by Lee French
Momma went to work and came back already, and now puttered inside. Peterson must not have mentioned Bobby’s visit, because she didn’t say anything. Actually, she seemed in a really good mood, so probably she had her needlework keeping her company. Doing it reminded her of Dad some, and best to do that sort of thing when she wouldn’t dwell on the bad stuff.
An Atlanta police cruiser pulled up in front of the house and stopped there. Two uniformed officers got out and started up the walk. Bobby couldn’t think of anything he’d done recently to warrant that kind of attention, other than maybe decking Peterson, so he frowned at them without getting up. It was too damned hot to run anyway, so if they wanted him in that air conditioned car to take to the air conditioned station, he didn’t have a lot of incentive to resist. “Can I help you officers?”
“Robert Mitchell?” The first one had his hand on his weapon, the second one stayed far enough behind him to be in a good position in case Bobby decided to take off.
“Yes, sir.” He did have to admire the two cops for being dressed in dark blue uniforms in this heat and not looking like they would rather be back in their cruiser. “What’s it to ya?”
“Son, you’re under arrest for vandalism at Bailey’s Package Store.”
Bobby blinked and still didn’t get up. “Huh?” In fairness to these fine officers of the law, he had committed a few minor acts of what they might call vandalism over the years, but nothing since he started dating Mandy, and he hadn’t felt the urge since she left. The name of the store didn’t ring any bells, either. “I got no idea what you’re talking about. Why’re you picking me up for it? I got no reason to even go to a package store, I’m underage.”
“Funny.” The first cop took his hand off his gun to grab his handcuffs. “C’mon, son, don’t make this hard on us. It’s too hot to wrangle or chase you down.”
Heaving out a sigh, Bobby lifted his hands for the restraints, acquiescing to being arrested. “My Momma’s inside, can we at least tell her before you haul me off for something I didn’t do?”
“I’ll handle it,” the second cop said, and he hustled up the steps and inside. He knocked as he walked in, calling out, “Mrs. Mitchell?”.
Bobby cooperated with being stuffed into the back seat of the cop car. His mother came out of the house with the second cop, staying on the porch and watching while he got in the cruiser. Bobby watched her cover her mouth in shock and stand there, stunned. Though he felt confident he’d be home in time for dinner, he watched until he couldn’t see her anymore. Something inexplicable about the situation made him unable to tear his eyes from her.
For the rest of the ride, he ignored the two cops and watched the scenery go by. He’d been taken down for questioning before, but never arrested. This time, he had no idea why it went to an arrest from the start. They couldn’t possibly have any actual evidence he’d done something. He had no idea where this Bailey’s place might even be.
Nothing for it but to wait and see what happened. The cops hauled him through the station with a hand balled up in the back of his shirt, then tossed him into a dingy little closet with a table and two chairs. One kicked the back of his knee while the other shoved him down into a chair. The rough treatment surprised him, since he had no record. Then again, if they mixed him up with one of his ‘buddies’, it made sense they’d treat him like some kind of hard core asshole. Further reinforcing the mistaken identity theory, they left his handcuffs on.
“I ain’t never been to that store that I know of,” he told them, now getting truly worried. “I been clean for more’n half a year, on account of a girl.”
“Don’t care.” The two cops left the room and shut the door. About five minutes of solitary silence passed before a plain clothes cop walked in. This surprised him more, since he didn’t think they usually did this kind of interrogation for something like vandalism. Then again, all he really knew about that came from watching TV, and that usually involved homicides.
“Robert, I’m Detective Cornell.” He laid a file folder on the table, currently shut. At a guess it had ten or fifteen pages inside it.
“Nice to meet you, aside from the how.” So far as Bobby could see, there wasn’t any harm in being polite. “Everybody calls me ‘Bobby’.”
“Bobby, then. Right now, I have a witness statement putting you at the scene of a crime, some vandalism at a liquor store. There’s also a spray can with your prints on it, so I can get you for that. Truth of the matter, though, is I don’t give a rat’s ass about that, it’s kiddie stuff. What I do care about is I got two witnesses that saw you have an altercation with one Jerry Peterson.”
Bobby sighed heavily. “Come on, really? That sonofabitch pressed charges? He’s the one harassing Momma.”
“No.” Cornell opened his folder, and the top page had a glossy color image of Mr. Peterson, badly beaten and covered in blood. “He’s dead. According to two witnesses, you said you would kill him if he didn’t back off your mother.”
“Whoa.” Bobby blanched and gulped. “I didn’t mean it like that.” He’d never seen a real dead person before, not even in pictures. The sight made him queasy. Worse, they thought he did it.
“They said you were pretty angry.”
“Well yeah, heck yeah I was angry. Bastard’s been schmoozing on Momma for months! Touching her and saying things and stuff. But I didn’t kill him. Jesus, I hit him once, then I left.”
“Right. From there you walked to a gas station.” Cornell pulled out another picture, this one from a security camera. It showed him walking up to the front door, looking perturbed, and had a time stamp in the corner. “The attendant said you were agitated and unhappy, asked for directions to the nearest bus stop, bought a Coke, and left. Jerry Peterson’s body was found behind that gas station, with the garbage, time of death about the time you left.” He slapped another picture down, from the same security camera, showing him leaving and heading around back.
“I didn’t kill nobody. I just hit him once, I swear, at the dealership.” Panicking, he showed his knuckles with their light bruising. “The bus stop was that way, and I didn’t see nothing or nobody back there when I went past.”
Cornell snorted at him. “Fine, stick to your story. A jury sees this and they’ll lock you up and throw away the key.” A knock on the door made him turn. It opened as he stood. The man barging in held a badge in a wallet, but Bobby wasn’t looking. He had no idea what to think or do, and his head filled with images of the awful things everyone knows happen in prison.
“FBI Special Agent Steve Privek. I’m taking custody of your prisoner. You don’t have a choice. He’s on the Terrorist Watch List.” The Fed walked right in, grabbed Bobby by the arm and hauled him to his feet.
Cornell took a moment to digest that, then he reached over and grabbed Bobby’s other arm. “You can’t just take my murder suspect.”
“Yes, actually, I can.” Privek yanked Bobby forward, smacked Cornell’s hand, and produced some papers Bobby didn’t get to see. “If we’re ever done with him, we’ll return him to the state of Georgia.”
“Wait, what?” Bewildered even more than before, Bobby stumbled after Privek, still handcuffed. Privek and another guy in the same suit bodily hauled him off, and he realized that as soon as he got into their car, he was basically dead to the world. Terrorist? Heck, they’d throw him in a deep, dark hole and not give a crap about guilty or innocent. He threw himself into suit and lurched to run for it, but they had a good grip. Still, he wouldn’t go quietly, not for this.
Privek punched him in the face, hard enough to draw blood. It knocked him for a loop, and his wits didn’t regroup until he’d already been stuffed into their black SUV. Somewhere in there, the Feds replaced his handcuffs with zip ties and tossed the cuffs back at the cops.
Reaching up to rub at his face, he discovered a sore spot and some blood on his lip. “You pack a heckuva wallop.”
“You wouldn’t calm down.” Bobby couldn’t really tell one Fed from the
other and didn’t bother trying.
“I ain’t no terrorist, and I didn’t kill nobody.”
The Fed looked unamused, unimpressed, and unrepentant. “What did you do to get on the Watch List?”
“You’re asking me?” Bobby snorted. “Heck if I know. Sure didn’t blow anything up, or whatever else qualifies these days. Unless sneaking a beer counts. This has gotta be some kind of crazy misunderstanding.”
“Nobody winds up on that list by accident, kid. Nobody.”
“Always a first time for everything.” Bobby muttered. He glared at the smirk Privek gave him. When the agent said nothing else, Bobby set himself on the task of not freaking out. Someone made a mistake, and they’d realize it before he got waterboarded or whatever other crazy stuff they did to suspected terrorists these days.
They drove through the streets of Atlanta, past places Bobby rarely saw. He lived on the outer edges of the city, and had no reason to go in deeper. They pulled into a parking garage and hustled him into an office building. In the basement, they forced him to strip down and put on an itchy orange jumpsuit and too loose white socks with shoes he didn’t think he’d like to be caught dead in. His new threads kept him company while he waited in a holding cell by himself.
Sitting there, he thought his bizarre journey would continue with more interrogation. Why else would they bring him here, instead of a jail? For an hour he stewed, imagining Momma hearing about this. She’d be horrified at her son. He hoped she’d deny it and protest his innocence. Then again, they might not tell her anything. It could be kept quiet. Her son would never come home, and she’d never know why. He had no idea which would be worse.
When they came back, he cooperated, unable to see an upside to resisting, or a way to get free. They hustled him into a van where he was chained down in the back like a… Rabid dogs got treated better than this, he thought. At least he hadn’t been crammed into a cage? The two agents gave him nothing, nor did they stop for anything. They drove for long enough that it got dark out. Bobby, bored out of his mind, fell asleep. A boot to his middle parts woke him up to see harsh lights in a parking garage. They shuffled him through a door that put them in an elevator. Privek removed his handcuffs and tossed him into a new cell.
It had to be the weirdest cell he’d ever seen. It stunk of bleach and other cleaning chemicals, enough that he had to cover his nose to breathe. In the back, it had a blank wall, white painted cinder blocks or something like it. The two side walls were some kind of thick glass or plastic, completely see-through. The front wall was made of shiny silver metal bars. A three foot wide space separated his bars from the bars of another cell. This area had a total of five on each side, so ten cells. Bobby’s was the second from one end. In the one closest to the wall on that side, another guy sat on the floor, arms crossed, scowling in his own orange jumpsuit. He had a kind of a Native American look to him, and was in good shape, like he lifted weights all the time. Across from Bobby was a girl, Asian of some sort, and pretty, though the orange didn’t do much for her. The cell across from the other guy had another Asian girl.
“Hey, any of you know what’s going on?” Bobby moved to the bars and grabbed them with both hands, finding the cold somehow comforting. The were solid and real and so far, the only thing out of all this that made sense and did what he expected.
“No.” The guy grunted out the word, sounding tired and cranky. Not that Bobby blamed him for it. “They told me I’m a terrorist,” he growled. The queer thing about the guy, though, was his eyes.
Bobby knew he had unusual eyes. They had an almond shape, which he’d seen on other people, but with an extra bit of tilt and uptick at the outer corners. He remembered seeing some posters for some online game or something with elves, and his eyes looked a lot more like theirs than any Arabic or Asian person. So far as he knew, nothing else marked him as strange.
This guy had the same eyes with the same icy blue color. On Bobby, a light brown haired white kid, the blue didn’t look off, and most people barely noticed. On this other guy, with his darker skin and hair, they looked downright weird. Now that he took a peek, the two girls had the same funky blue eyes, too. It made them look weird, too.
“Yeah,” the closer, slighter one said with a nod. “We all have the same freaky eyes. We noticed that, too.” She didn’t have an Asian accent, which surprised him. Most of the Asian folks Bobby had heard talk before were on TV and in movies, and they always had an accent. He never met any in his neighborhood, except for the one family that ran the Chinese place. She also didn’t have a Southern accent of any kind.
“And they think we’re all terrorists? Any of you ever do anything at all like that? I been a little rough around the edges sometimes, but never nothing That came from the shorter, heavier girl. She wasn’t chunky, just meaty where the other one was slight and waifish. That one had no Asian or Southern accent, too. “I have better things to do than get into trouble.”
“How’d you get arrested, then? I’m Bobby, by the way.”
“Alice. My car had a brake light out, and some bored cop pulled me over for it. Asshole. When he came back with my license, he arrested me, said I was wanted on a federal warrant.”
“I’m Ai. I was getting on a plane with my parents to go visit relatives in Japan. I got stopped in security and pulled off to the side because I was the on the Watch List.”
The guy sat there, nodding. “Name’s Jayce. I was getting on a plane, too.”
“Huh. So they ain’t actively looking for us, just when we showed up in the system someplace where they check stuff like that, they grabbed us up. Weird.”
“What’s weirder,” Alice said dryly, “is that all four of us are wanted for terrorism when we aren’t terrorists and have the same eyes.”
Ai nodded. “And we all happened to get picked up now. Why didn’t I get flagged when I got my passport? I just got it about three months ago.”
The door at the other end of the cells banged open, cutting Bobby off from agreeing with them. Three men in Army uniforms walked up the aisle between the cells. Two had rifles in hand, the other had a pack he carried to Bobby’s cell. “Stand back,” he ordered. His name patch read ‘Carver’, and he seemed older, with salt and pepper hair. To emphasize his demand, the other two lifted their weapons and pointed them at Bobby.
Suddenly faced with the prospect of being shot, multiple times, Bobby let go of the bars, put his hands up, and stepped back. “What’s going on?”
“You’re going to do exactly what I tell you to, or they’re going to hurt you. We clear? ”
Bobby gulped. “Um, yessir.”
Voice full of indignant outrage, Alice snarled at them. “You can’t just do whatever you want to us, we’re American citizens. We have rights.”
Instead of responding, Carver snapped a latex glove on and pulled a needle out of his pack. Bobby backed up until he hit the rear wall, and then flattened himself against it.
“Stand still, Mitchell.” He opened the cell door and grabbed Bobby’s arm with a steely grip, his two goons right behind him with their weapons pointed.
Bobby gulped. “What’re you gonna do?”
Carver pushed Bobby’s sleeve aside and stuck the needle into his arm. Blood splashed into the little tube attached to it, which filled him with relief. Taking his blood gave him much less cause to worry than an unknown injection. Confusion followed swiftly on its heels. What did they want his blood for? When the tube filled, he pulled the needle out and stuck a small bandage on the site, then directed Bobby to fold his arm to stop any bleeding. “Do you normally have trouble sleeping?”
“Uh, no?”
“Are you asking me or telling me?” Carver demanded.
“Go to Hell,” Alice growled.
Carver let the question go and pulled out a swab. “Open up.”
Bobby gulped. They wanted his DNA, too? Couldn’t they get that from the blood? “This ain’t gonna include a cavity search, is it?”
“Not unless
you give me a hard time.”
Bobby opened his mouth and let the guy use the swab on his cheek. Carver gave no further orders and left the cell, taking his two goons with him. The door clanged shut and Bobby slid to the floor, wondering what the heck was going on. Stuck ina daze as the three men did exactly the same thing to the other three, he rested his chin on his knees and stared. Ai cooperated, and so did Jayce, but Alice had to be held down and got a smack across the face for her struggles.
Up to the moment he’d been forced to give up bodily fluids, Bobby still held onto a shred of hope that this would turn out to all be some giant misunderstanding. Suddenly, it was very serious and not going to go away. Alice cried softly in a corner. Ai paced. Jayce stood against the wall, flexing his fists. Bobby laid himself down on the blank concrete floor and stared at the ceiling, hoping someone would come along and at least explain something about this nightmare.
Time crawled past, and he had no way to measure it. If they meant to break the four of them with boredom, he thought it might work. Between threads of panic, he had the thought to start conversation with the others a thousand times. His mouth opened, then he closed it again, not knowing what to say. He could talk about himself, or Momma, maybe his job. None of them had any reason to care, and if one of them started to do the same, he’d tune it out, too.
His thoughts went fuzzy after a while. A weird thump from Jayce’s cell interrupted it. He spent several seconds blinking, trying to understand through the haze of dozing. Sitting up, he looked over to see the large man had fallen down and lay in a crumpled heap. “Hey, Jayce, you okay?” Fresh panic surged through him and he sprang to his hands and knees. Crawling to the glass, called it out again, louder, but got no response. He pounded on the glass and still got nothing.
“Is he dead?” Ai breathed, the words laced with terror.
“Shoot, I don’t know.” Bobby shook his head, suddenly dizzy. Maybe Jayce keeled over from the fumes of whatever they sprayed this place down with. Why a beefy guy like that would drop before a scrawny guy like himself or a thin little girl like Ai, he had no idea. “Alice, you okay still?”
