Rule of Capture

by Christopher Brown

  Donny looked back at the stage. He recognized the emcee introducing the next act. It was a local rich kid turned silver-haired eccentric named George. He was the main investor in the place, according to Ward, who numbered George among his clients. With his disheveled blue suit, manic party maestro enthusiasm, and bow tie on the edge of untying itself, he looked like the coke dealer at the Yale Club. Which, according to Ward, he was.

  The next act George brought out was a man wearing nothing but the collar to which his leash was attached. Donny turned to Turner.

  “You come here every night?”

  “Nah,” said Turner. “Usually just on Tuesdays when they have the specials. Diane’s husband and I served together in Iran, during the cleanup. May he rest in peace.”

  Donny tipped his drink.

  “Everybody goes sometime,” said Turner. “Speaking of which, I hope we’re gonna see you at Judge Elwood’s memorial.”

  “TBD,” said Donny. “They’ve been keeping me pretty busy.”

  “So I heard.”

  “I’ll definitely try to make it to the afterwake.”

  “Gotcha,” said Turner. “They don’t invite the help to those.”

  “Trust me, you’re better off,” said Donny. “Let me buy you guys some skin. And another round.” He signaled the server, who was dressed in a barbed-wire bikini.

  “That’s real nice of you, Donny,” said Turner, saying it like he meant it. He raised a glass, and the guys joined in.

  “You doing as shitty as you look?” asked Turner, looking right at Donny.

  “Shittier,” said Donny.

  “Not as shitty as your clients, sounds like.”

  Donny returned Turner’s gaze. Those cold blue eyes glowing through flaps of pink middle-aged skin and government-issue plastic spectacles were not without sympathy. They reminded him of his high school cross-country coach standing there while he was puking after the first race, telling him “pain is weakness leaving the body.”

  “Nope,” said Donny. “I’m the guilty one. They’re innocent. Were, in Jerome’s case.”

  “I can’t believe they really did it,” said Turner.

  “Midnight Monday night,” said Donny. “I was there.”

  “I heard you went a little loco,” said Turner, raising his white eyebrows. “Loco enough for them to pick you up for questioning.”

  “Did you hear what they did?”

  “Above my pay grade.”

  “Bullshit, Turner. You seem like you know everything that’s going on.”

  “Just some of it. I hope they didn’t give you any of the special treatment.” He looked at the bondage scene onstage when he said that.

  “They probably wanted to, but were afraid of blowback. They won’t start torturing lawyers until they get done stealing the election.”

  Turner smiled. “Sounds about right. But doesn’t sound like that’s going to happen. No way they’ll let the Governor call the election all by himself.”

  “Not if Miles Powell keeps beating him in court,” said Donny.

  “I figure that’s why they went ahead and executed your client.”

  “For the elections?”

  “Yeah, getting folks all amped up about how dangerous it will be if they lose. People love executions. Especially of traitors.”

  “He didn’t kill anybody, Turner.”

  “He wasn’t innocent. None of those people you represent are.”

  “Look around,” said Donny.

  Turner scanned the room, and smiled. “I getcha,” he said.

  “They just want a future that includes them,” said Donny.

  “Then they can fight to get our country back.”

  “There’s like ten states north of here that are already dying, Turner. We can’t fix that kind of broke all by ourselves.”

  Turner shrugged. “Whatcha gonna do about that little firecracker that popped off in the judge’s face?”

  “I’m gonna get her out, that’s what. And make sure she’s the last one, if I can.”

  “You got a few days, at least,” said Turner.

  “Before the elections get sorted out?”

  “No, before they transfer her. They only take ’em out there once a week. Friday night flights, they call it.”

  Donny considered that, and wondered if he could figure out a way to get Broyles’s order invalidated before then.

  “Is it true what they say?” he asked. “About the ship?”

  “Fuck if I know,” said Turner. “They got so many levels of secret now in so many compartments, I don’t even try to figure it out. I just want to get through the next three years, take my full retirement, and hit the road.”

  “In that trailer you bought?”

  “Goddam right.”

  “Mac’s gonna be one of them R.V. swingers,” said the younger of his buddies, a wiry bald guy. “Hooking up in all forty-nine states.”

  “Sounds disgusting,” said Donny. “No offense, Turner.”

  Turner laughed. “What’re you looking for?” he asked. “I know you didn’t come here for the show.”

  “You should be a psychic,” said Donny. He leaned in, to where the others wouldn’t hear him over the noise. “You really want to know?”

  Turner nodded. Donny wondered if he was for real, or just luring him in.

  “I need to examine some evidence they have on my client. Physical evidence, some of her personal property they confiscated. Just so I can have a shot at giving her a fair trial. It’s not a secret, and I have a clearance anyway, so they’re just playing bullshit games rigging the rules and you and I both know it. I was about to collect some duplicate copies when they picked me up, and made me watch while they destroyed it.”

  He looked for Turner’s reaction, but he was just listening.

  “Imagine if it were your kid,” said Donny.

  “My kid died,” said Turner. “Fighting revolutionaries like her on the other side of the border, before they infected our own country.”

  Donny shook his head. “This isn’t like that, Mac. I’m telling you, she really is innocent, and I just need a quick look at this thing to be able to show it.”

  Turner nursed his beer.

  “Think about it,” said Donny. “Like you said, everyone can see how the election is going to be called. The curtain is about to come down on this whole dark episode. And trust me, I know what it’s like when a political flip like that happens. I represented guys before the tribunals after the last one.”

  “I remember.”

  “So trust me, Turner, you’re better off helping me than helping them. Having me owe you one could come in handy when the new regime comes around looking for scapegoats.”

  Turner looked at him with eyes that had seen the military detention camps that got some of those officers hauled in front of the tribunals. Then he looked down at his beer while he processed Donny’s postulate, as if the label encoded the answer.

  “I know a guy you could talk to,” he said.

  “I’m listening,” said Donny.

  Turner leaned way in, talking in Donny’s ear. He wore the same cologne as Donny’s great-uncle Vic, the one who smelled like dead flowers and Barbicide.

  While Donny listened, some fat guy in his underwear was breaking out of the cage they had put him in on the stage, while George the emcee crooned that old Bobby Earl Lee song about how Freedom Isn’t Free.

  24

  Donny’s apartment was in Montrose, on the second floor of an old commercial building. His front window had a view of the bar across the street, a place called the Submariner. When Donny went to open the blinds and crack the window, he could hear the music from the bar. “Ebb Tide,” the Tom Jones version, extra loud, one of Donny’s favorites from the Submariner’s well-curated jukebox of cheese. He sat there at the window and listened to it for a minute, momentarily forgetting his troubles as he imagined the water washing over, washing over them all. He looked down the street, remembering what it had looked like t
hat summer when he woke up the morning after the first big deluge and saw that dude paddling a canoe toward downtown.

  Right about where the canoe had been was where he saw the car. A red GMC Metron, just like the one he had been sure was following him after his meet-up with Turner, only to convince himself he was being paranoid. He had taken an alternate route just in case, cruising through the hospital district and then around the gated-off sections of River Oaks.

  The car was empty, parallel parked there among the other cars in front of the bars. He couldn’t see the license plates, or if there were any. The only people he saw were the guys hanging out at the tables in front of the Submariner.

  He closed the blinds, and then looked out the back windows at the alley. He saw motion at the edge of the light, then looked more closely and saw it was a little screech owl sitting on the power line. Donny’s Oldsmobile was there under the lamp, undisturbed. He checked the locks on the door, looked through the peephole at the empty landing, then checked the view from the bathroom window, and decided to stop worrying and see if he could get some work done. The Metron was an exceptionally common car, not just in the fleets of government agencies—perfect fodder for the kinds of urban legends people invent to explain strange times.

  Donny kept a bigger law library at home than at the office. Part of the reason was many of the volumes in his collection were ones you weren’t supposed to have—precedents of the secret court that were never supposed to leave the courthouse, documents from the underground, and his collection of banned books.

  One of the banned books was sitting there on his armchair, underneath the liner notes from one of Jerome’s old tapes that he had been reading Sunday night, which now seemed weeks in the past instead of days. As he put the notes back in their little plastic case, Donny morbidly wondered whether the value had already gone up. He went to get the tape from the deck, and thought about playing it again, only to decide he wasn’t ready yet.

  He had forgotten what book it was he had been reading as he stayed up that night sleeplessly waiting for news until he fell asleep in his chair and then overslept for morning call. Stay Hungry was one of the newest and craziest tomes in Donny’s collections, a chapbook of free verse by an American transient known only as Benjamin O. The energetic and explicit riffs on outlaw sex under freeway overpasses and in convenience store restrooms were what had gotten it banned, but the page Donny had had it open to when he zonked out was the thing that should have gotten it banned—a poem titled “Beautiful Boys,” a not-so-coded ode to the refugee kids who tried to kill the President. There was a passage that floridly traced the bullet that got blocked by one of the martyred agents, and another that envisioned the buttered popcorn paradise that awaited the boys.

  Donny closed that as the melancholy flashback came on, and put it back on the shelf where it belonged between Horizonte Verde, Brigada’s novel of eco-revolution that got him locked up in a Panamanian prison for seven years, and The Free Rebels, a rogue translation of The Aeneid by some high school Latin teacher who had reimagined the story of the retreat from Troy and the search for a new national home as a prescient allegory for the founding of the American republic—an allegory infused with the ultranationalist ideas that had taken fire after the loss of the war. On the next shelf, Donny found what he was looking for: the notebook he had labeled MARTIAL LAW.

  The document he was looking for in there wasn’t about martial law per se. It was a government memo outlining the basis on which large swaths of the state could be declared off-limits based on bad weather. Donny hadn’t printed all the appendixes that detailed the damages to the area they had fenced off—just the list at the end of the memo ran almost thirty pages of single-spaced text listing chemical spills, poisoned groundwater, failed bridges, power generation and transmission systems destroyed beyond repair, indefinitely fouled municipal water supplies, whole subdivisions of housing stock rendered uninhabitable due to water damage and rerouted tributaries. There was a map that showed the locations, islands in red scattered densely across the state east and south of Houston. And out in the Gulf, the much bigger zone where the spills were still spilling, like someone had slit the wrists of the Earth in the warm bathtub of those turbid waters.

  The message they had given the public was that those areas would be off-limits until the necessary repairs had been made. The problem was, the state and federal governments didn’t have the money to pay for the repairs. So the memo, written by a committee of lawyers supporting the interagency task force charged with coming up with a plan, went in a kind of unexpected direction. It started with a lengthy distillation of the governments’ emergency powers and how they provided a sound basis for temporarily seizing any properties as reasonably deemed necessary for public health and safety. It noted the state constitutional authority of the Governor to declare martial law in those areas where normal government could not be administered and the courts could not be kept open. But then there was this footnote that ate up a couple of pages all by itself, going off about how the governments could use their power of eminent domain to permanently seize the properties and sell them as-is for “rehabilitative redevelopment.”

  First the eviction, then the auction. And you could bet with public officials on one side and real estate types on the other, it would be a process rife with opportunities for corruption. Especially when you considered the value of some of those sites. The majority were industrial, and most of those related to the nation’s energy supply, places whose restoration to full capacity was urgent. Some were parklands, mostly along waterways, slivers of habitat that had never been amenable to development. And then there were the huge acreages along the coast that had been devoted to commercial and military space launch operations and already closed down long before Zelda by the treaty that ended the war.

  One of those, the HKBR Space pad just south of Galveston, was next to the national wildlife refuge where Gregorio had led his weeks-long illegal occupation. Donny thought about what Ward had told him, and wished he had been more specific about where.

  There was a second footnote in there, almost a footnote to the footnote, and that was the one Donny had really been looking for. A succinct recitation of how it was that all real estate in the state, and the whole country, was ultimately owned by the government, and everyone else just had a kind of permission to occupy it or extract resources from it or both. An idea at the base of American law that went all the way back to William the Conqueror divvying up England among his victorious warlords. But one that, when you dug down to the roots, had no principled basis—just whatever force had been able to take it and keep it. If you could expose the flaws behind that premise, it would upend the whole system.

  Donny must have been there an hour taking notes at his kitchen table before he heard the yelling outside and went to look. And when he peered out at the street, that red car was still there, and he still couldn’t see if it had plates. He decided it was time to go take a closer look.

  He walked down the block like he was out for a stroll, looking down the long straight sidewalks for signs of suspicious characters, but seeing none. It didn’t help that the street lighting left big stretches of shadow.

  When he got to the corner, he cut back toward the car and the bar. A couple of guys were walking in his direction, laughing, then they cut between the cars and jaywalked over toward the other side of the street where Donny’s apartment was.

  Donny slowed when he got to the car. No one seemed to be watching.

  It had plates. Basic Texas plates, not government. The windows were darkly tinted, which was not unusual in sun-scorched Texas. He looked around again and then used the flashlight on his phone to peer inside. It was tidy, almost too tidy, but for the air freshener tree hanging from the rearview mirror. That and the plates made him conclude it was probably just some civilian’s generic car, and he could relax.

  The blue neon of the Submariner beckoned, close enough that you could hear the crackle of the lights out front.
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  The Submariner was Montrose all the way, a place that combined a superhero fetish theme with a sense of climate-change languor. Like it was always last call at the end of the world, the superheroes had given up the fight and decided to get drunk instead, and that was a good thing. The summer before, Donny and Joyce would hang out there on hot nights when the power company had started imposing rations, staying up too late shooting the shit with friends at the sidewalk tables under the misters. The place had been converted from an old gas station, so they would throw open the big garage doors and even from the outside you could sit there and watch the beautiful men swimming in those giant aquarium tanks they had installed. Joyce liked that so much that Donny half-expected to see her there as he walked up. She wasn’t, so he grabbed a stool at the bar.

  “Hey, Donny,” said Vonda, the bartender. “Haven’t seen you in here since election night.”

  “Geez, that seems like a memory from another reality now.”

  “It’ll be over soon.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “What are you having?”

  “How about one of those Atlantean Dreams.”

  “You want that all the way?”

  Donny wrestled with that proposition, but not for long. “Yeah, why not. It’ll help me finish the work I still need to get done tonight.”

  “Gotcha,” she said, with a friendly wink. “Back in court in the morning?”

  “Yeah, but tomorrow I’m the defendant.”

  “Whoa,” said Vonda. “What happened?”

  “I got a little carried away arguing another case.”

  “Sorry to hear that. Let me get you your medicine.”

  The swimmers had the night off, and without the backlight the aquarium glass let you see the reflections of the bar behind you without having to turn around. Donny checked out the crowd that way, and saw only a sparser version of the usual scene—a few of the neighbors and some coupled-up dudes. So when the cocktail came, he felt safe enough to see where it took him.

  Vonda’s mixology was not always entirely legal, but it was usually safe.