“We’ll need you to come down to the station,” Detective Forehead told us.
“Just routine,” added Detective Hair Gel.
Just routine. I’m thinking, What? Is that the cop rationale for everything?
At the station house, they split me and Randy up, I guess so they could try to poke holes in our stories. Relieved us of our phones too. Just routine. Lucky me—I was the first one they decided to mess with. They took me into an office—not one of those cop-show interrogation rooms where they beam the bright light in your face—and I ran through the story about the ape men again, but it didn’t take long to find out I wasn’t there to fill in some minor details.
“Dylan, we see this kind of thing all the time,” Detective Hair Gel started out. “Kids out partying, trying new ways to get a buzz. Next thing you know, one guy goes too far, and then that’s it.” He snapped his fingers, his way of summing up the death of Hector Maldonado.
“We can tell you’re a party boy,” said Detective Forehead. He was standing behind his partner’s chair, looming you could say, so as to keep up the intimidation.
I was like, “What? I’m not a party boy.”
But Detective Hair Gel was unconvinced. “Sure you are. You got the hipster-style glasses, the baggy jeans, the rocker-boy black T-shirt. Shaggy hair. I’d say you probably like a taste of the ecstasy.”
For the record, my jeans were baggy because I don’t like pants pinching my gut too much, and the shirt was a retro Black Sabbath T-shirt that I only wear because I think Ozzy Osbourne is hilarious.
Anyway, I’m like, “Ecstasy? Is that still a drug? I don’t even know anyone who’s done ecstasy.”
Detective Forehead leaned forward and glowered. “Oh, it’s still a drug all right. And you know it.”
This was getting ridiculous. You can live your whole life a certain way and what good does it do when the law clamps down on you? I mean, I’m no goody-goody, but I probably hadn’t missed a day of school since I had the flu in seventh grade. Made mostly low B’s but could’ve bagged some A’s if I really cared that much and turned all my stuff in. The only time I ever got sent to the principal’s office since I got to high school was for wearing a T-shirt that said F***K BIGOTS on the front. Now, just because I happened to stumble over a dead body, all of a sudden the cops were treating me like I was some kind of terrorist with a bomb in my underwear or something.
They kept at me for about an hour. Didn’t matter that I told them I’d better call my parents so they’d know where I was. They just said it was early yet and I could call them in a little bit. Then they came back at me, wanting me to tell the story again and again until finally they got sick of hearing the same answer over and over.
“Why don’t you call the place where I work? They’ll tell you I was there and not out snorting crystal meth and ecstasy or whatever.”
“Hey,” said Detective Forehead. “You don’t make the rules around here. We do.”
“Dylan, just sit here and think about your predicament for a while,” Detective Hair Gel said. “We’ll see what your buddy has to say. And it’ll be too bad for you if he rolls over first.”
Then they swaggered out the door to put the screws to Randy.
So now I was alone, but it wasn’t much of a relief. Hanging at the police station is weird. There’s this air about the place that makes you feel guilty even if you didn’t do anything. It’s like you can’t move or even think the way you normally do. Chances are, they have a camera trained on you and are analyzing every move you make. There was a phone right there on the desk. I could’ve called my parents, but I didn’t. It was stupid, but it was like even doing that might make me look bad, like I was a criminal because the powers that be thought I was. So I just sat there staring at the floor.
I don’t even know how long it was before the dynamic duo waltzed back in to tell me how Randy just confessed. Usually, I would find that funny. After all, I was the king of watching TV crime shows, true-life and fictional, so I knew it was pretty much standard procedure to trick one guy into spilling the beans by saying his partner already did. But knowing Randy, I wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t cough out a confession. I could just imagine the exchange:
Detective Hair Gel: I’ll bet you’d like a Coke right about now, huh?
Randy: I wouldn’t mind a Dr Pepper.
Detective Hair Gel: Well, you tell us what we need to know, and I’ll see you get one.
Randy (unable to sacrifice immediate satisfaction in order to keep out of the big house): Okay, yeah, we did it. We pumped Hector Maldonado full of ecstasy, heroin, and a little jet fuel just to see what would happen. Now, how about that Dr Pepper?
No, I didn’t feel so good about my chances. “I want to call my parents,” I said.
“Dylan wants to call his parents,” Detective Forehead told his partner, in a mocking, playground-bully way.
“Do you really?” Detective Hair Gel asked. “I doubt that. I mean, what are you going to tell them, that you’re down at the police station because you were out doing drugs and killed your best buddy? Because that’s what we’ve got on you right now. The only question is whether it was an accident or intentional. And let me tell you, we’re a lot more likely to lean toward the accidental side of the situation if you just come clean about what you were up to tonight.”
It was starting to look like I’d never get home. At least not until I’d served a good twenty years in maximum security. I wondered what I’d done to deserve this kind of trouble. Obviously, I didn’t kill Hector, but maybe I’d done something else the universe was paying me back for.