Free Night and Day by Ken White Page B

case
you were thinking of trying something, I want you to know that my piece is in the gun safe up
front. If you think you can take me one-on-one, you’re welcome to try. I don’t have a problem
dragging you out to the wagon.”
    I pushed away from the wall. My legs held. Just barely. “Let’s go.”
    “Not so fast,” Holstein said with a smile. “Turn around, face the wall, hands behind your
back. You know the rules, Charlie. Prisoners in transit are always cuffed.”
    As I started to turn around, he came up behind me and shoved me against the wall, hard. His
hand, between my shoulder blades, burned like it was on fire. Holstein kicked my legs apart,
then jerked my right arm down and slapped the handcuff around my wrist. A moment later, he
had my left wrist in the cuffs as well.
    He spun me around.
    “Nothing personal, old buddy,” he said, flashing his teeth in a humorless grin, his face
inches from mine. “You’re moving like an old lady and we got a schedule to keep.”
    “You ought to think about breath mints, Ray,” I said. “Your breath smells like rotten meat.”
    His grin changed, his lips curling back over his teeth. Then he laughed and shook his head.
“Not the meat, Charlie. Just the juice.”
    He pulled something out of his jacket pocket. “One more thing and we’re ready to go.” It
wasn’t a hood so much as a ski-mask without eye holes. Holstein pulled it down over my head
and said, “There we are.”
    I could make out the difference between light and dark through the mask, but that was about
it. Light while he frogmarched me out of the cell and through the halls of Uptown station. Dark
when we went outside and he shoved me into the back of the paddy wagon.
    There was somebody else in the wagon, apparently another cop. I was lifted up onto one of
the benches that ran along the sides of the van, and my cuffed hands were fixed in place by a
metal bar. I heard the clasp on the bar snap shut.
    Holstein was speaking. “He shouldn’t give you any trouble, but keep an eye on him anyway.
And no conversation. I’ll be up front. If you need anything, just bang on the wall.”
    “Yes sir,” another voice said. The cop who’d be sharing my last ride with me had a young-sounding voice.
    I leaned back on the bench, my body on fire. The pain was a good thing, though. It gave me
something to concentrate on and kept me from thinking about where we were going and what
was going to happen when we got there.
    There’s a lot of speculation on the street about what Vee cops do with the people they arrest.
Some think they put them in prisons and drain them daily until they finally die. Others believe
they ship them out to farms where they’re fattened up for the slurp-clubs. Whatever they do, it
doesn’t bear much resemblance to what used to pass for the criminal justice system. Vee justice
is simple. If you’re human, and you’re guilty, you’re food. And the people they arrested were
always guilty.
    I wasn’t, but that didn’t matter. They had three Vee corpses. Ray Holstein was the lead
detective on Joshua’s murder, and probably the Cross/Ponittzo case as well. He didn’t like
Joshua, and he didn’t like me. I’m sure it made perfect sense to him. Solve three cases, get the
commendations that would come his way for his brilliant detective work, and get rid of me in the
process. It was a no-brainer.
    My innocence wasn’t part of the equation. Holstein had always been more about solving
cases than finding the guilty. It looked like that hadn’t changed.
    We were on the road for what seemed a long time. It was at least an hour, maybe two. I
could tell from the motion of the wagon and the sounds outside that we cleared the city in about
fifteen minutes. Then it was open highway, probably the interstate, the van swaying gently as the
driver picked up speed.
    The cop in the back of the wagon obeyed Holstein’s instructions. He never said a word.
    Toward the end of the ride, we got off the