Only then did I whip out my phone and dial 911. I gave them my location, the body count and the woman’s approximate description. I gave them the cereal box version of what had just happened, then cut off the phone and called Craig Montero.
“What’s up, man?”
“It happened again.”
“What happened again?”
I looked down at the woman breathing at my feet. I had taken off my trench coat and laid it over the lower half of her body to cover her nakedness there, and now a wind snaked in between the two houses and bit me. I shivered. “I killed somebody. Three this time.”
“You killed three people?”
Not people, Craig, I thought, but golems. The Bald Man sculpted them from plain earth and put his mouth over theirs and into their mouths he breathed life and then he sent them out into the world to do his bidding but it’s okay because I’ve confronted his golems before and right now I’m leading 6 to nothing.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“What?”
“Yes!” I said louder. “I got jumped in Durham.”
“Durham? What the hell are you doing in Durham? Where are you?”
I gave him the address of Ryan’s News & Video and told him to look for the police lights. Neither the Victorian nor its boarded-up Craftsman neighbor still had house numbers.
“Don’t talk to anybody until I get there, okay?”
The police sirens grew louder. “Okay,” I said.
“You have the right to remain silent. I want you to use that—at least until I can get a handle on what happened.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it, Kevin, no telling stories to the police without me there, you run your mouth and I will kill your ass!”
“Okay,” I said one last time.
Exercising your right to remain silent is a lot harder than it sounds. Craig had a reason for concern; upper middle-class people love to talk to the police, because the police are their friends. Upper middle-class parents teach their kids from a very early age that the police protect them from not-so-upper-middle-class people and are therefore their allies in the struggle between good and evil. The notion that an upper-middle-class person could be a suspect—that the police might actually not be his friends or allies—is a real flying saucer of an idea, because upper-middle-class people don’t do the kind of things that might cause the police to look at them sideways. Except for speeding and drunk driving, and even in these situations your typical divorce lawyer or bank manager or accountant will understand that he’s guilty, that he is very naughty—never evil, just naughty—and that he therefore deserves the scrutiny of the police. Whereupon he will fall all over himself to profess his guilt and demonstrate that he is a member of the upper middle class, that he thinks just like the police do and that he’s really one of them.
When the Durham Police Department cruisers rolled up on the curb in front of the two houses that flanked the crime scene, I reacted with very real, very physical relief. I tried and failed to picture myself saying, I’m not giving a statement until I talk to my lawyer. I could entertain the idea of a prank-calling demon conjuring
building, making
bad guys out of clay and sending them to attack me, but I couldn’t conceive of finding myself on the wrong end of the law.
Because I wasn’t on the wrong end of the law. So as soon as the first officer approached me, I began to talk.
Two officers went in between the houses while two more approached me on the porch and asked me my name, which I gave readily. I informed them that I had called 911; that I, along with the girl I’d covered up with my coat, was a victim.
“Whoa! We got bodies over here!”
“How many?”
“Four!”
Out came the handcuffs.
“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to turn around and give me your hands.”
And they handcuffed me. I stood on the bottom step and stared at the boarded-up front door of the bungalow and felt the cold metal closing around my wrists. Rough hands pressed against my belt line and felt me all over, frisking me for weapons. Finding, of course, the pistol.
“Gun,” called the officer behind me.
“Sir, you have the right to remain silent…”
My heart stopped for several seconds, then began to race. “Hold on! I called you guys! I’m the one that called! You can’t read me Miranda! You can’t arrest me!”
“Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You also have the right to an attorney.”
“I am an attorney! What the hell is going on?”
“If you cannot afford an attorney, the court will appoint one for you. Do you understand these rights, sir?”
My face burned. My chest thumped. This was insane.
Is it? Asked Bobby. Red and blue lights danced on the plywood sheaths covering the door and windows of the bungalow and twinkled in the broken glass on the porch. Think about it, man. You’re a stone-cold killer. That’s all these guys know right now. You’re a dangerous motherfucker, Kevin, you’re a hard son of a bitch. If I rolled up on you in the ass-crack of Durham at night, I’d cuff you, too.
Right. I was a stone-cold killer, I was a dangerous motherfucker and I was a hard son of a bitch. These cops saw dead people on the scene and found a gun in my waistband. They sensed the danger emanating from my pores; I was a good guy but a bad ass. They had to cuff me and frisk me for officer safety. They had to Mirandize me in case I made incriminating statements. They had to contain me until they got to the bottom of this.
And when they did get to the bottom of this, they would uncuff me. They would uncuff me quickly.
“Yes,” I said. “I understand. And I wish to give a statement at this time.”
The officer who had cuffed me turned me around. I found myself looking at a black ex-Marine—I could spot them from miles away—with shoulders as wide as I was tall. I squinted in the darkness at his nametag: this was MCADOO. His partner, a white ex-Marine with equally linebacker-ish proportions, stood back and to the side. I couldn’t see his nametag, as he stood too far away. Younger than McAdoo, this one regarded me with a suspicion and wariness that his superior didn’t. He kept his right hand close by the holster of his pistol.
“Girl’s alive,” called an officer around the corner. “She’s coming to.”
“Who are you?” Asked McAdoo.
“Kevin Swanson. Wallet’s in my right pocket. Driver’s license is in the flap.”
McAdoo reached into my pants and fished out my wallet. He removed my driver’s license and handed it to the younger man. “Check him for warrants,” he said.
The younger man—I could see his nametag now and it read BRADSHER—studied my license. Probably trying to figure out how anyone who seemed this dangerous out on the street could look so stupid in front of the DMV camera.
“I said, go check him for warrants,” McAdoo growled.
Bradsher looked up from the license and studied my face. His cold, businesslike expression had vanished, replaced now with a lopsided grin. “Kevin Swanson of Burlington?”
“In the flesh.”
“You’re that lawyer who blew away those two B&E sons of bitches with an AK-47.”