They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy Read online

"They're hidden. They're these little fiber optic wires that can record everything."

  "And send it to the NSA how? Magic? Is there magic here?"

  "The cameras feed wirelessly into my laptop."

  Like I said; sometimes it was productive to be a dick. I overheated her computer so the hardware inside would fry.

  "All right, I'll worry about that later," I told her. "Three o'clock, right?"

  Rosemary's dark eyes stared straight at me. "Really? You're really going to act like you didn't destroy my laptop just now? That's destruction of Federal property. You're really racking up the record here."

  I shrugged and didn't say anything. My defense team's expert witness would tell a jury that Rosemary leaving her computer on all the time could have caused it to overheat. There would be a lot more reasonable doubt on that than video evidence of me attacking Rosemary while she slept.

  "What about all that ice last night?" I asked her. "The fuck was all that?"

  She rolled her eyes. "Okay. Please listen to me, all right? That was you. You iced everything up then ran away all freaked-out. Now, here's something I want you to think about. I can't read you. It's like you're not even there to my brain. I would have incapacitated you with a psychic bullet by now if I could. You would be laid out. And you can kill me in a snap, right? We both know that. So why do you need me tied up? It's freezing on this floor, and I have a bad disc in my neck that's starting to pinch a nerve. I have to have a special pillow and mattress to sleep on because I can't just be like this, it cause muscle cramps and pain in my neck if I'm in this position for too long. I understand if it makes you feel more comfortable and in control, but you don't need to do it. But you need to think, really think, about what you're doing. What's your game plan here? I work part-time as an agent, mostly, and I don't have a lot of slack there. It was a badge or a jail cell for me, that was the deal I got. I'm not thrilled about it myself. Neither me nor Red are out to get you. Please just let me up, and we'll talk about what we can do to make this easy for you."

  I blew smoke from the side of my mouth. "God damn, does Red have to listen to this much shit? Jesus. I don't know if you're trying to make me turn the gun on myself, but just give me short fucking answers, shit. You're still sticking to the ice thing being me, fine. Whatever. Next question. Where the fuck is Tracey?"

  Her jaw clenched, and the patience began to drain from her eyes. "We went over this last night. She's got a supplier for psy-blockers like our agency uses. Nobody can track her mentally. Why do you want to find her?"

  "No, no, I'm asking questions right now. Will's in custody?"

  "I don't know. I haven't talked to Red since before Tracey pulled me to the bunker."

  "You don't know where your boyfriend is?"

  Rosemary rolled onto her back and stretched her neck. "No, Don, he hasn't called me yet. He's very busy, and we're just friends. That bike's only out there because he wanted a place close to the office to put some stuff. You need to take his jacket off."

  "Yeah, okay, 'cause I'm retarded enough to believe you two are just friends. Track Will and tell me where he is."

  "Don, I can't find Red or your friend. All active duty agents take psy-blockers, so I never know where he," she caught herself, "Where anybody is at the office. On top of that, any Post-Human like Will that's taken into custody is immediately given blockers to keep anyone from tracking or manipulating them." She finally made eye contact with me again. "Now can you let me up, please?"

  I didn't budge. I absently spun the notepad full of gibberish on the table with my finger. "Tracey is gonna try to kill Will. You guys need to get him into heavily protective custody because she'll find him. If you can promise me you can do that, I'll let you up."

  "If your friend's life is in danger, we can get him into more protective custody. Just let me up; I can't do anything on the floor."

  "That's not very reassuring."

  "It's the best I can do," she said.

  This was going fucking nowhere. Rosemary wasn't as stupid as she had played-up in North Dakota. Time to play the only bargaining chip I had. "I've seen Tracey kill a guy with a bottle cap, so, y'know, you'll have to pardon the fuck out of me if I want some action taken to keep Will alive."

  "Wait." Rosemary suddenly got very interested. "You saw her kill somebody?"

  "Yeah. That's some shit you can't un-see, either."

  She practically foamed at the mouth with that nugget. "The SCEIA hasn't found anybody that's come forward and said they've seen her something like that. They can't even find anybody that will admit without a psychic that they're one of her clients. If you cooperated with the investigation, they might be able to nail her with a murder charge."

  Bingo. They needed me.

  I felt her out with, "I'm not here to go to prison or get my head 'ported off. The only way I would do anything for you is if I got Witness Protection or something. You're not gonna use me and screw me over; I would want to cut a deal."

  "We can definitely look into that. I'm sure that wouldn't be an issue."

  She wasn't dumb, but it wasn't exactly hard to play her, either. I poured it on with, "And your office would have to catch her, which they fucking haven't been able to up to now."

  Rosemary locked her gaze on me, heaping on reassurances with her brown eyes. "With a break in the case against her like this, a witness like you, and sworn statements from me and Red, they could afford to throw more money at catching her. And we almost did catch her. Couple of guys busted the operation up if I remember right."

  "Y'all handled that all wrong," I said. According to my count, I had some assault charges, destruction of property charges on the back door, the shed lock, and Rosie's bedroom, and a charge for illegal detainment or whatever, all of which happened under the influence. They would try to get me on the bullshit charge of destroying the computer, but I could fight that. They didn't know dick about Wilmont Avenue or Run ALC, and I could plead mind control for the whole bunker thing. If I cut a deal, I could get Tracey off the street and be out with minimal jail time. Will could turn state's evidence and cut a deal for himself, too. It was better than my original plan of something, something, pound Tracey with a Louisville Slugger.

  I finished my last little bit of my cigarette and threw it in the sink. Glancing at my gun on the table, I got curious about the notepad full of nonsense, so I held it up. "What's all this shit you wrote on here?"

  "Please put that down," she said firmly.

  "I will. What is it?"

  "It's a message."

  "Looks like made-up shit."

  "It's a message in Portuguese."

  "You act like that answers my fucking question."

  "Oh my God, okay. I get messages, like visions, in my head in Portuguese. I write them down, fax them to a translator and find out what they say."

  ". . . I swear to God, do not fuck with me."

  "God, I'm not. Can you please just untie me?"

  I set the pad down. I couldn't get anything else from her like this unless I was prepared to cross this over into a long-term captive-in-a-basement-chained-to-a-radiator situation. I had what I needed; the next stage would be dealing with the bigger fish at the SCEIA. There was just one more thing to find out. "All right," I told her. "You can make your calls."

  "Thank you."

  I tucked my revolver back in my jeans, grabbed a peanut butter-caked knife off the counter and knelt down behind her to cut through the gray tape. "Where do these messages come from?" I asked.

  "God," she said. "I think they come from God. I don't want to talk about it because it's not really something I think you'll believe."

  "Try me."

  She went on about the stuff, about how the messages told her about people whose lives were in danger and needed help, and she took it as her responsibility to do it. She was really serious about it all, so I resisted the urge to be a dick and ask her why God talked to her in Portuguese.

  "So how long you been getting those visions?" I ask
ed instead.

  While she went on about it, I drew the revolver from my jeans. I screamed in my thoughts 'I'm gonna shoot you point blank in the head' as I pointed the barrel at the back of her skull and quietly pulled the hammer back. She didn't stop talking. She acted like she had no idea what was going on behind her. As far as I could tell, it sure as shit seemed like she wasn't lying about not being able to read me at all.

  "Did you stop cutting the tape?" she asked.

  "Yeah, I just need to adjust my gun." I put the hammer back down and shoved the pistol back in my jeans.

  With the tape undone, Rosemary rubbed her neck. "Thank you. Now are we arresting you peacefully or do I need to rattle off my power set to you?"

  That word 'arrest' made my skin crawl. The full weight of what that meant settled on my shoulders. "Just hang on," I said. "Don't try to like force me to do anything right now, okay? I'll go, but let's just take it easy."

  I felt a tug in the front of my jeans followed by the unmistakable sound of my revolver cocking.

  "Don't move," Rosemary said calmly as she peeled the tape off her pajamas. "Don, I'm sorry, but we don't have time for you to waffle on this. You need to put the stun gun on the ground and any other weapon you're hiding because you're under arrest for this whole mess here. I tried to give you a chance to do the right thing, but that was the fourth time you've assaulted an unarmed officer."

  "What? Twice," I corrected her. "Once with tazer, once with powers."

  "You pulled a gun on me last night and again just now. Yeah, I saw it in the reflection on the oven. Four counts of assault, one of them being powers. I don't have a choice anymore." She stood up with a loud, "Did you guys get all that?"

  "We got it," came the response from the cordless phone base in the kitchen, set to speaker.

  The whole fucking thing had been monitored from the start.

  "Good. Green for retrieval," she said. "Say again, green for retrieval."

  The voice on the phone said ETA would be fifteen minutes. Rosemary read me my rights, and I stared down at the gun in my pants. The hammer hung back telekinetically, a round in the chamber ready to take my manhood off. The crafty bitch had played the shit out of me.

  "Do you understand these rights as I have told them to you?" she asked.

  "I absolutely do. Now can we leave my dick out of this? And also do you maybe wanna go out sometime?"

  Chapter 14

  Overkill

  Twenty ball-shriveling minutes later, I was standing in the sun in her front yard next to a flower bed of weeds choking out some hot pink roses, waiting for the SCEIA to pick me up. Rosemary still had her pajamas and glasses on and made me leave Red's jacket in the kitchen. The only thing that kept my gun from castrating me while we stood there was her train of thought, so I kept making sure my crotch was on her mind as much as it was on mine.

  "So you could've arrested me like this at any time, Rosie?"

  She nodded. "Yep. Like I said, I was trying to get you to do the right thing in there. You didn't seem like that bad'a guy in North Dakota."

  She must not have seen much of what had happened in the bunker. "You were also trying to get me to talk in there," I said. "Don't think I don't know. You were trying to pull my strings into doing what you wanted."

  She looked at me sideways. "That must break your heart, a sweet, naive, innocent guy like you. I'm sure that was an open, honest discussion for you. Full disclosure, I can also pop a blood vessel in your brain in addition to the gun on you, so back up."

  "I'm not coming toward you."

  "Yeah, you are. Stay back."

  I moved back a couple of steps. "Considering you can make me a dickless stroke victim in less than a second, I think that Glock you've got aimed at my stomach is pretty fucking unnecessary."

  "Considering the many ways you've assaulted me in my home in the past twelve hours, I think it's not at all." After that, she added, "You're doing the right thing."

  "Shit. We'll see. I don't have a shitload of options is mostly what this is. Just make sure that Witness Protection comes through. Think you can get 'em to take a picture of her face when they bust in on her? Like right after they beat the shit out of her and punch her in the kidney?"

  "I'll be sure to ask that. Have you done anything else we should know about before we take you in?"

  The sound of helicopters in the distance came over the tree line. "You really can't read my mind?" I said.

  She pushed her glasses back up on her nose with a sigh. "No."

  "Then I have not."

  "You don't know anything about Tracey's client?"

  "I do not."

  "It'll be easier for you if you just tell me."

  "We'll see. Ask God about it."

  She didn't appreciate me being a dick about that. "You don't have to be a dick about that," she said. "I used to hate cops, too, y'know."

  "You did? Cool! Let's be friends. Can I keep a motorcycle at your place? Don't try to act like we're alike and buddies and all that."

  She rolled up her right sleeve up to the elbow. Buried in the tribal tats was a big, block letter 'FUCK THE PO-LICE.' She smiled at me. "Ooooo, see that? I just made you look stupid."

  Three helicopters appeared over the trees about a half mile off. Beside them was Delta-fucking-Blue, the positioning light on his vest flashing blue so air traffic could see him when he was airborne.

  I hated that arrogant fucker.

  Bushes and trees and grass whipped into waves from the helicopter blades above the lawn. DeltaBlue hovered over the driveway, giving the helicopter pilot directions to stay back over the tree line and not to land. His flight-goggled head kept glancing back at me, and he talked into a microphone in his collar. His positioning light flashed so bright it was hard to look at, but the bluish glow that hung around him was all him.

  They all maintained positions in the air until four fire trucks from different stations pulled up in front of Rosemary's house with lights flashing, and the crews scrambled to run hoses down the road to a fire hydrant grown over by bushes.

  "You gotta be fucking kidding me," I laughed.

  Out of fucking nowhere, a damn SWAT team came roaring out from around the back of the house.

  "Donald Guillory," a loudspeaker on the helicopter said loudly, "Lie down on your stomach and lace your fingers behind your head."

  I looked at Rosemary like they couldn't be serious. She yanked the revolver out of my pants, harder than necessary, and nodded with an expectant, "You'd better do it."

  So I lied down on the grass and put my hands behind my head. The whirring wind from the helicopter got stronger as it moved in closer.

  This was a stupid fucking idea. And I started to regret it.

  I stole a glance up before I was told to put my face back to the ground. DeltaBlue had landed and flipped off the safety of the shotgun strapped to him. Four people slid down from one of the helicopters on ropes, all decked out in Kevlar and gear like the rest. I recognized two of them as powered SCEIA Agents. The other two helicopters had sharpshooters leaning out the side doors with big-ass sniper rifles ready to take my fucking head off.

  Jesus Christ.

  All I knew about the three Poster agents they had sent to collect me, three for fuck's sake, I had gotten from television.

  DeltaBlue had been on the covers of GQ, People, Ebony, Essence and Muscle and Fitness and was the SCEIA Consultant for just about every movie that had a character in it who was supposed to be an agent. He could do some crazy shit with light and microscopic particles that you needed five college degrees to understand, and he always had a purplish-bluish haze around him while the rest of him looked like he was always in a shadow or something.

  Grammy winner Drashelle 'Cocoa Lightning' Parks gave off enough electricity to run a city and had to wear a black rubber-insulated bodysuit with plastic buttons, bootlaces and belt buckle so she wouldn't throw sparks. She couldn't even pack a gun, but a guy at work had told me the CIA was working on a 'glass
gun' with caseless ammunition for her to use. Her fans had gone apeshit when she cancelled her tour to enroll in the SCEIA Academy. I had the issue of Maxim that had her photo spread in it and got some use out of it. Her first album cover with her naked and covered in the right places by light bulbs she kept lit up was one of the most downloaded pictures on the Internet or something. Got some use out of that, too. She was a lot shorter in person.

  The third one who trailed behind them both, another gal, had a name I couldn't remember. In college, her softball team had nick-named her the 'something-Tank'. In an interview with Barbara Walters, she said that she'd played women's softball because it was one of the only sports where her being completely invulnerable to any kind of physical damage didn't give her an unfair advantage. Rumor was that the real reason she played softball was because she was a lesbian. Tank didn't get on the news a lot except for anytime somebody got a picture of her with a woman within three feet of her. As for her abilities, people said the government had tested her with everything they had; Howitzers, missiles, and a nuke out in the desert, but nothing hurt her. Sounded like bullshit, though, and she still hit like a chick because she didn't come with any extra strength or speed to go with it.

  "Donald Guillory," DeltaBlue shouted over the sound of the helicopters. "You are under arrest and are being taken into SCEIA custody. There are three agents present: one Class Six invulnerable, one electro-kinetic, which means she can control and generate electricity, and I'm a flyer, Class Two invulnerable and an EM-manipulator, which means I can control various wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum like light. Do you understand what I've just explained?"

  Some six foot-seven dickhole weighed down with fifty extra pounds of gear put his knee in my back against my fucking ribs while he yanked back my arms and cuffed them.

  "Yeah, I understand," I wheezed out.

  "Good. Now, Mr. Guillory, is that your truck parked up the road?"

  "Yeah."

  "Okay, before we search it, I have to ask you; do you have anything we should know about in there?"

  "Yeah. A garbage bag full of hardcore porn. Lots of girl on girl."