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There were few other options that I could see. Although they had given me back my phone, it was of course completely dead after its unhappy incarceration. So I stood just outside the front door, looking stupidly around me. I’d come in through the back, on the opposite side of the building. The view here in front was far more pleasant; towering up behind me was the delightfully ominous gray facade of the building, and wrapped around me, in a thought-provoking design moment, was a high barbed-wire fence. Cars were parked absolutely everywhere and anywhere they might, even in spaces that were not actually spaces. The parked vehicles stretched around three sides of the building and overflowed a large lot in back. They were crammed in two-deep under trees, on top of median strips, and in No Parking Fire Zone spots. Anywhere else in the city such madcap abandonment of vehicles would certainly be rewarded with towing and impoundment. It made one reflect on the irony that here, at the actual jail, where the most nefarious repeat meter violators and illegal parking offenders were incarcerated, there was no apparent parking enforcement.
It also made one reflect on a further irony: that with so many vehicles lying about unused, not a single one of them was available to give poor liberated Dexter a lift. It didn’t seem fair. But of course, nothing in life ever is fair, outside of a few old-fashioned board games.
Ah, well. Freedom is a two-edged sword, for it carries with it the terrible burden of Self-Reliance. And I now knew, from hard-earned experience, that my spirit yearned to breathe free air, and I should be willing to pay the price.
And I was. But in truth, if paying the price meant walking home, I would rather have put Freedom on a credit card.
So I stood there blinking in the bright sunlight and wishing I had sunglasses. And my car. And what the hell, a Cuban sandwich and an Iron Beer. And I had been standing there for a good three minutes before I became aware of a horn beeping nearby, at regular intervals. The sound came from my right. Out of no more than idle curiosity, I glanced that way.
Some fifty feet away, the car-crammed driveway bent right. Just beyond that, on the far side of the tall chain-link fence, there was a big vacant lot, also overflowing with cars.
Standing half-hidden by the open door of one of those cars, one arm reaching in to sound the horn, stood a man in resort clothing, baseball cap, and large wraparound sunglasses. He raised a hand and waved, beeped the horn once more, and as I realized with a start that he was waving at me, I also realized who he was, in spite of his outlandish Tourist costume. It was my brother, Brian.
The laws of our Universe are not terribly lenient when it comes to unbelievable coincidence. Seeing Brian here, so soon after he had sent me a Get Out of Jail Free card in the person of Mr. Frank Kraunauer, could not possibly be random chance. And so it was with almost no pause at all that I deduced that Brian had come to get me, and that I should take advantage of his presence. I therefore strode briskly over to the fence that separated his car from the detention center.
Brian watched me walk toward him, his terrible fake smile almost too dazzling to bear in the bright daylight. When I was ten feet away he lifted a hand and pointed to my right. “There’s a hole in the fence,” he said. He jabbed his index finger. “Right over there.”
Sure enough, there was indeed a hole in the fence, just a few feet away. It looked well used, and it was large enough to allow me through comfortably. In no time at all I was standing in the mud beside my brother’s green Jeep and showing him most of my teeth. “Brian,” I said.
“In person,” he said. He gestured at the passenger side of his car. “May I offer you a ride, brother?”
“You may,” I said. “And I will accept it with thanks.”
Brian climbed into the driver’s seat as I walked around the car, and he had the motor running, and with it the air conditioner, by the time I climbed in. “I also need to thank you for the splendid gift,” I said as I fastened my seat belt. “Frank Kraunauer was a wonderful surprise.”
“Oh, well,” Brian said modestly. “It was really nothing at all.”
“It was a whole lot,” I said. “I’m free.”
“Yes,” Brian said. “But not permanently…?”
I shook my head. “Probably not. That would be too much to expect, wouldn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so,” he said. “Oh, this wicked world.”
“Kraunauer got the judge to release me—the paperwork was a complete mess—but the state attorney will almost certainly try again. He really wants this case.”
“And therefore you?” he said.
“And me,” I said. “But I’m free for now.” I bowed to him, as much as I could while wearing a seat belt. “So thank you.”
“Well, after all,” Brian said, backing the car away from the fence, “what is family for?”
I thought somewhat unhappily of my other family, with particular reference to Deborah. “I sometimes wonder,” I said.
“In any case,” Brian said, putting the car into forward and bumping us through the mud of the vacant lot, toward the street, “it seemed little enough to do. You would do the same for me, wouldn’t you?”
“Well,” I said. “I certainly would now. Although I’m not sure if I could afford Kraunauer.”
“Oh, that,” he said dismissively, waving one hand. “I’ve had a little windfall. And it’s only money.”
“Still,” I said, “I am awfully grateful. It does get to be a little close in there.”
“Yes, doesn’t it?” Brian said. He turned out onto the side street, and then right onto NW 72nd Ave. I watched his profile, so much like my own, as he drove us happily away, and I wondered whether he had actually spent time inside TGK. There was a great deal I didn’t know about Brian, particularly about his past. We had been separated when very young: me to Harry and Doris and life as a Morgan—or a faux-Morgan, as it now turned out. Brian hadn’t had it so easy; he’d grown up in a series of foster homes, reformatories, and possibly jails. He had never offered much detail about this time, and I hadn’t asked. But it seemed a good bet to me that he knew very well what life was like on the Inside.
He turned and saw me looking at him, and raised an eyebrow. “Well,” he said happily. “What now?”
It may sound stupid—no surprise, considering my recent behavior—but I didn’t have an answer. I had been so focused on getting out that I hadn’t really thought beyond that. “I don’t know,” I said.
