Violet simply pointed at Cessily. "I am doing whatever she tells me to do. I'm a well-trained woman."
Luke almost snorted his coffee. "Bullshit."
Berto just nodded his head slowly. "So whatever the three of you did last night must've been a hell of a lot of fun."
"Luke and I ganged up on Cy," Violet explained. "So yes, it was very fun. This morning, however, my shoulder hurts like a bitch, and I'm a little bit pissed." Then she paused and looked around. "Is this a strategy meeting?"
"Could be," Billy said. "We do need one."
"Then someone needs to text Emily and get her over here," Violet said. "Whatever we do next is going to affect her, so I think she has the right to voice her opinions about it."
"I got it," I assured her as I pulled out my phone and whipped off the text.
"The downside of that," Berto pointed out, "is that the more she knows, the more she's implicated in what we do." He looked across the table at Billy. "And not everything we do is legal."
"She already knows," Billy assured him. "Granted, if she tries to complain about it, I have plausible deniability - so I'm not exactly worried. It's also a great way to see if she's loyal to the cause, and this thing we're doing is definitely a cause."
"Her son is gay," Luke told the rest. "Now, none of you see anything wrong with that, but in this town that means that boy is constantly in danger. Trust me, it's going to change what Emily will think of as acceptable."
My phone vibrated in my hands with an incoming text. I swiped at the screen and read it. Emily said she was grabbing shoes and heading up the hill, so I pushed back my chair. First, I needed to make sure that the front door was unlocked - I was pretty sure it was, but not positive - and I had a feeling that for this conversation the woman was going to need a coffee.
So after letting everyone know that she was on her way, I headed back into the house. The clock on the wall said that it was almost eleven, so most of the morning had slipped past already. We were all moving slowly, but that was okay. I had a feeling that rushing into this was more likely to cause problems than if we gave ourselves the time to stop and just think about it.
When Emily showed up and came in, I passed her a coffee, and pointed her to the back porch. Then, I grabbed one of the plates of hors d'oeuvres that hadn't been devoured last night and carried it out with me. Since it was almost lunchtime, and I knew Violet had a weakness for finger food, this would solve all of our problems.
My ass was barely in the seat before Berto took over. "So, what exactly do we know?" he asked.
"The cops showed up and used excessive force," Cessily said.
"Mrs. Simmons was here, and she didn't think her husband had made that call," Cy added.
"The police department sent every cop on shift last night to Southwind for a noise complaint," Luke said.
Billy just chuckled. "You had approximately sixty witnesses here and multiple cell phones that recorded the incident."
"Don't forget about Meredith, Jodi, and April," Emily added. "We can't rule out the idea that they're the ones who made the call, and could it be like one of those swatting things that teenagers do online?"
"What swatting thing?" Luke asked.
So I decided to give him the quick and easy explanation. "To bully each other, online gamers will sometimes call the police in their opponent's town, claiming that there's some sort of an emergency that would often require a SWAT team response. Hostages, guns, or things like that. The end result is that the victim has a tactical team burst into their house, and if it goes wrong, the victim gets arrested or killed."
"Talk about taking bullying to the extreme," Luke grumbled. "We know that Jodi is a bully."
Darnell grunted like he didn't agree. "We also know that Paul Simmons has the police in his pocket. Isn't it possible that since everybody in town knew about the party at our place last night, one of those cops may have decided to take matters into his own hands? Simply say that there was a complaint, knowing that Simmons will back them up, and use that to cause worse problems?"
"But it didn't," Billy pointed out. "All of our guests saw a trio of party crashers, heard how angry Faith was about the way her mother was acting, and then they witnessed the police abusing their power. Now, it might take them a while to realize exactly what happened, but I have a feeling that four cop cars responding to any incident in this town isn't exactly common."
"Only other time I can remember it happening," Luke said, "was when Ash and I got arrested at the Grill."
"Which sets up a history of the police harassing the people of Southwind," Berto added. "I've already sent the video I took to my friend on the Oversight Committee. She's just put a rush on things, because that proves that there's an imminent threat."
"But we don't want to put that out there," Billy said. "The chance of it making the people in town sympathetic to the police - since then they're 'just trying to defend themselves from their abusers' - is a little too high. So, from now on, we don't talk about what Berto is doing with his little government friends. Everybody on board with that?"
Around the table, we all nodded.
"Both Bev and Annie were there," Emily pointed out.
"And?" I asked.
