End Game (17 page)

Besides, the Mitchell boy was, what, fourteen, fifteen years old? For generations, that was the age of soldiers. They and those even younger were heroes of the Motherland during the Great War.

Graham Mitchell was an adult in soldier years.

Bringing him into custody was the single hurdle. From there, the diplomatic channels had already been greased, as the Americans liked to say, for the boy to be whisked to Russia, where the real work would begin.

The lady on the other side of the table had a nice smile, but hard eyes. Graham didn’t trust her. In fact, as he sat there, sipping his Coke and eating his Twix bar, he realized that he didn’t trust anyone anymore. They sat in a yellow-brown concrete block room, where the only furnishings were a beat-up steel table and two chairs that were both bolted to the floor.

After being beaten up by the cops who arrested him, he’d been put in a car and driven to this building that he assumed was a jail. For a long time, he’d just sat here by himself. They’d taken the cuffs off his wrists, and they hadn’t said anything about walking around, but there was nowhere to walk, nothing to do.

It was sort of a relief to have another person in the room. At least she was willing to talk—more than he could say about every cop in the building, who pretended that he wasn’t even there. She wasn’t particularly friendly—in fact, she seemed intent on being the opposite of friendly—but at least she was another heartbeat in the room.

“I asked you if you know why you’re here.” The lady said her name was Peggy, but Graham didn’t believe her.

“Because the police brought me here,” he said. It was a violation of the say-nothing rule that Jolaine had sworn him to, but he’d learned the hard way that saying nothing pissed people off way more than saying something that sounded like an answer, but really was not.

“And why do you think that happened?” Peggy asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Take a guess.”

Graham hesitated, worried what the reaction might be, then decided to roll the dice. “Because they had nothing better to do tonight?”

Peggy’s cold eyes hardened even more. “Do you think this is a funny time?”

“No,” Graham said. Finally, a chance to be 100 percent truthful. “I think this is a scary time, and I think you are a scary lady.”

She seemed to enjoy that. “Really.” She said the word as a statement, not as a question. “Why do you think I’m scary?”

Graham hesitated. Then he said nothing.

“Come on, Graham. You can answer. What makes you think that I am scary?”

He hesitated again. He sensed that Peggy was trying to trap him into saying the wrong thing, and that the wrong thing would get somebody hurt. At this point, silence was his most loyal ally.

Twenty seconds passed. “Graham, you realize you’re in custody, right? You realize that I control your future. That Twix bar could be the last bit of food you get for the next two weeks.”

“There,” he said. “You just threatened to starve me. That’s what makes you scary. I think you want something from me, and I think you want that something more than you care whether I’m dead or alive.”

He’d intended that to be startling, but Peggy took it in stride. In fact, she might have looked pleased. “Tell me what has happened over the past couple of days.”

“You go first,” Graham said. “Tell me what you think has happened.”

Peggy’s face morphed into something ugly. She probably thought it was a smile, but it looked more like pain laced with raw hatred. “So something
did
happen,” she said. “I wasn’t sure, but you just confirmed that for me. That’s how it works here. If you don’t tell me the truth, I’m going to find it out anyway. You don’t want to screw around with me, kid.”

This bitch wanted him to cry, or panic, but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction. Jolaine’s words raced through his mind—don’t say anything to anyone, don’t reveal any details—but Jolaine wasn’t here to help him. She wasn’t anywhere, in fact. For all he knew, she was dead, or she was saying things that would get him into trouble.

His mind raced for words that would create the
feel
of sharing information without actually sharing it. Were the cops even allowed to talk to kids without some other adult around? Didn’t he read a book or watch a movie or maybe a
Law & Order
episode where everything turned on the presence—or in the case of the program, the
absence
—of an adult during questioning?

“I want a lawyer,” he said. In the show, that had been the line of dialogue that changed everything. Once you asked for a lawyer, all the questioning had to stop.

Peggy laughed. “Gonna lawyer up, are you?” she mocked. “That’s cute. You think you’re in charge. That’s extra cute. Here’s the deal, Graham, and I need you to wrap your head all the way around it. You are not in control. You don’t even have a control to reach for. I control everything that happens to you from this point forward. You need to understand that. You also need to understand that pissing me off is a bad platform to start from. Now, I’m going to ask you again, but I’m only going to ask you once. What happened last night?”

“Probably something a lot like what you think it was,” Graham said. While he had no clue what was happening, he had the sense that Peggy was more bluster than action. How much could she do, after all, in a place that was teeming with cops? That was another thing: He didn’t believe that she was a cop. He didn’t know what she was, but she didn’t have the swagger of a cop.

Whether that was good news or bad news was a different discussion.

Peggy glared. Graham saw real anger behind her eyes. He glanced up at the camera in the corner near the ceiling. He pointed to it. “People are watching,” he said. “You gonna hit me?”

Peggy seemed to grow larger, as if there were a big balloon inside of her that someone had pumped with air.

“I need you to tell me what happened last night,” she repeated.

“Why?” he asked. “Why do you think that anything at all happened?”

Peggy turned red.

“Want to know what I think?” Graham taunted. “I think you think that you already know, and you just want me to confirm.”

“There was shooting,” Peggy said. “At your house. People were killed.”

Graham said nothing. He realized what Jolaine had been trying to tell him in the moments before they’d been taken into custody. People don’t really know anything until someone confirms it for them.

“Your parents were involved in the shootings,” Peggy went on. “Your father was killed.”

Those words landed hard, like a slap. He understood that she’d said it to knock him off balance, and as much as he wanted it not to be so, he realized that she’d succeeded. He felt tears press from behind his eyes. “Does this make you feel big?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Does it make you feel big to bully a kid who can’t defend himself? Does it make you feel all-powerful and shit to tell me that my father was killed? What kind of father did you have if you could talk to me that way?”

“Watch your mouth, Graham.”

Graham heard movement on the far side of the door, and then the distinctive sound of a key sliding into the lock. It turned, and the door opened, revealing the brown-uniformed cop who had earlier taken him to the bathroom.

“That’s it,” the cop said. “This interview is over.”

Peggy looked at him like he was a cockroach. “No, it’s not,” she said.

“Yes, it is,” the cop said. “As of right now.”

“Who the hell are you?” Peggy demanded.

“I am Deputy Milford Price,” the cop said. Unremarkable in every regard except for the mole under his right eye, his face was redder than the last time Graham had seen it. “And you are Peggy Darnell, who happens to have no profile in any record I accessed.”

“That fact alone should tell you something,” Peggy said. “Don’t interfere with what I’m doing.”

Deputy Price crossed the threshold and walked to Graham’s side of the table. “He had it right, you know,” he said. “You’re a bully and you prey on kids. It doesn’t get a lot lower than that.”

“I have business to attend to, Deputy.” She said the word
deputy
as if it smelled bad.

Price smiled. He beckoned Graham with two fingers. “Come with me, son.”

Graham stood. He wasn’t sure what was going down, but he sensed that he was destined to come out on the positive end of it. He felt a sense of peace when Deputy Price placed a hand on his shoulder.

“I’m sure yours is a complicated job,” Price said. “That’s the impression I got from the word that came down not to interfere with you.”

“It’s a good idea to follow orders,” Peggy said.

“Except for the immoral ones,” Price countered. “That was a hard-learned lesson for my father, and he made sure that I learned it, too. He was in the Army, back during Vietnam, when all the lines got blurry. Back when I was a boy—”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, must we really—”

“Yes, we must really,” Price said. “He was never right after that war. He was never able to justify the choices he was forced to make, and he never even confided in me what those choices were. But I knew for damn sure what the lessons were. He drove them into me just as surely as a nail is driven into wood.”

“Oh, good God, I cannot wait to hear.” Backed into a corner, Peggy became 100 percent bitch.

“When my daddy found out that I was going into law enforcement, he told me to pay attention to one thing above all others. And that one thing was the morality of what I was doing. Not all laws are just, he told me, and not all criminals are bad. Sometimes, people do bad things for good reasons. As an officer of the law, my job is to know the difference.”

“This is truly moving,” Peggy mocked. “I’m sure there’s a point here somewhere.”

“I’m sure there is, too,” Price said. “Just as all criminals are not bad, not all folks with badges are good. In fact, some folks should never be given badges in a million years because they don’t respect the power that comes with it.”

Graham watched the discussion like a tennis match, his head pivoting from point to point.

“And you think I’m one of those people,” Peggy said. Her body language said that she was bored and angry.

“I
know
that you’re one of those people,” Deputy Price said. “What kind of monster does an adult have to be to speak to a child the way you were speaking to this young man?”

“I believe I made it clear to your superiors that I am here on a matter of national security.”

“That’s no excuse for the way you’ve been speaking to Graham.”

“And how do you know what I’ve been saying to Graham?” Peggy said. She stood. “I left specific orders that this discussion was to be off the record.”

Deputy Price gave the kind of mocking smile that told Graham that he was definitely on his side. “Well, you know how it goes sometimes. Word doesn’t always leak down.”

Peggy glared.

“This isn’t your station house, Agent Whatever-your-real-name-is. This is
my
station house, and we’re in the United States of America, not in some secret CIA prison. The boy asks for a lawyer, you stop asking questions. You start taunting him about the loss of a parent, and I step in. You’re done.”

“You have no idea what you’re messing with,” Peggy said.

“You have no idea how little I care,” Deputy Price replied. “I sleep well at night, and when my journey on this spaceship is over, I expect to have a pleasant eternity in Heaven.” He paused for effect. “I have every confidence that we won’t run into each other there.”

Using gentle pressure on the base of Graham’s neck, he urged the boy toward the door. “Come on,” Price said. “We’ll get you settled down someplace more comfortable.”

This time, there were no handcuffs.

The walls of the hallway were made of the same yellow-brown brick as the interior of the meeting room. The floor tiles were the same brown-flecked white, too, only out here, the floors had a sparkle. Graham suspected that had something to do with people caring enough to clean them from time to time.

“Where are you taking me now?”

“We’re going to get you a warm bed in a house with nice people.”

Graham stopped, took a step backward. “I don’t know anybody here,” he said.

Deputy Price smiled. “I know plenty of nice people,” he said. “Trust me.”

Graham felt a flash of panic.
Trust me.
He couldn’t imagine anything that he could less afford to do. He couldn’t trust anyone. Everything about the past two days had proven beyond any doubt that no one was worthy of his trust.

He sensed movement behind him, and he turned to see that Peggy had stepped out into the hallway. Whatever about her had pretended to be nice before was all gone. All he saw on her face was anger as she glared past Graham and through Deputy Price.

“Listen to me, Barney Fife,” she said. “I think it’s time to place a call to your chief. You are way, way over your head right now.”

“Been there before,” Price said.

Graham made his decision. No matter what the other options were, all of them had to be better than sticking with Peggy.

“Think of the boy,” Peggy said. “You’re just going to make it all more difficult for him.”