End Game (19 page)

She sat alone in a holding cell that looked more like the pictures she’d seen of supermax prisons than what she’d envisioned a county jail to look like. Assuming the tiles on the floor were one foot square, her rectangular corner of the world measured roughly five by seven. A heavy steel door occupied the narrow dimension at the front of the cell, with a tiny wire-reinforced glass window that looked out into the hallway—or would look out into the hallway if the sliding panel on the far side were open. She imagined that the other panel in the door, this one about waist high and made of metal, was a hinged flap that would allow the guard staff to pass food to her without opening the door. It looked just big enough to accommodate a cafeteria tray.

Her cot was actually a concrete half wall that ran the length of the long dimension of the cell, and it was topped with a thin mattress that had been rolled up around her pillow and nudged up against the back wall. Hospital-green sheets and a blanket sat folded in front of the bedroll. The most prominent feature in the left-center of the space was a squatty, mushroom-shaped stainless-steel bar stool that served as the chair for the stainless-steel desk that folded up to reveal the stainless-steel toilet. Efficiency at its most hideous.

Aware of the fisheye camera in the corner of the ceiling nearest the door—enclosed, of course, by what appeared to be bulletproof glass—she wondered what bizarre pleasure some of the guards must have gotten from watching prisoners take care of bodily functions. It wouldn’t surprise her to learn that there was a porn channel devoted to just that.

As she placed the sheets onto the desk and began to unroll the mattress, she took inventory of where she was and how she’d gotten here. As far as she could recall, the arresting officers had never told her what she she’d been arrested for, and she hadn’t asked because (a) it would violate her rule of saying nothing, and (b) it would all be revealed sooner or later.

Imprisonment was a first for her. There’d been a close call back in her teen years where a kindhearted magistrate had overridden the desires of a county cop following a DUI charge, but to date, she’d never spent a moment in jail. She surprised herself with her own calm. Sure, it was scary, but she’d scored a single room where she didn’t have to deal with the politics and violence of other prisoners, and the entire ordeal was only a few hours old.

Give it a few more, she thought. Once nighttime came, and the boredom of her own company began to crush her, she imagined that there’d be plenty of panic to deal with.

For the time being, she committed herself to treating this mess as an adventure. If nothing else, she was experiencing an adrenaline rush of a magnitude she hadn’t felt since the Sandbox.

Jolaine’s sole experience with the rigors and processes of the criminal justice system was limited to what she’d seen on television. As she spread the nearly see-through thin green sheet across the mattress, she thought through the events of the past couple of hours, and she tried to reconcile the facts of her situation to the fiction that she’d seen so often.

They never read me my rights,
she thought. The realization startled her. Wasn’t that a requirement whenever someone was arrested? Yes, she was certain of it.

Come to think of it, they’d never actually said that she was under arrest. That thought brought her bed-making to a halt. She stood there, with the top of the sheet tucked in and the bottom of the sheet suspended like a flag as she tried to figure out what that might mean.

I’m in jail, but I haven’t been arrested.

The thought paralyzed her. She dropped the sheet and sat heavily on the bed. She felt the blood draining from her head, but she forced herself to sit upright anyway so as not to give whoever was watching her camera feed any indication of fear. She didn’t know why that was important, but it was.

Jolaine told herself to calm down and to think through exactly what she did and didn’t
know.
What she thought and what she feared were irrelevant. It was too easy to shoot out to the worst-case scenario, and to extrapolate from there that all roads and all options led to tragedy. Panic was the only result of bad assumptions, and panic always resulted in tragedy. She needed to think it all through.

Fact: Her arrest violated all of the rules she was aware of regarding arrest procedures.

Counterfact: She wasn’t a lawyer, and not everything you saw on television was true. Hell, depending on what channel you watched, only half of what you saw on the news was true.

Fact: Graham was the sole possessor of some kind of code that a lot of people thought was worth killing for.

Fact: If her observations about her nonarrest were true, then someone was asleep at the switch because—again, if television lawyers knew what they were doing—any case against her would be fatally flawed and the government would be guaranteed to lose.

Unless they don’t care about losing.

But why would that be? This couldn’t all be some scare tactic, could it? Could that possibly be legal? Wouldn’t there be consequences to pointing guns and pulling people out of their cars just to make a point?

No, she thought, it was more than that. Just as she had seen the terror in Graham’s eyes, she had also seen genuine fear in the eyes of those cops who took them down. They’d been expecting bad things from Jolaine, and that expectation had driven all of the rough handling that had followed. Even down to manhandling a fourteen-year-old boy.

Where did such fear come from?

Clearly, the police had been alerted to be on the lookout for them. That in turn meant that someone had told them what and who to look for. But who? Who would even know what car she was driving?

Fact: No one had asked her any questions. They hadn’t even fingerprinted her.

After all of the drama and all of the violence and near-violence, why would there be such silence? It was almost as though they’d been instructed not to say anything.

That’s it.
She didn’t know why, exactly, but in that moment of clarity, she knew beyond all doubt that the jail staff had in fact been instructed not to speak with her. Just the basics, to make sure that she didn’t pose an unreasonable threat, and then nothing else. All the praise she’d awarded herself for holding her tongue had in fact been a gift delivered by others. She hadn’t needed to speak because no one wanted to speak with her in the first place.

So, who was doing this? Why was she here? Who had she pissed off so badly?

Whoever it was, they were important and they were powerful—powerful enough to mobilize a law enforcement agency. FBI, maybe? CIA? She imagined that a conspiracy this complex had to be run by some kind of alphabet agency.

What’s their next move?
she wondered. Why take her to jail and then just let her sit? That didn’t make sense.

Then she got it. As the realization bloomed, her heart rate doubled. This was only the beginning of her journey. This was a holding place—a place to be only for as long as it took for whoever was in charge to move her someplace else.

And she knew with certainty that when that transfer happened, she would come face-to-face with the agency that was pulling the strings. And then what?

That answer was obvious, wasn’t it? They’d take her away and squeeze her for information that she didn’t have.

Jolaine stood again and paced her cell. To hell with what the camera watchers thought. She needed a plan, and she needed it before people arrived with keys and took her away. Just as certainly as she believed she’d landed on the reality of her nonarrest, she knew that after she left this place—after the bad guys, whoever they were, came to take her away—the fuse on her life would burn down to nothing. Once these people got from her what they wanted, they would stuff her into a shallow grave and never look back.

The damn stool in the middle of the cell made it impossible even to pace. She needed to pace. She needed to scream. What the hell was she going to do?

She hated the Mitchells for putting her in this spot. What had they been up to?

She wanted to think that the Mitchells were patriots, and as such would never try to pass along a secret that could harm her country.

But to learn otherwise would not surprise her. She knew that there were some foreign affiliations, and that not all of them were friendly. When Bernard and Sarah argued, it was always in their native language—someplace in Eastern Europe—and consequently, Jolaine never knew the true substance of what they were saying. But she’d sensed growing tension over the past weeks, and she’d sensed that it had something to do with the visitors who’d been coming by with greater frequency. They gathered with the Mitchells for meetings in the same foreign tongue that she could not understand. Voices were often raised, however, and the visitors rarely departed happier than when they’d arrived.

It was possible, she supposed, that the substance of those meetings was to conspire against the United States, but how could she know? And if that were indeed the case, that would mean that the Mitchells had willingly and willfully recruited her as a coconspirator. Would they really do such a thing after all she’d done for Graham and for the family?

How could she know?

Jolaine sat on the shiny stool. The fact of the matter was that she couldn’t know, not with any certainty. By extension, then, she had no choice but to assume the worst and act accordingly.

So, now what? She asked herself that question as if she had choices. Locked in a concrete room, her options were limited to one: Wait. For what, she had no clue, but the wait was a guarantee.

Sooner or later, that door would open, and when it did, options would arrive. She suspected that they would all be terrible ones, but at least they’d be options. She could not allow herself to be taken into the next stage. If a transfer lay in her future—and now she was certain that it did—she needed to make sure that the transfer would never be completed successfully.

If it came to that, she’d die trying, because the one thing she knew beyond all doubt was that she intended to survive.

D
eputy Price led Graham down the hallway and through a locked door into a part of the building the boy hadn’t seen before.

“Is this a jail? Graham asked.

“Technically, no,” the deputy said. “This is just a police station. We have some holding cells and some interrogation rooms—you know all about one of those—but the jail itself is down the road a bit.”

“Why am I here?”

The far side of the locked door opened up on a much larger area that looked like a hospital waiting room—or at least what Graham imagined that a hospital waiting room would look like. Molded plastic chairs, blue and orange, littered the area in what looked to his eye to be a random order, as if people moved them throughout the day to form their own conversation groups and then never put them back where they belonged. The yellow and brown theme continued out here, but the floors and walls seemed dirtier. Most of the chairs were empty now, and the occupants of the ones that were taken had all pulled theirs away from the others. No conversation groups were currently in session.

“Not sure how to answer your question,” Deputy Price said.

“You could just tell the truth,” Graham said. He’d meant it to be a flippant remark and it hit its target squarely.

Price got a little taller. “I’m cutting you a break, kid. Don’t make me regret it. Have a seat.”

Graham felt a gentle pressure on his shoulder—there was no way to call it a push—and he helped himself to a blue chair. Deputy Price pulled over an orange one and he sat sideways in it, with his legs crossed and his left arm slung casually over the back. Now that they were sitting, the difference in height was almost nothing.

“Graham, I’m going to be honest with you. I have no idea why you’re here. We got orders to stop the car you were in and to take the occupants of that car into custody.”

“Why?” Something about the way Deputy Price handled himself put Graham at ease. As long as they were just talking like this, he felt safe.

“I don’t have an answer for that,” Price said. “Sometimes that happens. We get an order to pull someone over and bring them in, and sometimes we don’t find out what the reason is. Doesn’t happen often, but sometimes. This was one of those times.”

“So, am I under arrest?” None of what was happening fit into any of the
Law & Order
episodes he’d watched with Jolaine.

“No. You’re in custody, but you’re not under arrest.”

“So I can leave?”

“Do you have someplace to go?”

The question hit Graham like a smack. Something sagged in his chest. On top of everything else that had turned shitty, he was homeless. Homeless, and maybe an orphan. He felt a rush of sadness that made him gasp. Words wouldn’t come.

Deputy Price leaned in closer. Close enough to touch, but he didn’t touch. “Talk to me, Graham. I want to help you. Have you and your friend Jolaine been up to no good?”

Graham wanted to answer. He wanted to tell this cop with the friendly eyes all about the people who invaded his house and shot up his family. He wanted to tell about the doctor in the middle of nowhere, and about how terribly pale his mother looked the last time he saw her. He wanted to tell the cop about everything, and then he wanted to be free from it all.

Graham wanted a do-over. He wanted a time machine where you just climb in, turn a few dials, and flip a few switches, and suddenly nothing is what it was. He wanted to do anything that would take away that horrible feeling in the pit of his stomach, the fear—no, the
certainty
—that something terrible was going to happen to him.

Yet as much as he wanted it—as much as he would have sold his soul to attain it—he knew that none of it was possible. He knew that telling Deputy Price anything would pose more problems than it would solutions, just as Jolaine had said. They’d listened to the radio in the car, and they’d watched television in the motel room, yet there’d been no mention of all those terrible things. How was that possible?

With no police reports to back him up, no one would believe his story anyway. And even if they did, and they drove all the way out to Antwerp to investigate, they’d find a lot of bullet holes and dead bodies, and then they’d start asking why he and Jolaine were on the run instead of calling the police in the first place.

And that would be a hell of a good question, Graham thought. Last night, it didn’t make sense to him why they didn’t call the police, and it didn’t make any more sense right now. They didn’t call because Jolaine said that it would be a mistake to call. That was the only reason, and what kind of reason was that?

Reason enough for her to risk her life to save me and Mom.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

Price’s shoulders sagged. “Son, I can’t help you unless you talk to me.”

Something about the deputy’s delivery rubbed Graham the wrong way, and his filters kicked in again. Maybe it was use of the word “son.” He already had a father, he didn’t need another one. “Let me ask you a question,” he said.

The deputy shrugged. “I’m all ears.”

“That ugly lady. Peggy. She said she wanted to help me, too. She told me that the best thing I could do was to tell her everything. Now you’re saying I should do the same thing. Why should I believe anything you say?”

Price took his time answering. “You can’t honestly tell me that you don’t trust me more than you trusted her.”

“That just makes you the good cop.”

“Excuse me?”

“The good cop. You know what I mean. It’s in every friggin’ cop show. She was the bad cop, and you’re the good cop. You work in a team so that she pisses me off, and then you butter me up.”

Price’s eyes narrowed to the point of squinting. “It’s not like that, Graham. I promise you.”

Graham wanted to believe him. He thought he did believe him, but trust was just too big a risk. “That’s exactly what you would say if I was right,” he said.

Deputy Price took a breath to reply, but then he let it go and smiled. “I got nothin’ to say to that,” he said. “You’re right. That’s exactly what I would say if I were trying to trick you. That’s not where I’m coming from, but I understand where you’re coming from. I got no answer that you can dare believe.”

Silence fell between them, and it lasted probably two minutes before a door on the far end of the room opened up and a young man and woman entered from the outside and walked to the front desk—a window thing with thick glass and a microphone. The couple didn’t look much older than Jolaine.

“I believe those are your foster parents for the next day or three,” Price said.

Graham felt a jolt of panic. “You mean I have to leave?”

“I promised you a comfortable bed. We don’t have any of those here. You’ll be fine. They’re the Markhams, and they’re very nice people. You’ll be safe with them.”

“But I was beginning to feel safe here.”

“This is a police station, Graham. It’s not a place for fourteen-year-olds. You’ll be better off there.”

Graham watched them at the little window as they talked to the lady in the uniform. They turned in unison and looked straight at him. The wife waved at him with the tips of her fingers. It reminded him of a cat scratching at a screen.

“I don’t like them,” he said.

“I’m telling you they’re good people,” Price said. He leaned over to the side to gain access to his back pocket and he pulled out a little black leather wallet. Inside was a stack of business cards. He slid one out and handed it to Graham. “This is me. My numbers are on it. If you have any problems or concerns, if you get scared, or if you just want to talk, you give me a call anytime—day, night, or early morning.”

Graham held the card in both hands. Why was this guy being so nice? What did he want?

Price pointed with his head to the Markhams. They were approaching, and he held up a hand to tell them to stay back for a bit. They stopped and moved to some chairs on the other side of the waiting room.

“Look at me, Graham,” Price said.

Graham looked. He saw a mask of concern on the deputy’s face.

“I know some bad things have happened. I don’t know what they are, but just in watching the emotion in your face and in your body language, I know that something really bad is going on. I know that you feel as though you can’t trust anyone.”

He paused, as if waiting for Graham to confirm or deny. He did neither.

“I’m going to tell you something important,” Price continued. “Whatever your secrets are, they’re yours to keep, from whoever you want to keep them. Now listen to me. If you’re not willing to tell me—and that’s fine that you’re not, I respect that—I don’t want you to tell anyone, understand? Whatever your secrets are, people are trying to hurt you to get them. That’s not right. That scares me, and it should scare you. You keep your secrets secret, understand?”

Graham’s sense of fear deepened. Price was serious, and he looked genuinely worried for him.

“Am I going to be okay?” Graham asked.

Deputy Price looked away. “I don’t know, Graham,” he said. “I just don’t know. That’s not the answer you wanted to hear, and I apologize for that. But it’s the only answer I know how to give.”

Price leaned forward and put out two hands in a clamshell gesture. “I pray to God that this is all just nothing,” he said. “But if the shit hits the fan—pardon my French—you give me a call and I’ll be there for you. Please trust me that much. If you find yourself without any other options, I’m worth a roll of the dice.”

Graham found tears tracking his cheeks before he knew that he was crying.

Price sat up straight. He shot a glance over to the Markhams. “No tears, Graham,” he said. “That’s no way to start with the new family. I hate to put it to you this way, but now’s the time to suck it up and roll with what’s coming. Don’t show weakness, know what I mean?”

Graham in fact did not know what he meant, but he knew that nodding yes was the right thing to do.

Price smacked the side of Graham’s knee twice. “Good,” he said. “I know this is all very scary, but try to think of it as an adventure.”

With that, the deputy stood and beckoned for the Markhams to come over and join them. They rose in unison and walked nearly in step. They stopped when they were six feet away and they smiled.

“Anita and Peter,” Price said, “this is Graham Mitchell. Graham, this is Anita and Peter Markham.”

Anita smiled wider and Peter extended his hand. “Hi, Graham,” he said. “I’m sorry that you’re going through tough times. I’d consider it an honor to have you join us at our home.”

The words sounded at once sincere and rehearsed. Graham wasn’t sure how they pulled it off, but it didn’t feel threatening. He accepted the hand and they shook. Peter treated him like a girl, accepting only Graham’s fingers in the handshake. That felt strange.

“Hi,” Graham said.

Anita’s hand shot out next. “I’m Anita,” she said. “This is Peter.”

Graham made a smile face and shook her hand, too. “I got that,” he said. He stood.

“Are you ready to go?” Peter asked.

Graham improved his posture and settled his shoulders. “Sure,” he said.

And it was done. The three of them headed toward the front together. As they reached the door, Graham shot a look back to Deputy Price, but he’d already moved on to other matters.

The lock turned and Jolaine’s cell door opened. She stood from her concrete cot.

A guard—an
officer
(they didn’t like being called guards)—said, “Are you Jolaine Cage?”

“Yes.” Who the hell else would she be? They’d put her here, for God’s sake.

“It’s time to go.”

She instinctively took a step backward, away from the door. “Go where?”

“There’s a team here to transfer you to Chicago.”

“Why?” Jolaine asked.

The guard half smirked, and assumed a weird, asymmetrical stance with one hand notched over the nightstick that resided where a firearm would be if he were a real cop. “I know I look like I run the place,” he said, “but you’d be surprised the shit they don’t tell me.”

Jolaine sensed that she was supposed to laugh at that, but she was disinclined.

“Yeah, okay,” the officer said. “I need you to turn around so I can cuff your hands.”

Jolaine didn’t move.

The officer rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, don’t do this to me. It’s almost the end of my shift. Don’t make me call the crisis team.”

He said that as if she had any idea what a crisis team was. “I don’t understand,” she said. While mostly a statement of truth, it was also a delaying tactic, buying time for one of those options she’d been waiting for to materialize.

The officer said, “What’s to understand? You turn around and I cuff you.”

“But I don’t want to go anywhere,” Jolaine said. “What’s in Chicago? That’s a long way from here.”

“Great food and a pretty city,” the guard said. “Though I don’t think you’re scheduled for a lot of sightseeing.” That joke fell flatter than the first one. “Look, I don’t know, okay? I have orders to deliver you out front. For me, that’s the beginning and the end. And please believe me when I tell you that I have every intention of following my orders.”

Jolaine remained in place.

“Your call,” the officer said, “is whether it all happens easily or if you end up bloody in the process.”

“But I haven’t been charged with anything,” Jolaine protested.

The guard shrugged with his whole body. Handcuffs dangled from one of his outstretched hands. “That’s yet another thing that lies outside my give-a-shit zone,” he said. “I’ve told you what my orders are. Now, you have to decide whether or not you’re going to follow them.”

“Don’t you see that this is wrong?”

The guard said nothing. He just stood there, the handcuffs dangling from one fingertip.

Jolaine tried to think of an alternative, but no option seemed available. She could refuse to leave, but then the crisis team would storm in—she imagined burly guards in riot gear with nightsticks and pepper spray. The result would be blood and bruises and she’d still end up in the car where she didn’t want to be.