The deputy tapped on the glass and pointed at his watch. Lester let the phone ring four more times, then hung up. He hadn’t expected Kathy not to answer and now he felt as cut off from things as he could imagine. For a second, it was as if she had never existed and wasn’t real at all; what they had started together was an illusion, just a lovely rug thrown over a hole in the floor and now the rug was gone and Lester was falling into something that had been there all along and she had only come into his life to lead him to it. Cold spread through his bowels and his face grew hot. He glanced at the deputy’s dark profile, thought of Behrani screaming in Farsi inside the patrol car, the veins coming out in his forehead and neck. Maybe he’d called his wife from the hospital and Kathy had taken a chance with the Bonneville and driven there. That’s just what she would do.Lester dialed information again and was going to ask for the hospital’s main number when the deputy walked in and pressed the hang-up button.
“Twocalls.”
“Two were information. I didn’t know the numbers.”
The deputy took the receiver, hung it up, and motioned for Lester to step back into the corridor. Lester felt a tightening heat deep in his middle and he wanted to hit the deputy in the mouth.
“Let’s go, Burdone.”
“It’s Burdon. Deputy Sheriff Burdon.”
The Chicano smiled, blinking his eyes as lazily as a lizard’s. “You’ll want to keep that to yourself around here, FTO. Now move.”
Lester walked with the deputy back down the corridor, his breathing shallow, the cinder-block walls a glossed eggshell white, not a blemish anywhere, no scuff marks or chipped holes from a leg iron, no graffiti, no dried spit and blood. A brand-new facility. He began to feel that edge again, all of his tissues clear and ready, his stomach a low fire.
Then he was in a small room with four or five others. Arrestees. All waiting for dressdown. The deputy told Lester to have a seat among a single row of steel chairs welded into two walls, facing each other. The Chicano handed Lester’s paperwork to a desk deputy, then left without a word. Across from Lester sat a long black kid, his skin the color of flan, his short hair freshly cut, his initials or his girlfriend’s shaved into his head. He wore a tank top, oversized jeans, and white Converse All-Stars untied. He kept picking at his nails, three gold rings on the fingers of his right hand, two on the left.
The others were young too, an Asian and a white kid who seemed to know each other, the white kid whispering to the Asian about a dead boy named Beef, the Asian leaning his head back against the wall, his eyes half closed in a waking nap, a small blue serpent etched beneath the corner of his left eye like a tear. Lester glanced at the man beside him. He was sitting sideways in his chair, his wide back hunched to the others, his hair dark and matted, and when he saw Lester he looked away quickly and Lester did too, a gush of heat letting go inside him. The man was Filipino, a small-deal bookmaker out of Daly City, and Lester couldn’t remember how or when their paths had crossed. For a moment he kept his face down, but then he thought he might appear weak so he raised his chin up again and sat back straight in the chair, his heartbeats lost somewhere inside his tongue.
The door opened and a jailhouse deputy called in the bookie, a name Lester didn’t know, and he smelled him as he passed by: piss and sweat and cigarette smoke in old denim. The door shut behind him and now the Asian kid was looking right at Lester, his eyes dark slits, his head still against the wall, his arms crossed in front of his chest. The white kid stopped talking and looked too, taking in Lester from his running shoes and bare chest to his face.
“You looking for something?” Lester said.
The white kid shrugged and glanced at his friend. The Asian stared at Lester a few seconds longer, then smiled and turned his head away slightly, closing his eyes and leaving the smile on his face. The other kid looked at Lester one more time, then at a spot on the wall just to his right, and Lester glanced at the desk deputy, a lean man in his fifties eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread, reading the San Francisco Chronicle.The Asian looked asleep, his eyes closed, his legs stretched out in front of him, but his lips were still fixed in that smile he’d given Lester, and Lester didn’t like seeing it now; it was as if the kid had looked and seen the trajectory of Lester’s entire life and was now gratified it had all come down to this.
The door opened again and the white kid stood but the dressdown deputy called in Lester, pronouncing his name perfectly, and soon the clothes Lester had yanked from his suitcase this morning at the fish camp were gone and he was pulling on orange jailhouse skivvies, orange canvas pants, an orange T-shirt, and a canvas button-down shirt with COUNTY JAIL embossed in black letters on the back. For his feet he wore orange socks under orange rubber shower sandals, and they clicked softly against each heel as he walked with a new deputy down a brightly lit corridor to Central Holding. The deputy was short and smelled of Old Spice cologne. It was what Lester’s father used to wear, and the deputy was chewing gum as they walked, reading through Lester’s paperwork. “An FTO?What happened,man?” He lowered the jacket to his side and picked up his pace. He didn’t look at Lester, just kept his eyes straight ahead waiting for an answer, without judgment, it seemed, like they were two old friends running together, talking out a problem. Lester’s legs felt heavy and stiff and he began to breathe harder, the jailhouse sandals slapping his heels like a reproach.
They reached a wide steel door at the end of the hall and the deputy pulled from his pocket an ID card attached with a clear plastic cord to his belt. He inserted the card into a slit in the wall, then opened the door for Lester, and they stepped into a cavernous room with three tiers of closed door cells, the fluorescent-lit ceiling over a hundred feet above. In the center of the floor was a rounded desk with two officers on duty, and in the corner of the second tier was a one-way-mirrored control booth. The air smelled of fresh paint and new air-conditioning, and Lester could hear the buzz of half a dozen radios in the cells above. Each cell door had a small window in its center and in one on the second tier was a man’s face, a strand of white hair hanging over his eyes. Lester followed the deputy to the desk where one officer was on the phone and the other was checking off names on a headcount sheet. The escort deputy dropped Lester’s paperwork on the desk. “When’s the last time you guys had an FTO in Protective?”
The deputy on the phone stopped talking, looked up at Lester, then glanced through his jacket. He shook his head once, pushed the papers over to his partner, then hung up the phone and gave Lester his full attention, squinting his eyes like he wanted to pose a question but wasn’t quite sure how to start.
“I haven’t gotten through to my lawyer or wife yet,” Lester said. There was a dull metallic bang from one of the upper tiers.
“You didn’t get your two calls?”
“No one answered.”
“Last meal’s at four. We’ll get you to a phone after that.”
“Home Sweet Home.” The escort deputy knocked once on the desk, then smiled and left, the electronically locked door closing behind him with barely a sound.
NOW LESTER LAY back on his bunk. He could hear the faint bass note of another prisoner’s radio, but nothing else. It was lockdown and the walls were thick. All was quiet and white. He was hungry and he had no idea of the time, but he knew at four they’d bring him food and then he could make his call. It would have to be to Carol, of course. He’d explain to her what he could, that one thing had just led to another, that he hadn’t quite been himself lately and now things were upside down and inside out. But none of that was true; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt more alive, more like who he might really be than in the last few days—making love with Kathy on the ground at the Purisima, coming inside her beautiful mouth, even sticking his pistol up under the colonel’s chin. But he would tell Carol none of this. He would ask her to call their lawyer, ask him to hold off on their dissolution papers long enough to suggest a criminal attorney. A criminallawyer. He would ask to speak with Nate and Bethany and he’d tell his daughter he’d see her at visiting hours and explain everything, that he was in this place because he did something wrong and people were right to keep him here for now. He imagined her face, more his than Carol’s, her dark eyes filling up right then, and he’d say, “No, no, it’s all right. Everything’s going to be all right.”