The Detonators Read Free

the punk ashore with his belongings and told him to get lost, fast.
    The following day, as Doug was preparing to tackle the next leg of his long-planned voyage, feeling pretty good again, the Coast Guard descended on him, guided by an anonymous telephone tip. They found a small cache of marijuana hidden on the boat where they’d been told to look—apparently the punk hadn’t kept all his smoking materials in his pack. Although Doug identified himself politely and asked them to call Washington, they’d heard that I’m-an-important-guy-and-anyway-I-wuz-framed routine before. They impounded the boat and called the police to take Doug away and charge him, or whatever the legal procedure is in such cases. Mac wasn’t specific about the details.
    Anyway, the cops got into the act somehow. When Doug protested, they apparently got a little rude and physical. Public servants ourselves in a sense, we don’t react at all well to being manhandled by our fellow workers in the governmental vineyard, city, state, or federal. We’ve had to take too much shit from the real enemy, whoever he may be at any given time. One thing led to another and somebody made the mistake of bouncing a nightstick off Doug’s head…
    Well, that was the Doug Barnett story as I’d pieced it together from what I already knew and what I’d been told over the phone. Fortunately, one of the Coastguardsmen who remained intact had a sharp pocketknife and knew how to perform an emergency tracheotomy on a crushed larynx, so the baton-happy cop survived. The three fracture cases were hauled off to the nearest hospital for splints and casts. The walking wounded were patched up so they wouldn’t bleed all over everything while they waited for proper dressings to be applied in the emergency room.
    Douglas Barnett, subdued at last, was dragged off to jail. Eventually he got to make the phone call to which he was legally entitled; and Mac passed the word to me, as well as, I had no doubt, to various influential personages at various levels of government. We take care of our own. Maybe Doug shouldn’t have blown his stack like that; but Mac knows perfectly well that the work he wants done would never get done by a bunch of docile characters who, falsely accused, would hold out their wrists for the handcuffs without argument. He also knows it’s money in the bank. I mean, the word gets around. Next time one of our people asks politely to be put through to Washington to clear up a misunderstanding, maybe he, or she, will be shown a phone instead of a bunch of overbearing cops.
    “It’s all so stupid!” said the girl riding beside me in the rental car. “I mean, even if he was innocent, why did he have to fight them like that?”
    I said, “When a man has spent his life fighting, he finds it pretty hard to stop, Miss Barnett. And you don’t really believe he was innocent, do you?”
    “Well… well, they did find that horrible stuff on his boat, didn’t they? Drugs, ugh! How
could
he? And people always do say they were framed, don’t they?”
    I said, “Maybe it’s just as well I’ve had very little contact with my own kids. This way I can keep my illusions. If they have so little faith in the veracity of the man from whom they’ve inherited half the genes they carry, I don’t want to know it.”
    She glanced at me quickly and started to speak, then checked herself. When we reached it, we found the jail to be located in a massive building that looked reasonably modern and handsome on the outside. Inside, although the interior decoration was pretty sharp, if a little worn, it was basically just another king-sized cop-house. There’s something about a bunch of big men swaggering around in uniform with guns and clubs that arouses in me an atavistic hostility. I guess I just want to tell them I’m pretty tough myself, so don’t give me that hard cop look unless you’re ready to back it up, Buster. Childish.
    We went through the usual visitors’ red tape