she cares about is whether my education has been neglected. We can demonstrate that it has not, no matter how she may stack the deck. That may be enough to deactivate her—whatever she may privately wish she could do to us.”
“I follow the logic,” I agreed, and looked for words to explain my doubt. “Back in the late 60s, I lived in Boston for awhile. There was a drug cop there like you’re talking about, Sgt. Holtz. Like Inspector Teal in the Saint stories: he lived by the rules, and as long as he didn’t catch you violating any laws you were safe from him. This made him unique among drug cops, then or ever. Well, this one pot wholesaler who thought he was as slick as the Saint—come to think of it, his name was Simon—used to yank Holtz’s chain all the time. Simon was slick enough to get away with it, too, was never on the same block as probable cause. But he was unwise enough to rent a third-floor walkup…and one night Sgt. Holtz arrested him for coming home.
“He’d turned up the fact that Simon was one-eighth Mohawk—it probably wasn’t hard, the guy used to brag about it—and then he’d done a little research. Turned out there was a very old law still on the books in Boston, then—might still be, for all I know—that made it illegal for an Indian to go above the first floor in any public dwelling. Sgt. Holtz explained matters to a judge who was just as much of a stickler for rules as he was, and Simon would have done time if he hadn’t jumped bail..”
“Okay, I get your point,” Erin said. “But Simon really was a drug-dealer, Pop. I’m really not an uneducated kid.”
“Agreed. The trick will be to overcome Ludnyola’s presumption that you are one. Whether we can depends on how thick her blinders are. And I’d have to say in the short time I shared with the Field Inspector, her mind seemed as made up as a bed the second week of Boot Camp.”
“Oh, big deal,” Erin said. “I don’t see what everybody’s worried about anyway. No matter what, she’s not taking me away from you guys.”
I didn’t say anything. Neither did Zoey. When neither of us had said anything for several seconds, Erin repeated, “She’s not ,” with rising pitch and volume.
“Of course not,” her mother said gently. “But think it through, honey. If she comes after us, she has the whole machinery of the state behind her.”
“So? We can whip ‘em all!”
“Sure,” I said. “But not without causing talk.”
“Oh. Shit.”
“If a state cop whips me upside the head with a baton, and I don’t seem to mind, he and all the other policeman will become very curious to know why not. Sooner or later they’ll learn me and my family are bulletproof, too, and then we’ll be talking to a lot of humorless people from Langley, and life will be much less fun. Those guys would have uses for bulletproof people—ugly ones. One way or another it’d be the end of The Place; I doubt they’d leave us alone to drink in the sun.” I reached for an empty mug and started to pour myself a beer.
“I’m not going underground at my age,” Zoey said. “I took that class.”
“Wait a minute!” Erin said. “So are you saying if we can’t head her off, I’m supposed to go with that nimrod? To some foster home?” The pitch of her voice began rising on the second word, and by the last it was close to supersonic. I opened my mouth to reply, genuinely curious to hear what I would say, but I never got to, because just then the man monster walked in.
* * *
It was as though he had been constructed specifically to refute my belief that a bureaucrat is the scariest thing there is. He was good at it, too.
First of all, he was big as a mastodon. I saw him right away, before he even entered the compound, and I spilled the beer I was pouring myself. I take great care not to spill beer. He
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