“What are you doing?” Dale said.
“I’m making sure Carl didn’t die for nothing,” Turnbull said. And then they disappeared along with everyone else.
11.
Just after sundown, Larry Langer and two others knocked on the front door of Donny Moss’s modest two-story house on the west side of town.
Moss opened the door, puzzled. He thought he recognized Langer from the television. Wasn’t he some kind of criminal?
“Yes?” Moss said, cautiously.
“Get your shoes, Mr. Moss,” Langer said. “You need to come with us back into town to open up your print shop.”
“What? It’s almost nine…”
“I’m not asking you, and I don’t really care if you have your shoes on or not. I was just being polite. But you are coming with us.”
A few minutes later they were in a Buick navigating the side streets toward the center of town. Moss was in back with Langer; the two up front kept watch for PSF cruisers, but there weren’t any roaming the streets tonight. The security forces were hunkered down in the station house on the other side of town, expecting retribution after what happened at the demonstration earlier that day.
They didn’t use the headlights, and Langer had opened the trunk and pulled the wires from the brake lights, so they drove through the dark using the ambient light. Near the print shop, they parked and Langer took his passenger up to the front door. After some fumbling with the keys, Moss got the door opened and they went inside.
“I don’t understand what you want,” he said, frightened. Moss had always done his best to avoid trouble. To his horror, it appeared now that trouble had sought him out.
Langer took a thumb drive out of his pocket and held it up. Moss stared, confused.
“I need some posters, Mr. Moss. About a hundred, if you please.”
“I can’t print any posters,” Moss said, miserable. “You don’t have a permit.”
“You guessed right there. I most certainly do not have a permit to print the posters of what one of our more artistically-inclined compadres did up on this computer stick. But you’re going to print ‘em up anyway.”
“I can’t,” Moss whimpered. “They’ll arrest me. The printers, they have counters and the government checks to make sure I haven’t printed anything more than allowed.”
“Well, Mr. Moss,” said Langer. “Then when they come and check your machines and see you’ve printed a hole shitload of extra posters, then you can honestly tell them that some of the local boys came in here and told you that if you didn’t do it, they were going to splatter your brains all over your shop.”
Moss swallowed, and took the thumb drive.
“I expect you saw the town this morning,” Kunstler said coldly to the wide-eyed Lieutenant Kessler. He was standing in the doorway of her office in the station. She put down her Starbucks latte.
“Yes, I saw.” What the inspector was describing was hard to miss, and there was no doubt what he was referring to.
But Kunstler still wanted to make his point and he produced a tattered poster, the edges ragged where it had been ripped off a wall. The photo was in full color and showed the dead Carl Hyatt lying on the street. The blood flowing down from the corner of his mouth and collecting on the asphalt was bright red.
In large white letters – Arial Bold – it read “THE PSF MURDERS OUR KIDS.”
Kunstler gave Kessler a moment to take it in, then crushed it into a ball in his hands.
“Dozens of them, everywhere. Get your officers on the street, Lieutenant. Right now. All of them. We need to demonstrate that we control this town, not these terrorists.”
Kessler’s eager nodding was interrupted by a ruckus across the squad room. Two plainclothes PBI detectives were frog-marching Donny Moss into the station.
“The printer,” Kunstler said.
The PBI agents brought Moss before their boss. Kunslter looked the miserable little man up and down.
“I didn’t do anything! They made me! They said they’d kill me!” Moss whimpered.
“Interrogation,” Kunstler said, and Moss’s eyes went wide as they dragged him away. Kunstler turned back to the lieutenant. “Get on it. In the meantime, I have an interrogation to finish myself.”
The PSF officers went out on the street fully armed and ready, hiking up and down the main streets in a show of force. The people pointedly ignored them; for the most part the citizenry pretended the armed invaders weren’t even there.
A few lost it and their curses got them tackled, hooked up, and roughly dragged back to the station. Even as the PSF officers hooked up a protestor, a crowd would gather – not too close, not too aggressive, and respecting the AKs pointed at them, but still there, watching.
The PBI detectives, drawing on their pattern analysis software and input from electronic surveillance, headed out on raids of likely insurgents. A teacher, a plumber, a fireman and more – all were dragged into the station and hauled into interrogation rooms where the PBI read them their rights with fists and batons.
By sundown there had not been too many incidents, and they had made a dozen arrests, but there had been no shootings and no real attacks on the security forces. Kessler breathed a sigh of relief.
“This town is ours,” Kessler said proudly to her PBI counterpart.
“We’ve only just started,” Kunstler replied, wiping the blood off his hands. “Tomorrow we continue. We show them we are in control.”
“What did he tell you?” the lieutenant asked.
“Nothing interesting yet,” said Kunstler. “But we have all night.”
The inspector walked back to Interrogation Room #2 and opened the door. A beefy PSF officer, stripped down to his t-shirt, was standing over a slumped and bloodied man handcuffed to the suspect’s chair.
“Wake him up,” Kunstler said, and the big officer smashed Ted Cannon hard in the jaw. If the chair had not been bolted to the floor, he would have gone flying into the wall.
“So Deputy,” Kunstler said, leaning in at Cannon’s swollen face. “As we’ve discussed for lo these many hours, you’re the only real candidate for being the spy who told the terrorists about the People’s Volunteers. So why not just do your duty and admit it and we can move on to who you told?”
“I told you,” Cannon said, his fat lips and shredded mouth muffling his voice. “I didn’t tell anyone anything.”
“Well, then who did?
“How the hell should I know? Maybe one of these assholes looking to score a bribe,” he said, gesturing to the big thug beside him. The officer did not bother to wait for the inspector’s signal and drove his fist hard into Cannon’s gut. The deputy coughed and retched.
“You know, the problem with you and your terrorist friends is privilege,” Kunstler said. “You were privileged before the Split and you think you still are. But you aren’t, not anymore. Not in the People’s Republic.”
“Like I said, I don’t know who dimed out your punks,” Cannon said. The thug smacked his head hard.
“Those were patriots, Deputy, murdered by your friends for daring to speak truth to power.”
“What does that crap even mean?” That drew another hard blow.
“Look, Deputy Cannon, I’m sure Davis here will be happy to pummel you all day and all night if need be, and I’ll be happy to watch. But I don’t think we’re getting anywhere this way, as delightful as our discussion has been so far. So,” Kunstler said, picking up a folder off the table and opening it. “Maybe tomorrow we start off again, only this time we bring in your sister and her husband the middle-aged insurance agent and their kids and Davis and I talk to them while you watch? How about that idea? Sound fun?”