1 Straight to Hell Read Free Page A

painting.  And a hulking woman with cropped, black hair who sat on a couch and stared at the floor.
    So this was a waiting room of some kind.  Dazed, I put my hand to my head, trying to remember how I’d gotten there.  Had I walked in myself?  Had a passerby seen the accident and helped me here?  I glanced at the woman on the couch, hoping for answers, but she continued to glare at her shoes, giving nothing away.
    When I looked around hoping to find a doctor, a nurse, or even a receptionist, I discovered that one entire wall of the room was made up of prison bars.  Panicked, I looked for another way out of the room, but there wasn’t one.  Those bars were as thick as broom handles, cold and unforgiving under my clutching fingers.  I tried to rattle them, but it was like trying to shake a bus.  My heart beat in double time.  “Hey,” I cried out.  “Hey!”  Beyond the bars was nothing but an empty hallway.  “I was just hit by a car!  Hello?  I need medical attention!”
    Sweat oiled my fingers, and my cell phone slipped from my hand.  I hadn’t even realized that I was still holding it.  Confused, I picked it up, thinking to dial someone, possibly even 9-1-1, as absurd as that sounds.  But as my fingers stumbled over the keys, the phone told me there was no service.  Furious, I shoved the thing back into my pocket.  Then it occurred to me that, even if my cell didn’t work, I was at least entitled to one call.
    That thought steadied me.  Yes, I was entitled to a phone call.  That and a lawyer, too.  And Miranda rights!  I had been jailed without having been read my rights!  My fear sloughed off, and I grew outraged.  I’d just been in a car accident, and instead of being taken to a hospital, I’d been carted off to prison.  This was Detroit, for God’s sake, not Stalinist Russia.  I glared at the hallway beyond the bars.  When the guard came, I’d let him have it!  Though I was no longer married to Dr. Ted Dempsey, orthodontist to the stars, I still knew people.  Lawyers by the dozens, of course.  As well as judges and even the county sheriff who had once slipped me some tongue at a New Year’s Eve party.  Just watch and see who’s career went into the toilet because they arrested Lilith Straight!
    I smoothed my sweater, then combed my fingers through my hair, dislodging a myriad of tiny pebbles that rattled onto the floor.  Stunned, I picked one up.  It was a fragment of glass, probably from the windshield of the car that had hit me.  But if I’d been struck that hard, how on earth was I standing upright now?
     Once more unnerved, I closely examined my surroundings.  Yes, there were prison bars here, but there was also an expensive leather couch.  Not to mention an oil painting hanging above it.  Not one of those cheesy ‘starving artist’ sale things, but what looked like a genuine work of art.  There were brass lamps and rugs and a bookcase full of leather-bound books.  In the corner stood a water dispenser alongside a coffee maker.  Three sides of the space looked like a waiting room in a plastic surgeon’s office, yet the fourth had the steel bars of a prison.
    But while the books and coffee maker seemed out of place in this jail, my cellmate did not.  She sat on the couch with her legs apart, and her elbows braced on her knees.  She had the shoulders of a linebacker, and her feet were clad in boots with thick, crepe soles.  Looking at her gave me much the same shiver as the steel bars had done.  This woman could eat me in two bites.  She was a bruiser who would make me her bitch.
    As if hearing my thoughts, the woman lifted her head and looked at me.  I pressed my back to the bars, not meeting her eyes.  Instead, I took in the white t-shirt with the cut-off sleeves and the ratty jeans and the thick leather wristband and the enormous chain that went from her front belt loop to her back pocket.
    But when a full thirty seconds had passed and she said