“That was pretty badass,” said Donny. “I hope you will come get me like that when it’s my turn.”
“You’ll talk your way out of it,” said Xelina.
“Maybe,” said Donny. “But to answer your question more honestly, to save you, I made a deal with the devil. You know which devil I mean.”
“What kind of deal?” said Xelina.
“I agreed to suppress, or at least keep to myself, the evidence I had on who killed Gregorio. Evidence that linked it to said devil.”
“We’ll get that information ourselves,” said Xelina. “And they can’t keep us from getting the word out.”
“Maybe,” said Donny. “We still have your footage, but I’m afraid it needs to stay locked in the archives for now. Part of the deal I cut.” He didn’t see any need to tell them what happened out on the golf course. Partly because he’d agreed to keep that secret, too, even from his own colleagues, in exchange for immunity for Joyce and him.
“It’s okay,” said Xelina. “Wait till you see the footage I got inside that ship.”
“With that little camera I snuck you?”
She nodded.
“Can you wait a while before you do that?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“Because I think I also got everyone on that floating prison freed, and I’d like to make sure that actually happens.”
“No fucking way,” said Clint.
“Wait until you hear the price,” said Donny.
“I don’t think I even want to know,” said Xelina. The light from a passing truck crossed her face, and you could see that dead spot again.
“I do,” said Clint. “Keep talkin’.”
“Basically, as close to giving the land back to the Indians as you could ever manage. Or at least starting the whole Monopoly game over.”
“Well, that sucks,” said Clint.
“It does,” said Donny. “But the ideas are out there now, anyway. People will keep pushing. And while we can’t actually rewrite history, we can slowly excise the injustice from the law.”
“Assuming there’s still any law left,” said Clint.
“There will have to be a settling up, sooner or later,” said Donny.
That was when Clint remembered to give Xelina her new gun. They had a different idea of how to hasten the settling up.
They drove on for a while longer. You could see the obelisk of the San Jacinto Monument off in the distance, the star the Texans had added to make it taller than the Washington Monument lit up in a way that made it look like it was burning.
“Where’re you going, anyway?” said Clint. He was holding Xelina close with his right arm, left hand on the wheel.
“You can drop me off anywhere,” said Donny. “I’ll find my way home.”
“You want some turkey?”
“You made turkey?” said Xelina.
“Yeah, girl. It’s Thanksgiving. As of about an hour ago.”
“Cool,” said Xelina.
“She hates Thanksgiving, you know,” said Clint. “Says it’s like celebrating the Holocaust.”
“It’s okay this time,” said Xelina. “Maybe we can make our own version.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Donny.
68
Donny got up at five that Friday morning and went to meet Joyce. He still had his overnight bag packed from the trip to D.C., so he just threw in the one swimsuit he owned, which was probably the ugliest and definitely the most colorful thing in his closet. He wore a suit, a blue cotton one that you could throw in the wash if you needed to. It never hurt to wear a suit while crossing borders. He grabbed the small quantities of foreign currency he had in the little wooden tray he kept atop his dresser, which included enough pesos to buy the first round. Then, for like the eighth time in as many hours, including the ones when he was asleep, he checked his phone for the passport app they had issued him in D.C. before his flight home. They could deauthorize it from the other end without notice, and Donny was sure it was just a matter of time before that happened.
He grabbed just one book, the one he had bought at the airport for Joyce.
Then he called a cab. The driver was a middle-aged white guy. Donny got him talking. He had been an actuary in Des Moines, saw the drought coming in his hand-wringing apocalyptic probability tables, and got out before they started closing the internal borders and diverting people to the camps. He said he was mostly living off his investments, and just driving the cab to learn the city. Donny took his word for it.
As they drove down Westheimer headed toward Joyce’s place over by Rice, they passed a convoy of military vehicles headed the opposite way, toward downtown.
“That doesn’t look like Coast Guard,” said the cabbie.
“No, it doesn’t,” said Donny.
The convoy must have been forty vehicles. One of those big armored cars led the line with a balaclava-masked dude standing in the turret showing off his black beret, followed by jeeps, troop carriers, a couple of trailers carrying what looked like flat-stacked sections of barricade, and three light tanks. Several of the jeeps pulled little trailers with big loudspeaker systems, and two of them had sonic cannons on the hitch, the ones they used for non-lethal crowd control. Donny looked back at one of the troop carriers as they passed and saw the platoon of soldiers sitting in there in the dim light, dressed for war, gas masks covering their faces and the flickers of augments where there should have been eyes.
“There must be a protest,” said the cabbie.
“Or a coup d’état,” said Donny.
It was weirdly awesome, Donny thought, even as it was horrifying. Something about the sight of the convoy stimulated his inner eleven-year-old, the sheer wonder of the massive power of the nation-state on display. That shock and awe was how they wanted you to react. But mostly it made him mad. Especially as he realized he had played a key part in it.
Toward the rear of the convoy were a dozen regular SUVs and a few flatbed semis, carrying even more troops. Only they weren’t soldiers. They were contractors, in the branded tacticals of Texical and Pendleton-Bolan.
It wasn’t a coup. It was a hostile takeover.
“Does this thing work?” asked Donny, messing with the TV embedded in the back of the seat.
“Oh, yeah, sorry, I forgot to turn that on.”
What came onscreen was white noise and test patterns. Donny kept tuning, wondering if something was up with the network, until he finally got a live feed from American News Network. The closest thing to an official organ of the government, but it was the only one on. When he saw what they were reporting, it made more sense.
PRESIDENT RE-ELECT DEPLOYS MOTHERLAND GUARD IN FORTY CITIES TO SHUT DOWN TERROR CELLS, read the banner across the bottom. DECLARES NATIONAL CALL TO ORDER.
Scenes of even larger military displays in Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, New York. Miami was already basically one big Coast Guard base, the parts that weren’t yet underwater.
“Those motherfuckers,” said Donny. “They couldn’t even wait for the Supreme Court to decide their case.”
“Trust me,” said the cabbie. “He’s doing the right thing. It’s this or chaos. I saw it back home. People, neighbors, fighting over water when the emergency tankers roll up. We need to protect what we have.”
“With a dictatorship that sells off the country and evicts its own citizens? I’ll take my chances with anarchy.”
“Maybe I should drop you off in the Tropic of Kansas and see how much you like that, buddy.”
“I’ll leave you my card and you can call me when they’re done torturing you,” said Donny.
And outside the window they were suddenly in the very lovely old residential block west of the Rice campus, where Joyce lived in her perfectly nice little house. A lawn sprinkler kicked on just as they pulled up.
“Sorry,” said Donny. “It’s been a rough couple of weeks.”
“You should be careful,” said the cabbie.
“So should you,” said Donn
y. And he did hand him his card. “Call me when you aren’t.”
As he grabbed his bag to get out of the car, Donny saw a crew in the yellow jumpsuits of Midwestern refugee laborers, preparing to work on one of the neighbors’ lawns. He wondered if they knew what was coming.
And then he saw Joyce, standing there at her front door, that beautiful old Mercedes of hers in the driveway, and a realtor’s for sale sign stuck in the yard. She was smiling, like she was actually happy to see him.
69
“Hey,” said Donny.
“Good morning,” said Joyce. Maybe it was the dawn light that made her look so good. Or maybe it was just the way she was holding the door open, the path to something better.
“You look great,” said Donny.
“You look like shit,” said Joyce. “And yet good. Must be the suit.”
“Rough couple of weeks.”
“Did you get it done?”
“I think so. It’s complicated.”
“Tell me,” she said.
“I got my client off.”
“Well done.”
“And I shut down the secret camp.”
“Get outta here.”
“But to do that, I gave up the opportunity to stop these guys, impact the election, maybe even achieve some meaningful land reform.”
She shook her head.
“It was my job, Joyce. And my sworn ethical duty. Not that anyone else cares about that sort of thing anymore.”
Joyce laughed.
“And it’s not over yet.”
“Yes it is,” said Joyce. “We’re out of here. I just shot a rich kid.”
“I know a good lawyer. And that incident is taken care of, too.”
“This place is beyond repair. We need to go start our own new country.”
“What if we could restart this one?”
“Come on.”
“I mean it.”
“How long do you think that will take?”
“Four years, at least. Probably more like forty. It’s a long game.”
“Fuck these people, Donny! They don’t want the help. Listen to what they’re letting those bastards do.” She put her finger to her ear. In the distance, you could hear the sound of orders being yelled over loudspeakers. “They want to be controlled, not liberated.” She held out her phone and shook it. “The willing architects of their own enslavement, using their thumbs to beat off their brains while the planet dies.”
“You’re wrong, Joyce. People are already fighting back. Maybe not in this neighborhood, but they’re out there, right now. And I’m fighting with them, right here, the only way I know how. One case at a time.”
She gave him a hard look. “I knew you would bail on me.”
“I’m sorry, Joyce. I have to. I didn’t realize it until I saw those tanks rolling down Westheimer. But now I know it with more certainty than I’ve had about anything in a long time.”
“I just saved your life,” she reminded him.
“I know. But I still have to earn it.”
He held out his hands. She let him hang there for a minute, before she let up and reached back.
And as they pulled each other closer, and kissed, you could feel the pull. But the house behind her was empty, and the only door that was really open was the car’s.
“‘In the future, there won’t be any borders,’” said Donny, quoting one of Joyce’s favorite lines from Brigada. Joyce nodded, and tried to smile. But they both knew he was lying.
Acknowledgments
Texas is a place where lawyer ads flourish like prickly pear, and it was a lawyer on a billboard that provided the initial inspiration for this story. I was pumping gas one afternoon on the side of Highway 71 at the outskirts of Austin, looking in the direction of Houston. Staring down at me from above the overpass was a criminal defense lawyer sporting a leather jacket, wild hair, and a trickster’s smile—one of those rare lawyers who work to show potential clients they are ready to fight the system, not be part of it. I was working on Tropic of Kansas at the time, and while I didn’t need a lawyer, my fugitive characters did—a lawyer who would combine some of the frontage road tenacity of a Texas plaintiff’s attorney with the political courage of advocates like William Kunstler and Jacques Vergès to help clients navigate the legal minefields of dystopia. Donny Kimoe didn’t make the final cut of that book, but his billboard did, and it was enough to make one character pick up the phone for that free initial consultation. My imaginary dystopian defense lawyer would not be possible without the example and inspiration of all the real ones who roll up their sleeves to fight for a dream of justice we all know is rarely achieved outside of fiction, and I humbly hope that this book inspires some others in the same way.
Donny Kimoe practices in a legal system I invented for this book. If you try to look up any of the statutes or cases cited here, you won’t find them (with a few exceptions, notably Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823)). But they are all extrapolations from existing legal precedents, from the military tribunals of Guantánamo and the Civil War to the loyalty laws of the Red Scare and the Cold War and the martial law invocations that occurred with remarkable frequency in the twentieth century, especially before World War II. To develop my jurisprudential variation on speculative fictional worldbuilding, I spent a tremendous amount of time in the Tarlton Law Library at the University of Texas School of Law, taking advantage of its prodigious collection of material, which even includes a section of dusty how-to guides for the domestic administration of military government in times of insurrection or emergency—as well as an amazing collection of law and popular culture ready-made for a writer wishing to decode the deep roots of the American lawyer story. I owe thanks to the librarians of that amazing institution, and to the authors of the many remarkable works I drew from in my research.
The other experience I had while working on Tropic of Kansas that had a big influence on this book was my service for several months on a Texas grand jury. Having only ever worked at the margins of criminal procedure over the course of my career as a lawyer, I found it a unique opportunity, and an eye-opener. Unlike a trial jury, which sits as the finder of fact in a specific case, the grand jury hears the government’s presentation of each felony indictment it wants to prosecute. The standard it applies is low. And the volume of cases it hears is huge—dozens or more a day, two or three days a week. Our panel was a diverse group of Texans with good bullshit detectors and a strong sense of justice, and we did our job to turn away cases where the standard was not met. But in most of the cases, indictments were issued based on the evidence, and you learned what it feels like to be part of the machine that takes people (many of them young people) off the street, marks them for life, and locks them up. People who may be guilty of the crimes for which they’ve been arrested, but caught through a process that’s rigged—from the decisions about what activity should be criminalized to the decisions about what neighborhoods to patrol to the way the system allocates access to lawyers. Serving on a grand jury, you quickly gain a deeper understanding of how justice is distributed the same way everything else is in this society. That from at least some vantage points, the system is already pretty dystopian, even without distortion through the prism of imaginative fiction. The experience recharged my sense of pervasive injustice in a way that impacted my own practice, especially my pro bono and community work, and led me to pursue the idea of this book. So thanks to my fellow grand jurors for helping me see the law from the perspective of their very different experiences, and to the court for the opportunity.
This story bears the imprint of my own experiences as a working lawyer, sometimes helping people who had no money and sometimes helping people who had too much, and the things I have learned from the clients and lawyers and paralegals I have had the good fortune to work with, from government and non-profit clinics to big law firms and bigger companies. Those people are too numerous to list, but I owe particular thanks to Charlie Szalkowski, who sets the model
of professional ethics and can tell you the story of just about every Houston lawyer who ever lived; Melissa Russell, who helped me see the things lawyers hide from each other; Len Sandler, who taught me how to truly listen to a client; and Steve Bercu, whose example has been more influential than he knows.
A few of those lawyers are also writers, and they proved especially helpful sounding boards as I fleshed out this book. In particular, I owe thanks to Paul Miles for reading various drafts and providing essential election law advice; to Dan Wood for helping me think through my ideas for how to write a legal thriller that was about the law as much as the facts; and to Justin Castillo for helping me vet both my law and procedure, and other insights as well. I also owe thanks to some writers who are not lawyers, including Pepe Rojo, for once again helping me see this country from the other side of the border wall that keeps us in; Kelly Link, for titular affirmation; Jessica Reisman, for being the truest of colleagues and the most trusted of advisors; Henry Wessells, for being the sounding board who always gets it; and Timmi Duchamp, for the engagement and example.
I want to thank my neighbors here in East Austin, with whom I have had the opportunity to work in recent years, especially Daniel Llanes and Susana Almanza, who have helped me see how the injustices of the twenty-first-century city are rooted in the history of the land on which it is built, and Bill O’Rourke, who provided important encouragement and helped me see the city from the streets. Thanks also to Sam Douglas for his documentary filmmaker’s tips on where to find Houston’s very best lawyer commercials.
Big thanks to my editor, David Pomerico, who saw the potential of this idea early on, and played a critical role in helping me flesh out the concept and make it something much bigger than I initially conceived. Thanks to the rest of the team at HarperCollins, notably cover designer Owen Corrigan for helping to convey the book visually. And thanks to literary agent Mark Gottlieb for helping to guide the project forward and providing insightful advice and counsel along the way.
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