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Ina rubbed her veined hands together in worry now that the thought of her tenant had entered her mind. His disappearance made no sense. She didn’t believe he would run off and leave without a word. As the days passed, she had become sure something must have happened to him. Jenna Black called and that only worried Ina more.
The building inspector made a last scrawl in the notepad, stabbing at the paper to endorse the finality of his decision. “You have seven days to vacate.”
Squaring her shoulders, Ina raised her chin and steeled her eyes at the inspector. “Well then, for seven more days this is still my home and I’ll thank you to get the hell out.”
When the crunch of gravel abated, and the building inspector’s car was gone from sight, Ina allowed her tears to spill from her eyes and zigzag down the wrinkles on her cheeks.
****
Eric looked down at a plate of runny eggs and fatty bacon. Four slices of toast, veiled beneath a layer of butter, shared the plate. “Ah…my morning dose of cholesterol, I was starting to run low.”
“I’ll bring you a muffin tomorrow.” Willy Parks closed the cell door behind him and rushed away.
Eric ate the eggs and most thoroughly cooked pieces of bacon and discarded the rest of his meal. He stood and stretched to loosen knotty lumps in his neck but took care to avoid compromising his broken ribs. After six days, suffering was no longer an apt description of how he was feeling. Sharp pains had ebbed to a tolerable ache and his facial swelling had subsided. A stubble had sprouted and covered the bruises on his jaw, but bands of purple and chartreuse lingered under his eyes.
The chief returned and Eric handed him his plate. “Not that I don’t think of this place as home sweet home, but I’d really like to upgrade my accommodations. Maybe have a room with a view, or better yet, one with a shower. Washing up in your rest room doesn’t really cut it.”
Willy ignored the comments and stepped back out of the cell, but Eric persisted. “Y’know, Chief, the first couple of days I was here, all I wanted to do was lie still and sleep off the pain. Now I’m starting to getreallypissed off. I haven’t been arraigned or formally charged with anything. I haven’t seen a judge. Seems to me you’ve bypassed due process.”
“Seems tomeyou’re familiar with getting arrested.”
“Could be. So when the hell do I get out of here?”
“When I say you get out of here.”
Eric grabbed the bars with both hands and pressed his cheek up close, shouting as Willy Parks hurried away. “You mean when Ash Baldwin says so, don’t you, you spineless son of a bitch!”
The plates rattled in the police chief’s hand. “As soon as your prints—”
“Fuck you! You never sent them to the state police because if you had you would have let me go. I told you who I am a hundred times. Send my prints out.”
He paced his cell for all of ten minutes before Willy returned. Without saying a word, the chief snapped a pair of extended link cuffs onto Eric’s wrists, keeping his arms facing front. The chief trawled him to his desk and carefully rolled his fingers against an ink pad to blot them onto the print sheet.
“There. Satisfied?” Willy said.
Eric cleaned his fingers with an alcohol wipe and shrugged. “Lose the ones you took the day I got ‘mugged’ or did you just toss them in the trash?”
“Shut the hell up.”
Once again, Willy Parks, corrupt chief of police, was in a lather of sweat, his uniform shirt dark at the armpits. Eric counted the number of times Parks brought a fist to his mouth and belched. The man looked to be fast approaching an ulcer, a heart attack, or both. He picked up the phone and called the trooper barracks.
“This is Police Chief William Parks of Cromline, badge number 8805. I’m sending a set of prints over for you to run through IAFIS, a John Doe Ijustpicked up for vagrancy an hour ago.”
“Just?” Eric raised his brows, smiled, and shook his head. “You are so screwed, Chief.”
****
Vagrants weren’t high on the list of a fingerprint match, and it took close to four hours before the chirping motor of the Fax machine peeled. Eric watched from his cell as the transmission came through. An endless roll of paper slid out of the machine and folded over onto itself like whipped cream on a sundae. Eric knew his resume would generate such a list.
Willy snatched the mass from the tray, straightening the length of flimsy paper to read it. Eric watched as the fat cop quickly scanned the mass.
“Anything interesting?” he called out.
“Very. Looks like you were quite the delinquent. I’ve never seen a rap sheet stamped with so many sealed juvie records.”
Willy’s waxy frown was replaced with a smile, and he blew a long whistle. “Well, well, well. Assault, resisting arrest,andattempted involuntary manslaughter. Ash was right about you. Movie star my ass.”
Eric chuckled. “Stop scanning over the charges and read the name.”
