Clown Girl - Monica Drake [41]
He turned onto Joad, then the short, unpaved stretch of Prosper, then onto Bleakest again, in a circle.
I said, “What, you’re paid by the mileage?”
After too long, Jerrod pulled over in back of the buildings. He sat there with the car idling. Voices squawked on the radio. He cracked his knuckles.
I was handcuffed in the back of a cop car, where the doors didn’t open. We were in a deserted part of town. I barely knew the guy. He was a cop with a boy’s laugh and a man’s gun. He had all the cards. The guns, the asps, the keys. I watched the back of his neck, and wondered if Jerrod had ever beaten anybody up. Maybe he’d clubbed a man with his nightstick. That’s what the tools were for, right? Could he have pepper-sprayed protestors, cracked a head with an asp, shocked a perp, maybe even shot somebody with his gun? For all I knew, Jerrod was a murderer. But he was a man who laughed like a boy.
He got out and opened the back door. He held a ring of keys in his hand. “Get out. And turn around.”
I did. Turned in the empty lot. My legs were weak.
His voice was steady. “The thing is, the lawn mower’s part of a bigger break-in. There’s a procedure I have to follow and not following it could cost me my job. What I’m doing right now, it’s a punishable offense in my line of work.” He unlocked the handcuffs. I heard the key in the lock, felt the cuffs drop away.
He said, “What I should do is follow the path of probable cause. I should read you your rights, search your person, cut the locks on that garage, go into the coop and search it top to bottom. I could corral your boyfriend there hiding on the porch and check out his story. Whoever else you’ve got living in the coop. Chances are, they’d be in the car, riding along beside you now. Those are all things I should do. But I won’t.”
I shook out my wrists. Like air rising in a balloon, blood coursed hot back into the acupuncture points, the baby-heart-spot center in the middle of the inside of my wrists. The suicide slash place.
“Sniffles, I’m letting you off. I don’t think you stole this lawn mower, though I don’t have evidence to the contrary. I don’t think you’re the thief. I’d be wasting my time if I took you in, wrote you up.”
He said, “I’ll save you from a record. This time.”
I wanted to pee, needed my jug. The sun was so bright it was an insult, a slap against the walls of the Ruins. I said, “I don’t know anything about where that lawn mower came from…”
He held up a hand, like a traffic cop directing me to stop. “Listen. I don’t want trouble. I’m going to say I found the mower in an alley. Easy enough.” He said, “ Now do me a favor. Lay low for a while. Pretend like I took you in. Can you do that?” He said, “What with everybody watching back there, I had no choice but to arrest you. I’ve arrested your neighbor for less, plenty often.”
I stretched my arms over my head to feel my own freedom. My breathing grew deeper. The Ruins were mine. “How can I thank you?”
He said, “Just don’t let on that I let you go. Hang out here for a reasonable length of time. Tell anybody you can that I took your fingerprints, your statement, and that I might be in touch.”
“Will do,” I said. My shoulders ached. I stretched one, then the other.
“I mean it. You could get me fired. And don’t buy goods off the street.” He got back in the car, then tossed me the bamboo cane. I picked it up out of the dust.
“One thing,” I said as I straightened.
He waited.
“That guy on the porch? He’s not my boyfriend. For what it matters.”
Jerrod looked at me without answering.
“That’s all,” I said.
He put the car in gear. The car rocked and lurched as he drove over broken cement. The tires of his cruiser kicked up a cloud of the dry ground.
“Hey, wait.” I ran behind the car, with my limp and my bum-leg lope. Jerrod kept going, across the empty lot. He stopped before he pulled into the road and looked both ways twice, even though it was an empty side street. A law abider. I caught up to him and tapped