“Your friend has a sheet. A homicide in Albuquerque. We don’t have all the details yet.”
“Cotton?” I said.
The streets were billowing with fog, the stone buildings on the hillsides like ships on the ocean. I couldn’t imagine Cotton killing someone other than in a war.
“You’ve been inside, haven’t you?” Benbow said.
I looked at the mist drifting over the windowsill.
“No comment?” he said.
“Jails are like flypaper,” I said. “They stay with you wherever you go.”
“Got a little bit of temper in you?”
“No, sir.”
“Stand up.”
“What for?”
“I need to hook you up. You bother me, son. I think you might have a warrant on you.”
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t call me ‘son.’?”
He pulled my left wrist into the small of my back and clapped a cuff around it. The resistance in my arm wasn’t intentional, but it was there. “Count your blessings,” he said.
* * *
AFTER EACH OF us was questioned, we were moved to the last cell on the row. Cotton was sitting on a wood bench, his head on his chest. Spud lay on a steel bunk bolted to the wall, a small battery-powered radio resting on his chest. His bottom lip was cut and puffed out of shape and one cheek swollen the size of a baseball. Carl Belew was singing “Am I That Easy to Forget” on the tiny radio.
“Where’d you get that?” I said.
“Gave a guy a dollar for it,” Spud said.
“You okay, Cotton?” I said.
“I could use some coffee.”
I sat down next to him. “I’ve got to ask you something.”
The rain was blowing hard on a window high above us. The walls of the jail were a pale yellow, and the bare bulbs in the corridor ceiling made shadows like bars on Cotton’s face. “So ask me,” he said.
“You killed somebody in Albuquerque?” My lips felt weak, as though I couldn’t push the words out.
“My son.”
“Your—” I said.
“I killed my own boy.” He fixed his good eye on me, then dropped his head. “My little boy. That’s how I still see him. When he was little and not what he turned into.”
Spud sat up on the bunk and clicked off the radio.
“He came home drunk and on drugs and shot me in the lung,” Cotton said. “Then he shot at his mother and little sister. He’d been in the state boys’ home twice. There wasn’t no fixing him.”
“I’m sorry, Cotton,” I said.
“It ain’t your fault. He was never right in the head. It ain’t anybody’s fault. You get the hand that’s dealt to you.”