by J.P. Voss
5
The cop secured his firearm, stuck a knee between my shoulders, and then cuffed me, like I was the prize in a calf-roping contest. After he frisked me, he stood up and planted his hard-sole uniform shoe directly on my lumbar vertebra. “You got any identification boy?”
“I don’t remember; I don’t think so.”
“What kind of answer is that hippie?” He spit a big wad of macerated chaw into a Creosote bush. “You been smoking marijuana boy?”
“No—but I could use a beer if you’ve got one.”
Pressing his heel into my back and twisting his hip, he ground the stiff leather sole into my flesh. When he was sure he had my attention, he gave his service revolver a love pat and said, “You better not move—you Goddamn hippie son of a bitch. You try and get away from me again—I’ll blow your Goddamn head off.” He chomped the corner off a fresh plug of tobacco and puke-red spit dribbled from the side of his mouth.
While the cop searched the pickup truck, I rolled onto my side. Except for the California Highway Patrolman uniform, he looked like an old dustbowl sharecropper. The CHP grabbed something small out of the truck bed and then opened the passenger-side door. He poked his face in the glove box and pulled out the past due speeding tickets. “Morgan Allison huh, looks like you got a couple of traffic warrants.”
Lying on my side in the fetal position, with my hands cuffed behind me, I was using my forehead to keep the pressure off my broken ribs. I lifted my face out of the dirt, scraped my tongue against my lips, and spit out a mouthful of grit. “I’m not Morgan.”
The CHP looked like I’d called his mother a whore. He stepped up out of the shallow ditch, took a couple of steps toward me, cocked back his foot, and nailed me in the gut. “You Goddamn hippie son of a bitch. Don’t lie to me.”
His toe caught me in a tender spot, just below a broken rib, and a muscle spasm lifted me off the ground. My vision blurred, and I struggled to catch my breath. When I could breath again, the cop stuck his shoe under my chin and lifted my face. He fanned a packet of banded twenty-dollar bills and asked, “Where’s the rest of it boy?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I didn’t see it, or even feel it, but I know he hit me with something, because the next thing I remember, I was laying face down across the back seat of the Highway Patrol cruiser. The sun was still up, so I knew I couldn’t have been out for too long.
Without thinking, I twisted my torso and pulled myself up off the backseat. My broken ribs ripped into tendon and triggered a wave of mind-bending pain. I jerked in a convulsive fit, and I almost lost my cookies.
“Pipe down you whimpering sissy.”
“I’m not whimpering, and I’m not a sissy. Why’d you kick me?”
“Pipe down boy. I ask the questions around here.” We turned up the back road into the old Calico Ghost Town. “I ask the questions, and you’d best have the answers.”
“I don’t know anything.”
The cruiser came to a stop behind a weather-beaten shed.
“What the hell are you doing?”
The gnarled old cop got out and opened the rear door. “Get out of the car boy.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
The cop pulled a leather slapjack from his back pocket and wrapped the lanyard around his wrist. I rolled out of the squad car, with my hands cuffed behind me, expecting to get nailed. I crouched with my head down, staring at his holster.
“I thought you’d see it my way,” the CHP said. He concealed the low-profile weapon in his back pocket. Then he threw a roundhouse slap with a cupped hand and whopped me up side the head. “Look at me you little faggot.”
I rolled with the slap. Cautiously, I lifted my eyes. “I don’t know anything. I want a lawyer.”
He took the banded bills from his utility belt and started slapping me with it. I spun around, and he beat the back of my skull. When he stopped to spit, I turned to look, and he threw the packet in my face.
“You don’t need a lawyer boy. You need a miracle. It’s going take a goddamn miracle for me not to snuff your sorry ass.” The crazy cop got in my face and started choking me. “You know how many fucking piece of shit hippies I’ve left in the desert. You better start telling me what I want to know.”
With both hands clinched around my neck, he crammed my face against the squad-car window. I tried to spin away, tripped, fell to my knees, and landed with my back to the cop. I expect to feel the sting of his leather slapjack, when a police siren blasted a quick crescendo, filling the air with a startling reverberation. I turned to look, and the local Deputy Sheriff, Officer Martin, got out of his car. The young deputy came around the vehicle with his baton at the ready.
“Everything all right here Patrolman?”
“Son of bitch tried to get away,” the CHP said. He shook hands with the deputy and introduced himself as Leonard Elmore Masterson. “My friends call me Lem,” he said. “I was part of a three-unit team set up over by Tubby’s on County Road 1712. We had everything secured, nobody in or out. When I see this little prick slumped over the steering wheel of his pickup truck, sneaking out of the trailer park. When I caught up with him, he refused to pull over. I pulled in front of him, trying to block the truck, and the crazy fucking hippie tried to run me over. Kid must be on drugs. He’s been talking nonsense ever since I cuffed him.”
The deputy was staring down at me while the CHP told the story. After the CHP stopped talking, the deputy dialed me in with eyes like a telescopic sight. “That’s where I’ve seen you.” He turned to the CHP. “Did you say that he was driving a pickup truck?”
“Yeah, little prick ran it into a ditch over by the power lines. I found this packet of twenties in the truck bed. It’s got to be part of the stolen money. He won’t tell me were the rest of it is. Not yet anyways.”
“And you observed him exiting the High Desert Trailer Court?”
The CHP nodded yes.
The young deputy started moving toward his car. “Secure your prisoner and follow me.”
“Right behind you deputy,” he said, taking hold of my handcuffs and jerking me off the ground.
The deputy sheriff was almost in his squad car when he stopped and called out, “Patrolman Lem, notify one of your team members to block the exit at the High Desert Trailer Park. And notify your dispatcher to put out an APB on Harper O’Neal, blonde, female, blue eyes, 5’7”, 120, early twenties.”
The CHP tossed me in the back of the cruiser, called in the APB, and took off after the deputy. Both cops drove with total disregard for public safety. A few minutes later at the trailer park, we drove the wrong way through the exit and came to a screeching stop in front of Harper’s trailer.
As the deputy stepped up to the trailer door, he reached for his holster and unlatched the safety strap. He rapped on the sliding glass door three times. Repeating the pattern, he repeated it again, getting louder each time. Finally, the deputy called out, “Miss O’Neal, if you’re in there, answer the door. I won’t ask again.”
He stepped back, pulled his nightstick, and smashed the sliding glass door. While the deputy was exchanging his baton, the CHP was through the door with his pistol drawn. He reconnoitered the small trailer, before the deputy even got his gun out. They started walking toward me. I didn’t like the look on their faces. The CHP ripped me out of the backseat and jammed me up against the car.
The deputy stepped in. “Where’d she go?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I want a lawyer.”
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Morgan Allison,” the CHP said. “At least that’s what was on the registration and the delinquent speeding tickets.”
The deputy gave me an uneasy look, like what he knew and what he was being told didn’t fit. “That’s not what the girl called you. What did she say your name was?”
“I want to talk to a lawyer.”
The CHP reached in his back pocket and started to br
ing out his slapjack. Something stopped him. When I turned to see what it was, another Highway Patrol cruiser came to a commanding stop. The man on the passenger side got out and started toward us. He had on a freshly pressed uniform, replete with ribbons and lieutenants bars. As he approached, the two low level cops in front of me stepped back.
The Lieutenant said, “I heard the APB. You men have a lead on the stolen money? Who’s this O’Neal woman? What’s her connection?”
The psycho CHP showed his lieutenant the cash and told him the bullshit story about me trying to escape. The deputy connected the dots back to Harper.
The lieutenant examined the cash and tried a new approach. “What’s your name son?”
“I’m not saying another word. I want a lawyer.”
The CHP supervisor game me a stern look. “You’re in a lot of trouble young man. Your only choice is to cooperate. You need to tell me everything you know. Now. Before it’s too late. If we don’t recover the rest of the money, you’ll be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. How would you like to spend the next fifteen years in prison? It would be rough on a good-looking young man like you.”
“I want a lawyer.”
The lieutenant had his subordinates toss me in the back seat of his cruiser, where I landed in the lap of another prisoner, whose clothes smelled like ninety-weight grease, stale smoke, spilt beer, and fermented body odor. His eyes were a dark-bottomless sinkhole, and his pallor was junkie jaundice. When he turned his back to me, so I could see the Serpents patch, I recognized him as the guy standing guard at the shack where I dropped Morgan off.
The lieutenant sat down in the passenger seat and told his driver, “Return to home base.” He turned back to me and said, “This is the time to tell me what you know. If the money is recovered based on information that you’ve provided, I’ll be happy to talk to the district attorney on your behalf. But if you insist on being a tough guy, and you choose not to cooperate, I’ll do my best to see that you are punished to the full extent of the law. Do we understand each other young man?”
“I want a lawyer.”
“That’s right kid. Keep your mouth shut. Fuck these pigs.”
The lieutenant said, “Keep out of this.”
The rancid biker said, “Fuckin’ cops are so full of shit.”
The lieutenant took off his cap. Using the palm of his hand, he brushed back the spoiler on his buzz cut. “Don’t listen to this miscreant. I’ll bet it was a lowlife like him who talked you into this mess.”
“Fuck you pig,” the decimated lunatic sitting next to me ranted. The biker leaned over and stuck his face six inches from my ear. “I seen you before motherfucker. Don’t think I don’t know who you are. You keep your fuckin’ mouth shut.”
“Don’t be a fool son,” the lieutenant said. He adjusted his hat in the rearview mirror then turned around and said it again, “I’m going to give you one more chance young man. You need to tell me everything you know. You need to do it right now. Your only hope is for us to find the money before it disappears. The money is holding you up son. It’s your only card. Once the money is gone, you’ll be left hanging in the breeze.”
“I want a lawyer,” was the last thing I said to the CHP Lieutenant.
The last thing he said to me was, “You made the wrong choice son.”
The driver pulled into the Barstow CHP office and drove around to the employee’s entrance. The lieutenant got out of the cruiser and told the driver, “County Jail.”
When the cop pulled back on the highway headed for San Bernardino, things really started to close in on me. It was claustrophobic in the back seat. And the guy next to me smelled like a dead hobo. With my hands cuffed behind my back, I had to lean forward, which put more pressure on my broken ribs. If I moved, the spot where the cop kicked me felt like I had a burst appendix. That wasn’t the worst of it. The worst part, the part that kept messing with my head, I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. The cops could do anything they wanted to me.
The CHP driver turned us over to the San Bernardino Sheriffs, and they dumped us in a holding cell without air. The stench was so bad, I forgot about my ribs. I stepped past the toilet, which was more like an open sewer pipe, and rolled onto a concrete bench. I pulled my t-shirt up over my nose, and watched as my junkie bunkmate shivered with a bad case of the cold sweats. When he upchucked into the toilet, I stumbled to the bars and called out for help.
The jailer dragged his feet as he came over. He held a pen to his clipboard and asked my name. I told him I wanted to see a lawyer, and he looked at me liked I’d asked for a steak dinner. He turned without saying a word and walked away. When he came back, he had a pissed off looking sergeant with him.
The sergeant pointed at me and asked, “You the one who wants a lawyer?”
I nodded my head yes.
He turned to the jailer. “Put him in the closet. Keep him there overnight; see if he’s got a name in the morning.” He turned back to me. “When one of my men asks you for your name, they don’t want any bullshit, they want your name.”
“Kids these days got no manners,” the jailer said. He opened the cell door and looked at me like I was a boil on his dog’s ass. “On your feet junior—time for a attitude adjustment.”
I stepped out of the cell and stopped. The jailer was behind me. He put his palm against the back of my head and shoved me as hard as he could. I stumbled forward. After I caught my balance, I looked back at the jailer, and he pointed toward a solid metal door with a deadbolt lock. We passed through the door into an unbelievably bright hallway. The walls were whitewashed concrete, and the ceiling was a battery of high output security lights. It was like looking into an acetylene torch. At the end of the short hall, there was another solid metal door. Beyond that, there was nothing.
I stepped through the threshold into a dark concrete vestibule. I could feel the heat from the lights in the hall behind me. There was no lighting in the room. And the security lights in the hall cast a dreadful shadow on the boilerplate door in front of me. When the jailer told me to strip, I looked back at him, and the light stung my eyes. I did what I was told, like the man said, and felt my dignity fall to the floor. I reluctantly kicked my clothes into the hallway, and turned my shame into the dark.
The jailer told me to grab the handle and open the iron door. I felt the bottom of my soul drop out, and my knees buckled. When I heard the guard chuckle behind me, I got pissed, opened the door like I owned it, and walked in tall. It was another concrete box, only much smaller, with no lights, and nothing in it. The jailer kicked a steel mop bucket through the opening, slammed the boilerplate door shut, and secured the slide bolt. I could still see a few cracks of light around the edges and at the bottom of the door. As I reached out to touch the light, the jailer shut the hallway door, and all signs of life disappeared.
I could feel the filthy floor under my feet, and I could hear my trembling breath. But I couldn’t see a goddamn thing. I didn’t move until a bug ran across my naked toes. I jumped back, bounced off a wall, and dropped to the floor in a pile. I felt myself start to lose it, so I took shallow breaths to calm down. I was miserable. I was also exhausted. I closed my eyes and passed into a world of twisted dreams. I was in a room with a thousand doors, and I could hear my mother’s voice crying for help from behind everyone of them. I was running from door to door, opening each one. In one room, my brother was being tortured on a Medieval Rack. In another, a million black snakes with no eyes slithered along the floor and crawled up the walls. I snapped awake. I was cold, tired, sore, and hungry. And I was scared. I was scared until I got pissed off. I held onto pissed off. It was all I had.
When I heard the outer door open, and light from the hallway came through the cracks at the bottom of the boilerplate door, I guessed it was morning. Someone popped the slide bolt, and the door opened.
A large silhouette stood in the doorway and tossed my clothes into the box. “You aren’t going to give me any trouble are you? I heard yo
u were some kind of jailhouse lawyer calling for the ACLU before they even got you booked. I don’t need it this morning. I don’t need it at all. I ate some leftover corned beef for breakfast, and I’m already on antacids. I’ll make a deal with you. Don’t cause me any problems, and I’ll help make your stay here down right tolerable.”
While I got dressed, the constable in the doorway came into focus. Blossoming into middle age, ready for the next size uniform, he had a thick head of curly red hair, and could have easily played the sidekick in one of those old serial westerns. He popped an antacid in his mouth and let out a monumental burp.
“You can call me Curly,” he said. “You got a name partner?”
“Duff Allison.”
“You look rode hard and put away wet mister. Let’s get you booked, fumigated, orientated, and fed. Once that’s done, things aren’t so bad around here.”
“I think I need a doctor.”
“You can still stand up, so it’s going to have to wait. That’s policy around here. First I book you. Doctor won’t even look at a prisoner without a file.”
Curly was pleasant enough while he processed me, and I cooperated to a point: name, rank, and serial number. He booked me on suspicion of armed robbery, possession of stolen property, evading arrest, assault on a police officer, and attempted murder. I asked, but he wouldn’t say anything about the robbery or the attempted murder charges.
He did say, “All I know is—you got swept up in a wide-area dragnet. The local boys got on the phone and called every agency within 200 miles. All those different departments converged on the scene at once, and there was no way to coordinate that much manpower that quickly. Everyone was running around pell-mell. The boys may not have had much of plan, but they sure are being thorough. They’re dropping a net on anything that moves. It’s open season on the bummers and drifters out there. All the suspects are getting dumped here.” He pointed to a packed holding cell. “A lot of these desert rats will be out tomorrow morning. Probably won’t even get booked. Looks like you’re going to be sticking around for awhile.”
Curly turned me over to another guard, who had me strip while he checked all my holes. That dude handed me over to another guard, who herded me into a shower and sprayed me for bugs. After another guard issued me a jailhouse jumpsuit, the guard who looked up my butt handed me back over to Curly. He led me past a large holding cell, packed with about twenty dudes, and around the corner to a smaller holding cell, which was about 12’X12’, with a metal toilet and two concrete benches.
On one of the benches, some guy was stretched out using his leather jacket for a pillow. He reminded me of a carnival roustabout. I could tell just by looking at him, this wasn’t the first time he’d been in jail.
Curly held open the cell door and handed me a brown sack lunch. “Told you it wasn’t going to be too bad as long as you cooperated. You settle in here and have something to eat. The big boys upstairs are still deciding what to do with you. They’ve got a special interest in your future.”
I sat down on the open concrete bench and started to eat my Wonder Bread and bologna sandwich. The chips were stale, but the milk was still cold, and it all tasted pretty good. I stuffed it down and slumped against the wall. I was staring off into space, not talking to anyone, when I started lamenting the previous twenty-four hours.
“Damn—I can’t believe all the bullshit. I lost my brother. Then I lost my girl. Now I lost my freedom.” When I remembered the roustabout, I looked his way and said, “At least I don’t have anything else to lose.”
“You could lose your life,” he replied.