“So why the hell am I talking to you if the case isn’t being reopened?”
“Because I asked you to.”
“Why’d you do that?”
“Because I care,” Jessica said. “I know the woman, Harbour. I know her son.”
“The kid.” Kristi nodded. “It’s all about the kid for you. It has been for me, too, the past ten years. I think about that kid being born in prison. I read a thing in the LA Times about it. About how they give you an hour with the baby before they take it away.”
A bartender came by and wiped their table. Kristi grabbed his arm. “Can I order another beer?”
“Afraid you’ll have to go to the counter, ma’am.”
“Oh, come on, just—”
The young man wandered away. Jessica went to the counter, keeping her profile to Zea so she would see if the young woman decided to run off. She brought a beer and a bourbon chaser back to the table.
“The woman was pregnant.” Kristi gulped the bourbon, didn’t wince. “I mean, fuck. Who does that? Who goes running into the middle of—”
“Kristi—”
“Of something that’s not even—”
“What happened?” Jessica dared to put her hand on Kristi’s, to grab the fingers firmly. “Just tell me. Forget about who’s to blame. It’s time to let it all out and tell the truth.”
“If I can’t get immunity, I want cash.” Kristi blinked a little too slowly. Jessica wondered how long she had been in the bar. “Ten grand for my confession now. Twenty to say it in court.”
Jessica slipped off her stool and took out her wallet, fished for a couple of bucks. She lifted her empty glass and slipped the notes underneath, then turned to leave.
“Okay.” Kristi made a swipe for her arm, knocked the table stem with her knee, rattling the glasses on the table. “Okay. Okay. Okay.”
Jessica sat back down. Kristi drank half her beer and rubbed her face, hard, as if she was trying to remove a stain from her cheeks. In time she lifted her eyes from the tabletop, and Jessica realized it was the first time the girl had made eye contact since their meeting began. Kristi took a deep breath.
“There was eight hundred grand’s worth of coke in the house,” she said.
BLAIR
At the Pump’n’Jump, my mind was full. Alejandro’s breath in my ear and his hands shoving my jeans down. Dayly’s frightened eyes behind the gun that wavered in front of my face. The crunching, shuddering halting of the car against the traffic light pole. I absently served customers and let these things cycle through my brain, anything but Jamie and Henry and Sasha, the breaking up of my son’s family, the plunge into icy, turbulent waters. I thought about the plumber, Ramirez, at the hoarder house in San Jasinte. What had Officer Lemon been doing inside the house while the plumber came out to speak to me? Why hadn’t he heard us talking? Was it his house, or the house of a relative or friend? I hadn’t had any experience with hoarding during my time as a doctor. I’d heard horror stories from other pediatricians of children from such places coming in with rat bites, malnourishment, bedsores from sleeping on filthy, bare mattresses for months on end. Lemon had seemed like a regular, stand-up cop. He’d looked and smelled good as he leaned over me in the dented Gangstermobile.
At ten o’clock I started cleaning the drinks fridges, restless and bored. Plenty of questions, no answers. I thought about Lemon’s messages to Dayly.
Are we on track?
A week left, maybe less.
Where are you?
Where are you?
Where are you?
A pair of long-haired, guffawing teenage boys used the distraction that the drinks fridge was providing me to pour themselves a mega blue slushie and slip one of their own hairs into it. They feigned horror and disgust, threatened to post a picture of the contaminated drink to Instagram. I let them have the slushie, as I had three months earlier, and a few months before that. They were obviously too stoned to realize they had played the gag on me before, or perhaps they did it so often they couldn’t keep track of their hits.
At eleven, my phone dinged. It was Ada.
You’re not at your house. Are you at that shitbox gas station where you work?
I texted back. Yes, I’m here. Is everything okay?
I’m coming by.
I knew there was no point in asking Ada to explain herself. I exhaled and texted Sneak.
Can you come to the Pump’n’Jump now? Ada’s on her way here and I don’t want to be alone with her.
Sneak was a couple of minutes in answering.
Why?
WHY? I shook my head, bewildered. Because Macaroni, that’s why!
I had been sharing a dorm room with Sneak, Ada, and thirty other women when the Happy Valley Macaroni Incident occurred. An inmate named Nelly Raddlett, new to the prison, had been loudly professing how thoroughly she had enjoyed the evening’s macaroni dinner to a group of girls in front of the television set where Ada was trying to watch a rerun of The Sopranos. Raddlett pronounced the word mac-uh-ron-nee, not mac-uh-row-nee. The mispronunciation had so irritated Ada that by the fourth or fifth repetition, Ada had stood up, walked to the front of the room, and told Raddlett that if she mispronounced macaroni one more time, she was going to take a belt from the nearest guard and beat her with it.
I’d watched on from my bunk, curious to see if Raddlett was stupid or bold enough to mispronounce the word again, or if indeed Ada had the kind of clout in the prison to obtain a belt from a guard for the purposes of beating another inmate with it.
Both happened.
Thirty-one women and two guards stood idly by that night while Ada Maverick beat Nelly Raddlett for two
