'Where can we take you?' the governor asked Brazil. 'Home? Back to headquarters? The jail?'
Brazil rubbed his forehead. He poured water on a napkin and gently cleaned Weed's cut and wiped dried blood off his neck.
'What will it be?' the governor asked.
'Honestly, Governor, you don't have to do that. I can't let you go to the trouble,' Brazil said.
Governor Feuer smiled. 'What's your name, son?'
'Andy Brazil.'
'As in the NIJ fellow who wrote the op-ed on juvenile crime?'
'Yes, that's me.'
The governor was favorably impressed.
'And you?' he asked Weed.
'Weed.'
'That's your real name, son?'
'How come everybody always asks me that?' Weed was tired of it.
'I guess headquarters would be good, sir,' Brazil said.
'Swing by headquarters,' the governor told Jed. 'I guess you'd better call my scheduler and tell him I won't make it to whatever.'
Time had stopped for Patty Passman as she sat in the urine-sticky dark on the cold metal floor of the wagon, arms wrenched behind her, ankles immobilized. Her hands and feet were numb. She was chilled to the core. She envisioned gangrene and amputations and lawsuits.
The scales of her unfortunate chemistry were back in balance. Although weak and somewhat banged up, she was thinking with clarity and premeditation. She knew exactly what Rhoad was doing. The wagon could not carry her to lockup for processing until he filled out at least one arrest sheet. The son of a bitch was trumping up every charge imaginable, filling out the paperwork on every single one because the longer he took, the longer she sat, trussed up like a turkey inside an icebox.
Passman wriggled backward across unforgiving metal, finally finding a side of the van to lean against. She shifted positions every few seconds to relieve the bite of the handcuffs and the ache in her shoulders.
'Oh please hurry,' she begged in the dark as the tears came. 'I'm so cold. Oh God, I hurt! Please! You're so mean to me!' She burst into sobs that no one heard or would have been moved by were she standing in the middle of a packed coliseum.
No one cared. No one ever had.
Patty Passman's first mistake in life was being born a girl to parents who already had six girls and were devastated when they had yet one more on their last try. Passman spent her childhood trying to make it up to them.
She pounded on her sisters and told them they were ugly, stupid and flat-chested. She broke toys, dismembered dolls, drew obscene pictures, passed gas, belched, spat, didn't flush the toilet, was insensitive, hoarded candy, kept quarters meant for the Sunday school offering, lost her temper, teased the dog, played Army, played doctor with other girls in the neighborhood and refused to play the piano. She did all she could to act like a boy.
She toned it down as years passed, only to find she had been gender contraire for so long she had fallen too far behind in the female race to ever catch up or even come in last. She was disqualified and defaulted by all except Moses Pharaoh, who nominated her for the wrestling homecoming court because, he told her as he escorted her across the spotlit basketball court that illustrious night, he was turned on by fat women with small teeth.
Afterward the two of them ate lasagne, garlic bread, salad and cheesecake at Joe's Inn. On the way home in his '69 high-performance Chevelle, with its 425 horsepower and 475 pounds of torque, Moses drove her up to the observation point at the end of East Grace Street.
What Passman knew about kissing she had learned from movies. She was not prepared for the huge garlic-tasting thick tongue thrust down her throat. She was shocked when Moses shoved his hands down her chiffon neckline, groping for the Promised Land. He parted her, crossed her, broke all ten commandments, or seemed to, on that awful night when her long pink satin dress was pushed up and crushed, all because she had not been born a boy.
She was shivering and feeling crazed again when the wagon rumbled awake. It pulled ahead. With each turn it took she rolled on her side like a log in the tide. Minutes seemed forever. The van finally halted.
'Sally Port One, put the gate up,' a male voice announced.
Passman heard what sounded like a grate lurch and begin slowly rolling up. The van drove ahead and stopped again. The grate screeched back down. The van's tailgate swung open, a cop standing there, chewing gum.
He was disheveled, his waist drooping over his duty belt like excess pizza dough hanging off the pan. One eye was hazel, the other brown, his graying hair slicked back, ears and nostrils bristly like stiff paintbrushes. Wagon drivers were the flatworms of law enforcement, a throwback to a spineless, lazy, lower order of life Passman had grown to despise.
'O-kie do-kie,' he said to her. 'Let's head 'em up and move 'em out.'
Passman squinted at him from her supine position on the floor.
'I can't,' she said.
He clicked her a giddy-up out of the side of his mouth.
'I'm not going anywhere until you at least undo my ankles.' She meant it.
Her dress was pushed up to her padded hips and she could do nothing about it. He was staring. She knew if she lost her temper again, it would only ensure further bondage.
'Please undo my ankles so I can get out,' she said again.
'Pretty please with sugar on top?'
She thought she recognized his voice, then was certain.
'You're unit 452,' she said.
'Guess I'm famous. Now I'm gonna cut off these flex cuffs, but you so much as twitch and I'm gonna keep you busy.'
She did not know his name, but one thing Passman did know was voices. She had total recall when it came to words uttered on the air by hundreds of units she never saw. Unit 452 cut off the flex cuffs with a pocketknife and the feeling rushed back to her feet in swarms of tiny pins. She worked her way to the open rear of the van, her skirt hiking higher, far above the brown tops of her panty hose, up to the waistband. He stared, chomping gum. She inch-wormed her way to the ground.
Unit 452 pushed a button on the wall to open the door to lockup, and on his way in used a key from his snap holder to secure his pistol inside the gun safe. He got out another key, this one tiny, and unlocked her handcuffs.
'Unit 452,' Passman mimicked him. 'Go ahead, 452, I'm 10-1 2600 block of Park. Ten-4, 452. That'd be the Robin Inn, for a meal. Uh, 10-4…'
'You!' Unit 452 was shocked and deeply offended. 'You're the one! That bitch in the radio room!'
'You're that dumb shit who's always hiding out at Engine Company Number Nine playing your fucking nutless puzzle games. Tetris Plus, Q*Bert, Pac Man, Boggle!' Passman accused.
'What, what?' Unit 452 stammered.
Passman had him.
'Everyone knows,' she went on as Deputy Sheriff Reflogle took the arrest sheets from unit 452 and began to search Passman.
'Looks like you're getting the book thrown at you, girl,' Reflogle said. 'Must've been a bad time at home to act out like this.'
Passman wasn't listening.
'You're a joke in the radio room!' she railed on to Unit 452. 'B is boy, not bravo, and H is Henry, not hotel, you shit dick! What do you think you are, an airplane pilot?'
'Now you quiet down,' Deputy Reflogle said to her as he fished eight quarters out of her skirt pockets.
He rolled Passman's fingers on an ink pad and transferred her loops and whirls to a ten-print card. He took mug shots. He asked her about aliases. He asked about a.k.a's in case she didn't know what aliases were. He locked her inside a holding cell. It was not much bigger than a locker, a hard bench to sit on, a small square screen to see through. She ate cherry Jell-O, cottage cheese and fish sticks for lunch. '
The magistrate's office for the city of Richmond was on the first floor of the police department, past the information desk and in close proximity to lockup and Sally Port 1.