They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy Page 14

  "Yeah, you got it."

  "First try, too." He slid the paper and pen to me. "All right, whenever you're ready, just go at your own pace."

  I wrote down everything that happened from the Sudiak Building to the job in North Dakota. My version of everything that went down. Tracey killed Kamikaze and forced us into the job, she got in over her head, I felt like somebody might've been in my head the whole time, Red used excessive force in my arrest and Will defended me, all that. Even down to the Barker Plumbing and Heating cover. Felt like my hand would fall off before I finished, but I wrapped it up and slid the pages back to him.

  He looked over all of it and tapped his pen on the table while he read; it made a metallic echo. "Anything you want to add to this?" he asked.

  "No."

  "Okay. So you guys set off the fail-safe yourselves."

  "Tracey did."

  "And you did that intentionally."

  "No, Tracey wanted to so she could teleport to the vault that had the stuff she was after, and doing that meant the fail-safe was going to trigger."

  "Okay. That could be interpreted as intentionally setting off the fail-safe."

  "All right, if you want to say that."

  "And the young man under the door? This 'Splode' guy? Did he die? You didn't make it clear if he got out with you or not."

  "I don't know. Tracey yanked me out of there before I could help him."

  "So you tried to help him."

  Fuck no.

  "Yes, I did. He was dying."

  "All right, all right. So, this, uh, creature that was there that Tracey teleported away, um, do you know where she sent it?"

  "Like I said, I don't know."

  "What happened after she teleported it?"

  "She teleported me back to my place."

  "I'm sorry, I mean what did you see and hear when she teleported it?"

  "There was like this sucking, then explosion of air."

  "Like rushing in to fill a vacuum?"

  "What, you mean like outer space?"

  He pulled an 8 x 10 photo out of the folder and slid it across the table to me. "Is that his hand? This picture was taken by a telescope in orbit, like a satellite, and when NASA saw a hand in the frame, it came to us. Is that the thing you fought?"

  I looked at it hard. It was grainy, but it looked like those big fucking meaty fingers. "Yeah, that's it, I think. Jesus, she sent him to space?"

  "That's what we think," he said, taking his photo back and sliding it into the folder.

  "God damn. Hey, before we go on," I said, "I wanna make something clear. I think I've been mind controlled by Tracey's psychic during all this time. Maybe even since the first meeting. I've done things," I paused and shook my head and looked upset, "Ever since then that only make any sense at all if they put some kind of, like, hypnotic suggestion in my head. Y'know, made me more open to doing what they wanted me to do."

  "Uh oh," Blue said like a disbelieving asshole.

  I went on. "I've never taken LSD before, and I've lived for years since I was brainwashed in Europe without doing anything criminal with my powers. Now, all of a sudden after I get hooked up with Tracey and her psychic, I'm burning stuff down, taking drugs and assaulting a Federal Officer? That's a, a very radical behavior change for somebody who gave up a life of crime to be a simple, well-liked, blue collar factory working American. And I think a jury would kind of agree."

  Yeah, I was playing the 'mind control by a Post-Human' card. It was hard as fuck to disprove, and I had a lot of circumstantial evidence going for me. They were jerking me around and getting cocky and needed to know exactly what kind of man they had on their hands.

  DeltaBlue didn't make a note. His sunglasses stared straight at me, his head cocked slightly to the left. "So, you want us to immediately do an MRI on you, then, to find signs of psychic trauma? Because that will be the first step after we leave this room. We don't want to undermine this clearly very worthwhile and well thought-out legal defense. And, Lord, we don't want to upset your delicate mental state and have you crying and pissing yourself because you've been mentally traumatized."

  Asshole.

  I leaned back in my chair. "I think you'll find a lot of evidence of psychic trauma to my brain."

  "Really."

  "Yeah, that won't be an issue. What will be an issue, and, I don't mean to do your job for you or anything, is any kind of testimony in a court, if you were to take this there, against me to, uh, establish, well, no, to refute my claims of my frame of mind at the time of this incident. Prosecutor's gotta do that, right? And Rosemary's the witness. But, and stop me if I got this all bass ackwards, Rosemary's undercover, right? She's sure as hell not advertising she's a Fed, she's getting close to Tracey or whoever for you guys, and having everybody believe she's still a criminal is important. So I think it'd be pretty stupid to pull her out of something important like that just to testify against me for an assault charge and a B & E and all the other piddly shit that won't stick after any lawyer that's any good gets done with my case."

  DeltaBlue rolled his tongue around in his mouth. "I'll pass that along to my superiors, and thank you for the advice. Now let's get back to this robbery in North Dakota. Special Agent Jaspers said that when you showed up in the bunker, you had blood all over your little outfit, and you said it belonged to somebody associated with Mr. Rory Sakata aka 'Kamikaze' of the West Coast Supervillain Crew. You seem to have left that out of your story here. Tell me about that."

  Shit.

  "Okay, yeah, that was self-defense."

  "Can you elaborate on that?"

  "It was a home invasion into my apartment. He forced his way in, the guy was a speeder, all coked-out and shit, tried to rob me, put a gun to me which I was able to get away from him, and then he left me with, y'know, it was either him or me. He's the one that busted my ribs."

  "Did he tell you his name?"

  "Yeah, Angelo Luis Cabrera. He called himself Run ALC. Said he was with the Crew like Rory."

  DeltaBlue's head nodded as he made notes. "It's getting hot in here. Do you find it's hot?"

  I crossed my arms over my chest. "No."

  "All right, you tangled with somebody else in the Crew after Mr. Sakata. Bunch'a little bastards. I know who you're talking about, too. Mr. Cabrera has been on our list for a while. We were running a joint operation with the DEA and the Border Patrol to nail his little taco ass crossing the border. Do we need to keep throwing taxpayer money at this problem, or has it been resolved for the American People?"

  "Did you search my apartment?"

  He nodded. "It's being searched right now, yes. Judge signed the warrant this morning for what was left of it. You had a little fire there, looks like. Your neighbors were lucky to get out."

  "You find a body?" I asked.

  "I haven't gotten any updates on that yet. Are they going to find a body?"

  "I don't think so, no."

  "You don't think so. Did you burn it?"

  "No, I did not. When I got back from my abduction to North Dakota, Tracey had teleported it away. What condition it was in when she did that, I don't know, and I don't know why she wanted me to attack him or him attack me or whatever exactly happened."

  "Oh, because you were being," he pointed to his head, "mind-controlled, right?"

  "Right."

  "So he was alive when you left is what you're saying."

  "Yeah, he was alive when she snagged me to North Dakota."

  No fucking way he could prove I was lying about that.

  "Despite all the blood on your little outfit?"

  "Yes."

  He made a note of it. "So you two got in a powers fight? Can you help me just get an idea of what happened exactly? You said you got the gun away, were you able to fire shots off at him? Is that what happened?"

  "No, I didn't use the gun because I was afraid a bullet might go through the wall and hit one of my neighbors."

  "Very thoughtful. So you attacked him with your po
wers?"

  "Yeah."

  He wrote that down. "So what happened after that?"

  "Well, he lost his shit and came at me, so I, uh," fuck what even really happened? It was all a blur. Shit. I had to come up with something. "He said he was going to kill my family. My sister and her family in Wooster." No, wait, fuck, he had said he was going to rape the girl next door. "He said 'I'll be there in less than three minutes, and then they'll be dead.' He was also going to rape, he threatened to rape, my next door neighbor. He told me that. So as he was running out the door, I just tripped him up with some heat."

  "You tripped him?"

  "Yeah, a cloud of heat hot enough to make him stumble."

  "A cloud of heat. That's kind of vague. How big was this cloud?"

  "Maybe three feet."

  "Good aim. How hot?"

  "I don't remember."

  "And he just fell?"

  "Yeah. He fell."

  He put his pen down. "Okay, I'm having a hard time understanding this. You tripped him, and he fell. What happened next?"

  I glanced at the one-way mirror without thinking and jerked my eyes away to look at the wall. "He fell into my doorframe."

  "At high speed? He was going fast?"

  "Right."

  "How fast?"

  "I don't know. Really fast."

  "And that did what? Knocked him out?"

  "Yeah, he went out like a light."

  Blue shrugged. "And that's it?"

  "Yeah."

  "Okay, okay, now I gotcha. Hopefully, that apartment's not burned up so much that the doorframe's been destroyed. We can corroborate this from the damage, right?"

  "Yeah, the frame got busted to shit."

  "Okay, all right. Now, we'll circle back around to this to find out about all this blood, but it brings me to the next question I've got. Wilmont Avenue. What happened there?"

  Holy. Fuck. My heart slammed against my ribcage. Felt like I had just found out my mother had been a man in drag all my life.

  "What?"

  He checked the sheet like he wanted to make sure he'd read it right. "Wilmont Avenue in your hometown there. They had this wild fire that ate up a city block. Witnesses said," he went through the reports, "'the fire burned with an unnatural intensity,' and no cause has yet been determined. You know the world we live in, stuff like that gets forwarded up the chain 'cause assholes get puckered tight when people think a Post-Human is going nuts. And with you being pyrokinetic, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask. So can you tell me anything about that?"

  I shook my head. "No. I don't know anything about that."

  "Okay. Now, don't take this personally, but I have to say this too. We got another warrant this morning for a federal psychic to do a sweep down there, and a warrant to do a sweep of your truck and your apartment. Now if they come back and say they found a match between your truck or your apartment and any residual thought pattern at Wilmont Avenue, you know you're gonna be in trouble, right?"

  "I've driven by there before."

  "While thinking about fire?"

  "Man, I'm always thinking about fire."

  "So you're saying you don't know anything about the fire that killed five people on Wilmont Avenue? And you're saying that we'll find no evidence whatsoever linking you to it?"

  It was getting hard to take a goddamn breath in there.

  "Look, man," I started, licking my dry lips, "I turned myself in to help y'all catch Tracey--"

  "You were arrested," DeltaBlue butt in casually.

  "But I didn't resist. Because I want to help you catch Tracey. You've probably got a whole group here trying to catch her, don't you?"

  He nodded. "That's correct."

  "Then that's what I'm here for. I'll tell you everything I know about her, and slink away into Witness Protection for the rest of my life or whatever. I didn't turn myself in to get the fucking third degree."

  DeltaBlue put his pen down again. "Mr. Guillory," he stopped to find his words. "We. Investigate. Post-Human crime. That's what we do here. It is our responsibility to indiscriminately pursue those who pose a danger to society--"

  "I guaran-fucking-tee you Tracey's more of a danger than I am."

  "Let me finish, please."

  "Fine, but I'm not a fucking danger."

  "Before we can do anything like getting you into the Witness Protection Program, we have to assess what you know and how valuable you would be to any case against her. You witnessed her commit not one but possibly two murders, that is true, but what we also have to determine is if it's prudent to use you for testimony and then release you back into the wild with the general public. Now I'm gonna be perfectly up-front with you: you have a serious criminal past which you seem to not want to acknowledge--"

  "You gotta be fucking kidding me--"

  "And you don't seem to show any signs of stopping that behavior, Mr. Guillory. Am I wrong in believing that?"

  "Yeah, you're fucking wrong. I want to get back to my normal life. I've been living a normal life for fucking years. Until this shit with Tracey started up."

  "The Wilmont Avenue fire happened days before your planning session in Missouri, if the timeline you've given me is correct. And we haven't even scratched the surface of your time in Europe yet."

  "You've gotta be fucking kidding me," I said.

  "No, I am not fucking kidding you." His glowing light got more intense. "And as for what I think about all this, I think this is just your way of getting back at somebody who pissed you off. You can't find her, so let us do it, right?"

  I licked my dry lips. I felt like laughing, crying and jumping up to whip his ass all at once. "I said I wanted my friend in protective custody. That's why I'm doing this. But not one of you assholes has told me a goddamn thing about any of that. He will die because Tracey will try to take him out just like I stopped her from doing to Lee in Missouri, and you're sitting here giving me shit instead of protecting him. And I'm the asshole?"

  DeltaBlue nodded and closed his file. "So, for the record, you have no knowledge of what happened on Wilmont Avenue, is that correct?"

  "I don't know what happened there, man. Some crack head probably lost control of his pipe."

  "And you don't have any information about Tracey's or Kamikaze's client?"

  "No."

  "And is there anything you'd like to add to your statements before I shut off the recorder?"

  I stuck my middle finger out on the table. "No, Sir."

  DeltaBlue nodded and gave a signal to the people behind the mirror. "All right. Let me go check on that protective custody thing for you."

  He left me there at the table alone. I gave the finger to everybody behind that one-way mirror.

  "This is bullshit," I said, boiling and unable to sit still. My plan was eating its own asshole right in front of me. "I'm doing all of you a favor," I told the mirror.

  Ten silent minutes passed, and I shot the mirror a pissed-off look. "Any day now, guys. I'm waiting on you."

  The Tank walked in and took DeltaBlue's seat.

  "Hello, Mr. Guillory, I'm Special Agent Bethany Nowakowski. How are you today?"

  "I'm not fucking good, Tank. How 'bout you?"

  She adjusted herself to get more comfortable in her seat. Up close, she had freckles and short, strawberry-blonde hair. The cream-colored suit she wore looked like it came from the Men's Department.

  I asked her, "Hey, what was your nickname when you played ball? I can't remember and it's been bugging me."

  "The Tennessee Tank," she replied. "I played for the Lady Volunteers."

  "That's it, that's right."

  She put her own digital recorder and folder on the table and went through all the legal shit. Again.

  "I'm sorry, I know this is hard for you," she said, "and I want to warn you, I don't have good news for you. They sent me in specifically in case your control on your powers lapses. So please, please remember to keep them in check even though I am invulnerable to them."

/>   "Yeah, okay. We'll see."

  "Do you feel you are in a state of mind conducive to controlling your powers at the moment?"

  "Fuck if I know, Tank."

  "Do you want to do this another time? We can if you don't feel up to it right now."

  "Look, do whatever the fuck it is you're in here to do. Jesus Christ."

  She read from a page, "This is about North Dakota. Do you remember what happened there?"

  "Yeah. I do."

  Her eyes went back to the page as she read. "Agent Red was found dead in North Dakota near Harper Township, killed by a radio pulse detonation. Seven residents of Harper Township have been admitted for psychiatric care due to the detonation's effect." She stopped for a second. "Additionally, Mr. William Bowman was found with Agent Red, also deceased."

  ". . . What?"

  "Both of them were found dead. I'm very sorry." She gave me a moment. "Due to the circumstances, Agent Red's death is being investigated as a murder. What we're trying to do is determine the events that lead to his death. Since they did find ample evidence of fire damage to clothing fibers found on him, we're hoping you can shed some more light on this for us. In your statement, you did not mention coming into conflict with Agent Red, only that Mr. Bowman did."

  "How'd he die?" I said.

  "Both Agent Red and Mr. Bowman died from the radio pulse fail-safe you described. When it went off, the pulse created nearly instant--" she hesitated, "lethal brain damage."

  "I need to be out of this room," I said. "I, I fucking feel the walls closing in on me, and I need to be out of this room, or I'm not responsible for what happens."

  "Take a minute, take some deep breaths. I know this isn't easy. Is there something I can get you, Mr. Guillory?"

  I could hear myself breathing in my ears. "I need a cigarette, a fucking bottle of something to drink and I need to be out of this goddamn fucking room right now."