Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

Across the plaza, the revolving door of the HSI Building slowly turned, and out of the gap stepped an unsettling vision. Holmes had to look and then look again to make sure it was real: his twin, a black man dressed in an almost identical getup of polyester and vinyl, right down to the patch on his sleeve.

But not really a twin after all. When the guard turned and the wind stopped billowing into his shirt, Holmes could see he wasn’t as big as he’d seemed. But he more than made up for that with the gun holstered on his hip.

Holmes felt himself teeter. It was now or never. He nodded to Myles. At least he tried to nod, but his head was so heavy he couldn’t be sure it moved.

There was an excruciating pause, and then Myles cleared his throat:

“Today, before this gathering of witnesses,

Here in the shadow of this great obelisk of capital,

We find thee guilty of avarice, of arrogance, of deception, of murder,

Of pressing benevolent tools into the service of enmity.

“For thou hast filled thy belly at the tables of tyrants.

For thou has lent thy back to indiscriminate burdens,

Not as a servant, but as a mercenary.

For thou hast reaped profit in damnation.

“We, the jury of thine infamy, have espied

Thee building empires upon the swollen catacombs,

Have beheld thy bitter seed

Aborting thy neighbor’s fertile pastures,

Have heard thy chants and prayers

To summon storms of poisoned rains.

“For thou art duplicitous.

Thou art both pillar and pillage.

And we, those of us gathered here upon this solemn day,

And those whose headstones pave

The paths of thy secret gardens,

Are ready to receive thine head and hands

Into this, our hallowed pillory.

“May God have mercy on thy soul.”

Throughout Myles’s recitation, the world to Holmes had seemed to stand still. The wind, the traffic, the shoes, the chatter — all of it had melted away. Even Myles’s words had seemed distorted. Holmes had been aware of him speaking, or at least of Myles’s lips moving, but there was no discernible sound. Now, however, the indictment had been read, and now Myles’s lips had stilled, and now the world began to reawaken a bit at a time. First there was the piece of paper flopping like a fish in Myles’s hand. And then the suits and the leather soles became animated again. But the bodies wearing them were different from before. The revolving doors of the HSI Building continued to suck them in. The guard had left his post by the entrance, heading straight toward Holmes.

Holmes realized now, in fact, that almost nothing had stopped, that almost no one had noticed anything. Aside from the guard, there was only an older white woman in a burgundy skirt who stood a few yards away, the only still body in the entire plaza. The suits swerved around her. Even the wind appeared to leave her alone. A strange expression consumed her face — a cramped, bemused smile. She was looking from Holmes to Myles and back again. She seemed to be waiting to see what would happen next. It was only when the guard reached her side, and she turned slightly to speak to him, that Holmes recognized her. Hers was the face from the picture Fitch had shown them. This was the woman McGee had been coaching him to meet.

Ruth Freeman had hair like a librarian: gray and short, boyishly sweeping across her head. She held her briefcase in both hands, like a child with a basket full of eggs. And in the moment the guard came forward to grasp Myles’s arms, the woman’s expression changed to something that looked to Holmes like pity.

In the scuffle, the powdered wig slid across the dome of Myles’s head. Freed from his legs, the lectern pirouetted once in the wind, then shot across the plaza like a luge. The speech swirled in some invisible vortex.

As the guard pulled him away, Myles pointed to Holmes and shouted, “Bailiff! Take away the prisoner.”

Despite the quiver in his fingers, Holmes managed to remove a pair of handcuffs from his pocket. And with the guard distracted, he strode over to the entrance and locked his own wrist to the handle of the nearest door.

§

McGee was calling it a party. But what the hell was the occasion? As best Holmes could tell, they had nothing to celebrate. A couple clips of their arrest on the evening news? Snarky, pompadoured anchors who couldn’t even be bothered to mention what the protest had been about? From what Holmes had heard in the hour he’d been out of jail, the local stations had been playing Myles’s performance for comic relief, a fuzzy cell phone video shot by someone passing by. It was hard to imagine McGee impressed by such cheap notoriety. But here she was, throwing a party.

Maybe Myles had gotten what he wanted after all.

Fitch had delivered the invitation when he came to bail them out. But he didn’t seem to know anything either.

“All I heard was ‘party,’ ” Fitch said, scrawling his name on the clerk’s forms and returning them unread. “But something tells me there’s not going to be a lot of dancing.”

Fitch’s response to the situation was vodka. It was his response to everything. He’d been medicating himself with the stuff almost nonstop since his own charade a few days before with the woman Holmes had seen in the plaza. The encounter had left Fitch unnerved.

“I still don’t know how she did it,” he said as he drove Holmes and Myles from lockup to the loft. “Some kind of Jedi mind tricks.”

Fitch had been insisting he’d done everything he was supposed to do, asked the woman every question McGee had written down for him. And still Ruth Freeman had revealed nothing.

“I told you I wasn’t cut out for this stuff,” he said to Myles in the rearview mirror. “I told McGee. I barely even know what this shit is about.”

Holmes was having a hard time feigning sympathy. “We’ve only had like a thousand meetings to talk about it.”

In the backseat, Myles sat silently.

“It’s complicated,” Fitch said. “There’s too much shit to keep track of.”

“Especially if you’re asleep.” Holmes looked to Myles for agreement, but he was looking out the window, not even paying attention.

“I’ve got a lot going on,” Fitch said. “That new demo …”

“Have you even started recording?”

Fitch glared back. “I don’t remember you leaping to volunteer for Myles’s little … Shakespeare-in-the-park.”

Myles turned his head briefly at the sound of his name, then drifted back to wherever he’d been.

“I still did it,” Holmes said.

“So did I.”

“Yeah,” Holmes said, “but yours isn’t going on your criminal record.”

“Stop!” Myles shot forward, hovering over the center console.

“I spent the night in jail,” Holmes said. “I’m not done complaining.”

“Stop the car.” Myles was pointing to a store at the corner. “I want to get some cookies.”

Fitch elbowed Myles softly in the head, nudging him back into his seat. “Grown men in a van don’t stop for cookies.”

“For McGee,” Myles said. “They sell her favorite kind.”

“Jail’s not enough?” Holmes said. “We have to buy her cookies?”

“For the party.”

“Should we get balloons, too?” Fitch said. “Is someone turning seven?”

“Don’t be a dick,” Myles said. “Pull over.”

The next logical stop after cookies was the liquor store. Fitch’s supply had run out.

The bottle he picked was squatting alone and dusty in the bottom corner of a buckled aluminum shelf, no brand name, just the word VODKA printed in bold block type across a coat of arms dominated by an eagle wearing a sarcastic smirk. The bottle was the size of a bullhorn. Holmes didn’t drink and never had, but as they drove the rest of the way to McGee and Myles’s loft, he started to feel attached to the weight of the brown paper bag in his lap, and he could imagine clinging to the bottle for the rest of the night.