They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy (23 page)

"Nope."

"You've got a girl's power, so you must've been the catcher, right? I could see that, he was a big guy. I couldn't tell what he looked like because of the damage but he had strong hands, and I guess he was big in that kind of bear way--"

In my head I saw myself jumping up and my fist nailing her right across her face. My body decided to skip running the idea past my brain and just did it the fuck anyway.

Tank staggered back a couple of steps just from the momentum of it, but it didn't faze her. She got those steps back real damn quick
and shoved me hard to the wall.

"That's all? The boys in the Pib are going to eat you alive."

I reached out and snatched that nightstick off the table and rammed it into her invulnerable jaw. She didn't make a sound. I went up the side of her head with it until I had backed her into a corner, then kept swinging until my arm ached.

When I stopped to catch my breath, she swung a hard fist into my stomach that knocked the wind right out of me. She followed it up with a row of calloused knuckles across my chin. I gripped the nightstick with both hands and swung a grand slam into her fucki
ng face.

She stumbled back and said, "Okay, that's enough in the face."

I hit her stomach with the stick, but she blocked my second s
wing with her forearm and combo'
d that shit into
an elbow to the side of my head.

"F
uck!" I wheezed, out of breath.

She punched me in the stomach again and sent me to the floor with an elbow between the shoulder blades when I doubled over. I kicked her left leg but didn't make her fall, so I just yanked it out from under her with my hands and brought her down to me, grabbed her hair and smashed her face into the cinder block wall. She reached around underneath my arm and pressed my face to the blocks and wriggled free, keeping my arm twisted out to my side. She let me go, and I half-heartedly picked up the stick and hit her right in the tit.

"Hey, shit!" she said, almost laughing. "Truce. Truce." She pulled a pack of smokes out of her jacket pocket and handed me a cigarette. I made a lame swing with the stick, and she caught it in her hand. "Hey, c'mon. We're done with that. They found a few packs of cigarettes when they searched your truck. This is your brand, right?"

I nodded and took the smoke, lighting it my lips as I sat on the linoleum floor. She didn't give me any shit about using my powers. I couldn't suck a lungful fast enough. "Jesus Christ, that's good," I said, savoring it like sex after a long dry spell.

She pulled a Slim out for herself and asked me to light it. I did, and she sat on the steel table to join me in nicotine
ecstasy
. "Do you feel any better?"

I nodded, out of breath and tired. "Uh huh. Kinda."

"Good." She gave me a minute of quiet with my addiction. "You know, we really do want to help you."

"It's not gonna last, though," I told her. "I got nothin' in there to, y'know, make me stop thinking about all this shit. About Will and everything." I could feel my throat tightening up and my voice starting to waver. "I can't go back in there and just think about this shit. I can't."

"Do you want to talk about him? Get some of it off your chest?"

"Fuck. No offense, but I'd rather eat shit-covered glass than talk about it." As soon as she started going on about the counselors they had on staff, I shook my head, "No, no, I'm not doing that shit. That's not gonna help anything."

"You might be surprised."

"Uh huh, can I get another smoke?"

She let me smoke in peace for a little while before she started up the good
Samaritan
stuff agai
n.

"Hey," she said gently. "I have to go reapply for my job. Do you need some more time here?"

I crushed out my cigarette on the wall. "Fuck it, I'll go back. It ain't gonna get any easier the longer I wait." I looked at her through a cloud of smoke. "Did you really fucking quit?"

"Yeah, I did."

"Nuh uh. Bullshit."

She half-heartedly put the shackles back on my wrists and opened the door for me. There were two paramedics waiting that had been standing outside while we were in the room. She told them to give us a minute and told me, "Don't believe me, it doesn't matter. I did it because I like to help people, Don."

"Nobody likes to help pieces of shit."

"I do. It gets me hot."

"Huh. I heard it was Latina ass."

She grinned. "Not during work hours, smartass. The guards will take you back. If you need anything, tell them to tell me."

"Thanks."

She put her hand on my shoulder. "It's never as bad as we think it is. We can make it through anything."

A dozen guards led me back down the Power Line to my cell. My ribs hurt but not much. Felt like they were getting better already. The inmates in the Pib went nuts when I came back in. The guards had to threaten to call in a couple of agents to get them to shut up about me.

"You got something from your arresting officer in your cell," the weight gain powder addict informed me. "It's been cleared, no contraband."

They punched in the code to my cell, and the door opened. A plain brown box, stamped and initialed to certify that the guards had cleared it, sat on the bed waiting for me.

"What is it?" I aske
d as my shackles were unlocked.

"Turn and face the wall," the weight gain powder addict ordered before he removed the chains. "We just got here, Guillory. Open it and find out."

Dick. The guards locked me in and left. As soon as they left the Pib, the shit heads in the cells started in on me. I didn't pay them any attention.

I grabbed the teal card off the desk and held it up in front of the cameras for a privacy request. After five minutes of holding the fucking thing and waiting for a guard to get off his ass to come approve the camera shut-off, I dropped the card on the floor and opened the damn box anyway.

One good rip tore it right open. Agent Red's shoes, his jeans, Seminoles jersey and Rosemary's black billfold with her badge and ID all fell out. A hand-written note on blue stationary fell to the floor.

Don,

I am giving you these things temporarily because I got a message about you. That is the only reason. Please do not interpret this as anything else. They told me about Red after you left yesterday, after you stood in my house and lied to my face and let me think he was okay. I know you think I'm stupid for believing I have visions, but I refuse to ignore them for any reason. Take these things and the time you have been blessed with to reflect on how your choices affect people. I will have these items sent back by the guards when I feel the time is right. P
lease do not try to contact me.

She didn't even sign it.

I crumpled the note up and shoved it back in the torn box with shirt, the shoes, the jeans, the billfold, everything. My pulse pounded in my ears. I didn't fucking know he was dead when I talked to her, that was bullshit to say I was lying. I didn't know. And where the fuck did she get off talking down to me like that? Her and Red fucking--fuck, man, they did more to cause this shit than I did.

I stood on the bed and got as close as I could to one of the cameras. I shouted, "I need a guard in here now!" and threw the box at the camera. "Take this crap back. I don't want it. I'm about to go off in here. G
ive me some fucking sedatives."

Nobody came. The Pib door didn't even open.

"Send the guards in here!"

Still, nobody came.

Fuck 'em, they asked for it.

I put my mouth to the food tray slot and shouted into the corridor, "Hey, which of you shit-dicks is G-Mod Killah? I'll blow anybody that gives him up. What cell's he in?" If I was gonna fuck somebody up, I wanted it to be somebody that really fucking deserved it.

"Cry for some more shots, pussy," somebody shouted back down the way.

"
Shut the fuck up!
" I yelled at the guy. "G-Mod, you're a fucking bitch! I'll burn this fucking place down if you don't man up! Fuck all you assholes, tell me which cell he's in."

"Don't move," came over the speaker in the ceiling.

"Fuck you," I told the cameras. "Fucking put me to sleep, that's the only way I'll shut up. And tell Agent Jaspers I didn't know Red was fucking dead. Tell Tank to tell her
that because that's bullshit."

"
Beast
, hey, you a fucking bitch," somebody yelled down the Pib.

"Don't move," the speaker said again.

Heavy fists pounded on cell door 12 across the corridor from me. "
Das Biest
, burn the whole place down! You're a bitch pussy if you don't! Burn it, man, won't hurt me!"

I grabbed all of Red and Rosie's shit to shove it out the food slot since the guards wouldn't come get it.

Then the air hissed and everything went white.

A Short Trip Through Hell

When the white and the noise of rushing air went away, I stood in a rocky desert valley. I still had a thin layer of concrete
cell floor
under my feet and everythin
g Rosie had given me
. Empty red-orange sand stretched out in every direction. There wasn't
a damn thing on the horizon.

Fucking Tracey had gotten to me even on the inside. And that voice on the speaker, that fucking voice. That was Lee.

"Shit," I muttered. "You gotta be fucking kidding me."

The prison grays were thick and stiff and heavy, so I burned them to trade up for the Red's jeans and jersey. I shoved Rosemary's billfold and badge in my pocket and read her note one more time before I set it on the sand and watched it slowly burn.

A few yards away from where I
came in
, someone had arranged a bunch of rocks into an arrow that pointed what I figured had to be north going by the sun. Then I thought if I was on the other side of the world it could be south, but then I realized I was fucking retarded because the sun still set in the west even on the ot
her side of the world, dipshit.

So
I found a nice flat slab of rock and sat my ass down on it. Tracey could go fuck herself because damn if I was gonna do what she said and go where she told me to go. She could come fucking find me.

"You're a bitch," I called out, letting the echo come
back to me. "Come and get me."

Out of nowhere, a bullet clipped the
rock a few inches from my leg.

"
Jesus fuck
," I shouted, rolling myself off into the sand.

Another bullet hit just behind where I had been sitting. Neither of them came with the sound of a gunshot.

I backed away
from the rock
. No other shots rained down,
and
I stopped
back-stepping
. That got me a ricochet ten feet away
that scared the piss out of me.

The sniper or whoever the fuck just wanted me moving
.

"You shooting at me now, Trace?" I called out. "That's bush league. How much that sniper cost you?" I checked out where the last shot had struck in the sand. The bullet had left a good-sized hole in the ground that I probed with my finger. I had to dig to reach where the bullet had finally stop
ped. It had gone straight down.

I looked up in the sky, and another shot hit nearby.
It was a
goddamn flier was shooting at me from somewhere farther up than I could see even
with a
clear blue sky.

I gave a middle finger skyward and got moving the direction the arrow p
ointed
.

I practiced my fire while I walked through an empty wasteland. The balls of flame I created crackled and popped in the air, barely doing what I thought them to do. It was like trying to keep a forest fire in a jar, I was so pissed off. I couldn't get the spheres to move right, couldn't get the shape I wanted to them, they just burned hot.

I got past the fact that I was gonna get blamed for this shit and end up doing more time for an escape so I could think about what was really going on here. Something was fucked about the whole thing. Tracey didn't want me dead or she would have just killed me. She had Lee, I knew that voice was Lee's, tap into the holding cell cameras with
those
nanites to
feed
her a picture so she could grab me. But why
bring me out to the middle of fucking n
owhere?
If this was just somebody being stupid, it was far beyond Tracey's kind of stupid.

"If this is for another job, I'm out," I
shouted at the red-orange sand.

What the hell was all this for?

"Kamikaze," I said out loud. "That's where it all started. Fucking Kamikaze and his fucking client. Okay, so who's the client, Tracey? Who was the client that wanted to blow all that cash for some notebook
s and computer shit?
Who
s
e
bunker was that, Trace?" I kicked a rock and watched it roll and bounce away. "Doland? What did he do that was so special? What did he have? Never heard of the guy. And you got a psychic again to fuck with me and you gave Spencer's nanites to Lee. You wanted to kill Lee, but then you gave him something as important as nanites."