Private: #1 Suspect

CHAPTER 58

I was walked through the building to the men’s jail, where I was strip-searched again and issued a “roll-up,” a pair of orange pants and matching shirt, and plastic shoes. Then I was given a prisoner’s tour of the facilities on the way to my cell.

The jail was made up of hundreds of two-tiered pods, each with dozens of holding cells, each pod meant to hold thirty men, but as I was walked past, I could see each pod was double booked and held more like fifty living, crying, coughing, desperate men.

My cell was the size of a walk-in closet, six by eight feet, with two narrow metal slabs and a stinking, clogged toilet.

I was the fourth man in that cell.

I sat on one of the slabs.

The overhead lights glared. There was no window, no way to tell the time, but it seemed to me that at least ten hours had gone by since Fescoe’s phone call to me at Private.

A rank-smelling man, somewhere between twenty and forty years old, sat on the bench next to me.

He said his name was Irwin, and he wanted to talk. He told me he’d been in holding for five days. He’d been caught with cocaine and a teenage girl in his car two blocks from a school. Still, Irwin, I thought, had less to worry about than I did.

He had a festering wound on his arm, another on his neck. He told me about the mystery-meat sandwich for lunch and the dinner burrito, the kind you get at gas stations.

I had missed both.

He asked if I had a good lawyer. I said I did, then I leaned back against the wall. I didn’t want to attract any kind of attention. I was drowning in a riptide of despair that didn’t make total sense to me.

I’d been through marine boot camp and then a war. I’d killed people. Friends had died. My parents had died. I’d been wounded in action. In fact, I’d died and been brought back to life. All of that.

And yet the one thing I couldn’t remember feeling before was an utter lack of hope.

Nothing I said mattered.

I had no access to anyone. No moves to make.

I was at the mercy of people who wanted me put away. Even Fescoe had let me down: confess or else.

Irwin moved to the other slab, and another unwashed desperado took his place next to me. He seemed like a decent guy. Had a couple of kids, a wife, had gotten into a bar fight. Said he hadn’t been able to make bail. He had a bad cough. Sounded like TB or maybe lung cancer.

I feigned sleep. I made a mental list of people who hated me. It was a long list of guys I’d busted, thwarted, fired, or exposed.

Tommy’s face kept coming to me, and then I was awakened out of a murky dream. The lights were all on. One of my cell mates was grunting on the can. But what had awakened me was the voice booming over the public-address system, naming which people would be bused to what court.

Irwin said, “This is what they do at four a.m. Like it? Court isn’t until nine.”

My name wasn’t mentioned.

They hadn’t called my name.

I closed my eyes, and sometime later a guard hit a buzzer and the door to my cell slid open. The guard said, “Jack Morgan? You need to get dressed for court.”