Rule of Capture

by Christopher Brown

  “Sure,” she said. “But don’t take too long. I’m leaving on Friday with or without you.”

  After they hung up, he turned off his phone. Then he turned around and took an alternate route to his destination.

  When he saw the car turn around behind him, he drove faster.

  16

  Forty minutes later, after a few detours to shake the tail or the paranoia, Donny finally found Xelina’s house. It was way out east, on the south side of Pasadena, in a part of town that had looked like the end of the world long before the storms put the oil back in the ground and made big swaths of the area uninhabitable. Pasadena, Texas, was not a place you would ever confuse with its California cousin. No flowers, just flareoffs.

  Except in front of this place, of all things, the first things Donny noticed in his headlights were flowers. The yard was full of them. Yellow flowers, not too big, but wild and tall, sticking up out of the weeds that looked like they were about to swallow the front porch of the little house.

  The house didn’t look like the headquarters of a terrorist conspiracy. It looked abandoned. One of those little shotgun shacks that are so common in mostly winterless Texas: wood frame with a pointy roof and a little more insulation than your average cardboard box. There was purple warning tape across the front. Not crime scene tape, but the kind they used to seal off contaminated sites.

  Donny looked around. There were two other houses on the short block, some more the next block over. Behind the house was a patch of woods. Farther back you could see a tall fence around what looked like a warehouse, with one lonely security light where the bugs were dancing. Next door all the way to the corner was empty, and almost as overgrown. Probably razed, since at the end of the street there was fencing blocking off the road and everything in that direction—the beginning of the Evac Zone. Donny wondered how people could live so close to cancer land. But it had always been bad around here in these residential neighborhoods sandwiched between the chemical plants, mostly occupied by people who worked in those same plants. The weirdest thing was, when he turned off his headlights and rolled down the window to listen and look more clearly, it seemed so nice. Not pretty, but real. And not quiet, but quietly alive. You could hear the bugs and frogs out there mixed in with the machine hums and thunks of the factories and the buzz of the electric lights, a little corner of tranquility hiding in plain sight. A different kind of hideout than he’d had in mind.

  He put on the gloves, put the knife in his pocket, grabbed the flashlight, and stepped out into it.

  He didn’t get far before he caught his sleeve on the thorns of a mesquite, puncturing skin and cursing as he tried to pull it loose, and then screaming when the flashlight roused a snake that lay in the branches. It wasn’t a big snake, or a venomous one, and the tree was really just a bush, half hidden by the weeds. But he screamed anyway, pure reflex, and that got some dogs barking across the street.

  At least they sounded small.

  Donny scrambled through the weeds as fast as he could around the side of the house, hoping to get out of sight before the pit bulls woke up.

  When he got to the back, he could already feel little prickly things on his ankles, something from the weeds poking through the thin socks he wore with his suit pants and wingtips. He shined the light on the back wall. The windows had the bright FEMA stickers on them but no tape. There was a door, like Xelina said. And there was the big oil drum that had been made into a planter, with some kind of yucca growing out of it. He went in close, and found the fake rock that had the key.

  Turned out he didn’t need it, because the back door was already open. The flimsy screen door made a loud noise behind him as he stepped in.

  The place looked vacated in a hurry. Dirty dishes in the sink, muddy rain boots on the floor by the back door. No sign of anyone there now. Flashlight on, he looked for the cache.

  The long hallway was papered up like a big collage. Photos of wildlife mixed with industry. A hawk sitting on a telephone line, humongous storage tanks looming behind it. A family of deer crossing the interstate, blocking four lanes of traffic. A coyote in front of a suburban office building. There were posters, too. A campaign poster for Gregorio, young, handsome, pan-racial, and hopeful, one fist raised and the other holding some little kid’s hand. The kid was the one holding the flowers. An older one farther down, the famous one of Tania, before she was martyred, with her beret and the AK-47, the one they said started it all. Donny remembered his mom had a smaller version of that image on the wall of her study when he was a kid, before she quit the people’s clinic and went to work for the company.

  The front room looked like a storm had blown through, furniture upended and stuff dumped all over the floor. He didn’t have time to go through it, but his eye was drawn to one thing, maybe because it was hanging from the ceiling, slowly turning in the flashlight beam. Some kind of art object, almost like a chandelier, but made from animal bones and human trash instead of glass. Antlers and teeth and rebar and valves, a few dashes of color from the severed heads of plastic toys, all attached to one center piece, a piece of driftwood that looked like it probably floated up the Ship Channel from some primordial ocean on the other side of time.

  He scanned away from that, following the ceiling back down the hallway until he found the thing that Xelina said covered the access to the crawl space where he would find the backups of her videos. It was a band poster. Electric Hephaestus, the original album cover for Back to Pishon, where the musicians and their friends were all skinny dipping in a mountain stream. Donny had smiled when Xelina told him what to look for, because he had a copy of that album as well, with the censored version of the cover, and without the backmasking. In a way, it was the first thing they had really shared in common.

  It probably still was, until suddenly lights from outside filled the house, and he heard the voice of the machine calling his name.

  “DONALD KIMOE. WE KNOW YOU ARE IN THERE. THIS IS THE TASK FORCE. WE HAVE YOU SURROUNDED. COME OUT. NOW. HANDS OVER YOUR HEAD.”

  He looked to the window to see, but the light was so bright he couldn’t see anything. And when he looked back at the poster, he only saw white. He reached up anyway, looking for the pull cord with the idea that maybe he could get up there and get it in time, but then he hesitated when he heard the chopper blades, thinking he better wait until he could come back, and not tip them off now.

  Then he heard the three hard knocks, and before he could say anything, he heard the splintering of the door, which sounded like it was his own head.

  17

  “You can’t arrest me,” said Kimoe. “I’m a lawyer.”

  “Shut up,” said the officer who was watching Donny be cuffed. The guy wore a blue windbreaker that said POLICE FEMA on the back and had the name “Coats” on the front. “Martial law means we don’t need any more fucking lawyers. We are the law now, pal. And you broke it good.”

  “I represent one of the residents of this house,” said Donny. “I have every right to be here.”

  “Sit down,” said Coats, and the guy who had just cuffed Donny pushed down on the chain between the cuffs like he was yanking a dog’s choke collar. Donny didn’t fight it, and kneeled in the middle of the street between the headlights of a half dozen patrol cars and one big green police truck. He looked up at Coats, who had turned to say something to one of the guys up at the house, but the chopper was so loud he couldn’t hear what the guy said. Then Donny felt the rotor wash and his tie slapped him in the face.

  Coats turned in time to see that, and pointed and laughed.

  “I’ll be in court in the morning,” yelled Donny. “And we’ll see about who broke what law.”

  “Let me play you something, smartass,” said Coats. “Hold him good, Garrett.”

  Garrett got down behind Donny, grabbed both arms, put his knee up against Donny’s back, and pulled. It hurt. When he tried to resist, the guy pulled harder.

  Coats pulled out his phone, messed with the buttons,
and then put it to Donny’s ear. The volume was all the way up, which hurt even more than the knee in his back. But what hurt the most was that what he heard over the noise of the chopper and the hollering cops and the barking fucking Chihuahuas who had probably gotten him in this mess was the sound of his own damn voice.

  What was playing was the message he had left on the White House voicemail.

  It was not the kind of message your lawyer wants to hear.

  Donny knew each provision of the federal criminal code that those sorts of threats on the life of the President violated. He had defended his fair share of cases involving less imaginative and more profane versions.

  He looked up at Coats, who was giving him the stern father, angry good old boy edition.

  “I meant every word,” said Donny.

  Now Coats got a different look in his face. Those eyes.

  The eyes of frontier justice.

  “Light it up,” hollered Coats, turning to the squad at the house and flashing a hand signal.

  A couple of the guys went over with hand torches from the truck and did as Coats commanded, hitting spots inside and then around the outside of the house.

  And then they watched the house burn. So hot Donny could feel the scorch on his face from out there in the street.

  Razing damaged buildings in the disaster zone was part of the job description for FEMA cops. They had a reputation for getting a little carried away with it sometimes. Gentrification by fire, people called it. What amazed Donny was how fast they worked.

  He was in the back of the police truck looking through the bulletproof glass when the whole frame collapsed in on itself. Right around the time the tow truck came to take away his car. It was an old car, but a nice one, the fancy Chinese import he had bought with his severance money from the law firm. And because it was Chinese, they started abusing it before they even got the chains on.

  For some reason it was the car that finally made him lose his shit. Maybe the way it reminded him of some of his other epic fails.

  18

  “You should blame his predecessor, President Green,” said Broyles, as he teed up on the fourteenth hole one Saturday morning that summer. “He’s the one who started turning our own people over to the tribunals.”

  Donny had tried to reply, to make a distinction between war criminals and political dissidents, but Broyles signaled him to shut up and wait while he addressed the ball.

  This was in August, right after the political conventions, as the campaigns got their frenzy on for the final stretch. It was a beautiful morning at the Cypress Bayou Country Club, the third Saturday of the month, when Donny’s former colleagues played a round followed by lunch and cards at the grill. The other three were members of the club, and Donny was their guest, filling in for their regular fourth, a deal lawyer named Alan Massey who had to spend the morning with a merger agreement—the Pendleton Services acquisition of Bolan Corp. they would read about on Monday before market open. The fourth hurricane of the summer was supposed to blow in from Africa that night, but the skies were clear and the air surprisingly cool. Trey and Lou were still sweating through, probably because they were wearing the blood blue, as was the judge. Almost-black polo shirts and slacks—black madras shorts in Trey’s case, a Southern preppy variation on fashion-as-politics that some boutique menswear store out of South Carolina had come up with. It was the first time Donny really appreciated the dark turn politics had taken that year, in no small part because of the case he had before Broyles. Only the most strident radicals ever called American patriots “fascists,” but seeing those three standing with their clubs that morning made him wonder. Like maybe if he said the wrong thing Trey would hold him down while Lou shoved a ball in his mouth and Broyles brained him with the sand wedge. They used to joke about shit like that back in the day. Maybe they meant it more than Donny realized.

  Inviting Donny along was Lou’s idea, and the reason was a case Donny had before Broyles—the Jerome Hardy case, which was about a lot more than Jerome Hardy. Lou was worried it was destroying their friendships. That maybe some time together on the course would help bridge the gap, maybe even help clear a path to working out a deal. Donny figured it couldn’t hurt to have a chance to work on Broyles outside the courtroom. He knew the good the guy was capable of from the years they had worked together. But those years were starting to feel like a whole different reality, one that was lost forever to the rapidly distancing past.

  At his convention the week before, the President had announced the suspension of habeas corpus in thirteen counties in Texas and Louisiana that he had designated in an earlier executive order as “zones of insurrection”—areas where law and order had failed after the storms. Earlier such declarations had included mostly rural areas in the drought-ravaged Midwest, but this one included most of the Houston metroplex, with exceptions for downtown and some of the neighborhoods that had been cleared. Houston was ground zero, in a way, for problems in other parts of the country that had migrated here. Literally, in caravans of pickups and station wagons and sometimes tractors, to the resettlement camps that included the big one by the airport not far from where they were that morning. The one the President had been visiting when those refugee kids, four originally from Wichita and one who had walked all the way from Kearney, Nebraska, tried to put a hole in him.

  They got themselves shot in the process, and took three Secret Service agents with them. Their pictures were everywhere, and the domestic refugee problem became a whole different kind of crisis. The resettlement camps became a whole different kind of camp—the kind you never leave. And then they started looking in the cities and towns for other homegrown enemies who needed to be excised from the population to keep the political disease from spreading.

  It was a phrase one of the kids screamed as he pressed the detonator, a lyric from one of Jerome’s songs, that got the investigation focused on just what Jerome had been instigating in the tapes he had been selling kids in the camps, and in the bombed-out storm zones of the metroplex. Donny, being a fan of Jerome’s music, was happy to take the case. He hadn’t really thought about the politics of it, or the personal consequences, until he was all in.

  The trial had been expedited, and short. Donny’s part, at least. Broyles gave the prosecution as much time as they needed to build an error-free record, and gave Donny a day and a half. After being name-checked by the President in his big speech, complete with a scary photo of the “terrorist ringleader” holding a rifle in one hand and a political tract in the other, Jerome had been convicted that week after Broyles did his best to preempt the jury. Donny had been working on his sentencing brief the afternoon before when Lou invited him to join them.

  “We all need to stay friends,” was all he had said.

  And for half the course, they had followed the rules and talked about a lot of nothing. A few fishing stories, one adulterous confession, and the world’s longest lawyer anecdote about a screwy case Lou and Broyles had worked on. Until they got in the carts at the thirteenth flag, and Donny finally called out the elephant on the fairway.

  “I can’t believe we are playing golf while you all are shredding the Constitution,” he said.

  Broyles was immediately aggravated, but the only way you could tell was by how quiet he got. It didn’t show in his play, when they got to the next tee. He hit the ball hard and straight. They watched it sail.

  “Nice,” said Trey, the voice of a forty-something pledge captain.

  “He’s been taking lessons,” said Lou.

  “Just clarity of mind,” said Broyles. “It comes with age.”

  “And the power to lock up anyone who bugs you,” said Donny.

  Broyles gave him a look normally reserved for the worst defendants, and then changed to a mean smile. “Don’t be bitter, Donny,” he said. “Stick with sentimental.”

  Trey and Lou laughed. All four of them had worked at the same law firm, though not all at the same time. Broyles had left the summer Donny clerked,
to take over as head federal prosecutor for the region. Trey and Lou had been the senior associates Donny worked with right out of school. Trey was now the GC at Texical, more of a corporate fixer than a lawyer, and Lou was still at the firm, a senior partner handling big corporate disputes.

  “Donny is good at sentimental,” said Lou. “Remember the Helios Industries case?”

  Donny remembered. That was the case where it became clear he would never make partner, after he disclosed incriminating documents he found in their own client’s files, documents revealing the client’s knowledge of defects in their heat tiles that had caused a corporate orbiter to flame out on reentry and crash into a Mexican village. What Donny did was required under the rules. They rewarded him by putting Lou on the case instead, and making Donny the lawyer who handled the non-billable pro bono cases—the charitable work the rules also required, the subject of public admiration and private derision. That lasted a year, until Donny and a half dozen other lawyers were terminated for what they said were economic reasons but in fact was a political purge. At least they made it a soft landing, getting Broyles to bring Donny on as an Assistant U.S. Attorney. And then President Mack took the oath for the first time, Broyles went on the bench shortly thereafter—the prize for prosecuting cases that helped take down the prior administration—and Donny switched sides. And things between them were never quite the same, even as the cabling of collegiality persisted across the divisions of politics.

  “He cares,” said Trey. “We all care. Donny just lets the scales balance all the way over to where the old blind lady’s about to fall and not get up.”

  “Apparently His Honor finds me sentimental for thinking people should not be detained without a legally defensible reason.”

  “Then blame Abraham Lincoln,” said Broyles, pulling his tee, also black, and then using it as a pointer to aid in the lecture. “He was the model. Not for the reasons people usually cite. The model of iron-fisted strength in service of nationalist principle. First president to hire his own elite mercenary corps to do his bidding.”