Free The Illegal by Lawrence Hill Page A

would be alone. If any immigration official or police officer approached him, Keita would run for his life.

CHAPTER FIVE
    V IOLA H ILL PASSED THE TWO-KILOMETRE MARKER in her racing chair. She was making good time on the harbourfront boardwalk. At seven o’clock on a Wednesday morning, there were no toddlers dashing out in front of her, no grannies standing in the middle of the path, no oblivious smokers and no dogs off-leash as Viola wheeled at sixteen kilometres an hour. The sun was coming up. To Viola’s right, it struck the waters of Ten-Mile Inlet at a low angle, and to her left, it washed the white stones of the government buildings in soft light. Viola would do a U-turn at the commercial harbour and get back home in time to shower, eat and make it to her shift at the paper. Viola liked to arrive early. Always.
    Viola had a cellphone strapped to her arm and plugged into her earbuds. Mick Jagger was getting no satisfaction. Damn right. Viola had been trying for two years to get off the sports page, and she couldn’t get any satisfaction either.
    Viola had nothing against sports. She liked to work out, and she liked the burn in her biceps, triceps and deltoids when she wheeled three mornings a week. Yes, she liked sports, but she wanted to write about news. She wanted people to look for her stories and read them, without knowing or caring that she was blagaybulled—black, gay and disabled—and proud of it. “Blagaybulled” was Viola’s own word, and she wanted her words to fly without being weighed down by her identity. In sports, she could not escape it. Every team manager,athlete and sports reader knew her. And she knew them. She knew which ones were thinking, Here comes that bigmouth in the wheelchair.
    She was strong. And fast. Viola easily overtook walkers and joggers on the boardwalk. So it surprised her when a runner came up from behind and shot past her. This was no jogger. This man was flying. Slim, fit and running faster than 3:30 per kilometre but not even looking like he was working. Black. Short, tightly cropped hair. Medium height. He wasn’t wearing long, loose, baggy shorts that hung almost all the way to the knees. No sir, this man had proper marathon shorts, slit up the side of the thighs. His hamstrings were as well defined as rope, and his calves bulged like rocks. He lifted off the balls of his feet as he entered his stride and spent more time airborne than on the ground. Viola enjoyed the view of his working backside until he disappeared around a bend, and then she wheeled faster to bring him back into sight. As she rounded the bend, only a kilometre from the end of the boardwalk and the piers by the commercial harbour, where the multicoloured containers were lifted on and off the decks of the huge ships, the runner was coming back her way. At the same time that she saw him—mid-twenties, baby face, clean-shaven—she heard the sirens.
    The runner said, “I’d turn back, if I were you.”
    “Why?” she asked.
    “Mob, up ahead.” And then he was gone.
    Viola kept wheeling onward. If there was a mob, that’s where she would head—and quicker than before. She tilted forward into a racing position and pumped harder with her arms, catching the wheels with her gloved hands and pushing down to accelerate. What were the sirens for, and where was this mob? There. Where the boardwalk ended, up ahead. Five police cruisers, two paddy wagons and a handful of Freedom State Immigration Enforcement vehicles were parked helter-skelter in a lot. There was a boat at the wharf. About ten metres long. Chipped paint. The Voyager . Rough shape. But the boat wasn’t as shabby as the small crowd of black people on deck. One by one, they were being led stumbling over a gangplankand onto the pier, where they were handcuffed by a police officer and led to the paddy wagon.
    Viola wheeled up to the pier. “Excuse me,” she called up to an immigration enforcement official. “Excuse me. What’s going on