The door opened and a jailhouse deputy called in the bookie, a name Lester didn’t know, and he smelled him as he passed by: piss and sweat and cigarette smoke in old denim. The door shut behind him and now the Asian kid was looking right at Lester, his eyes dark slits, his head still against the wall, his arms crossed in front of his chest. The white kid stopped talking and looked too, taking in Lester from his running shoes and bare chest to his face.
“You looking for something?” Lester said.
The white kid shrugged and glanced at his friend. The Asian stared at Lester a few seconds longer, then smiled and turned his head away slightly, closing his eyes and leaving the smile on his face. The other kid looked at Lester one more time, then at a spot on the wall just to his right, and Lester glanced at the desk deputy, a lean man in his fifties eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread, reading the San Francisco Chronicle. The Asian looked asleep, his eyes closed, his legs stretched out in front of him, but his lips were still fixed in that smile he’d given Lester, and Lester didn’t like seeing it now; it was as if the kid had looked and seen the trajectory of Lester’s entire life and was now gratified it had all come down to this.
The door opened again and the white kid stood but the dressdown deputy called in Lester, pronouncing his name perfectly, and soon the clothes Lester had yanked from his suitcase this morning at the fish camp were gone and he was pulling on orange jailhouse skivvies, orange canvas pants, an orange T-shirt, and a canvas button-down shirt with COUNTY JAIL embossed in black letters on the back. For his feet he wore orange socks under orange rubber shower sandals, and they clicked softly against each heel as he walked with a new deputy down a brightly lit corridor to Central Holding. The deputy was short and smelled of Old Spice cologne. It was what Lester’s father used to wear, and the deputy was chewing gum as they walked, reading through Lester’s paperwork. “An FTO? What happened, man?” He lowered the jacket to his side and picked up his pace. He didn’t look at Lester, just kept his eyes straight ahead waiting for an answer, without judgment, it seemed, like they were two old friends running together, talking out a problem. Lester’s legs felt heavy and stiff and he began to breathe harder, the jailhouse sandals slapping his heels like a reproach.
They reached a wide steel door at the end of the hall and the deputy pulled from his pocket an ID card attached with a clear plastic cord to his belt. He inserted the card into a slit in the wall, then opened the door for Lester, and they stepped into a cavernous room with three tiers of closed door cells, the fluorescent-lit ceiling over a hundred feet above. In the center of the floor was a rounded desk with two officers on duty, and in the corner of the second tier was a one-way-mirrored control booth. The air smelled of fresh paint and new air-conditioning, and Lester could hear the buzz of half a dozen radios in the cells above. Each cell door had a small window in its center and in one on the second tier was a man’s face, a strand of white hair hanging over his eyes. Lester followed the deputy to the desk where one officer was on the phone and the other was checking off names on a headcount sheet. The escort deputy dropped Lester’s paperwork on the desk. “When’s the last time you guys had an FTO in Protective?”
The deputy on the phone stopped talking, looked up at Lester, then glanced through his jacket. He shook his head once, pushed the papers over to his partner, then hung up the phone and gave Lester his full attention, squinting his eyes like he wanted to pose a question but wasn’t quite sure how to start.
“I haven’t gotten through to my lawyer or wife yet,” Lester said. There was a dull metallic bang from one of the upper tiers.
“You didn’t get your two calls?”
“No one answered.”
“Last meal’s at four. We’ll get you to a phone after that.”
“Home Sweet Home.” The escort deputy knocked once on the desk, then smiled and left, the electronically locked door closing behind him with barely a sound.
NOW LESTER LAY back on his bunk. He could hear the faint bass note of another prisoner’s radio, but nothing else. It was lockdown and the walls were thick. All was quiet and white. He was hungry and he had no idea of the time, but he knew at four they’d bring him food and then he could make his call. It would have to be to Carol, of course. He’d explain to her what he could, that one thing had just led to another, that he hadn’t quite been himself lately and now things were upside down and inside out. But none of that was true; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt more alive, more like who he might really be than in the last few days—making love with Kathy on the ground at the Purisima, coming inside her beautiful mouth, even sticking his pistol up under the colonel’s chin. But he would tell Carol none of this. He would ask her to call their lawyer, ask him to hold off on their dissolution papers long enough to suggest a criminal attorney. A criminal lawyer. He would ask to speak with Nate and Bethany and he’d tell his daughter he’d see her at visiting hours and explain everything, that he was in this place because he did something wrong and people were right to keep him here for now. He imagined her face, more his than Carol’s, her dark eyes filling up right then, and he’d say, “No, no, it’s all right. Everything’s going to be all right.”
Lester closed his eyes, felt sleep waiting for him there behind his eyelids and in his limbs, a heavy dark warmth, and he opened them again; he knew the shooting of the colonel’s son would add a decade or more to any conviction. And even if he was found guilty of lesser charges, his life in law enforcement was over. He wanted to see Kathy. The patrol cars would be at her place in Corona now, more men in French blue moving in on her, escorting her from her house, most likely charging her with everything they were giving him. But she hadn’t answered, so maybe she’d left already. Maybe she’d dropped Mrs. Behrani off at the hospital and just kept driving. But he hoped that wasn’t true. He hoped at the very least she was waiting for him somewhere. He wanted to see her right now. He wanted to stretch out beside her and rest his cheek on her bare breast, smell her smooth olive skin, hear the beating of her melancholy heart. He wanted to push himself all the way inside her and tell her not to worry, don’t worry about anything.
Lester closed his eyes again, but when he did he saw the colonel’s son standing there in the sunlight pointing the gun at him, his brown eyes moist with fear, one hand raised like he was getting ready to break and run, something Lester was certain the boy would have done if he’d known the truth, that the pistol was empty and useless. But Lester had denied him the truth to save himself; he had let fear have its way and now he could only imagine that it had been otherwise, that the boy dropped the weapon and ran through the coffee crowd and away, his lean arms pumping, his thick black hair jerking slightly, people getting out of his way, Lester wrestling himself from the colonel just to watch, watch that one boy fly to someplace better than this. And he thought again of the men who’d shot Esmail, practically boys themselves, letting their fear rule them as well.
After what seemed a long while, Lester’s body began to feel like part of the bunk. He was breathing deeply through his nose, and as sleep began to take him he mouthed a prayer for Esmail, for his full recovery, and he saw himself holding and kissing Bethany and Nate. Then he was in a boat on some river and Carol and Kathy were lying beside him and there were thunderheads in the sky but there was nothing to do about them, and so Lester closed his eyes, one arm beneath each woman. Something rumbled far off in the eastern sky. The air began to turn cool. He breathed in the smell of fish scales and perfume and damp wood. One of the women let out a whimper, as if in the middle of a bad dream, but Lester just settled deeper into the bottom of the boat and waited, waited for the river to take them where it was going to anyway, to the inevitable conclusion of all he had done and failed to do, the air cooler now, almost cold, the boat beginning to rock.