Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend (23 page)

She didn't even have her phone with her. She didn't want to be part of this organized confusion.

But she had to get past the speaker on the stairs if she wanted to turn herself in to the authorities.

And so she pushed through, calmly. At first it was a struggle, but then people saw who she was and made way. Quiet infected the rally. Even Melanie Mull stopped talking. When Shiels reached the steps, Melanie motioned to the microphone, ceding her place.

It was just because no one else was speaking up,
Melanie Mull's eyes seemed to say.

Shiels was sure her feet were going to continue to bring her into the station. That she would pass up the chance to say anything—what would she say, anyway?

But she found herself heading for the spotlight. Maybe her father was here? He would have guessed where she was going. But she couldn't see him. The microphone was suddenly in her hand.

She glimpsed Sheldon. His arms still around Rachel Wyngate. His eyes big. Worried for her. She felt the wave of it from across all those bodies. And: he was going to have a good life. She felt that in an instant too. A happy, loving life.

Without her.

She fiddled for a moment with the switch on the microphone. Was it on? Off?

Someone in the crowd—Robbie Lewis, enormous in the back—yelled out, “Free Pyke! Free Pyke!” But the chant died soon after, when Shiels stayed silent.

They were all waiting to hear what she had to say.

On.

Off.

On. A little red light on the microphone handle. Proceed with caution!

“I'm sorry,” she said simply. “I'm sorry for everything I've done.”

And then she walked into the station to give herself up.

Inspector Brady, Shiels's
interrogator, had the hands of a cement factory worker: thick fingers, stuffed tight like sausage flesh. She imagined him reaching across the little table in the airless room she now shared with him, those hands around her neck, how small her own hands would feel, gripping his meaty wrists while the life drained out of her.

She imagined Pyke bursting through the shut door, freeing her with one swipe of his deadly beak, and then the two of them flying off . . . somewhere. Somehow.

But she was here to save Pyke, not the other way around. And Inspector Brady was staying on his side of the table, scratching his biceps stuffed into the rumpled gray suit that looked as though he'd been wearing it since early in the week.

“I just want to be clear with you that you have waived your right to have a lawyer present, or a parent, for that matter. And if you do so agree, then please sign here to that effect.” He pushed across a single sheet of paper filled with writing. Shiels felt like she was signing away permission for doctors to take whatever organ they thought necessary.

But she was doing this to save Pyke.

“You will let me see him after I give my testimony,” she said, pen poised.

They had already agreed on all of these details.

“In all likelihood,” Brady said. His sad eyes were red-rimmed. Shiels had a sense of him toiling around small print and hardened criminals for years upon years.

“Right after we talk,” Shiels said. “You'll take me to see Pyke right after this.”

“Sign first. Tell me what you know. I'll do my utmost after that.” He had loosened his tie, yet she still wondered if enough oxygen was reaching his brain through his thick, bulging neck.

“You told me just a few moments ago that I would definitely be able to see him.”

“And you will. Definitely! I haven't been a cop for twenty-two years without having people trust me.” He widened his eyes at her, flexed his fingers, opened his palms.

Shiels signed the paper.

“It was all my fault,” she said. “Pyke is in no way to blame for what happened. I am the one who—”

“Just a second, please, Ms. Krane. Shiels, is that your name?”

She nodded impatiently. If she wasn't able to confess soon, she might lose her nerve.

“Is it a short form? I've never heard of it before.”

“It's short for Sheila Marie. Which I hate.”

“Then Shiels it is.” Inspector Brady placed a digital recording device on the table between them. When the red light came on, he said his name and hers, the date, and read into the record the fact that Shiels had waived her right to have either legal counsel or her parents present for the testimony. It was as if he were rubbing it in. So Shiels said loudly into the recorder, “And Inspector Brady has promised that I will be able to meet with Pyke right after this interview!”

Brady blinked wearily. “What is the nature of your relationship with the pterodactyl-boy who goes by the name of Pyke, Ms. Krane?”

Shiels examined her fingernails—short and serviceable. “I don't see what relevance any of that would have—”

“Just answer the question, please.” He was smiling, but his voice weighed upon her.

“I'm his elected representative at the school. I am indirectly responsible for his being in the game. I was the one who got our quarterback, Jeremy Jeffreys, to throw a football to him during a public assembly, knowing that the principal, Mr. Manniberg, would take advantage of Pyke's phenomenal ability to catch just about anything, to change the tenor of the meeting, which I have to say was going badly at the time—”

Brady cut her off. “Are you aware of the existence of a video showing you apparently engaged in an intimate, sexual form of dancing with the pterodactyl-boy?”

Shiels felt like bricks were being stacked, quickly and efficiently, around her as she sat trying to do the right thing.

“I knew that Pyke would catch the ball. I knew that Manniberg would use the moment to—”

“What about this dance video?”

“It's called a wrangle dance. It was part of the school's Autumn Whirl festivities. As I said, I am the student-body chair—”

“That colored nose of yours—isn't it true it's only worn by women who have been sexually taken by the pterodactyl-boy in question?”

Shiels stood suddenly and lurched for the door. “I'm sorry, this is a mistake,” she said. “I don't believe you're interested in hearing my actual testimony at all!”

She gripped the doorknob, but it wouldn't turn. They were locked in. “Please let me out!” she called, and pounded twice on the metal door.

Brady did not get up, but he softened his voice. “I have to ask these preliminary questions so your story can be evaluated in the proper light. No one is judging you. But it would make a difference if you were intimate with Mr. Pyke. You're not the only young woman I've had in here in love with this character.”

Jocelyne Legault. Who had persuaded Pyke to give himself up. Probably she was being held in a room similar to this one, with its soul-sucking gray walls, its dangerous shadows.

“We're not intimate,” Shiels said. “We danced at an event. I have spoken with him on fewer than a dozen occasions.”

Pitiless eyes. “Could you sit down again, please, so I can record your testimony properly?” He leaned toward the device. “Subject has moved away from the microphone.”

Warily Shiels returned to her seat.

“You dream about him constantly, don't you?” Brady said. He flipped back some pages in his yellow-lined notebook. “Just a few days ago you wrote on something called the
Leghorn Review
 . . .”

“All right, all right, yes!” she said. “I didn't realize dreaming is a crime. Or that the police have such ready access to Vhub. Are you sure you have enough prisons to hold everyone who ever lusted after somebody else?”

Blink, blink. “I just want to tack down the nature of your relationship,” Brady said.

“I am a friend. He is a pterodactyl in my school. I don't know why my nose has turned purple. But I'm still a virgin. I thought I was pregnant by my boyfriend of the time—” She'd almost started to name Sheldon! “But we didn't actually . . .”

Brady wrote furiously. “So would you say that the sexual fantasies you have about Mr. Pyke are so far unfulfilled?”

“I wouldn't say any of that!” she declared. Why had she ever agreed to submit to this questioning? She was never going to see Pyke. She knew that now. She had a wild idea that she could gouge out Brady's eyes—or at least confuse him greatly, somehow, with her short fingernails—then grab the key from inside his pocket and dash for the door. But probably he didn't have the key in his pocket. Probably he had to knock on the door himself to be let out.

“This line of questioning will never hold up in court!” she said. Hadn't she seen something like this sort of blatant harassment on a crime show recently? Sheldon would remember.

Sheldon—

“We're not in court, Ms. Krane,” Brady said in a tired voice. “I'm just trying to figure out who you are, and then we'll get to what happened.”

He pressed his eyes shut with his enormous fingers. Part of him seemed exhausted.

Part of him was taking a prurient interest in the supposed love life of the teenager opposite him.

“I'm the one who dreamed up the scheme of putting Pyke on the football team for the game against Wallin,” Shiels said. “It came to me quickly, in the heat of a situation. I thought it might even up the game. I should've tried harder to prepare him, make sure that he went to practice. I'm responsible. It was my fault that boy hurt his arm so badly.”

“You told the pterodactyl to slash anyone who came near?”

“No.”

“You told him to poison his opponents?”

“No, of course not.”

“So he did it on his own?”

“No. No. He's just a pterodactyl. He reacted—”

“He had no such order from you, student-body chair of Vista View High?”

“I wanted him to win the game for us. But I was blind to what he might do—”

“Because of your infatuation with him. You and every other girl he seemed to know.”

“He's a pterodactyl, he just was himself. It was my duty to know better. I put a lot of people in harm's way.”

Why was he taking so many notes when he was recording the interview anyway?

“All right,” he said finally. He put down his pen and stopped the recorder.

“All right, you're taking me in? You're letting Pyke go?”

“No—all right, we're done. I'll call you if I need any more.”

“But—”

“You're not the coach of the team, Ms. Krane, or the principal of the school. You didn't put that ball into the pterodactyl's hands. And you didn't cause him to slash the other boy's arm. I watched the video. You and his other girlfriend were just cheering from the sidelines. He probably couldn't even hear you because of the wind.”

“But—”

“You know what?” Brady said. “I've had a really long day. And I promised you you'd be able to see the poor bastard before you go.”

•  •  •

They walked down the hall to a dark and narrow side room. Though Brady seemed to get puffed even in that short distance, he also looked impressively solid. Shield imagined herself bouncing off him like a crow flying into a pile of cannonballs. Brady pulled open a screen, and Shiels was able to see through a two-way mirror into a cheerless, fluorescently lit room with a bunk, a sink, a toilet, and something bundled in the corner, in the darkest spot. At first Shiels could not make out what she was seeing in that corner. It looked flattened, like the contents of a parcel that has fallen off a truck and then been run over several hundred times in the ensuing traffic. There was a wing, oddly pale, stretched at a strange angle over bits of rib and bone; there was a beak, bent back, headed in the wrong direction.

“You've murdered him!” Shiels cried.

“No, we haven't.” Brady's voice was neutral, stony. “He's perfectly fine. That's just the way he folded himself when we brought him in.”

Like a fossil, Shiels realized. Pressed cruelly into the rock wall of the cell.

“Let me talk to him,” Shiels said. It was hard to tear her eyes from the pitiful sight of her flattened Pyke, but she knew she had to address Brady full on. “You told me I could see him!”

“And you're seeing him,” Brady replied. “But I can't let you get closer than this. He's a risk to anyone he comes in contact with. Even you.”

Shiels threw herself at the mirror. “Pyke! Pyke! It's me!” she screamed. “We're going to get you out!”

Her hands did not shake the heavy glass. Her voice echoed off the many hard surfaces, and Pyke did not stir. He didn't seem to hear.

“If you kill him, if you kill him in custody—” Shiels yelled. “I swear, I will train the rest of my life in the law and will come back and prosecute you to your grave!”

Brady's face folded into a lopsided grin. “Be careful about threatening an officer of the peace, Ms. Krane,” he said quietly. “And are you sure you want to add to the world's growing surfeit of lawyers? Why don't you do something worthwhile with your life instead?”

•  •  •

The rally had broken up. Downtown felt deserted. She had not brought her phone. If she had, she could've taken a photo of the miserable conditions in which Pyke was being held. She could've broadcast to the world how crushed he was in the grip of the state. There would've been an outcry, a massive movement from every corner of the wired planet to free him.

Outside a corner store, in perhaps the last phone booth in the city, she called home. Four rings. Five. The answering service kicked in, her father's voice, calm, reassuring. He would get back to the caller as soon as he could.

“Daddy,” she said, “I need you to come pick me up. I'm sorry for all the trouble I made. But Pyke is dying; he's being held in barbaric conditions at the police station right now. I've seen him—” And then her father was on the line.