Nightcrawling(46)

I know one of them sent her ’cause that’s the name I gave Camila, gave everyone that ever saw me on the street. They must have found me out. Maybe this is the day they take me in, enter my fingerprint into their computers, and leave Trevor alone. “Maybe. You need something?”

The man takes his turn now, after lady cop tilts her head. She doesn’t even look at him, just gives this little head tilt and they must have rehearsed this before because his mouth opens a beat later. “We’re undergoing an internal investigation and we’re going to need to speak with you. I’m Detective Harrison and this is Detective Jones.”

I rub my free hand across my face, wipe up the water still running from my hairline. “Trevor, why don’t you go upstairs and start on that cake? I’ll be up soon.” I squeeze his hand, look down at him. His face maps fear like a direct route to a panic attack, but I don’t got time to comfort him when they’re still standing here, staring at me straight out the shit pool. I release Trevor’s hand, and give his shoulder a nudge toward the stairs, watch him go all the way up, and wait for the door to slam.

The woman, Detective Jones, scrunches her lips up toward her nose so they wrinkle. “Actually, we think it would be best for you to come into the station with us. We’re going to need to complete a recorded interview and some paperwork and it would be best to do it all at once. Don’t you think that’d be a whole lot easier?” She tries to make her voice higher than it is. I can tell because the pitch squeaks at the end of each sentence and the corners of her eyes squeeze, trying real hard to keep herself soft. I bet she’s the good cop in their role-playing. Bet she don’t like it that much.

I should have known it would end in this. The station. Cuffs must come next. “How long this gonna take?” I cross my arms to cover the way my bra shows through the shirt, sticky and wet.

Detective Harrison puts on his bad-cop face, knits his nose upward, chin tilt. “You’ll be home before dark for sure. Unless you wanna make this harder on yourself and then it might take longer.”

I don’t know what he means, but it’s clear they’re not about to tell me, so I nod, pull my sneakers on. Jones motions her arm for me to follow Harrison out the gate. I trail behind him, sandwiched between them, trying to get one last flash of Trevor on the landing. He isn’t there.



* * *



—

Lived here my whole life and never been in OPD headquarters. The building is larger than any other one in the area, plopped between Jack London Square, Chinatown, and Old Oakland. It hovers in the center of the city like a camera hidden in plain sight. All the cop cars emerge out of the headquarters, swarm the area.

I’ve never paid any attention to the building, though. Hoped there’d never be any reason to walk inside these doors. Inside, everything feels metallic even though it’s not. Even the windows feel like they’re made of metal, a thin kind that disguises itself as glass. I want to tap on it to see if it feels like metal too: cold and impenetrable.

They made me ride in the back of the car on the way here and I’ve been in the back of a cop car more times than I’d like, but this time I felt more like criminal than victim or woman. Jones kept her body turned halfway toward me in the passenger seat the whole time, stared at me through the metal bars that make up the partition. No way out.

My shoes squeak through the lobby, past uniforms and more uniforms, following Harrison to the elevator. I always take the stairs because you can’t guarantee the doors are ever gonna open again when you step into an elevator and my legs are more reliable than any machine ever could be. But Harrison steps in first, puts his arm through the doorway to keep it open, and waits for me and Jones. The moment the doors shut and he presses the button, I think my eyes might split themselves open.

“I ain’t done nothing.”

I haven’t spoken since we got in the car and they both look surprised that I got words, stare at my lips.

“We’ll talk about it when we get in the office.” Detective Harrison is trying not to look at me. Probably part of the bad-cop act.

Jones stares straight into my eyes, but I don’t even think she’s looking at me. I swear her eyes have blurred and I am just fuzz or the kind of portrait that has no distinct lines. Girl with her mouth open.

I make my hands into fists just so I can feel my nails digging into the palms, know I still got claws. “You arresting me?”

“If we were going to arrest you, we would have started with that.” Jones is already bored with me.

We step off the elevator into a hallway indistinguishable from any other office building, except there are security cameras lining the ceiling and it is too quiet. Phones ring but there are no voices. Harrison leads us down the hall, past doors and more doors, all the way to one with interview written in heavy type on the front.

This room looks just like every other interrogation room they ever showed on CSI or Law & Order. After Daddy got out, he’d sometimes talk about how the cops brought him in these rooms, tried to bury him, chip at his bones, how back in the ’70s the Panthers brought pistols into the streets.

Jones tells me to please have a seat and somewhere at the base of my spine a shock crawls up my body, through my skin, makes me want to punch her. Haven’t been in a fight since middle school, but if I had a chance to watch her peeling lip bleed, I would. I sit down in the chair on one side of the metal table and Harrison takes a seat across from me.