by R. H. Herron
“I just want to look through his cell window.”
“No.”
“Please?”
“No way.”
“I’m not asking to talk to him. Just to look at him.”
“I know.” Sarah leaned her hip against the watercooler. She seemed relaxed. And from hundreds of hours of idly watching the jail cameras, Laurie knew she could go from relaxed to sprung in a split second. If Laurie ran for the door that separated intake from the cells, Sarah would have her on the floor before she took two full steps.
“You can see him fine from here, my friend. On this big ol’ camera right here.”
“He hurt my daughter.”
Again Sarah said, “Honey, you don’t know that yet for sure. None of us do.”
Laurie put her hands together in front of her chest, prayer position. “I promise I won’t kill him.”
“Out of respect to you as a close friend, I’ll prevent you from having to make that decision.”
“He raped my baby.” The words were agony, raw flames in her throat.
The whites of Sarah’s eyes widened. “Technically he’s still just a suspect—”
“While she was unconscious.”
“Laurie. It’s my job to protect him.”
He was there, he was less than twenty feet away, just through that door. Laurie couldn’t physically get to him, but she wanted so desperately to see him through nothing more than thin glass, to hurl her body at his cell door over and over again until he was terrified of her.
One more try. “Please.” He probably knew exactly where Harper was. He had the information, and he was right there. What was worse—what she barely wanted to think about—was the fact that she didn’t care where Harper was half as much as she cared about who had hurt her own girl.
“If you see him, you’re contaminating whatever case we have against him.”
Mutely, Laurie shook her head.
“You know that. It’s all on camera. All of it. Anything you say to him or, God forbid, do to him in here would destroy the entire case.”
“So turn off the cameras.”
Sarah bit her lip, and for one hopeful second Laurie dared to dream. She could still control this. Somehow. If she could just get to him and figure this all out—she could understand what the fuck was going on, and then she could fix it.
But Sarah said, “No fucking way. I’m so sorry, Laurie, but you’ve got to get out of here.”
Laurie waited one more long, quiet second.
She wasn’t going to be allowed to control this.
So she lost what little control she had.
Laurie ran at the door that led to the corridor where Leeds’s cell was. She didn’t even get to the keypad. It was enough to throw herself at the door, enough to feel Sarah behind her, grabbing her arm and twisting it behind her. The pain felt good. Bob Ringon tried to help Sarah, but Laurie lashed out with her foot and kicked him sharply in the shin.
“Fuck, Laurie!” Bob bent forward to rub his leg.
Sarah frog-marched Laurie to the jail’s front door. Laurie’s elbow banged against the jamb, shooting sparks into her shoulder.
Unceremoniously, Sarah shoved Laurie into the hallway. “You know you’re my girl. But don’t you dare try that again.”
Laurie looked up at the camera trained on the jail door. She knew—she knew—that Maury, Shonda, and Charity were all watching, riveted. She stuck the hand that wanted to flip them off into her pocket and banged her way out the heavy door into the lobby. Home to Jojo. To Pamela, to Andy.
Will Yarwood stood at the reception desk making notes on a report. “Hey. Nice pajamas.”
No, no. Not Yarwood. He was a bantam rooster, all voice and fighting legs. He’d had three on-duty shootings, all ruled good ones, but one more and the department wouldn’t be able to afford the liability insurance and they’d have to bring him inside. Laurie dreaded that—if Yarwood was confined to a desk job, he’d spend half his time in dispatch, talking up the good old days and sucking audibly on his too-large teeth.
“Hey yourself.” Laurie didn’t slow.
But he caught her arm as she passed him on the way to the front door. His hand was hard on her elbow, almost painful, and for one split second Laurie thought she was going to lose it, like that other time, so long ago now. She was going to come around with her left fist and pound him in the right temple. She’d follow up with a groin strike and then one to the head as he went down. She’d leave him gasping and retching in the department lobby, and then she’d go home to her girl and a bag of ice for her hand.
“Whoa!” He laughed and backed away, holding up mock-surrender hands. “I just wanted to say I heard what happened and that it sucks.”
Laurie drew in a quick breath and tried to swallow the chemical flood of adrenaline in her mouth. “Yeah. Thanks.”
“How is she?”
She’d bet it was the first time in a month he’d talked about anyone other than himself. “Fine.”
“How’s Omid doing? Can we bring him anything?”
By “we” he meant he’d sign his name to the card that dispatch would send from the department. He’d been a piece of shit when they’d started on the force together, and this many years later he was still a piece of shit, except with a bigger gut. Single, he lived alone and worked his way through the badge bunnies who fell for his alpha-male routine at an astonishing rate.
“He’s fine. I gotta go.”
Yarwood lurched forward, his arms moving into shapes that looked like he wanted a hug, and she’d be damned if she would waste a single second making him feel better. She spun sideways, out of his reach, and gave a short wave.
“Take care, Laurie,” he said. “See you later.”
The large glass doors of the lobby were on a weight that closed them gently, which was a pity, because Laurie wouldn’t have minded slamming them so hard they shattered.
SEVENTEEN
JOJO WOKE TO find light streaming through her bedroom windows. The police scanner in her parents’ room babbled softly down the hall. There was always radio traffic in the Ahmadi house, but Jojo never heard it as anything more than white noise unless someone yelled on the air, usually a foot or a traffic pursuit. Now she wondered what it had sounded like last night, when they’d been looking for her. When she was little, her father used to let her say good night on his radio on her birthday. It had been more exciting than cake, the chance to click the big button and speak the words clearly so that everyone in the whole city could hear her. It wasn’t till she was older that she realized that not everyone in the world kept one ear on the police radio, that some families didn’t even use police code at the dinner table, that not all kids had a police-code nickname (she’d been Car 143, chosen because her parents said the number was old pager code for “I love you”).
Now, for the first time, she realized that all the noise on the channel was bad news. Except for her birthday good night and the occasional (frowned-upon) light banter on the airwaves, everything that was said on air was because of something bad that had happened. Always.
She felt unbearably naïve.
Jojo was in pajamas as if she’d gone to bed, but she didn’t remember doing so. Carefully, she untangled her legs and pulled them out. She stood slowly.
She wobbled her way to the bathroom to pee.
Snippets of the night before floated back to her—Andy and Pamela in her bedroom. The hilarity she’d felt at seeing Pamela wearing that sheer nightgown. The feeling of being sucked down into sleep as if she were light and sleep was a black hole. No wonder people freaking loved sleeping pills. They were magic. She should scoop up a couple more of Mom’s before they disappeared forever, which was bound to happen soon.
The thought of the pill brought it back: Plan B. Raped.
What the hell, was she a #MeToo? She was a fr
eaking hashtag now?
And it wasn’t even the worst thought.
Zach, poor sweet Zach, Zach who seemed to know everyone’s name, Zach who always got queasy when they did anything in the street-medic trainings that involved theoretical blood. They had to be prepared to help anyone who got hurt in protests, and that included knowing what to do in case of stabbings, teargassings, shootings. He’s just here for me, Kevin would say with a smile. That’s what friends are for, Zach would respond, his face sweaty. Jojo herself felt queasy, sick with the thought that she’d never see him again. How was that possible?
And where was Harper? Her stomach dropped another ten feet, right through the floor. She sent another text and prayed to whatever gods there might be that she’d feel a return buzz in her hands: Chill, jeez, I’m fine.
She sat on the toilet and waited.
But no text came back. Frantic flutters beat in her chest. Harper. Come on. Jesus, Harper. Jojo needed her. She’d lost her once for a little while—the worst thing that had ever happened in her life. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—lose her again.
Jojo was done peeing, and soon she’d go take the pill. She knew that it was in the brown paper bag on the kitchen counter. She was supposed to take it with food, but her stomach hurt and she didn’t want to make it worse. What if it backfired somehow—what if it made her bleed forever? She knew that wasn’t the way it worked. Mathematically, if she remembered her human-sexuality shit, the chance of her being pregnant was so small that—
No. She would take that fucking pill. She’d take ten of them.
What did Kevin do to her?
It couldn’t be him. He was her friend. It could not be him. There was something she was missing, something she would remember. . . .
Jojo wadded up a piece of toilet tissue and wiped.
It stung.
Somehow the feeling of it, that slight sting as if she had a rash down there, made everything in her whole body contract into a tiny ball. When Jojo was a kid, she and Harper liked to make those roly-poly bugs roll up and then flick them at each other. The goal was always to shoot it back and forth, but the bug was always too good a roller and it had always disappeared. She would do that. She’d drop to the bathroom floor and roll into the hall, then find a crack in the wood. She’d just go back to sleep, dry up, and die alone.
Jojo blinked. She was folded so far forward over her thighs that her lower back hurt. No, hell no. This wasn’t how the world worked. Yeah, shit was fucked up everywhere—she knew that. But girls like her—girls who were feminists and worked for social justice and believed the victims—they weren’t supposed to be victims.
Fuck, this was stupid. She had to do something, even if she had no idea what that might be.
She pulled up her pajamas, washed her hands, and went back into her bedroom.
Jojo pawed through her closet. A conviction grew in the recesses of her mind that if she just kept doing all the normal things she did on a daily basis, she wouldn’t have to think of what had happened.
Not until she had to give her statement.
But until that moment, maybe she could fill her brain with other things. She propped up her iPad on her desk and turned on Spotify. Stupid pop music, as loud as her Bluetooth speakers could handle.
She pulled out clothes. Jeans, the baggy ones that looked terrible on her but that she couldn’t give up because she and Harper had inked hearts and skulls all around the cuffs in Sharpie. The blue shirt that Harper had borrowed once and hadn’t given back for three months. Jojo’d had to go into Harper’s closet and pull it out herself. She’d waved it at her. “Once a thief, always a thief, huh?”
Harper had blushed, and the way her face had gotten pinker had made Jojo feel so weird inside that she regretted teasing her, something that normally didn’t ever happen. Their whole friendship had been about teasing, about mocking, about making each other harder on the outside so nothing could hurt them. Mom was a big gardener, and she always started plants growing inside right about this time of year. When spring came, she’d put them on the porch during the day, bringing them back in at night or making Jojo do it if she was at work. Once Jojo had completely spaced, and the baby tomatoes had all died in an unexpected freeze. Mom had looked so sad in the morning when she got home. “I was hardening them off, but they weren’t ready for that kind of cold.”
That’s what Harper and Jojo did for each other.
And it turned out that Jojo wasn’t ready for the cold, either. Fuck, if they didn’t find her, what the hell would that—No. It was impossible to think of, a great black rush of frigid air that would kill her. Harper was somewhere. She was fine. She had to be.
“Hey.” Mom pushed open her door slowly. “How’s my girl?”
A tug of salt at the back of Jojo’s throat made her wild with sudden anger. She jabbed at the volume of the music, turning it down so that her mother would be able to hear the anger in her voice. “How do you think I am?”
Mom didn’t even give her the satisfaction of wincing. “I think you’re probably terrible.”
Jojo would not cry.
She would not cry. Not again, like she had in the fucking shower.
And then she stupidly—childishly—did. The tears came in this dumb flood, and she was making noises like a dying cow, and Mom had her arms around her. Jojo was freezing, even though her chest felt like it was on fire. Somehow Mom wasn’t crying, and thank God for that—it allowed Jojo to cling to her for a moment, to pretend she was seven and nothing worse in the whole world could happen than her guinea pig dying.
“Shhhh,” Mom said into her hair. “Shhhh.”
Mom didn’t mean for her to be quiet. Mom had never meant that when Jojo cried. It was her way of sounding like the ocean, she’d once told Jojo. Like the conch shell you raise to your ear. That’s me. The big ocean, holding you. Shhhh.
No, now Jojo was the big ocean, full of salt and scary slimy-ass shit that she didn’t even know how to begin to get out of her system. Harper . . .
Finally, a million unbearable years later, Jojo wiped her snotty nose on the back of her hand. “Stupid,” she muttered.
“Shhhh.” Mom stroked her hair, and Jojo wished she could just stay here for another month or two.
“I didn’t take that pill yet.”
“You want me to be with you when you do?”
Jojo did want that. But she said, “It’s not a big deal.”
“I’ll just get it for you, then.” Mom was up and out of the room before Jojo could tell her not to.
She came back with the paper bag and a glass of water. She pulled out the paperwork and started reading it, holding it far from her face in that way that always made Jojo irritated, like she was showing off the crappiness of her eyesight.
“Just give it to me.” Jojo grabbed the bottle. A whole bottle for a single pill—what a tragedy for the environment. She’d make sure to recycle it.
“No, wait. Let me read. Are you supposed to take this with food or anything?”
Since Jojo didn’t feel as if she’d be hungry ever again in her whole life, she wasn’t too worried about it. She popped the pill and swallowed. Mom stared, just as she’d done when she’d scarfed the Ambien.
Jojo shrugged. “What can I say? I like drugs.”
Mom’s eyes widened. Her mouth opened slightly.
“Oh, my God, Mom.” A true laugh climbed out of Jojo’s lungs. “You look horrified. I don’t like drugs.”
Mom gave a pant of relief.
“I love drugs.”
Mom flashed her a fake frown, the same one as when Jojo was stealing bacon from her plate. “Good to know.”
“Can Dad get me some from evidence? Like that officer who got fired? What was his name?”
“Jason Stern.”
The guy had been using crack out of the evidence locker for like nine months,
and no one had noticed, even though he’d been getting skinnier and skinnier. Dad still felt bad about that one, which didn’t actually make sense, since it wasn’t as if Vice and the chief of police worked together every day. “Yeah, him. I think crack would be fun.”
“Crack is fine,” said Mom. “Just stay away from sugar. That’s the real killer.”
Good, they were back to talking but not talking. That was better. Jojo was used to that.
Mom stood up. She crumpled up the papers and the bag and tossed them and the recyclable pill bottle into the wastebasket next to Jojo’s desk. “Okay, sweet girl. Let’s get going.”
“Where? To see Dad?”
She looked almost startled. “I meant the station. We’ve got to get your statement. But yeah, we can see Dad, too.”
That snake of irritation that lay coiled in Jojo’s belly rattled. Did Mom even give a shit about him? “‘We’? It’s my statement.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You’re just a dispatcher, Mom. You’re not going to take my statement.” She checked her phone for the billionth time, hoping Harper had sent her a text. Nothing.
Her mother took a deep breath in through her nose, noisy and whistling. “We can get Starbucks on the way.”
Jojo wanted to say something cutting—I don’t like anything they have there, but it wasn’t true, and Mom knew it. Jojo would just about kill for a Venti Caramel Macchiato right now.
But it was her statement. Hers. No one else’s, especially not Mom’s.
“Fine. But I’m getting Dad something at Starbucks, and you can’t stop me.” Not that Mom would stop her. It was just something for Jojo to say, to push Mom back those few inches, getting herself some goddamn space while she waited for Harper to come back and fill it.
EIGHTEEN
OMID WILL KNOW what to do next. Laurie waved a hand at the nurses’ station and moved faster toward Omid’s room.
Jojo darted in front of her, shoving the door open. “Daddy! We brought you presents!” She held up the bag and shook it.