The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “Roger One Nine Bravo,” came a female voice over the radio. “Units and ME responding. Do you need an RRT?”

  “Negative, incident not connected with domestic terrorism,” replied Roscoe. “Just a pimp that got his skull beaten in by one of his prossies.” Kicky screamed like an animal in its death agony and tried to fight, tried to throw the huge negro off her and run. He balled up his fist and slugged her in the jaw, crashing her head back onto the concrete floor of the alley and knocking her unconscious.

  * * *

  Kicky was still unconscious when they brought her in. She didn’t even know for sure where she was. It might have been some station house, but most likely she was somewhere in the bowels of the downtown Portland Justice Center on Pioneer Courthouse Square.

  Originally built as a modish complex of brick, glass, and concrete to adorn a stylish and politically correct power structure, decorated with murals and sculptures by trendy Portland artists, the Justice Center had taken on a much more grim and stark appearance and function since the Coeur d’Alene rebellion had broken out the previous autumn. Other areas had been slow to realize the danger and had accordingly suffered courthouses and police stations burned, bombed, and invaded by the NVA, who sometimes torched big stacks of legal and law enforcement papers and records on rural courthouse lawns. Not Portland. The multi-structured complex of the Justice Center’s several buildings containing the courtrooms both state and federal, offices, and the headquarters of the Portland Police Bureau, had immediately been transformed at great taxpayers’ expense into a fully fortified and secured Green Zone, based on plans drawn up by consultants from Israel and the United Kingdom who had prior experience in erecting such places in the West Bank and Northern Ireland, respectively. Surrounding buildings and businesses had been seized by special eminent domain acts of the state legislature and city council, then bulldozed and cleared away to allow for the erection of an encircling rampart of Bremer walls topped with razor wire, and surveilled with closed circuit television cameras. The concrete perimeter had been expanded to take in the federal courthouse as well as the state and local occupants, and the Justice Center now sat like a blistering scar in the middle of downtown. Entrance and exit to the Green Zone were strictly controlled through electronically activated gates at sandbag-reinforced checkpoints, all vehicles were logged in and out and inspected coming and going, and anyone not wearing the correct ID badge inside the complex was liable to immediate arrest or, in some areas, shooting on sight. There had in fact been several unfortunate incidents due to white employees misplacing their badges. The streets approaching the Justice Center were blocked with rolls of razor wire and patrolled by black-jacketed, automatic weapons-toting SWAT teams and dogs, on the alert for car bombers or anyone with a pale skin who didn’t seem to belong.

  But the Center had become a place of fear and nightmare not just in its outward appearance. Inside were the headquarters not just of the police, but of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. These agencies had considered their pre-10/22 offices too exposed, and they had taken over a large portion of the administrative floors of the federal courthouse and sealed it off. There were rumors of excavations being done in secret by specially imported construction crews of Asian and Mexican laborers as more offices, soundproofed interrogation cells, and holding cells were dug deep beneath the complex. Then there were the stories of the torture chambers deep beneath the earth or high in windowless rooms, padded to muffle the screams. The Portland Police Bureau occasionally issued pro forma denials that white prisoners suspected of security or terrorist-related offenses were being abused in the Justice Center. The FBI and DHS on the other hand frankly admitted it, and pointed out that torture in federal custody had been legal since the Patriot Act, so long as the Dershowitz Protocols were followed and only Muslims or alleged white racists were abused. It was known that more white prisoners entered the Justice Center than ever emerged. What happened to them no one knew, but it was rumored that there was a covert crematorium in one of the walled-off courtyards of the complex. The Justice Center cast a long shadow over the city of Portland, a warning to any who might dare think of rebelling against the United States, and a source of anger and hatred that glowed secretly in the recesses of men’s hearts and minds, burning steadily brighter as time went on and more and more white people’s family members disappeared into the Green Zone.

  Kicky now sat shackled to a chair in one of the interrogation rooms. They had already taken away her clothes and dressed her in the orange jumpsuit of American shame and humiliation. She knew she would probably never wear ordinary clothing again. They hadn’t allowed her to see a doctor. Her head and her ribs still hurt terribly where she had been kicked and punched, and her ribcage was swollen and tender, but nothing felt broken, and they’d at least given her a wad of paper napkins and let her go into a rest room to wash the dripping wound in the back of her head where Jarvis had knocked it into the concrete. It had finally stopped bleeding, and now her hair was stiff with dried blood while it scabbed over. They had brought her here to this room and chained her to an iron rail running along the floor, her hands manacled together in front of her. The female Mexican guard had simply pointed to a plastic chamber pot in one corner with a roll of toilet paper sitting on the floor beside it, and walked out the door. That had been hours ago. There was no clock, so she didn’t know how long she’d been there. There was a long mirror running half the length of the opposite wall and a closed circuit TV camera with a glowing little red light on it hanging from one wall. Kicky had no way of knowing if anyone was behind the two-way mirror, or who was watching her on the TV monitor. She simply sat at the table and stared into space, the physical pain of her beating slowly giving way to utter, black horror as the full weight of her situation bore down into her consciousness.

  It was all gone. She was white, she was poor, and everything she knew from her very birth told her that no one on earth would lift a finger to help her. She had always held the bitter belief that she had nothing, but now that it was all gone she understood how much she’d really had before, the trailer where she could at least lay down her head at night alone if she chose, the sad drunken woman who had borne her but at least had not left her, and above all the little golden child she would never see again except maybe through the glass on visiting day. This couldn’t be happening. It was surely a nightmare. She had them sometimes. Surely she would wake up soon. She closed her eyes and desperately willed herself to wake up, but when she opened her eyes, she was still in the god-awful puce green room with the cloying and overpowering smell of fresh paint, a smell that was making her sick. She leaned off the chair and suddenly retched again and again, uncontrollably, dry-heaving because she had nothing to bring up, vomiting hysterically in sheer terror and mindless anguish.

  Outside, behind the two-way mirror, although Kicky could hear nothing through the soundproofed walls, Jamal Jarvis was having a spirited discussion with his partner, Detective Sergeant Elena Martinez. Lainie Martinez was the Mami half of the Portland detective team commonly known as the Mami and the Monkey. She was a tall, slim, thirty-something woman with clear olive skin, straight black hair, brown eyes and a figure that looked fine indeed in a bathing suit and turned many heads both male and lesbian in the indoor swimming pool in the police gym where she worked out every couple of days and swam 50 laps afterward. Outside the gym, Lainie was the Bureau’s fashion plate, her skirt-and-jacket business suits and her pants suits for field work invariably expensive, coordinated and flawlessly chic. Her shoes were Gucci and her watch one of several Lady Rolexes presented her by a series of highly placed lovers, mostly in the legal system somewhere but none in the PB, some of them married, all of them white. She was unmarried, consummately professional, all business and all career. Unlike her quondam FBI counterpart, the late and rather unlamented Rabang Miller, Lainie was actually respected, if not liked, by her superiors and her fellow officers in the PB for her competence and her occasionally brilliant dete
ctive work. No one remembered ever having seen her smile.

  She wasn’t smiling now. “Oh, for God’s sake, Jamal, how many of these messes do you think you can get away with making until Internal Affairs has finally had enough?” she snapped.

  “Hey, it ain’t my fault a white boy’s candy ass is so fucking fragile he cain’t take a little beat-down,” muttered Jarvis defensively.

  “Look, I know how the game is played,” said Lainie in irritation. “Until police salaries come up to something commensurate with the work we do, and the risks we take, especially now with a bunch of racist crazies gunning for us every time we step outside the door, then every officer with any initiative is going to have something going on the side. I have my little sidelines like selling information to reporters and PIs and fiddling the odd background check, clearing some palefaced bozo for employment when our records show he went to an Aryan Nations meeting twenty years ago, petty shit like that. You have yours. But this thing with Gillis is way out of line. If it goes bad and IA takes you down, or worse yet the media gets hold of it, I’m going to get some of the splatter. You can fuck up your own career if you want, but now you’re putting mine at risk, damn it!”

  “It ain’t gonna go bad!” protested Jarvis. “I tell you, me and Roscoe between us got dis white ho’ locked down already. Hell, bofus saw de bitch whalin’ on poor Mister Gillis wif our own eyes.”

  “Of course you did,” said Lainie, rolling her eyes. A Mexican uniformed officer came down the hall toward them, holding a larger manila file folder and handed it to Jarvis.

  “Hey, Jamal, here’s the file on your puta blanca with the tattoos in there,” he said. “Lookin’ good, my man. Seems Lenny Gillis filed a complaint with us a few months back when she assaulted him, hit him in the head with a beer bottle. He dropped the charges, but it’s on record. She’s got priors for solicitation and holding, and she did fourteen months in Coffee Creek on a two to five for larceny and possession of stolen goods.”

  “Only fourteen months?” asked Lainie curiously.

  “She had a baby while she was inside, and she and her mother played the sad violins for the parole board. Poor little trailer trash girl, new baby, baby’s Daddy killed in Iraq, brother killed in Iraq, inmate sole support of aged parent, yadda yadda yadda. Overcrowding was even worse than usual that month, so they sprung her,” explained the officer carefully. He had once made the mistake of addressing Sergeant Martinez in Spanish with a flippant “Hola, Mami!” and had almost found himself hauled up on sexual harassment charges.

  Lainie was thoroughly Americanized, and she spoke Spanish only on these occasions when it was required in the line of work. Her one secret neurosis and obsession, not even admitted to the Bureau shrink during her periodic required evaluations, was that she wanted more than anything else to be white. Not just any white; Elena Martinez dreamed of herself as Nordic white, with creamy skin and golden hair. Like the girl in the interrogation room, only without the tattoos. Her unconscious longing had long ago sublimated itself into an almost insane hatred of white people in general, white racialists in particular, and blonde white women even more particularly. She was intelligent enough to realize she needed to control this inner demon, at least in public, and she almost always succeeded. And yet she would take only white men into her bed; in her entire life, she had never slept with either a black man or a Latino or another woman of any race.

  Jamal Jarvis was sharp enough to realize that Lainie was smarter than he was, and he sensed that hers were good coattails for him to ride on, so he generally acted as the brawn of the team while she was the brains. It worked surprisingly well, and their high clearance rate and general rep for getting results in the form of confessions from suspected racists and other thought criminals had done them both good, departmentally speaking. But Jarvis sensed that Lainie was what the Hispanics referred to as a “cocoanut,” brown on the outside and white on the inside. The rumor mill had informed him that they both shared the same preference for Caucasian sexual partners of the opposite gender, and he knew that she had heard the same about him. With a crude and vicious sense of humor, he had taken her down a peg very subtly, by refusing at any time in their acquaintance to try hitting on her. This not only deprived her of the pleasure of shooting Jarvis down, but let Lainie know that he did not consider her white. It was the ultimate insult, and it bugged the hell out of her.

  “I needs to get a statement from her, is all,” said Jarvis after the Mexican uniformed officer departed. “Just somethin’ to put in the file. Also be good to make damn sure she unnerstands just where the hell she is.”

  Lainie was reading over Kicky’s file. “Shouldn’t be too hard,” she said. “It says here that the daughter, one Mary Ellen McGee, aged eighteen months, is a child deemed to be at risk and therefore of interest to It Takes A Village. We know the kid’s going to end up there anyway, but the Illustrated Slut in there doesn’t, at least not for sure, so we can use that as leverage. Blonde baby girl, no less.”

  “Healthy?” asked Jarvis, his interest piqued.

  “According to this, yes. Not born with AIDS or fetal alcohol syndrome or any STDs, nothing of the kind you’d expect from a trailer trash mom.”

  “Hey, little blonde girl, sky’s de limit on de adoption bond,’ said Jarvis.

  “I’ll need to get the case number and see if a case worker’s been assigned,” said Lainie, ruminating. “If there’s no case worker, then I’ll bet we can cut at least a twenty percent commission, depending on the judge. He or she will be getting a cut too, so he or she will award the child to the highest bidder, and if between the three of us we can’t get half a million for her from some rich yuppie couple we’d all better find another line of work.”

  “Twenty percent of half a mil? Thass a hundred grand, 50 grand each. Not too shabby for beating down a cheap cracka pimp,” chuckled Jarvis, pleased. “See, I tole you it would turn out righteous! Now let me go in and get her confession.”

  “I think we’d both better go in, Jamal,” said Martinez. “Just to make sure you restrain your habit of getting frisky with female inmates of the pale-skinned persuasion. I think this is one case where somebody needs to make sure you keep your fly zipped. Besides, I need to protect my investment.”

  “Fine,” said Jarvis with a shrug. He realized that this one could become ticklish if the girl couldn’t be persuaded to keep her mouth shut about what she’d seen, play along, and cop a plea.

  Kicky looked up as the door opened and the two detectives entered the room. Jarvis had a thick file in his hand that she presumed were her yellow sheets. She looked at Lainie, Levantine sleek and arrogant and dressed to the nines in a blue serge skirt and jacket like some kind of model in the Lady Cop Chic section of Vogue. She knew full well that any faint hope she had of ever getting out of this depended on her crawling and groveling like a whipped dog to these two, and yet something in her that she didn’t understand seemed to take on a perverse life of its own. “I see the Monkey, so I guess you must be the Mami,” she snarled at them.

  Martinez leaned over the table, and like lightning she lashed out in a vicious slap across Kicky’s face, almost knocking her out of the chair. “Inmates in this Justice Center are prohibited from using racial or ethnic slurs, derogatory references to anyone based on race or sexual preference or national origin, or other hateful language, Ms. McGee,” she said. “It’s not only a violation of JC regulations, it’s a violation of the hatespeech section of the penal code. If you do so again you will be charged with felony hatespeech in addition to first-degree murder. I suggest you take heed. You’re in trouble enough.”

  “Watch yo’ mouf, bitch,” added Jarvis.

  Martinez took the file and slammed it onto the desk in front of Kicky. “We’ve got you cold. Your previous assault on your pimp with a blunt instrument is the icing on the cake. You’re gone, girl. I’m offering you one chance for a deal. One only. You will plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the death of Leonard Gillis an
d I can arrange it with the DA so you get twelve to twenty. As an added sweetener, since I’m feeling generous this morning, I can arrange for you to serve your sentence in a medium security facility so you won’t have to go back to Coffee Creek. This is as good as it’s going to get, Kristin. Take it or leave it.”

  “They call me Kicky,” said the girl sullenly.

  “Of course they do,” sighed Martinez.

  “Don’t I get a lawyer?” she demanded.

  “Technically speaking, since 9/11 the state no longer has to provide you with one, depending on whether we want to file this as a security case under the Patriot Act, but in Portland the powers that be do like to keep up appearances. So yes, if you want I can get you a legal aid attorney,” explained Lainie. “Any such attorney will almost certainly be black, Hispanic, Jewish, gay, female, or some combination of the above, and probably will hold as little brief for white trailer trash crack whores like you as I do, and they will advise you to take the deal I’m offering. But if you put me to that much trouble and delay, I might downgrade the offer to twenty to twenty-five years. The DA doesn’t want to be bothered with petty crap like this and she’ll follow whatever recommendation I make, and Judge Feinstein will follow whatever recommendation she makes. Kristin, you know as well as I do, you’re fucked. Play ball and make it easy on yourself.”