Free Angels of Detroit by Christopher Hebert Page A

“HSI.”
    “Didn’t we just do this—like two weeks ago?”
    “This is different.”
    “I’ll let them know.” His voice sounded far away, as if his handset were already descending back toward the cradle.
    “The press release,” McGee said quickly. “Did you get it?”
    “Hundreds of times.”
    “The one I sent yesterday,” McGee said. “The accident.” She finally felt the pieces jarring loose. “Last week a drone built by HSI misfired, destroying a rural school and a nearby clinic—”
    “Right,” he said.
    “You got it?”
    “The kids were away, weren’t they? Some kind of holiday?”
    “There were known flaws,” McGee said. “Poorly trained outsourced labor, substandard facilities, little oversight, no accountability.”
    She heard tapping at the other end, as if he were actually typing this down.
    “How many protesters?” he said.
    McGee looked out the window. So few that in a glance she could see someone had gone missing. She’d have to count herself just to stay in double digits.
    “Thirty.”
    “Including pigeons?”
    “Just send someone,” McGee said. “It’s important.”
    The line clicked dead.
    She’d always hated the telephone, ever since she was old enough to use one. In junior high, the other girls had blathered endlessly from the moment they got home from school to the moment they went to sleep, the phone like an iron lung. Her best friend then was Jennifer Stern, who had long blond hair and a phone in her bedroom shaped like a stiletto heel. It was impossible to say anything that mattered to someone with a shoe in her ear. When McGee’s parents weren’t there to make her answer it, McGee let her own phone ring and ring until finally Jennifer stopped trying. McGee hadn’t realized at the time how that decision would mark her, how lasting the effects would be. Eventually, though, she came to enjoy the pleasures of solitude.
    McGee would’ve loved to hand off this job to someone else. But April was too easily flustered. Fitch could flirt and charm, but he didn’t care about the facts. Holmes was better with his hands. Myles could talk to anyone, but he worried too much about being liked, telling people only what they wanted to hear, afraid to push back when they said no thank you .
    She took a deep breath and pulled her hand out of her pocket. With stiff fingers, she dialed the next number on her list.
    “Hello,” she said, turning away from the foggy window. “I’m calling about a demonstration downtown … HSI, yes. To protest … Yes, there are forty of us so far. Yes, we’re expecting a lot more. You should come and …”
    The next number rang and rang until she gave up.
    She needed a cigarette.
    Across the street, a woman in a long tan raincoat climbed the three steps from the sidewalk to the plaza. As the woman made her way toward the revolving door, April raised her sign: MERCHANTS OF DEATH . Because of the rain, the words looked almost as if they were bleeding. Through the plush, carpeted walls of the van, McGee could just barely hear the faint rhythm of their chant. They’re making a killing, making a killing, making a killing. Myles stepped into the woman’s path, smiling, holding out a flyer, and the woman let the paper brush against her sleeve, not even glancing as she pushed through the door.
    Myles had said he’d enlisted some high school students to paper the city with flyers. So far McGee hadn’t seen any trace of the kids or the flyers. It happened every time. Myles wanted to win the kids over, so he made all of this sound like a party. But as soon as they realized there was work involved, they moved on to other things.
    Not a single reporter had shown up. No one at all had come whom she didn’t know personally.
    Beneath the canopy at the side entrance of the building, a security guard pinched a cigarette to his lips. McGee watched the glow and burn, feeling her mouth run dry.
    Maybe she could just roll down a window. Fuck Fitch’s