They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy (20 page)

I forced a smile and a weak chuckle to play my part. "I miss my bed, man, and I need a cigarette. Y'all gotta help me out."

"Yeah, I hear you, man. Hopefully, we'll get you out of there soon. And Special Agent Jaspers treated you okay, too? Other than putting a gun to your crotch, right?"

"Yeah, she was all right."

"Good, good. She's part-time, you know. Just want to make sure she's keeping in line with our high standards."

"Yeah, she did good. Hell, she caught me, so I can't say shit about her. She's a cool chick. Kinda shitty taste in men, though." Okay, reel it in, dic
khead.

Blue glanced at the one-way mirror off to side. "Yeah, we were all surprised by that."

"Huh. Nobody knew about her and him until yesterday, huh?"

"It's all right," he said to me with a wave of his hand. "No worries about it." He turned on his own recorder on the table next to a thick manila folder and went through the whole legal bullshit again. "All right, now I understand you're looking for protection for some people, is that correct?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, we have to get your statement first before we can start that process. There are a lot of calls and a lot of paperwork involved in something like this."

Time for outrage. "She's going to kill them all, do you understand that? I waived my right to attorney, okay? I'm just trying to do the right thing here, and I feel like everybody's treating me like I'm the one who's, like I'm the one you all have to watch out for. I've been off the radar for years. I just wanted a normal life, do you get that? When I find out my sister and Will are safe, I'll talk, but not before then. You don't know what she'll do."

I didn't give him a chance to respond and just kept spewing panicked words out. "Look, I already did this for hours. So let's get to what everybody here wants: fucking Tracey in the ass, excuse my language. Get me some Witness Protection papers, get Will into protective custody, and I'll give you everything you need to nail her to the wall."

Blue put his pen down and leaned back in his chair. "See here's the thing, though; we need your story to give to the Attorney General so he can decide if it's worth throwing bulldozers', 'bout eight, nine bulldozers' worth of taxpayer dollars away on keeping you safe and warm and holding your hand so the bad people can't get you at night. If you don't want to say anything, that's your right, and I'll pack up my stuff and be on my way. And you will be carted off back to your cell and sent to the judge to see what he wants to do with you. You want us to help you, fine. That's what we do around here. But there are rules and regulations and all that, and this is how it's done. So do I need to tell the guards you
want to go back to your cell?"

I breathed hard and noticed my fingers were clasping a cigarette that didn't exist. I put both my hands in my lap. "Fine. If you those're the hoops I have to jump through to save my friend's life, fine. That's what you guys do around here, right?"

"Yes, we do." Blue flipped to a fresh page of his yellow notepad. "I did have one more question for you before we get down to business: nobody can read your mind. We've got psychics here with warrants to get what they can from you, and they can't get a thing. The psy-blocker dose we gave you has worn off but, still  nothing.
Special
Agent Jaspers said the same thing. Do you have any psychic abilities you're not telling us about?"

"I don't, I swear to God. I don't know what's going on with that. Rosemary told me that, too."

"You do know that trafficking in psy-blockers is illegal and carries a minimum four year sentence, while taking those illegal blockers is also illegal with a minimum one year sentence and lying about your abilities is a Federal Offense?"

"Yeah, I know that. But I'm not on any, and I don't have any other powers. I had a psychic fucking with my head
plenty
since all this shit started. I don't know what's changed between now and then. Nothing could have."

"So you are saying that you are not currently on psy-blockers, and a
blood test will back that up?"

"I'm not on blockers to the best of my knowledge. I've been mind-controlled by a psychic, so maybe she did something to me."

"Do you know who this psychic is?"

"I don't, man. She was a friend of Tracey's or this kid name Kamikaze's or something. Tracey killed Kamikaze and took his phone, so she had his connections."

"Okay." Blue made some notes in fucking Chinese or something so I couldn't read them. "Let's just get down to what I'm here for. I'd like to get a timeline of what's been going on recently in your life, and I have some questions that I'd like to ask you if you'll just bear with me. So, start where your involvement with Tracey began; for now I mean recent involvement, not the stuff that happened years ago with the," he checked his file, "Kay-o-tish-uh . . . Sex? Is that how you pronounce that?"

"Yeah, you got it."

"First try, too." He slid the paper and pen to me. "All right, whenever you're ready, just go at your own pace."

I wrote down everything that happened from the Sudiak Building to the job in North Dakota.
My
version of everything that went down. Tracey killed Kamikaze and forced us into the job, she got in over her head, I felt like somebody might've been in my head the whole time, Red used excessive force in my arrest and Will defended me, all that. Even down to the Barker Plumbing and Heating cover. Felt like my hand would fall off before I finished, but I wrapped it up and slid the pages back to him.

He looked over all of it and tapped his pen on the table while he read; it made a metallic echo. "Anything you want to add to this?" he asked.

"No."

"Okay. So you guys set off the
fail-safe
yourselves."

"Tracey did."

"And you did that intentionally."

"No, Tracey wanted to so she could teleport to the vault that had the stuff she was after, and doing that meant the
fail-safe
was going to trigger."

"Okay. That could be interpreted as intentionally setting off the
fail-safe
."

"All right, if you want to say that."

"And the young man under the door? This 'Splode' guy? Did he die? You didn't make it clear if he got out with you or not."

"I don't know. Tracey yanked me out of there before I could help him."

"So you tried to help him."

Fuck no.

"Yes, I did. He was dying."

"All right, all right. So, this, uh, creature that was there that Tracey teleported away, um,
do you know where she sent it?"

"Like I said, I don't know."

"What happened after she teleported it?"

"She teleported me back to my place."

"I'm sorry, I mean what did you see and hear when she teleported it?"

"There was like this sucking, then explosion of air."

"Like rushing in to fill a vacuum?"

"What, you mean like outer space?"

He pulled an 8 x 10 photo out of the folder and slid it across the table to me. "Is that his hand? This picture was taken by a telescope in orbit, like a satellite, and when NASA saw a hand in the frame, it came to us. Is that the thing you fought?"

I looked at it hard. It was grainy, but it looked like those big fucking meaty fingers. "Yeah, that's it, I think. Jesus, she sent him to space?"

"That's what we think," he said, taking his photo back and sliding it into the folder.

"God damn. Hey, before we go on," I said, "I wanna make something clear. I think I've been mind controlled by Tracey's psychic during all this time. Maybe even since the first meeting. I've done things," I paused and shook my head and looked upset, "Ever since then that only make any sense at all if they put some kind of, like, hypnotic suggestion in my head. Y'know, made me more open to doing what they wanted me to do."

"Uh oh," Blue said like a disbelieving asshole.

I went on. "I've never taken LSD before, and I've lived for years since I was brainwashed in Europe without doing anything criminal with my powers. Now, all of a sudden after I get hooked up with Tracey and her psychic, I'm burning stuff down, taking drugs and assaulting a Federal Officer? That's a, a very radical behavior change for somebody who gave up a life of crime to be a simple, well-liked, blue collar factory working American. And I think a jury would kind of agree."

Yeah, I was playing the 'mind control by a Post-Human' card. It was hard as fuck to disprove, and I had a lot of circumstantial evidence going for me. They were jerking me around and getting cocky and needed to know
exactly
what kind of man they had on their hands.

DeltaBlue didn't make a note. His sunglasses stared straight at me, his head cocked slightly to the left. "So, you want us to immediately do an MRI on you, then, to find signs of psychic trauma? Because that will be the first step after we leave this room. We don't want to undermine this clearly very worthwhile and well thought-out legal defense. And, Lord, we don't want to upset your delicate mental state and have you crying and pissing yourself because you've been mentally traumatized."

Asshole.

I leaned back in my chair. "I think you'll find a lot of evidence of psychic trauma to my brain."

"Really."

"Yeah, that won't be an issue. What will be an issue, and, I don't mean to do your job for you or anything, is any kind of testimony in a court, if you were to take this there, against me to, uh, establish, well, no, to
refute
my claims of my frame of mind at the time of this incident. Prosecutor's gotta do that, right? And Rosemary's the witness. But, and stop me if I got this all bass ackwards, Rosemary's undercover, right? She's sure as hell not advertising she's a Fed, she's getting close to Tracey or whoever for you guys, and having everybody believe she's still a criminal is important. So
I
think
it'd be pretty stupid to pull her out of something important like that just to testify against me for an assault charge and a B & E and all the other piddly shit that won't stick after any lawyer that's any good gets done with my case."

DeltaBlue rolled his tongue around in his mouth. "I'll pass that along to my superiors, and thank you for the advice. Now let's get back to this robbery in North Dakota. Special Agent Jaspers said that when you showed up in the bunker, you had blood all over your little outfit, and you said it belonged to somebody associated with Mr. Rory Sakata aka 'Kamikaze' of the West Coast Supervillain Crew. You seem to have left that out of your story here. Tell me about that."

Shit.

"Okay, yeah, that was self-defense."

"Can you elaborate on that?"

"It was a home invasion into my apartment. He forced his way in, the guy was a speeder, all coked-out and shit, tried to rob me, put a gun to me which I was able to get away from him, and then he left me with, y'know, it was either him or me. He's the one that busted my ribs."

"Did he tell you his name?"

"Yeah, Angelo Luis
Cabrera
. He called himself Run ALC. Said he was with the Crew like Rory."

DeltaBlue's head nodded as he made notes. "It's getting hot in here. Do you find it's hot?"

I crossed my arms over my chest. "No."

"All right, you tangled with somebody else in the Crew after Mr. Sakata. Bunch
'
a little bastards. I know who you're talking about, too. Mr. Cabrera has been on our list for a while. We were running a joint operation with the DEA and the Border Patrol to nail his little taco ass crossing the border. Do we need to keep throwing taxpayer money at this problem, or has it been resolved for the American People?"

"Did you search my apartment?"

He nodded. "It's being searched right now, yes. Judge signed the warrant this morning for what was left of it. You had a little fire there, looks like. Your neighbors were lucky to get out."

"You find a body?" I asked.

"I haven't gotten any updates on that yet. Are they
going to
find a body?"

"I don't think so, no."

"You don't think so. Did you burn it?"

"No, I did not. When I got back from my abduction to North Dakota, Tracey had teleported it away. What condition it was in when she did that, I don't know, and I don't know why she wanted me to attack him or him attack me or whatever exactly happened."

"Oh, because you were being," he pointed to his head, "mind-controlled, right?"

"Right."

"So he was alive when you left is what you're saying."

"Yeah, he was alive when she snagged me to North Dakota."

No fucking way he could prove I was lying about that.

"Despite all the blood on your little outfit?"

"Yes."

He made a note of it. "So you two got in a powers fight? Can you help me just get an idea of what happened exactly? You said you got the gun away, were you able to fire shots off at him? Is that what happened?"