Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 71179 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 356(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71179 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 356(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
These cops are both armed. So are we, but our guns are hidden, and they can sure get to theirs quicker than we can get to ours. If I’m resisting arrest, they can shoot me in cold blood and no one will pay the price.
“Fine.” I turn around.
And I wince at the click of the handcuffs in place again.
“You have the right to remain silent,” the cop says, turning me around. “Anything you say can and will be held against you. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to represent you. Do you understand these rights as I have read them to you?”
“Do I fucking ever,” I say. I meet Leif’s gaze. “Take care of her. Please.”
“You got it. Who should I call?”
“Call my father. He’ll get an attorney to see me right away.”
“You got it.”
I walk out, led by the two deputies. They open the backseat of their squad car and shove me in. I resist the urge to bitch about the force that they’re using.
How did they find me?
They couldn’t have followed Leif or me. I was on high alert when Savannah and I drove here.
Doesn’t fucking matter.
They’ve got me.
And they’re right. I have violated the terms of my parole. Which means they can throw me back in the fucking slammer.
And then who will protect Savannah?
About twenty minutes later, we get to the local station. They take me in, put me through intake, take a mug shot and my prints.
Then into a holding cell I go. A couple of drunks and a meth head are in with me.
Christ.
A large bearded man sits on the steel toilet in the corner, farting and shitting. The putrid stench makes my eyes water.
Six cots altogether. I’m the sixth in the cell.
Guess they’re thinking I’ll be here all night.
They can think again.
I don’t talk to the others. I just plunk my ass on an empty bed and lie down. Stare at the ceiling.
And wonder how the hell it came back to this.
Sharp rocks are a commodity.
I have one that looks like granite that I found a year ago during our outdoor time.
A few days later, I bought a new toothbrush from the prison commissary. I claimed to have lost mine in the bathroom. Things get stolen all the time in prison.
I began to whittle the end of the toothbrush into a sharp point using the rock and alternately filing it against the spalling concrete inside my cell.
It was slow and tedious work, but by the time I was done, I had a shiv that could rip the throat out of somebody.
I kept it on me as often as I could.
When they searched our cells for contraband, I hid it and the rock in a large crack in the concrete between my wall and the floor. I hid other things there too. I’m not a smoker, but I kept cigarettes on hand as much as I could. They helped me keep the other men in line.
No drugs, though. A few men are addicts, but I don’t allow drugs on my cell block. Some of the addicts get transferred. Others go through a painful and torturous detox, but they’re better off for it in the end.
Once Zion came to my cell block, I kept that shiv on me at all times.
I learned to hide it in different places. In the waistband of my underwear was the usual place, and with a little sleight-of-hand, I could move it during a body search.
I never put it up my ass. Was too damn sharp.
Plus, that’s the first place those derelict guards would look.
I had one guard, Hoyt, for whom strip searches were a fetish. He loved doing them. In fact, he only looked up our asses. He generally didn’t look anywhere else.
Fucking sicko.
But Hoyt’s fingers were the only thing that ever got my ass during my years in the joint.
Zion wanted me, though. He was fucked up. Every time he met my gaze, he’d stick his tongue out and make a slurping sound like Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs.
Made me hate him all the more.
No way was that filthy bitch going to get anywhere near me.
And if he tried?
I had my fucking shiv.
“Bellamy?”
My eyes shoot open.
God, the cell still smells like that guy’s shit.
“Yeah?”
“Got an attorney here to see you.”
They cuff me and take me out of the holding cell and into an interrogation room.
Lola Briggs, my attorney, wearing her signature tight-ass navy blue suit, sits there, along with two cups of coffee. “Nice going, Falcon,” she says.
“I had my reasons, Lola.”
“They’re thinking of charging you in the death of that guy.”
“That was self-defense and defense of another. He was armed, and he trespassed on my property. Besides, all I did was pistol whip him. That blow to the head could not have caused his death.”