Эйс Аткинс - Kickback

Iris Milford had a very direct, authoritative way of speaking. Sheila swallowed, looked to me, and then nodded back at Iris. “Okay,” she said. “Come in.”

We walked back to a small kitchen table with a fine view of the parking lot and other similar apartment units. They were all newish brick, two stories tall, with white vinyl dormers. The chosen landscaping was of the type to survive a nuclear winter. Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips had more British charm than Ye Old English Village. I turned away from the window as Sheila disappeared into a back room. Iris set out a digital recorder and her notepad. I touched my temple with an index finger and said, “Steel trap.”

“You really remember everything?”

“Everything.”

“What was I wearing when we first met?”

“A dashiki,” I said.

“Hmm,” she said. “Could be. I can’t remember myself. But that sounds like something I would’ve worn back then.”

“I once wore a leisure suit.”

“Burn the pictures?”

“You bet,” I said.

Iris smiled as a back bedroom door opened and out walked a big sleepy kid wearing gray sweatpants and an oversized white tee that fell to his knees. He didn’t wear shoes, and his feet were bigger than mine. He looked thinner than he had in the photographs I’d seen, different somehow, or maybe it was just the hair. His thick, curly hair from the pictures had been cut shorter than Daddy Warbucks’s.

He took a seat at the head of the table and widened his tired eyes at us. I waved. Sheila put a hand on his shoulder and introduced us. Dillon blinked a few times and sat up a little straighter. He wiped his eyes a bit and nodded, staring right at me. “You were the one who got me out?”

I shrugged. “Mostly it was a tough attorney named Megan Mullen,” I said. “You’d like her. She’s about your age.”

“What?”

“He’s kidding,” Sheila said. “Spenser helped her with some information. You and a lot of other kids were being sent away without an attorney. You can’t do that. You can’t do that to anyone.”

Dillon’s face hardened. He nodded along with his mom, his eyes flicking back and forth between me and Iris.

“What’s it like?” Iris said. “Out there on that island?”

“It sucks.”

“Can you tell me in more detail?”

“It sucks hard,” he said. “It’s colder than shit.”

I looked at Iris. “You writing all this down?”

Iris nodded, took a long breath, and pushed the digital recorder closer to Dillon. “Were you abused?”

“Me?” he said. “No.”

“Did it straighten you out?”

“For setting up a Twitter page?” Dillon said. “It may have been stupid. But no one should get treated like I was.”

“How were you treated?”

“Like a freakin’ prisoner,” Dillon said. “What do you think? They made me take a chemical shower and then shaved my head. I was stuck in this room with a bunch of kids who were in for real crimes, real violent crimes. One of the kids had nearly killed his old man with a ballpoint pen. A few others actually killed someone. We were told to shut up, don’t do anything, stick around and watch a crappy TV until they turned the lights off.”

“What about school?”

Dillon snorted out his nose. “That’s a joke.”

His mother had not moved, standing with a hand still on his shoulder. Sheila again wore her signature perfume and a lot of it. “Dillon said he was sent to a room for thirty minutes a day for study period. Study period was pretty much keeping quiet and doodling in old workbooks. Almost all the books had been filled in, front to back.”

“How about counseling,” I said. “Did you meet with anyone?”

“There was this weird guy I saw a couple times,” Dillon said. “We called him Dr. Feelgood. He was an absolute idiot. I’m pretty sure he was on drugs. He was zoned out. You know? I think he was taking the drugs meant for the kids who needed them. If you got to be a problem, he’d give you some kind of pills. Some of the kids would act wild and give guards trouble just to get the scrip.”

“So no school, no real psychiatric care,” I said. “They must have some terrific cultural activities.”

“Oh, yeah,” Dillon said, grinning. “We got to hum a little while we picked up shit on the beach.”

“Dillon,” Sheila said.

“What else can I call it?” he said. “We were on garbage detail. We cleaned up the beach every day until we had two sacks full of the stuff. Sometimes we’d add in seaweed and crap to make it all go faster. They didn’t really care about the cleanup. It was just busy work. Everything we did was about checking the box. School, the doc, recreation time. Even the food. I wasn’t exactly expecting great stuff, but I wouldn’t feed a dog the kind of stuff they dished out.”

“My dog has gourmet tastes.”

“Well, your dog wouldn’t last on Fortune Island,” he said. “It’s not a place to live. You just sort of exist. It makes you feel like you’ve been put on hold, and nobody gives a shit anymore. I know that’s not true. I know everything my mom was doing. But they want you to believe that you’re nothing and no more important than the crap that washes up on the beach.”

I nodded. Iris kept writing down notes. Sheila started to cry a little. She told us she’d already found a new place for them to live. They’d never come back to Blackburn. Ever.

“Did you meet other kids like you?” I said. “Given a sentence for a minor offense.”

“How long you got?” Dillon said.

“Long as you want to talk,” Iris said. She had on severe black-framed glasses that gave her a serious and focused look. Not that Iris Milford had ever been a wallflower.

“Listen,” Dillon said. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. I’ll tell you everything that happened to me. My mom and I already talked about it. If I shut up, then people like Judge Scali have won. I’m not ever going back to that school and we’re moving out of this town. But I have a favor to ask, Mr. Spenser.”

I nodded.

“I met a friend out on the island who had it a lot worse than me,” Dillon said. “He’s from Blackburn, too, but a senior. He was a wrestler and a real good guy. I knew who he was before the island but we really didn’t know each other. He did something real stupid but not violent. He got sent to the island and when he was there he wouldn’t get with the program. I respected him for not letting the guards beat him down.”

“What’s his name?”

Dillon told us.

“How can we help?”

“If you don’t get him off that island they are going to freakin’ kill him,” Dillon said. “These guys, the guards, they don’t give a shit. Sorry, Mom. But they don’t. They’ll shoot him and throw him into the harbor and no one will ever find him. I’m worried they may have already done it.”

“Why him?”

“Because the kid won’t quit,” Dillon said. “They can’t break him. And the guards don’t know how to handle it.”

I lifted my eyes at Iris. She was taking notes. She met my eyes and just shook her head.

“Okay,” I said. “Tell us all you know.”

Sometime in the morning, before the other kids were up, Robocop kicked the boy awake. He told him to get dressed and follow him to the security check. This time Robocop didn’t watch him dress. The boy did as he was told and soon he was following the man down a rutted path to the docks. There were two small boats teetering in the lights where two guards unloaded boxes and set them into the back of a small pickup truck.

“What?” Robocop said. “You need a fucking invitation?”

The boy walked to the boat, where a fat man in an MCC uniform handed him a heavy box. He loaded it onto the truck and kept on with the boxes until they were gone. The truck drove off. The boy was sweating under his clothes. He stood alone with Robocop on the long, weather-beaten dock. They could see the outline of Boston’s lights clear from where they stood. He thought about what he’d told Dillon Yates, and for a half a second he thought about jumping and trying to swim. But then he saw the jagged pieces of ice and the high breaking waves on the beach.