"You want to tell me why he just took a detainee into a parking garage? Do you have a new substation around here that I'm not aware of?" I said in a snarky voice.
"I'm going to ask again. What are you doing here?"
"It's a free country."
"You’ve been following around one of our officers for two days now. Is the county investigating the PBPD? I know you’re not working with internal affairs."
I knew where this was going, and it wasn't anywhere good.
"Am I being arrested?”
He said nothing.
"Name the charge," I demanded.
"I'll think of something.”
Two officers yanked me to my feet and stuffed me into the back of a patrol car. I thought about putting up a fight, but it was probably best to let this play out for another moment to see where it went.
I sat in the back of the squad car as the four officers huddled in front of the vehicle, discussing the situation. The headlight beams illuminated their uniforms, red and blue lights still flickering.
Cars passed on the streets, and people gawked. Nothing unusual on a Saturday night near the strip in Pineapple Bay.
After the brief conference, two officers returned to the patrol car and climbed inside. They pulled away from the curb and left my bike where I had parked it.
"Want to tell me where we’re going?" I said.
It was apparent before long that we weren’t heading back to the station.
The car rattled as they drove across town. We ended up in the warehouse district near the wharf. At this time of night, the place was desolate.
We pulled into the lot of a rundown brick warehouse. The headlights raked across the graffiti-covered brick. Several milky windows had been broken out. Tires crunched across gravel in the lot as the squad car came to a stop.
The officer threw it into park, killed the engine, and hopped out. He opened the door to the backseat and pulled me out of the vehicle while his partner kept his gun at the ready.
"Don't do anything stupid, or I'll drop you right here," Twitchy said, aiming his black 9mm at me.
"Good luck explaining that one,” I said.
"Don't worry. No explanation necessary. Nobody will ever find you.”
I didn’t think he was lying. There was no doubt in my mind that these guys had made plenty of people disappear.
The two officers escorted me up the steps to the loading dock, then forced me inside the abandoned warehouse. Shafts of moonlight spilled in through the windows, illuminating the cavernous space. The floor was littered with papers and debris.
The other officer clicked on his tactical flashlight, and the beam cut through the dusty, dark air.
More graffiti tagged the interior walls. A soiled mattress in the corner with a few tattered sheets offered a place to sleep forvagrants. Someone had tried to make a home of the place at one point in time.
There were empty beer cans and bottles, along with empty soup cans and spent Sterno cans. A few hypodermic needles littered the ground. No doubt junkies had gotten their fix in the relative privacy of the abandoned warehouse. It had a musty, moldy smell, mixed with the remnants of spilled beer and urine.
I'm sure there was asbestos all throughout the building—in the insulation around the piping, in the mastic underneath the snowflake tiles that were broken and torn away from the floor.
The two officers forced me to take a seat in a rickety office chair.
One of them shone a flashlight in my eyes, while the other one kept his pistol aimed at me.
"Well, this is fun," I said.
