Phineas is fucked.
I crush my eyes with the heels of my hands until I see stars but I am not transported back to my trailer in the desert or anywhere else. I wonder who it was, who set me up. John Ransom Miller. Molly. Jude. Jeremy, the spurned doorman. Veronica had no discernible motive but then motive is the biggest crock of shit in legal and literary terminology. Consider the waitress with a hacking cough who serves you hashed browns at five a.m., what the hell motivates her. The guy outside the diner, waiting for a bus with a hole in his shoe. The guy who drives the fucking bus, for that matter. What motivates them. What motivates any of us but money and sex and basic survival. Veronica had arms like winter twigs but she might well have been stronger than she looked. She had intimate access to that wig and if someone offered her a thousand dollars, who the hell knows, she might have been happy to shank a common street whore. How the hell do I know. I had my cock in her mouth for about ninety seconds but I didn’t get to know what was in her heart. I can’t help but laugh. I love this society we live in. I don’t know. I don’t know who rang my bell and it really doesn’t matter. It could have been any one of them. It wasn’t me, anyway. I was drunk as a lord but not drunk enough to kill.
I am left to decompose for a few hours.
At what feels like two in the morning, the new guard arrives with a gloomy kid in medical scrubs who takes samples of my blood and urine. Then at dawn I am served a meal of processed meat on white bread, half of a canned peach in sticky syrup, and a small paper cup of grape Kool-Aid. The meat is slimy, the bread damp. The peaches are gray and the Kool-Aid is grape only in name and color. I need my strength, though, and I consume the food mechanically, masticating with a dull efficiency that pleases me.
Along about five, not long before the first pink fingers of dawn, I get another surprise. The guards bring me a cellmate. A white guy, cat thin and lined with tattoos. The hard leather arms of a welterweight. Dirty blond hair and eyes like smoke, a scruff of beard. His name is Sugar Finch, and when he sees me, he just grins. He grins like his mouth is full of locusts.
sixteen.
AND THE GUARDS TAKE HIS BODY AWAY AT NOON. I never get breakfast or lunch. I expect them to move me into another cell, an isolation unit, but they never do. I expect them to come beat me half to death, but they never do. I expect the detectives to send for me, so they can tell me just how badly I have fucked myself, but they never do.
I dragged Sugar Finch into the corner, where the water was up to my ankles, and killed him with my hands before dawn. Impaled his eye sockets with my thumbs, just as I’d imagined. I skull-fucked him with my fingers and the blood spilled up my arms, all the way to my elbows. I don’t want to talk about it, not yet. I may never want to speak of it. It was the worst thing I’ve ever had to do. This little cell is now the perfect crime scene. I expect dire consequences, but none seem to be in the offing. No one says boo to me.
Come six or seven next evening and my head is a pocket of rage. Tunnel vision. The angry flap of blackbird wings, just out of reach. I am crawling with imaginary bugs. My skin is slick with sweat and I’m cold. This is one of my usual headaches, with a touch of the delirium tremens thrown in. I reckon my body has designated this as happy hour and now it wants a fucking cocktail. And here comes the guard, just like that. Wonders never, so they say.
Phineas Poe, he says. Time to see the judge.
I don’t understand. They wouldn’t take me directly to be arraigned, not after I’d killed my bunkmate, would they. I would expect another round of questioning, maybe even a beating.
The guard leads me down a long corridor with flickering lights. My hands remain shackled together but I consider myself lucky. I am told to wait in line with about twenty prisoners to be transported to court and several of the poor bastards are wearing those leg and crotch shackles that make them walk like angry ducks.
The courtroom is fairly disappointing. The walls are a pale pea green and the floor is carpeted. The lights are fluorescent and everyone’s skin looks faintly orange. There are no shadows. I am taken in by the bailiff and led over to the defendant’s table where John Ransom Miller is waiting for me. He wears a black suit with black shirt and black tie. He has recently shaved and smells vaguely of licorice.
You. You’re my fucking lawyer.
He hisses at me to be quiet and sit down.
This is just great.
Quiet.
Maybe I have something to say.
Later, he says. You can talk later.
I curse inwardly at him and sit down in a wobbly wooden chair. It seems to me that the state could step up and provide chairs that didn’t wobble but then maybe they have other fish to fry. Miller sits beside me and shuffles papers. I find my nostrils twitching every time I catch a whiff of licorice.
The whole thing plays out with very little drama. The bailiff coughs and tells everyone to rise and there is great, unceremonious shuffling of bodies as a middle-aged white man with a shiny bald skull comes in wearing the standard dark robe. My name is called and the charges are read. The judge barely glances up through the whole thing, which takes about ninety seconds. He asks how we plead and I flinch as it occurs to me that Miller and I didn’t exactly discuss that. But he says not guilty and no one is surprised. The assistant prosecutor makes a fairly convincing statement about the horrific nature of the crime and claims that I am a vagrant and therefore a flight risk and should be held without bail. Miller says nothing, which pisses me off. He stares at his fingernails, bored, as if he knows the outcome already. Then the judge whacks the gavel and says that the prisoner will appear before the grand jury in one week and bail is set at two hundred thousand dollars and that’s that. The prosecutor mutters a few sweet nothings to herself and the bailiff comes to take me away. Miller informs me that because the police are holding my clothes as evidence, he brought me a suit to wear and he hopes it fits.
He says he will be waiting for me outside.
The process of being released from lock-up involves a lot of waiting on benches with three or four other gloomy fuckers who smell bad and look sorry as hell. I am given a small, grimy envelope that holds a mashed pack of cigarettes and ninety dollars. I had no wallet, of course. I had no identification and no jewelry. There is blood in my hair and I stink to heaven, so I ask to be allowed to shower but the guards ignore me and it seems like a good idea not to push it as I wouldn’t want anyone to get the bright idea to delouse me or something. Then I am given a new Hugo Boss suit in a sort of chocolate brown color and stylishly cut with narrow legs and wide lapels. The material is a wool and silk blend and light as a feather. There is a pale pink shirt to go with it and no tie, and I must say I look fucking sharp. I particularly like the way the bloodstains on my motorcycle boots complete the outfit and I start to snort and giggle like a mental patient.
Then outside, flinching away from the sun like a rat. Miller waits for me on the steps. He asks me how I’m doing and his tone is casual, as if we are meeting for lunch.
I’m a peach. Where is Jude?
Detained, he says.
How did you know I was arrested?
He shrugs. Heard it on the scanner, actually.
Cool, I say.
Yes. He sniffs me.
I know. I stink.
You’re deadly, he says.
I assume you paid my bail.
He smiles. It was the least I could do.
Thanks. I take it you’re a good lawyer.
The best, he says. And very expensive.
Of course.