Private #1 Suspect (Private 2)

CHAPTER 57

I WAS SHUFFLED between cops to the Twin Towers infirmary, where a nurse swabbed my cuts and scrapes with alcohol. She put a bandage on my chin.

I was thinking about Colleen, that if she had been pregnant, it was impossible for the baby to have been mine.

Except for our good-bye tryst a week ago, I hadn’t seen Colleen in more than six months. I mean, I would have been able to tell if she’d been six months along, right?

Still, as Tandy said, the murder of a fetus was a special circumstance when tacked on to murder. Yes, I would be denied bail. In fact, I could spend the next year in this sewer before I went to trial.

I refocused my eyes as a few feet away Tandy explained to the doctor that I had tripped and, since I was cuffed, hadn’t been able to break my fall.

“And what about the bruise on the back of his head?” the doctor asked. The doctor was a late-middle-aged white man. If he’d graduated anywhere in the top 99.9 percent of his class, he wouldn’t have been here.

“Jack is one of those masters-of-the-universe types,” Tandy joked. “Doesn’t like being detained. When I was putting him into the back of our car,” Tandy twisted his body to show exactly how I had rammed my head into the doorframe, “he bumped his head.”

The doctor asked me, “Is that how it happened?”

Saying no would have been a mistake. A few years back, an inmate had complained to an ACLU monitor that no one in his pod had been allowed a shower in three or four weeks. He was beaten. His leg was broken. The ACLU got involved, but for all I knew, that inmate was still here awaiting trial.

“It happened as the detective said. I was clumsy.”

“Duly noted,” said the doctor.

“May I have an aspirin?”

Tandy nodded. “Give him an aspirin, Doc. Our farewell gift.”

Caine said, “Shut up, Tandy.”

I wanted to seriously hurt Tandy. I hoped I would live long enough to do it. Tandy and Ziegler waved bye-bye and slithered down the hallway.

Caine said to me, “Hang in, Jack. I’m working on one thing. Getting you out. I’ve never let you down before and I won’t now.”

A nurse took my vitals, then gave me a mental-status test, checking to see if I was crazy. Or had plans to hang myself. Or commit murder.

From there, I was taken into a large open room, stripped, and given a military-style physical. I grabbed my butt cheeks and coughed on command, let the guard do a cavity check.

I was declared good to go and escorted back to intake with a young sheriff-in-training who struck up a conversation with me. He said he was hoping to get out of here by five today. He was picking up his folks at the airport.

He took my watch, phone, wallet, belt, and shoelaces. My fingers were pressed onto an electronic ten-printer. I stood in front of a height chart holding a number to my chest. I turned to my left, turned to my right, as requested by the bored man with the camera.

I did what I was told, but I was swamped with a lot of feelings beginning with the letter D: depressed, demoralized, degraded.

All around me, people puked, screamed, threatened, spat, and seemed to be begging to be knocked around.

I wanted to shout, I’m not one of these guys. I’m innocent.

It would have been like shouting down a hole that went clear to the center of the earth.

And my morning was just beginning.

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.