us with the cops
They shouldn't have told us to stay apart
They shouldn't have tried to break our hearts
chorus
A State Patrolman passed us right by
that was an hour or so ago
we've both discussed this, it's what we want
looks like our cash is getting low
So if you got doubts better tell me now
we still got time to head back to town
or no more talking if we should or not
we're gonna keep going unless we get caught
We're going to a place
where we can make a stand
you'll cook and raise the kids
and I will work the land
now I'll take the wheel and steer
and dream about our plans
while you get down on your knees
and work the pedals with your hands
Hear a demo version of the song
(JCF: vocals and guitars)
"Going to Texas #6"
He nearly wet himself when the blue and red lights started to flicker from the blackness of the rearview mirror. But then they went to one side and raced around him, leaving his heart pounding.
His hands trembled against the wheel. He looked over at her. Asleep. She had missed the whole thing.
They were safe for the moment. Maybe her folks hadn't found the note yet. It was as much as he could hope for.
The sight of her calmed him as he guided the car down the interstate, toward the million-to-one shot that was their last, best hope.August 28, 2006
Copyright 2008 by Joe Clifford Faust
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