They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy (18 page)

"Try me."

She went on about the stuff, about how the messages told her about people whose lives were in danger and needed help, and she took it as her responsibility to do it. She was really serious about it all, so I resisted the urge to be a dick
and
ask her why G
od talked to her in Portuguese.

"So how long you been get
ting those visions?" I asked instead
.

While she went on about it, I drew the revolver from my jeans. I screamed in my thoughts 'I'm gonna shoot you point blank in the head' as I
pointed
the barrel
at
the back of her skull and quietly pulled the hammer back. She didn't stop talking. She acted like she had no idea what was going on behind her. As far as I could tell, it sure as shit seemed like she wasn't lying about no
t being able to read me at all.

"Did you stop cutting the tape?" she asked.

"Yeah, I just need to adjust my gun." I
put the hammer back down and
shov
ed the pistol back in my jeans.

With the tape undone, Rosemary rubbed her neck. "Thank you. Now are we arresting you peacefully or do I need to rattle off my power set to you?"

That word 'arrest' made my skin crawl. The full weight of what that meant settled on my shoulders. "Just hang on," I said. "Don't try to like force me to do anything right now, okay? I'll go, but let's just take it easy."

I felt a tug in the front of my jeans followed by the unmistakable sound of
my
revolv
er
cocking.

"Don't move," Rosemary said calmly as she peeled the tape off her pajamas. "Don, I'm sorry, but we don't have time for you to waffle on this. You need to put the stun gun on the ground and any other weapon you're hiding because you're under arrest for this whole mess here. I tried to give you a chance to do the right thing, but that was the fourth time you've assaulted an unarmed officer."

"What? Twice," I corrected her. "Once with tazer, once with powers."

"You pulled a gun on me last night and again just now. Yeah, I saw it in the reflection on the oven. Four counts of assault, one of them being powers. I don't have a choice anymore." She stood up with a loud, "Did you guys get all that?"

"We got it," came the response from the cordless phone base
in the kitchen, set to speaker.

The whole fucking thing had
been monitored from the start.

"Good. Green for retrieval," she said. "Say again, green for retrieval."

The voice on the phone said ETA would be fifteen minutes. Rosemary read me my rights, and I stared down at the gun in my pants. The hammer hung back telekinetically, a round in the chamber ready to take my manhood off. The crafty bitch had played the shit out of me.

"Do you understand these rights as I have told them to you?" she asked.

"I absolutely do. Now can we leave my dick out of this? And
also
do you maybe wanna go out sometime?"

Overkill

Twenty ball-shriveling minutes later, I was standing in the sun in her front yard next to a
flower
bed of weeds choking out some hot pink roses, waiting for the SCEIA
to pick me up
. Rosemary still
had her pajamas and glasses on and made me leave Red's jacket in the
kitchen. The only thing that kept my gun from castrating me
while we stood there
was her train of thought, so I kept making sure
my crotch
was on her
mind as much as it was on mine.

"So you could've arrested me like this at any time
, Rosie?"

She nodded. "Yep. Like I said, I was trying to get you to do the right thing in there. You didn't seem like that bad'a guy in North Dakota."

She must not have seen much of what
had
happened
in the bunker
. "You were also trying to get me to talk
in there
," I said. "Don't think I don't know. You were trying to pull my strings into doing what you wanted."

She looked at me sideways. "That must break your heart, a sweet, naive, innocent guy like you. I'm sure that was an open, honest discussion for you. Full disclosure, I can also pop a blood vessel in your brain in addition to the gun on you, so back up."

"I'm not coming toward you."

"Yeah, you are. Stay back."

I moved back a couple of steps. "Considering you can make me a dickless stroke victim in less than a second, I think that Glock you've got aimed at my stomach
is pretty fucking unnecessary."

"Considering the many ways you've assaulted me in my home in the past twelve hours, I think it's not at all." After that, she added, "You're doing the right thing."

"Shit. We'll see. I don't have a shitload of options is mostly what this is. Just make sure that Witness Protection comes through. Think you can get 'em to take a picture of her face when they bust in on her? Like right after they beat the shit out of her and punch her in the kidney?"

"I'll be sure to ask that. Have you done anything else we should know about before we take you in?"

The sound of helicopters in the distance came over the
tree line
. "You really can't read my mind?" I said.

She pushed her glasses back up on her nose with a sigh. "No."

"Then I
have
not."

"
You don't know anything
about Tracey's client?"

"I
do not
."

"It'll be easier for you if you just tell me."

"We'll see. A
sk God about it."

She didn't appreciate me being a dick about that. "You don't hav
e to be a dick about that," she said. "
I used to hate cops, too, y'know."

"You did? Cool! Let's be friends. Can I keep a motorcycle at your place? Don't try to act like we're alike
and buddies and all that
."

She rolled up her right sleeve up to the elbow. Buried in the tribal tats was a big, block letter 'FUCK THE PO-LICE.' She smiled
at me
. "Ooooo, see that
? I just made you look stupid."

Three helicopters appeared over the trees about a half mile off. Beside them was Delta-fucking-Blue, the positioning light on his vest flashing blue so air traffic could see
him
when he was airborne.

I hated that arrogant fucker.

Bushes and trees and grass whipped into waves from the helicopter blades above the lawn. DeltaBlue hovered over the driveway, giving the helicopter pilot directions to stay back over the tree line and not to land. His flight-goggled head kept glancing back at me, and he talked into a microphone in his collar. His positioning light flashed so bright it was hard to look at, but the
bluish
glow th
at hung around him was all him.

They all maintained positions in the air until four fire trucks from different stations pulled up in front of Rosemary's house with lights flashing, and the crews scrambled to run hoses down the road to a fire
hydrant grown over by bushes.

"You gotta be
fucking kidding me," I laughed.

Out of fucking nowhere, a damn SWAT team came roaring out fro
m around the back of the house.

"Donald Guillory," a loudspeaker on the helicopter said loudly, "Lie down on your stomach and lace your fingers behind your head."

I looked at Rosemary like they couldn't be serious. She yanked the revolver out of my pants, harder than necessary, and nodded with an expectant, "You'd better do it."

So I
lied
down on the grass and put my hands behind my head. The whirring wind from the helicopter got s
tronger as it moved in closer.

This was a stupid fucking idea. And I started to regret it.

I stole a glance up before I was told to put my face back to the ground. DeltaBlue had landed and flipped off the safety of the shotgun strapped to him. Four people slid down from one of the helicopters on ropes, all decked out in Kevlar and gear like the rest. I recognized two of them as powered SCEIA Agents. The other two helicopters had sharpshooters leaning out the side doors with big-ass sniper rifles ready to take my fucking head off.

Jesus
Christ
.

All I knew about the three Poster agents they had sent to collect me,
three
for fuck's sake, I had gotten from television.

DeltaBlue had been on the covers of
GQ
,
People, Ebony
,
Essence
and
Muscle and Fitness
and was the SCEIA Consultant for just about every movie that had a character in it who was supposed to be an agent. He could do some crazy shit with light and microscopic particles that you needed five college degrees to understand, and he always had a purplish-bluish haze around him while the rest of him looked like he was a
lways in a shadow or something.

Grammy winner Drashelle 'Cocoa Lightning' Parks gave off enough electricity to run a city and had to wear a black rubber-insulated bodysuit with plastic buttons, bootlaces and belt buckle so she wouldn't throw sparks. She couldn't even pack a gun, but a guy at work had told me the CIA was working on a 'glass gun' with caseless ammunition for her to use. Her fans had gone apeshit when she cancelled her tour to enroll in the SCEIA Academy. I had the issue of
Maxim
that had her photo spread in it and got some use out of it. Her first album cover with her naked and covered in the right places by light bulbs she kept lit up was one of the most downloaded pictures on the Internet or something. Got some use out of that, too. She was a lot shorter in person.

The third one who
trailed
behind them both, another gal, had a name I couldn't remember. In college, her softball team had nick-named her the 'something-Tank'. In an interview with Barbara Walters, she said that she'd played women's softball because it was one of the only sports where her being completely invulnerable to any kind of physical damage didn't give her an unfair advantage. Rumor was that the real reason she played softball was because she was a lesbian. Tank didn't get on the news a lot except for anytime somebody got a picture of her with a woman within three feet of her. As for her abilities, people said the government had tested her with everything they had; Howitzers, missiles, and a nuke out in the desert, but nothing hurt her. Sounded like bullshit, though, and she still hit like a chick because she didn't come with any extra stren
gth or speed to go with it.

"Donald Guillory," DeltaBlue shouted over the sound of the helicopters. "You are under arrest and are being taken into SCEIA custody. There are three agents present: one Class Six invulnerable, one electro-kinetic, which means she can control and generate electricity, and I'm a flyer, Class Two invulnerable and an EM-manipulator, which means I can control various wavelengths in the electromagnetic
spectrum
like light. Do you understand what I've just explained?"

Some six foot-seven dickhole weighed down with fifty extra pounds of gear put his knee in my back against my fucking ribs while he yanked back my arms and cuffed them.

"Yeah
, I understand," I wheezed out.

"Good. Now, Mr. Guillory, is that your truck parked up the road?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, before we search it, I have to ask you; do you have anything we should know about in there?"

"Yeah. A garbage bag full of hardcore porn. Lots of girl on girl."

"I tell you what, you know how to pack. Get that bagged up and delivered to me. For evidence," he joked with the guys standing around waiting for orders to blow my head off. Nobody laughed. "Now, Mr. Guillory, as far as the rest of your truck, are we going to find any drugs or guns when we search it?"

"No, you won't." While coming down off the acid earlier, I had sworn off drugs and threw the rest of the LSD, the weed, and Will's bong deep into the woods, then buried it all, then rearranged the leaves covering the hole fifteen times trying to make them look natural.

"On a scale of one to ten, what's your level of control of your powers?" he asked me.

"Uhhh, I guess a eight."

"Anything other
than
pyrokinesis?"

"The ability to turn everything I touch to shit."

Rosemary said something to him I couldn't understand.

Blue helped me up off the ground and put me on my feet. In my ear, he loudly said, "Cryokinesis. she says you make ice."

"I've never done that before in my life," I said back.

"All right," he nodded. "I'll take your word for it, but if it starts getting cold around here,
we're gonna have a problem."