Mind + Body by Aaron Dunlap (free books to read TXT) 📖

sentences.

So I sat there, my face frozen in an expression of mid-speech. Amy waited for noises to come out, and then ran her eyes around the inside of the car as if looking for the remote to turn my volume up. She pulled my cell phone from the center cup holder and handed it to me, saying, “Your mom called.”

As if I’d forgotten each, the fact that my mom was supposed to come home today flashed into my mind, and then the fact that home wouldn’t be there.

“Called me?” I asked.

“Your phone,” she said.

“Did you answer it?”

“I did.”

“What did she say?”

“‘Who’s this?’”

“And what did you say?”

“‘Amy.’”

“And she said—”

“‘Amy who?’ ‘A friend of Chris.’ ‘Where’s Chris?’ ‘Meeting with someone.’ ‘Meeting with who.’ ‘Someone in Quantico. ‘Oh.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘So he’s all right.’ ‘As far as I know.’ ‘Okay, could you have him call me back as soon as he can?’ ‘Okay.’ End of communication.”

“You told her I was here?” I said.

“Yeah, I didn’t really know what else I could say. I didn’t know what would be believable for you.”

I sighed, not knowing either, and called my mom’s cell phone from my own. It rang once.

“Chris?”

“Yes.”

“What are you—oh, God, so you’re all right?”

“I… am. Are you back in town?”

“Yes. I mean I, I’m at the police station. Do you know what happened to the house?”

The phone felt hot on my ear. “Oh that, it’s this whole… thing. I can’t really talk now; I’ll come meet you at the police station in 45 minutes or so.”

I hung up, started the car, and drove out.

“The police station?” Amy asked.

“Oh… no,” I said in realization, “I’m trying to avoid them, aren’t I?”

“That’s what I thought.”

“My mom’s there, though, so if they still think the dead cop in Lorton was my fault they’ll have already told her. And there’s the fact that you called 911 last night saying there were guys with guns at my house.”

“Should you call the FBI people? Maybe they can keep the police off you like they did before.”

The FBI. If what Schumer said was right, the FBI may have been the ones who killed my dad. Or responsible for it, or something. I could use a few hours to sit down and process everything.

“Chris?” Amy said.

“What?” I’d just pulled onto the highway.

“FBI?” she repeated.

“I don’t think—” I started. “What was our working theory for what’s going on with… everything?”

“Umm, I think we were at him being a spy and getting killed overseas while escorting a diamond baroness trying to emigrate from a communist regime.”

“And about me?”

“Stress plus super movie fight scene-absorbing powers?”

“Had we ever brought up brainwashing?”

“I think it may have come up once.”

“Well, whoever came up with that one gets horseshoe points for being closest.”

+ + + +

I only had a vague idea where the police station was in Fredericksburg, so we drove around town for a few minutes before I was onto its trail.

I didn’t exactly have a plan for what I was going to say. The police will wonder why my house had burned down and why someone had called 911 saying men with guns had stormed in just before. Were it not for that 911 call I could say I wasn’t home, or that I left some stress-release candles burning next to the drapes while I was scraping the safety labels off of all my aerosol cans with a knife and cooking bacon in my bedroom with a portable stove, using wood shavings for that hickory flavor. Without that 911 call, it was just another house burning down in the middle of the night. Instead, it was a whole conspiracy that I didn’t have the capacity to lie my way out of. This is all peripheral to the fact that my car was found bisecting a guy with a dead cop in his trunk seven days ago.

“What exactly did you say when you called 911?” I asked Amy as I parked in the lot of the station, a rather modern-looking building made of tan stone blocks and metal accents. It looked more like a mall food court than a police station, and the architecture reminded me of my high school. Maybe they were designed by the same guy.

“Last night?” she responded, not seeming to appreciate the slight curvature of the roofline or the amount of natural light that would come from the glass atrium on the eastern side of the building.

“In my closet.”

“I don’t know, why?”

“Because depending on what you said, I might have to go into there and tell some nice police officers that some guys burned my house down to hide the evidence of their failed attempt to kidnap or kill some teenagers because of, or as a product of, the fact that I had my DNA screwed around with as an embryo and have been secretly trained as a soldier every day in school in some black ops experiment run by the Marine Corps and designed by my dead father, who may have been killed for trying to sell those designs to foreign governments.”

“Let me think…” she said, pursing her lips and rolling her eyes slightly upwards.

“Did you say who you were, at least?”

“N—no,” she said.

“What did you say?”

“I gave them your address, which I didn’t really remember because I’ve never sent you a letter so I just said the brownish house about nine houses down on your street, and said to send the police.”

“You— you didn’t say anything about guys with guns?”

“I didn’t know about any guys with guns. You started watching that video of yourself on your computer, then you stopped talking, darted out of your room, then came back and stuffed me in your closet and handed me your illegally purchased handgun and told me to call the police. This was all before I heard shooting downstairs and you came and jumped out your window.”

“So all you said was to send the police to my house?”

“Yes. They asked for my name but I hung up.”

“Oh.”

“Is that good?”

“Yes it is.”

I put my hand on my door’s handle and started to open the door. Amy did the same with hers, but stopped and looked back at me. “Am I coming in?” she asked.

I thought about it, and decided it was probably best if she did. I tried to remember everything that happened that night so I could put together a reasonable story. Amy called 911 from my cell phone, so that number would be on record, so I couldn’t exactly say the call was from a neighbor who noticed the house was on fire. We’d gone out to eat just before and I’d used my debit card to pay so there’d be that as proof that I was out of the house. But why would I call 911 from my phone if I had nothing to do with the fire?

“We were driving back to my place and from outside we saw people breaking into my house, so we parked and you called 911 from my phone while we watched from across the street, or something.”

“And why didn’t I give my name or say what was going on?”

“Because… you were scared, and tried to make the call quick because you didn’t want any of the guys to hear you.”

“And why didn’t you make the call?”

“Because… I’d left the car and was going to sneak around to the back of my house to see what they were doing, and I gave you my phone and said to use it.”

“And why didn’t I use my phone?”

“Because… yours had died.”

“And why didn’t we go right to the police?”

“Because… we’re stupid teenagers? We went to your place.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Anybody would go to the police if their house was being broken into.”

“I don’t know, maybe we were all kinds of high and didn’t want to go to the police until we’d come down.”

“That’s dumb.”

“Then what? Stupid teenagers? We were going to wait at your place until the cops came but we both fell asleep and didn’t wake up until a few hours ago.”

“Right. Fell asleep. Because of all the drugs.”

I sighed.

After a few minutes we had our story straight, making sure we were synchronized on every made-up detail so we couldn’t be separated and made to contradict each other. We went into the police station, stopped at the front desk and explained that my house had unfortunately burned down and I believed my mother was inside the station somewhere. I was directed to the second floor, and so to the second floor I went. The sign by the stairwell door on the second floor said “Investigation: Robbery, Homicide, Arson, Vehicular” and I paused, noting that in the past few days I’d dabbled in a bit of each. I couldn’t think of any robbery per se, though, so I awarded ten points to my own scruples. Bank fraud must be on the third floor.

It was when I pulled the heavy metal door open that I remembered stealing that kid’s passport in the Vienna airport and took back those ten points.

The floor wasn’t the bustling, open floor of littered desks and furious investigation and stale coffee I expected. Instead, it looked an office building, standing in the midst of a hallway flanked on both sides by rows of office doors and wide windows. Amy and I wandered the halls until I saw my mom though one of the windows, sitting inside a large conference room, at a long, wooden table with her back to the window. Across from her was sitting, in the same plain black suit I’d seen him wear a few days ago, Special Agent Bremer. He was talking to my mom from his seat, his left hand idly spinning an empty Styrofoam coffee cup on the surface of the table.

“Who’s that?” Amy asked, peering into the window along with me. “He doesn’t have a badge.”

“It’s on his belt,” I said.

“So he’s a cop.”

“No, he’s FBI.”

“One of the guys who talked to you before?”

I nodded in the affirmative.

“What would he be doing here?”

“No idea,” I said.

Then, into view strolled Special Agent Rubino, walking and talking into a cell phone. He paced the room and had stopped behind Bremer when he glanced up at me through the window, acknowledged recognition, and waved me into the room.

I shrugged, took in a breath, and pulled the wooden door to the conference room open and waited for the bullets to start flying. When my mother saw me she got up and darted toward me, hugged me and asked if I was all right. I couldn’t remember the last time I was so embarrassed. I realized that the last time I’d seen her, the biggest concern I had was a fight at school and an unwillingness to return. With her out visiting my aunt and leaving me alone, I’d gotten used to the slight amount of freedom and having to fend for myself. With her back, I feared I might slip back into being a kid again. Maybe, I pondered, if that happened all of this madness would go away again. Maybe all the death and guns and lies were all just teenage home-alone antics I’d “gotten myself into” and, with at least one parent around again, I’d take my scolding and have everything sorted out by grownups.

Just maybe.

I noticed that there were no police officers in the room. Just two FBI agents, two Bakers, and one confused girl trying to decide her place in all of this.

I sat down