A Bad Night's Sleep Read Free Page A

But I need a favor.”
    She’d regretted most of the favors she’d done for me in the past but she said, “Anything.”
    My eleven-year-old nephew had been living with me for the last three months. He would be rolling out of bed about now, wondering why the house was quiet and where I was. “Jason needs breakfast and a ride to school,” I said.
    She hesitated. “They’ll let you go in time to pick him up after school?”
    A good point. “Will you call my mom and ask her to take care of him for a couple days?”
    She seemed relieved that I hadn’t asked her to do it herself. “Sure.”
    “Thanks,” I said. “I owe you.”
    “You’ve always owed me and you always will,” she said. Then, gently, “Are you all right?”
    I lied. “Yeah, I’m fine. Any moment now, they’re going to bring me coffee and donuts.”
    “Joe?” Her tone told me not to screw with her.
    “Look, I’ve just got to go through the process. I’ll call as soon as they let me go.”
    “Do,” she said. I imagined her standing over a worktable in the back room of her landscaping business. The bright light and heat of sunlamps would surround her. She would be wearing jeans and short sleeves and her arms would be dusted with potting soil. She would have a dozen green plastic pots on the worktable and she would be transplanting the first growths of flowers and ferns, which she would transplant again into the gardens of her wealthy customers in the spring. I’d seen her like that dozens of times. I wished I was standing with her. I started to tell her that but she’d hung up.
    At the other end of the hall a door swung open and a cop guided a short black man my way. The man wore a blue surgical gown but he looked like the closest he’d ever gotten to being a surgeon was when he broke into a doctor’s medicine pantry for a fresh supply of OxyContin. He stumbled twice, and, when the cop handcuffed him to a chair down the line from mine and disappeared through the glass door, he kept his eyes on the floor.
    I dialed Lucinda Juarez. We’d worked together for the past month, and we’d spent a night together once before that—the worst of the screw-ups that had kept Corrine and me apart. Lucinda was another ex-cop, smarter and quicker than anyone I knew on the force and way smarter and quicker than me. If Larry Weiss screwed up and left me sitting in jail, I figured I could count on her to do what it took to spring me. I needed her to get started now.
    As Lucinda’s phone rang the glass door swung open and the woman cop and three uniformed cops came out. She extended her hand for my phone. I gave it to her.
    “Time to check into the First District Hotel,” she said.

 
    THREE
    FOR THREE DAYS I sat in an isolation cell behind the 1st District Station, which had the biggest stationhouse lockup in the city. If a political convention came to town and a demonstration got out of hand, the cops put the protesters there. The rest of the time, the jail housed hookers, pimps, dealers, and addicts. Far as I could tell, the cell block I was in held no one but me.
    A little time to myself. Time to think. Time to reflect on my life and the choices I’d made. Not a bad thing, I told myself. Everyone should do it.
    That worked for about an hour.
    For three days I had no newspaper. No TV. No phone calls. Larry Weiss never managed to get inside to see me. Maybe he was right—maybe I needed a better lawyer. Corrine didn’t get in either. Lucinda must’ve figured out where I was but she never showed. Guards delivered three meals a day, enough to survive on. They shrugged when I asked to see my lawyer. They laughed when I demanded to talk to the district commander. I didn’t bother to ask for Corrine or Lucinda. The stainless steel toilet and sink were clean when I arrived but started to stink on the second day. The world outside the stationhouse could’ve burned and I wouldn’t have known.
    In the evenings before Jen Horlarche had hired me to watch