"Ah." Perry just wanted this day to be over. He missed Hilda, though
he barely knew her. It would have been nice to have someone here at
home with him, someone he could cuddle up to in bed and talk this all
out with. Maybe he should call Tjan. He hit the button on his computer
that made the TV blink the time in Morse code. It was 1AM. He'd have
to be up in six hours to get the ride up and running. Screw all this,
he was going to bed. He hadn't even gotten a single email from Hilda
since he'd left Madison. Not that he'd sent one to her, of course.
Lester was still snoring when Perry slipped out of the condo, a bulb
of juice and a microwavable venison and quail-egg breakfast burrito
under his arm. He had a little glove-box microwave and by the time he
hit his first red light, the burrito was nuclear-hot and ready to
eat. He gobbled it one-handed while he made his way to the ride.
There were two cop cars at the end of the driveway leading to the
parking lot. Broward County sheriff's deputy black-and-whites, parked
horizontally to blockade the drive.
Perry pulled over and got out of his car slowly, keeping his hands in
plain sight. The doors of the cruisers opened, too. The deputies
already had their mirrorshades on, though the sun was still rising,
and they set down their coffees on the hood of the cars.
"This yours?" A deputy said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at
the flea market and the ride.
Perry knew better than to answer any questions. "Can I help you?"
"We're shutting you down, buddy, sorry." The cop was young, Latina and
female, her partner was older, white and male, with the ruddy
complexion that Perry associated with old time Florida cops.
"What's the charge?"
"There's no charge," the male cop said. He sounded like he was angry
already and anything Perry said would just make him angrier. "We
charge you if we're going to arrest you. We're enforcing an
injunction. Now, if you try to get past us, we'll come up with a
charge and *then* we'll arrest you."
"Can I see the injunction?"
"Sure, you can go to the courthouse and see the injunction."
"Aren't you supposed to have a copy of it to show to me?"
"Am I?" The cop's grin was mean and impatient.
"Can I go and get some stuff from my office?"
"If you want to get arrested you can." He pulled a dyspeptic face and
drank some coffee, then got back into his cruiser.
The other cop had the grace to look faintly embarrassed at her asshole
partner, but then she, too, got back in her car.
Perry thought furiously about this. The cop was clearly itching to
bust his ass. Maybe he hated the ride, or this duty, or maybe he hated
Perry -- maybe he was one of the cops who had raided the shantytown
all those years before. Perry had taken a pretty big settlement off
the county over the shot in his head, and it was a sure bet that a lot
of cops had suffered for it and now harbored some enmity for him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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