“Then you can wait until then for your precedents. I’ll be here.”
“I need them now!”
“Then get them yourself. Pay for play is where we are at right now, Mr. Kimoe.”
“Fine. Fuck you, but fine. I’ll be there as close to six as I can. Maybe in the meantime you can help me on this new case I just got today.”
“Another political case?”
“I know you told me you just want to work on the regular criminal cases,” said Donny.
“The people who actually deserve our help,” said Percy. “Down at County, lined up to be put in cages for being too poor, too stupid, or too black, brown, or yellow.”
Percy’s father was one of them, one who died in the cage, and the reason Percy had gone to law school. Her full name was Persephone, picked by Dad, who knew how things worked.
“And the way we take care of those people is by changing the system,” said Donny. He didn’t mention the part about the rates on the classified cases being almost double.
“It hasn’t changed in centuries, and you think you can change it by banging your head against the bench in that psycho-court? And now stretching your neck out on the block, sending flaming petitions to the man himself?”
“This case could change things. It’s about what happened to Gregorio. Listen.”
Donny told her the story. The condensed version. She listened. She got it. She said she would see what she could come up with. And suggested some things he might be able to get that would help her.
Donny checked his watch again. As he walked back toward the courthouse, he made a list in his head of what he needed to pull off in the next eighteen hours. He squeezed through the mob of parents still crammed behind the barricades, and when the guard checked him against the afternoon list and asked him what business he had back there, Donny said he had a meeting with Bridget Kelly. The guard waved him through, under the trellis of razor wire that canopied the main entrance.
6
“You ready to give me the straight dope on this Rocafuerte case?” said Donny.
“Sure,” said Bridget, looking at her watch. “But we need to make it quick. I’m trying to get ready for a sentencing and the judge will be back soon.”
“If you’re too busy you can just give me the unredacted files. Because you and I both know what they are doing with this Rule 19.4 bullshit isn’t going to hold up.”
“I don’t make the rules, Kimoe.”
“You don’t fight them when you know they’re unjust, either,” said Donny. You could tell she wasn’t fazed by the jab. They were in the courtroom, but the judge was not there—just some of his staff working at their stations below the bench, and Bridget and a colleague with their files spread out at the prosecution table. “Mind if I sit?”
“I guess,” she said, as if having a defense lawyer sit at the prosecution table would violate hygiene protocol.
Donny pulled out a chair, then set his litigation bag up on the table and opened it to grab his file. When he did that, a bunch of stuff he hadn’t meant to grab spilled out on the table.
“Jesus, Kimoe,” said Bridget. “Are you living out of that thing? You have more shit in there than I keep in my purse.”
“Sorry,” he said, sliding the portable office supplies and accumulated miscellany into a pile to the side. Then he opened the file, and reminded Bridget of the classified exhibits. “So what am I missing?”
Bridget reached for her own file. “Basically we have four things on this woman. The movies, chats and emails with her friends, physical evidence collected from her home, and the interrogation transcript.”
“What about the details on the arrest?”
She flipped through the file. She stopped on a red page that looked a lot like the one in Donny’s file. “I guess I don’t even have that,” she said.
“Sounds a little fishy, Bridget.”
“I’ll talk to the CSO.” They both looked, but Walton wasn’t at his station. “After my hearing.”
“You working late again?”
“No, Kimoe. I have plans.”
“I thought your boyfriend was still in Washington.”
“I dumped him. Too whiny about me being away.”
Donny smiled. “We should hang out sometime.”
“Fuck off, Kimoe,” she said. “No consorting with the enemy.”
Donny laughed, and Bridget smiled.
“Is he a Coastie? I bet he flies choppers. Rescues children and disappears insurgents.”
Bridget’s father, Donny had learned, was an Air Force pilot, shot down and killed in one of the southern wars when she was a kid. The lapel pin she wore was an American flag in tones of black and blood blue, inset with a purple cross. Being the daughter of a martyred patriot gave her a privileged position with her law enforcement colleagues.
“The guy I’m meeting tonight is a real estate developer, if you really want to know.”
“Now I know you are finally finding the real essence of Houston.”
“And we’re just going to a fund-raiser.”
“The President’s election defense fund?”
“No, that’s week after next. But I’m going to that, too. You should come.”
“You think it’s a good investment?”
“Don’t believe everything you see on TV.”
“I don’t. I know you’re censoring it.”
“I just help bag the trash and take it to the curb. Anything else?”
“How do I get the interrogation transcript?”
“You don’t,” said Bridget. “The confession should be all you need.”
“What confession?” said Donny.
“Exhibit 21,” said Bridget. “You want some Adderall?”
Fuck. Donny looked at his file. Exhibit 21 was a three-page recitation of admissions, signed by Xelina.
“Anything else?” said Bridget.
“You assholes. They used enhancements on her, didn’t they?”
“They don’t tell me if they do,” said Bridget. “But I would guess not.”
“How can you, Bridget?”
“She did it, Kimoe. All of it.”
“All of what?” said Donny, scanning the confession’s numbered paragraphs that described Xelina’s social and online activity through the paranoid eyes of the state. “None of these things are criminal or seditious. All she did was bitch about politics with her friends and post some goddam amateur videos, like about ten million other kids do every day.”
“She’s a propagandist for the insurrection, Kimoe. Converting naïve young people to the cause. Turning them into new recruits for the FRO.”
“By putting videos on Pinboard for her friends to see? Doesn’t everybody do that?”
“I don’t.”
“Because you aren’t allowed to,” he remembered. “Unless you’re one of the creeps behind a surveillance account.”
She gave him a weird shrug.
“You are one of the creeps behind a surveillance account,” said Donny.
“Maybe I was,” said Bridget. “I’m too busy now with this.” She nodded at the banker’s box of case files.
Donny imagined a younger Bridget working her way up the ladder at DOJ by luring politically suspect citizens out through social engineering over the friendnets. Like high school, only with detention taken to a whole different level.
“Wow,” said Donny. “Didn’t you just try to link me on Breakroom?”
Breakroom was the workplace version of Pinboard, where people connected with their professional colleagues. Donny had an account, because you had to have one. He logged in an as little as possible, because he knew it was just another way they watched you, advertisers on government leashes making money off you every which way they could. But he got the messages whenever someone clicked his button.
“I don’t think so,” said Bridget. “Probably just the bot, trawling my contacts.”
“When it’s not busy monitoring kids for being too interested in sa
ving the planet.”
“Did you see how many views this little provocateur gets, Kimoe?”
“Not really. My legal assistant says every one of the links has been replaced with a government takedown notice.”
“And I’ll try to help you out with getting copies of those when I talk to the CSO, because you’ll see we’re right. A lot of the content was republished on sites known to be associated with the underground.”
“There is no underground, Bridget. Unless you mean the kids with no future Paxing their brains out in the tunnels under downtown. There’s something else going on here. It’s not about her videos. It’s about what happened to Gregorio. They’re even hiding it from you, for Christ’s sake.”
Bridget looked at the red censor notice she still had her file open to. Then she looked back at Donny. “I’ll talk to Walton, like I said.”
“How about helping me get Broyles to give us a postponement?”
“I wish. But you and I both know that would be a waste of time. He’s all about the throughput, and not just because bonus time is coming. I’ll see what I can do to get you more of the file before I leave today. And if you want my advice, don’t spend all your time going after the legitimacy of her arrest and detention. The President and his Congress have suspended habeas corpus down here pending the end of the emergency. Or maybe you didn’t get the memo.”
“I got it,” said Kimoe. “What I’m worried about is the memos they won’t even give you.”
She looked again, and closed the file. “We’re all just following the rules, Kimoe. You should try it sometime.”
“This would be so much easier if you weren’t so likable,” said Donny.
“Wish I could say the same,” she said, smiling.
Just then the light glistened off her lapel pin, and it reminded Donny, and made him think about what she had said, about consorting with the enemy. Donny liked to think he didn’t have a side in the big fight. That he was just a lawyer. It was a big part of what had torn him and Joyce apart. But the way the pin and what it stood for reflexively repulsed him made him realize he wasn’t as neutral as he liked to think.
“Hey,” said Bridget. “Can I bum one of those Mentodes? I love those things.”
She was looking at the tin of breath mints Donny had moved to his bag after leaving it in his suit pocket on the way into the courthouse. It was now sitting there in the pile of stuff that had fallen out of his bag.
“Oh,” said Donny. “Those aren’t mints, sorry. I just like the tins. All that one has is some portable office supplies.” He picked it up and shook it, wishing it sounded more like paperclips and less like waxy nuggets of controlled substances.
“I have some gum, though,” he added.
“No thanks,” said Bridget. “I’ll let you know what Walton says.”
“Thanks,” he said, putting the tin back in his suit pocket as he stood to leave, and then thinking it might be able to help him navigate his current predicament.
7
White-Out was just the street name. The on-brand stuff made by the German pharmacists of New Jersey was called Paxetrate. Donny could never remember the scientific name. It was developed as a stress management remedy that could be prescribed for diagnostic conditions clinically defined for just that purpose: Chronic Workplace Stress, Chronic Life Stress, and Sustained Performance Depletion. It first took off with people working high-pressure sales jobs, and quickly became popular throughout the corporate world, as a secondary market flourished among the year-end bonus crowd—people selling each other the free sample double doses the manufacturer had seeded so generously among the physicians, while building demand through a series of unintentionally hilarious and extremely effective commercials showing the freakouts of life in the productivity-credit-consumption grinder dissolving into medicated bliss. Once the patents were published, the high-quality street versions started to appear. Houston was good at inventing its own drugs from available materials.
The heavy users of White-Out were called blankers. Donny was one of them.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to concentrate and do your job better, he told himself.
They called it White-Out because it made your mistakes go away. The truth was, it didn’t. It just helped your brain cover them up and stop worrying about them. The actual color of White-Out was usually a sticky black.
Some people said White-Out was the real reason we lost the war, but Donny wasn’t buying it.
Donny had never really been a user before White-Out. He would go to the occasional pot tasting with Joyce after legalization, and drink a little, but no synthetics.
White-Out changed that. It was mildly euphoric, mildly hallucinogenic, and ephemerally antidepressant. The street had invented all sorts of variations that added other effects. Lights Out took the escape from sensory stressors to the edge of catatonic, aided by a douse in embalming fluid, and was the version that had really taken off in the poorest communities, leaving bodies zonked out on street corners. Love In was what they usually called the versions cut with virility drugs, only a few of which tripled your likelihood of an immediate heart attack and the most fun you had ever had getting there. Fear Off was the one the soldiers and gang bangers liked, often blended with performance enhancers and designed to turn you into something like a Viking berserker for half an hour. Closet Door took you on the longest trip, stimulating waking dreams of surreal insanity. Donny liked that one a lot, but his standby was Lights On, which helped you focus. It was cut with amphetamines and worked especially well for reading books, even hornbooks and case law, letting you dive deep into the material and stir up fresh ideas. Often the ideas did not seem as brilliant when you looked at the notepad scrawls the next morning, but Donny was convinced it had helped him come up with some of his most winning arguments.
The problem was the side effects. Most notably the cognitive gaps that would start to develop when you were technically sober, the extra sleep needed to recover, and the waxiness that would begin to develop in your skin, especially if, like Donny, you were of predominantly white complexion. The other thing was that most people, including Donny, quickly built up a resistance that required increasingly potent doses, which worsened the side effects, increased the likelihood of getting some unexpected toxin in the mix, and compounded the effect of rapidly depleting your available funds and making you want to do really crazy and stupid shit to be able to buy more.
But as he sat back out there in the open-air tomb of the dead astronaut heroes listening to the ambient sounds of the city burning up the organic sludge of the oceans that had once covered this land and were getting ready for their big comeback, facing two deadlines, neither one of which was reasonable to meet on its own, and one of which for sure and maybe both were a matter of life or death for his client, it seemed like the right thing to do. So he pinched off a nugget, ate it, and got to work.
8
For the next two hours, instead of eating lunch, Donny camped out in the KopyKat and wrote a long public letter to the President of the United States, juiced by desperation, illegal performance enhancers, free coffee that had been sitting on the warmer coil all day, and a profound sense of fiduciary duty. He wished the latter were enough, and tried to remember the last time that it was.
The KopyKat Business Center #4 was an ancient office services place in a run-down 1980s building on Milam Street. Self-serve photocopiers, workstations, and printers. It smelled like old carpet, burnt paper, and workplace stress. The staff knew Donny, because he used the place a lot—in addition to being close to the courthouse, the machines were so old, and the business so obsolete, that the surveillance was minimal. He even had a preferred workstation, back in the corner. When he checked in, the young guy manning the counter sized him up like he could tell Donny was blanked, and then casually handed him the means of remote office production like he was in on the deal.
If it hadn’t been for the White-Out, Donny might just have sat there and stared at the blinking cu
rsor, not knowing where to start.
Because the truth was, there was no real form for a petition for clemency, just a kind of procedural wrapper. The administration had made pardons and commutations a bigger part of its program than its predecessors, with a widely known but rarely discussed transactional subtext. Turned out there was really no constitutional prohibition on selling such dispensations, at least not according to Justice Hatch writing for a 6–2 majority in People for Ethical Government v. Mack, on using the pardon power on behalf of those with whom the President had business, campaign-contributor, or personal relationships. The only real check was political, and so far it had not proven very effective. The President had pardoned one of his first-term girlfriends, the television actress Katrina Von, for selling classified situation room transcripts to the Peyton Report. He claimed she had done the public a service, since the transcripts showed how his predecessor had failed to retaliate against the Chinese when they disabled the Eris milsat on the eve of the war. He had pardoned the main ringleader of the NoDak biofuels scam, Weldon Bengtson, two weeks after Bengtson announced his billion-dollar endowment of a new investment fund to buy media properties critical of the administration. Most astonishingly of all, he had commuted the sentence of Walter Maughn, a Coast Guard Master Chief who was caught on camera hanging looters from a bridge after the New Orleans floods. “Justice is not always pretty,” he said.
Donny looked at the precedents, and realized he did not have the usual currency with which pardons were purchased. Quite the opposite—he had a client who had been personally demonized by the President, by the Governor of Texas, and by the media, even what was left of the so-called opposition media. Jerome’s was one of the first cases where the government sought denaturalization based on findings of treasonous conduct. Donny successfully prevented that outcome. They punished him for that by giving his client the ultimate punishment. So Donny dug even further into the death penalty precedents, and tried to make a better case on the merits than he had at trial.
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