The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  At the promise of another hit, Twitch nearly floats out of the cell. Concise turns to me. “We got to hide the bullet in here.”

  I look at him like he’s crazy. If we’re both leaving the cell, and there’s no one to watch over the prize possession, then our modus operandi is to take it with us. “If Twitch ain’t bullshittin’, then today we ain’t just gonna get strip searched. They gonna sit us down on a metal detector chair, too.”

  Concise wriggles under the bottom bunk and starts to scrape the cement between the bricks. A few minutes of digging creates a hole deep enough to house the .22. He backs out from under the bed and starts rummaging through his personal items for toothpaste, and Metamucil. He mixes these together in the sink; scoops it into his palm. “Keep an eye out,” he says; and he creeps under the bunk again, this time to grout.

  * * *

  Concise and I are handcuffed together for the trip back from the courthouse to the jail. He is quieter than usual, almost haunted. The sad fact about being in jail is that no matter how bad you think it is there, the reality of what you face in court is worse. I am only beginning to taste that bitter future; Concise has swallowed it whole today. “So,” I say, trying to lift his spirits, “you going to pull an OJ?”

  He glances over his shoulder. “Oh, yeah. I got them eatin’ out of my hand, man.”

  “But can you get a bloody glove over it?”

  Concise laughs. We are buzzed in through the level slider, and strip searched once again before being allowed back into our pod. I follow him upstairs to our cell and fall onto the lower bunk. Distantly, I am aware of one of the DOs beginning his security walk. Late afternoon, the general noise level is at a high hum—guys hollering to one another across the common room or slamming a hand of cards down on a metal tabletop when they get gin, televisions blaring, toilets flushing, showers running.

  Concise sinks down onto the stool, his hands between his knees. “My lawyer says I’m looking at ten years,” he says after a moment. “By the time I get out, my boy’s gonna be as old as I was when I got jumped into the Crips.”

  There’s nothing to say; we both know that no matter how we try to convince ourselves we’ll outrun our past, it always crosses the finish line first.

  “Hey,” he says. “Do us a favor and check the goddamn bricks.”

  I get down on my hands and knees and start to crawl under the lower bunk. But I can smell it before I can even see the telltale hole: the pungent mint, the ground powder that dusts the cement floor.

  Then there is a shot.

  * * *

  It is louder than you think. It echoes against the walls, and leaves me deaf. I shimmy out from underneath the bunk and catch Concise as he falls off the stool. His eyes roll back; his blood soaks me. “Who did this?” I scream into the crowd that has already gathered. I try to find the shooter, but all I see are stripes.

  Concise falls on top of me in a heavy tangle of limbs and desperation. What is black and white and red all over, I think, a joke Sophie once told me. I cannot remember her punch line, but I know a different one: a black man dying in jail; a white one watching him go.

  I hear the crackle of a radio, and the jail comes alive with a web of response: Officer needs assistance in three-two B pod. Man down. All officers on levels two and three respond to three-two B pod. David two, did you copy?

  David two copies: Ten-seventeen.

  Inmates in B pod, lockdown.

  Steel scrapes as the cell doors are shut.

  I am dragged away from Concise. Someone is asking me if I’m hurt and looking at my arms and chest—places where I am covered in Concise’s blood. I am handcuffed behind my back and led to the ghost town of the East Dayroom.

  In the middle of all this, no one has bothered to turn off the television. Emeril’s bursts of instruction are interrupted by the RN shouting to call 911; by a deep voice saying, “More pressure”; by the jangling arrival of the Phoenix Fire Department paramedics.

  “This is hot hot hot,” Emeril says.

  They will take Concise to Good Samaritan Hospital, the closest trauma center. “Hey,” I yell out, as he is carried past on a stretcher. “Is he going to be okay?”

  “He’s dead,” a voice replies. “But then, you already knew that, didn’t you?”

  When I look up, I see a tall, well-dressed black man with a detective’s badge clipped to his belt. He stares at my uniform, covered with Concise’s blood, and I realize that, like every other black man in the Madison Street Jail, he believes I am a killer.

  * * *

  The Homicide Division Offices at the General Investigation Division are near Thirty-fifth and Durango. I am kept waiting while the detectives systematically interrogate everyone else in the pod—from the officers and the blacks who say that just days ago Concise and I were fighting, to Fetch, the young white boy who watched me vomit out the bullet after the rec yard fight.

  Whoever did this knows that no one will believe a white man and a black man in jail might forge a friendship. Whoever did this knows that the blacks will assume I was the one who killed Concise—after all, everyone knows it is my bullet that went into him. The whites, for once, will agree with them.

  Whoever did this was trying to punish both of us.

  Detective Rydell has hooked me up to a CVSA—a voice stress analyzer. It’s like a polygraph, only more accurate: It doesn’t measure physiological reactions due to stress, but instead microtremors in a voice frequency range that the human ear can’t hear. Microtremors are present only when a person isn’t telling the truth, or so the detective tells me.

  “I took a shower that morning,” I say. “I knew I was going to court.”

  “What time was that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe eight o’clock.” I do not tell him about Twitch, and the Boss Chair, and about the way Concise and I carved a hole in the brickwork for our bullet. “Then I read until it was time to leave the pod.”

  “What did you read?”

  “A novel, something from the jail library. Baldacci.”

  Rydell folds his arms. “You did nothing between approximately eight-fifteen A.M. and eleven?”

  “I might have gone to the bathroom.”

  He stares me down. “Piss or shit?”

  I rub a hand down my face. “Can you tell me why the answer to that is going to help you figure out who killed Concise?”

  Rydell exhales heavily. “Look, Andrew. You got to see this from my point of view. You’re an educated man, thirty years the victim’s senior. You aren’t a career criminal. Yet you’re telling me that you bonded with this guy. That you actually found something you had in common.”

  I think about Concise, talking about his little boy. “Yes.”

  There is a moment of silence. “Andrew,” Rydell says, “help me to help you. How can we prove you didn’t kill this guy?”

  There is a knock on the door of the interview room, and the detective excuses himself to go speak with another investigator. After he lets himself out, I look down at my shirt. The blood has started to dry, stiff, against my chest. I wonder if someone has called Concise’s son. I wonder if they’d even know how to find him.

  The door opens again, and Rydell approaches with a face as blank as glass. “We just found a zip gun in your buddy’s locker. Care to comment?”

  I can see it, buried under the stash of medications and food items that Concise had gotten from the canteen: the zip gun that he had been dutifully crafting to prevent a moment like this. I had assumed that it, too, had been stolen. But apparently, someone else had been making one, too.

  I find myself fighting for breath, for logic. “It wasn’t used.”

  Rydell doesn’t even blink. “There’s no ballistics testing for a zip gun,” the detective says. “But I bet you know that, being educated and all.”

  I swallow hard. “I’d like to speak to my attorney.”

  I am given a telephone with a long cord, and Rydell stands over my left shoulder while I dial Eric’s