Chapter 142: PB - #18 Good Morning for a Hanging

Good Morning for a Hanging

Such a disturbance didn’t seem to bother the cute gray mouse sleeping on his shoulder, curling up against a fold of his grimy yellow sweater. Dimitri was the name he gave her—like the main character of the TV show he used to watch when he was a child.

A bearded man with a craggy face and a black hack gilet passed through the buzzing metal detector of the death row. That day, he didn’t carry a plate of moldy hoecakes and a glass of unfiltered water. Instead, a dirty plastic bucket dangled against his thigh; the content of which landed seconds later right in Miles’ still-sleeping face.

Scared, Dimitri had gone to hide in its hole near the Turkish toilet against the brick wall.

Coughing, Miles sat up. From his filthy hair and the tip of his sore nose tasted a mixture of urine and old oil. A new humiliation imagined by the night shift sergeant before heading back to his trailer park.

The guard cleared his throat before turning to the small figure hitherto in his large shadow. Spatting a brown gob on both the floor and his protuberant chin, he muttered: “You told me to wake the jailbird up. I woke the jailbird up.”

Miles painfully opened his eyes, running the back of his wrist against his cheeks and forehead to rid himself of the smears. Squirting, he witnessed Clover Watercress in her flamboyant Pinkerton uniform pitting herself at the lawman: “Clear off!”

Miles cracked his sore shoulder. “Clover?” Pressing one nostril with his thumb, he blew a clot out of the other. The effort made his head spin. “Sorry about that…”

“Visiting this ace-high place. It reminds me of where I was born.”

Miles coughed. “An underground prison cell?”

“Yep.” She withdrew her snoot from between the bars, and grabbed a wobbly stool to sit on. The scrape woke up the other inmates at the end of the corridor. Clover resumed without even paying attention to the racist slurs and threats: “The local police had a lead on Poncho—turned out to be a hoax to drive me crazy. So I came to remind them what happens when you play a trick on a vengeful rabbit.” She paused. “They were boasting about you, you know—down the hall. After kicking the right guys in the corn sacks, they allowed me to check on you—for my case, I let them believe.”

Miles smiled to reveal a broken canine. “The Nouvelle Patrie Police Department is as incompetent as stupid. They would give access to the precinct’s data-core to a data-thief for a strawberry beignet.”

The rabbit almost fell off her stool. “Stop the taradiddles! Would she be on Mimas too? In a place like this?” Frowning, she moved closer to the cage. Her blue eyes glimmered from anger. Her nose wiggled. “Are you mocking me too?”

“Are you sure?”

“Mimas seems to be the center of the solar system lately.”

Noise sounded on the other side of the heavy door. Behind it, the police station in the Martian Quarter of New Patrie and the finest of the local peacekeepers appeared to be making a din. Loud slams made the bars tremble.

Clover pointed to the swinging metal detector with her thumb. “Your old buddy—the racist commissioner—is utterly pissed.”

Miles had met Armand Wayne on his very first day. The Superintendent was a former Ganymedian bounty hunter with a long history of blunders. The Alliance of the Auxiliaries of Justice had sent Miles to the Jovian shattered moon to report on the man’s most recent misbehavior. The investigation didn’t go very well, and Wayne threatened to kill the debuting administrative assistant. Luckily, Wayne’s suspension had been enforced on the spot by a local auxiliary—a rogue MK called MarKus—who broke the man’s knees during a fierce duel in the streets of Ganyville.

His pitiful look earned him a grimace from the Pinkerton detective. “What happened to those soldiers in your hotel room?” she asked.

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“You probably read about it.”

“What’s your side of the coin?”

Clover sketched a smile before frowning. “Obviously! I saw the bodies in the morgue. Kevlo-teflon lining, military grade Panasonic optics, micro-layered memory modules with more explosives intermingled than a thermonuclear missile… These guys were as much Separatist soldiers as I’m a Welsh pastor. You killed corpo-thugs. Not rebels.”

“Twice rather than once.”

“That’s unprofessional.”

Miles stood up to limp closer to Clover. She could smell the urine and the bruises that thinned the skin on her arms and face. Only half of the injuries were from his arrest. The rest he owed to Wayne’s night warden.

“You’re far from Ceres standards here, Pinkerton …”

“Saw that. Also, I wasn’t the only one who saw the bodies. Half the town rushed to the Monteleone when the police stored the cyborgs in the coroner’s van.” She turned her head towards the bulletproof window leading to the street above.

“Great.”

“A darn zoo, even!” She tossed him a painkiller she grabbed from her empty holster on her belt. “From Edith. The marijuana-smoking pharmacist.”

Behind the Freak-rabbit, the door flew open and the limping commissary burst in, his obnoxious bolo-tie making the metal detector going haywire. “Trial? You ain’t going towards no judge, Miles Villanueva!” His voice occasionally went high, from a velo-speed bullet that had left a gaping hole shaped like a rectum under his thyroid. “Sons of whores like you swing from a rope.”

Armand Wayne joined Clover before ordering the two guards following him to move her aside so he could open the door.

Laughing, the chief of police opened the magnetic door and the other guard went to cuff Miles. “Pinkerton, when we need advice on countryside cottages—or stews, we’ll come and ring your ears!” he spoke.

The first warden put the rabbit back on the ground.

Wayne followed her with his eyes before lingering on her rabbit tail swaying to the rhythm of her steps. When she finally left, he whistled before turning to Miles. “Jesus fucking Christ… She’s madder than a wet hen! If the Jovian Freaks possessed half her temperament, the Technos’d have a bigger problem than the Cause.”

Miles stared at him wordlessly as he was jolted outside his cage.

“Fuck off.”

“You sure? Because believe it or not, I’m willing to offer you a way out!”

A new man had decided to make a dramatic entrance.

Miles recognized General Bragg, another roughneck with a face covered in frostbite from a faulty spacesuit. Bragg was a former Techno-Marine admiral, a graduate of the Academy but last in his class. Prior to his defection to the Separatist Army, he had been assigned to the New Worlds, where he had suffered debacle after debacle against Lady Goldsun’s pirates, before being relegated to his adopted home world of Thetys.

Miles glared at Bragg and hardly managed to sustain his bovine gaze. “And if I refuse?”

The Forlorn pilot coughed.

“Was that a yes or a no?” Bragg asked from the metal detector.

Miles spat on the floor—and on Wayne’s boot. “I’ll be your damned pilot…” he concluded.