Billy laid it out like a hard-won war story, and in time, with enough retellings, I knew he’d come to believe it too. Seeing Billy so confident and sure, seeing the flashing lights and the deputies securing the scene, I tingled, beginning to wonder for the first time if maybe everything really would work out. The bomb shelter was Lionel’s oldest, most secret warehouse. I had come here once, as a child, when Lionel had to unload product in some kind of emergency. I kept that secret in my mind for years, protecting it like a precious inheritance. I didn’t know where his other stash spots were, not anymore, but I had a hunch that he’d move it all here if he was worried about a raid. It looked like I was right.
“Listen,” Billy said. “I appreciate you bringing this to me. I know it wasn’t easy on you, it being your father and all.”
I shrugged, kept my face blank, and retreated to the safety of cliché. If nothing else, I know my role. “What’s right is right. People can’t sell dope in this county. I just don’t want anybody knowing I was behind my own daddy getting locked up.”
Billy nodded, looking sympathetic, then he pointed to a patrol car underneath an ancient blue spruce tree. “He’s sitting right there, if you want to talk to him.”
I thought about that for a second, then decided I did.
Lionel sat in the back of the patrol car, looking angry but in control. The deputy standing watch nodded and wandered off a respectable distance. I leaned over Lionel’s window, took in the scene surrounding us for a moment, then looked inside and locked eyes with him. Seeing my father handcuffed in the back of a patrol car and knowing I put him there, it felt like the enormous weight that had been crushing my chest and my heart for most of my life had started to lift just a little.
“Thought you were leaving town,” I said.
“I don’t expect that’s exactly true.”
“No,” I told him, “it isn’t.”
Lionel leaned back, looking comfortable, but that didn’t bother me as much as I’d have thought it would. It was all out there in the open between us now.
“I got two sons, and each one is dumber than the next,” Lionel said.
“Is that a fact?”
Lionel shook his head. “You must think this will make you sheriff. You’re so dumb you can’t see that Keely and C.T. will tell everyone those are their drugs.” He shrugged. “This is nothing, this will be just a parole violation for me. I’ll do six months at most.”
“Is that a fact?” I said again.
Lionel nodded. “None of this will stick to me. It never does.”
I looked at him and smiled. And my smile got wider and wider, so wide that it felt like my face would crack. And my father looked at me, really looked at me, for maybe the first time in his life. And when he did, I leaned in close and whispered in a voice as clear and cleansing as a mountain creek: “Old man, it’s not the drugs you should be worried about.”
I left Billy to his paperwork and the slaps on the back. He didn’t know it yet, but he’d be getting a lot more of both soon. Who knew, maybe before I was done Billy would be the next sheriff, him the deputy nobody much trusted with a gun.
As for me, there wasn’t much else to do. Just the last two dangerous parts.
First I went back to the Cadillac and Selby Cluxton’s body one more time. Nobody saw me. I mean, Lord, I hope not. Then, when I was done there, I went looking for Toola.
I found her at her mother’s old house, like she said she would be, sitting on the front porch steps, as if she had been waiting for me all night. She wasn’t wearing makeup or any colored contacts now, and her eyes were a soft blue-gray. She looked more beautiful than I could ever remember.
“They caught Lionel moving a mess of drugs,” I said. “He’s on ice now. He will be for at least a couple months. It’s awful hard to buy judges or intimidate witnesses from prison, even for Lionel. And that’s all the time we’ll need.”
“Need for what?”
Toola looked at me for a second, waiting for an answer, and I felt that tingle again, that belief that it was all going to work out. Then I put her necklace in her hand, the necklace I found ripped and broken beneath the driver’s seat of Selby Cluxton’s Cadillac yesterday morning. I didn’t know for certain why she shot that disgusting creep or why her necklace would be ripped and lost right there. There’s a danger in letting your mind run wild. And there’s a danger too in asking for explanations.
“Tomorrow morning you need to go to the sheriff’s station and ask for Deputy Price,” I said. “Tell him that Selby Cluxton is missing and you haven’t seen him for a couple days. And that the last thing he said was, he was going to meet with Lionel to settle a disagreement.”
I took a deep breath and kept going.
“If they don’t find Selby in a couple days, I’ll make an anonymous call. I’ll tell them about seeing Selby’s Cadillac off of Paint Creek Road. They won’t find anything of yours there, I made sure of that. But they’ll find Lionel’s pack of Chesterfields on the dash. I made sure of that too.”
Toola looked at me and she didn’t nod or say anything. There wasn’t a need to, not anymore. But after a moment she smiled.
Because to answer Toola’s question, I still didn’t know if I was the type of person who could kill a man. But I knew for certain now that I could send a man to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. I could do that if it meant getting revenge for the woman I had always loved. And if it meant protecting the woman, I believed I was starting to. Lionel would learn that about me soon enough, but he wouldn’t be able to complain. That’s the way the world works, after all. Like he taught me years ago, what the truth is and what you can prove, they’re only second cousins.
Brian Cox
The Surrogate Initiative
from Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine
Cassandra Howard walked around the small band of protesters gathered across the street from the courthouse. The handwritten signs they raised read JURIES ARE HUMAN! and MY PEER IS NOT A DROID!
The Frank Murphy Hall of Justice in downtown Detroit was a rectangular cement monolith, its brutal bulk squatting over nearly an entire city block on St. Antoine Street. Every time she visited the Third Judicial Circuit Court, Cassandra was reminded of an enormous mausoleum built to endure centuries.
She climbed the steps and entered the courthouse. She swiped her hand under the yellow UR? reader that registered the I-AM chip implanted at the base of her right thumb before passing through the softly humming maze of body scanners. Security drones hovered in the lobby, running facial identification checks on the crowd as Cassandra crossed to the elevators.
The chief judge’s chambers were on the sixth floor.
As the elevator doors whisked shut, Cassandra recognized a colleague crossing the lobby. Forrest Latham walked with his hands in his pockets and his head tilted to the side as if he were considering an entertaining thought. His stride was slow and leisurely. He carried the air of a bemused man who had nowhere to be anytime soon and for whom everything came easy. Cassandra found his charm and confidence to be as annoying as it was attractive. In graduate school at Carnegie Mellon, he once asked her to dinner, but she had lied out of nervousness and told him she didn’t date white men. He hadn’t approached her again, but she’d felt self-conscious around him ever since. She knew he had been recruited to work on the Surrogate program — there were, after all, only so many AI psychologists — but what was he doing in Detroit?
Cassandra closed her eyes briefly as she realized Forrest was likely the consultant for the prosecution.
“Terrific,” she muttered.