Pretty Please
By Unicode Smith
Chapter Four
Billy slogged through the rest of the school day fighting a growing sense of unease; he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss. When he passed through the school’s double doors into the parking lot, he got confirmation in black and white.
A police car was sprawled arrogantly across two teacher’s spots in the corner. A uniformed policewoman, a fit 20-something blonde in a ponytail, stood near the car. Leaning on the hood was grim looking man in an ill-fitting jacket—presumably another cop. They were talking to Ms. Hewitt and another woman he’d never seen before.
Then Hewitt spotted Billy coming out the door. She said something to the others and pointed at him.
He turned and shuffled quickly back into the school, as Hewitt called after him in an uncharacteristically stern voice, “Billy!”
Billy barreled down the hall, nearly knocking over a group of students leaving for the day. He made a right, sped past a row of anonymous classroom doors and ducked into a bathroom. The door closed agonizingly slow as he fished out his cell phone and speed-dialed Kelly. Maybe she’d answer this time.
“Hello?”
“Kelly? It’s me. Something’s happening. Have you—”
“You bastard,” she screamed through the phone. “You little fucking monster!”
“What—?”
“I remember, Billy. I remember everything. What you did to me. To Jason. To Jessica. All of it. I remember, and I told them everything.”
He breathed into the phone anxiously—at a loss. He could hear a police walky-talky crackle in the hall outside.
“I thought you were just a geek, but you’re not. You’re a monster. God, the things you made me do to you; to myself ...”
“You—you wanted to do them,” he said lamely.
“You made me want to do them!” He heard her take a calming breath. “You’re going to prison, Billy,” she said levelly. “They’re going to take your little toy away, and put you in prison, and if there’s any justice some 400-pound inmate will make you into a sex slave.
“Oh, and when you get out, my brother’s going to break you in two, you sick little fucker.” She hung up.
Billy stared at the phone for a moment. What now? He made another call.
The four adults moved quickly down the hall, checking classrooms as they passed. Detective Phillips found a janitorial closet locked, and gestured to Kirsten. She fished through her keys, unlocked the door, and the two cops vanished inside. They returned seconds later empty handed.
“Billy!,” Phillips yelled. “You’re only making it harder on yourself!” They listened in vain for a reply.
The blonde officer nodded towards another door. “Men’s room,” she said. Philips followed her. They stormed into the bathroom, leaving Kirsten and Stringer in the hall.
The police emerged from the bathroom, again without their prey. Phillips pointed to the door across the hall. The ladies room.
“I really need you do this,” Billy said quietly into the phone, his voice shaking. He knew he sounded desperate, but he could hear the police radio echoing outside, getting louder. Then came a clamor of footsteps closing in on the bathroom. “Just do it. Please. Just do it.”
The bathroom door swung open. Billy jumped into a stall, pulling the door behind and stuffing the phone in his sock. The door was wrenched from his hands and crashed into the metal wall.
A man’s hands grabbed Billy roughly, spinning him out of the stall. “Hey, Billy,” the detective smiled predatorily. “Taking a shit in the little girl’s room?”
“Wh—what’d I do?”
“Cuff him,” the detective said to the woman in uniform. “He think he’s Houdini, so make sure they’re tight.”
The uniformed cop pushed him against the wall and bent his left arm behind his back. The cuff ratcheted over his wrist, biting into his flesh. The other hand followed.
“Do you have knives or needles?,” she asked.
“What? No!”
She patted him down brusquely, pulling his keys and some change from his jeans pocket. Then she grabbed him by a thin bicep and guided him, off balance, out into the hall.
Hewitt was there, along with the bespeckled blonde woman from the parking lot. The four of them walked him in silence back to the parking lot, ignoring his protests of innocence. The blonde cop put him in the back of the cruiser and slammed the door.
The streets of Billy’s town looked different from the back of a cop car—completely familiar, but distant and preserved, like a museum exhibit behind a velvet rope. The feeling grew all the more eerie as the car turned onto his block, green and dewy with the approach of spring.
They were following the detective in his unmarked car. Bill looked out the back window: the blonde with the glasses was following them in her SUV. Hewitt had stayed behind.
The caravan arrived at his house, the cruiser pulling into the driveway and the other cars finding spots on the street. The blonde cop got out. Car doors opened and closed and the detective was suddenly in the front of the black-and-white, giving Billy a hard look through the steel mesh.
“You want to save us some trouble and tell me where it is?”
“Where what is?”
He shook his head. “The judge is just going to love you.” He started to get out.
“Okay, okay,” Billy said. “But it’s hard to describe. Bring me in and I’ll show you.”
The cop smiled mirthlessly. “That’s a great idea! Yeah, I’m going to do that. Because I’m a complete idiot and I want to reunite the little mad scientist with his mind control machine so he can make me think I’m Baryshnikov and send me off to join the Russian ballet.”
He stepped out of the car and slammed the door contemptuously. Billy watched the three of them march to the front door of his house, the detective fingering the keys they’d confiscated from him. After a moment, they disappeared inside.
Just as Billy was wondering how things could possibly get worse, a blue minivan pulled in from the street. His parents, back from vacation.
They jumped out and rushed over—his mom’s face a mask of concern, his dad’s one of anger. They yelled chaotically through the glass: What’s going on? What did you do? Billy shrugged and shook his head to indicate that he couldn’t hear them. His parents walked quickly to the front door.
Dr. Stringer watched the police work as they tossed Billy Norton’s room with military efficiency, flipping over his mattress, pulling his sci-fi books from his shelves onto the floor, upending his drawers and dumping the contents to the carpet.
Something caught her eye. She stepped to the unmade bed and pulled a bundle of magazines from under it. Stringer leafed through the yellowing science journals, then handed them to the detective. “You’ll want these,” she said.
He gave them a cursory examination, grunted and dropped them into a transparent evidence bag. “Great, but where’s the hardware?”
She shrugged.
“Alright, let’s do the rest of the house.” He led Stringer and the blonde cop into the hall ...
Only to find someone waiting for them. A girl, with dark hair and caramel skin, wearing odd-looking colored glasses and pulling a toy red wagon by its handle.
“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” Amy said, before reaching down and flipping the switch.
Billy watched the silent house from the back of the police car for what seemed an eternity. Finally, his cell phone rang. He maneuvered his cuffed hands and worried the phone out of his sock, flipped it open, moved it awkwardly to his ear and pinned it with his shoulder.
“Hello?”
“It’s Amy. I did it. They’re all, like, frozen. They’re just staring at the light.”
“Good. Listen—”
“Wait, someone’s coming up.” A pause. “It—it’s mom and dad. Now they’re staring at the light too. Billy, what’s going on? What is it doing to them?”
“Nothing. Just—”
“I don’t like this. Why did you make me put on these stupid glasses? I’m taking them off.”
“No! Please don’t.”
“Why? Where are you?”
“I’m outside.”
A rustling sound through the phone, then Amy appeared at an upstairs window. “You’re in the police car? What did you do?”
“Don’t worry about that. I need you to go to the cop, the blonde one. Tell her it’s all been a terrible mistake, and she has to come down and uncuff me and bring me upstairs.”
“But, she’s, like, asleep. They all are.”
“Just do it, please. You may have to tell her more than once. Just keep telling her until she does it. Please.”
There was a long pause, then, “Okay. Hold on.”
Amy set the phone down and walked back into the hall. They were all there, absorbed in the flickering blue light like children at a matinee. She squeezed past the man in the coat and approached the blonde cop, whose head was tilted thoughtfully, mouth slack.
“You’ve, um, made a terrible mistake. Billy is innocent. You have to go down and release him, then bring him up here.”
The blonde blinked at the light a couple of times. “A ... mistake?”
Amy started—she speaks! She cleared her throat. “Yes, a terrible mistake. You have to uncuff Billy and bring him back here. And, um, apologize to him. For the mistake.”
“A mistake,” she murmured. “A terrible mistake.” Like a sleepwalker, she straightened and moved slowly down the hall, her arms limp at her sides, past the red wagon and towards the stairs.
Billy began sweating. What was taking so long? Then the front door opened, and the cop with the ponytail walked out in a daze. She came down to the car, put her keys in the back door and pulled it open.
She looked down at him, her stormy blue eyes showing puzzlement. “I—I’m sorry. There’s been a terrible mistake. Let me see your hands.”
He turned his back and scooted towards her. There was a clinking of keys, and the cuffs fell away from his left wrist, then his right.
“Come with me,” she said softly.
Billy rubbed his sore wrists as she walked him back into the house and up the stairs. At the top, the cop caught sight of the machine and fell motionless, like her battery had run out.
Amy was in the hall, standing next to the one in the glasses, lifting the blonde’s arm up by a finger experimentally, then letting it fall limp to her side. “This is just too weird, Billy. How did you—”
Billy pulled off her glasses. A small sigh escaped Amy’s lips as she surrendered her gaze to the device.
He walked the length of the hall, crowded eerily with living, breathing statues. He took a headcount: six people. He’d never had so many under the influence of his invention before. He felt strangely alone.
He’d have to pare them down. He started with his parents, easily persuading them to forget the scene at the police car and subsequent events, go to their bedroom and take a long, sound nap after their exhausting trip.
He made Amy forget everything surrounding the device and the torrent of visitors, then sent her off to the movies. The detective took longer. “A ... hoax?,” he asked, dubious even while mesmerized.
“Yes. A stupid student hoax. Not even worth filing a report. Nobody will ever convince you otherwise.”
After about twenty minutes the detective was convinced, and he left the house.
Only the two blondes remained: the cop, and the mysterious woman in glasses. He pulled the red wagon into his bedroom, guided them both in after and closed the door.
It was a mess. Books, magazines, comics, junk everywhere. He shook his head—what would his parents think? He glared resentfully at the blonde cop.
She was surprisingly cute for an adult, and a police officer. If she put on a little makeup and let her hair down ... But there was no time for that. Too much was unraveling in his world.
Billy stepped behind her and rested his chin on her shoulder, her blonde hair tickling his cheek, his erection pressing against her ass. He placed his hands around her narrow waist, above her belt and holster.
“Any knives or needles?,” he whispered with a giggle.
“Wh—what?,” she murmured.
He cleared his throat. “You feel terrible about arresting me and ransacking my room.”
“Yes ...” the girlcop murmured. “Terrible.”
“You want to make things right, no matter what it takes,” he whispered in her ear.
She nodded, her ponytail bobbing up and down.
“Open your shirt for me.”
With shifting her gaze, her hands floated to her chest and her fingers started nimbly unbuttoning the uniform blouse: one, two, three ... seven buttons. She was wearing a plain white bra underneath.
Billy let his hands play over her warm skin and settle on her breasts. He fondled his first adult tits through the bra. He thought of Ms. Hewitt, her curvaceous form and gently accusing eyes. How he wished she had come with them. He’d fill those eyes with lust for him. Make her cry out for him, and spread those long, shapely legs for his pleasure.
“You need to put my room back the way it was. Quickly.”
She nodded again. He let her slip from his embrace, and she promptly walked over to a pile of books next to an empty shelve. He watched her ass as she bent to pick them up, her blouse hanging open, then he turned his attention to the other woman. Her face was a blank, and the blue light flickered in her square glasses.
“So,” he grinned. “What’s your story?”
The wheels of the little red wagon let out a repetitive, annoying squeak as Dr. Stringer rolled it out of the elevator onto the eighth floor. Just like a teenager, she thought. Smart enough to build a mind control machine, but too dumb to think of buying a little WD-40.
Of course, he would be needing neither in the Juvenile Hall lockup. She summoned a vision of Norton in the police car, then the hypnotherapy sessions with Kelly and Lori, and allowed herself a rare, unprofessional thought: She hoped that Billy Norton was having a very bad night.
Stringer found the unit number and rang the bell. The door opened. Kirsten was in sweat pants and a halter top, her hair tied back.
“Sorry we had to do this so late,” said Stringer. “But Norton’s going in for arraignment in the morning, and Detective Phillips wanted me to be prepared to testify about all this ... stuff.” She gestured at the wagon, which, in addition to the electronics, now held a pile of scientific journals and papers, a romance comic and a pair of ski goggles with translucent film over the lenses.
“It’s no problem,” said Kirsten. “But like I said on the phone, I don’t know how much help I’ll be.” Her gaze moved to the electronics. “Is ... that it?”
Stringer nodded.
“Is it safe?”
“Yes. They took out a couple of components. They say it won’t work now.”
“Okay,” Kirsten said, eyeing the wagon warily. “C’mon in. I’ll put up some coffee.”
The Radio Flyer squeaked some more as Stringer wheeled it into the apartment.
The door closed, and Billy emerged from around the corner in the hall and crept stealthily to the threshold. He wondered what Stringer would have done if he’d poked at her in the elevator. She couldn’t see him; would she think he was a ghost?
He liked that. Billy the Ghost. A phantom. The Shadow, with the power to cloud the minds of beautiful blonde women. He sat down in the carpeted hall and waited patiently.
After a few minutes, the door opened again. Stringer walked into the hall, the ski goggles covering her eyes, her eye glasses hanging in her left hand. She was dazed. She looked down at Billy in obvious confusion. He stood.
“Did you do it?,” he whispered.
She was silent for a moment. “Yes. I—I turned it on. I don’t know why.”
“Because I told you to. And do you remember what you’re going to do now?”
“I—I’m going to go home and go to sleep.”
“That’s right. And when you wake up?”
“I won’t remember any of this. I won’t remember you.”
“That’s right. You’re a good girl. Tell me you’re a good girl.”
“I’m a good girl.”
“Give me the goggles.”
She pulled them off her head and handed them to him, her hand brushing against his fingers. She put her own eye glasses on.
“Kiss.”
She leaned over and pressed her lips against his. He squeezed her ass.
“Okay. Go home.”
Stringer moved languidly down the hall to the elevator.
Billy walked through the open door and closed it behind him. The apartment was dimly lit, and smelled of fresh coffee.
He passed through the entrance area and peered into an open door. It was the bedroom, dominated by a neatly made king-sized bed adorned with throw pillows. A sturdy dresser was topped with photos, of Hewitt, an old couple he assumed were her parents, and some likely siblings, nieces and nephews. A intricately carved jewelry box was open next to the pictures, and a large mirror hung above the dresser.
He crept deeper into the quiet apartment. Another door led to a bathroom filled with make up and hair products, a nightlight and hair dryer plugged into an outlet by the sink. The mixed aroma of perfume and soap hung in the air.
He moved on, following the flickering blue light into the living room.
Ms. Hewitt was there, standing next to a soft leather sofa, her gaze fixed on the red wagon in the center of the room. Dark hair hung over half of her face. Her lips were parted, and her large eyes held a distant look, the blue light bouncing off of them and caressing the smooth skin of her face. Beside her, a cup of coffee rested on an end table, steaming and untouched.