Chapter 8: Bail

The chief drove me down the hill in the back of his cruiser with my camera bag on the seat beside me.

He didn't turn on the siren.

He didn't need to, because it was Friday noon and all of Main Street was out to lunch.

They took my fingerprints at the city jail behind the courthouse.

The officer pressed my left hand onto the glass of the scanner three times.

Each time the screen came up blank, and each time he frowned and wiped the glass.

"Use the ink," the chief told him. "Some people just don't print."

The charge sheet said attempted theft of an heirloom glass plate, property of Eugenia Rountree.

Bail was five hundred dollars, and the magistrate wouldn't be in until morning.

My father was on a mail route with his phone in the truck.

I didn't call my mother.

I called Jesse, and he said, "I'm coming," and hung up before I could tell him not to.

The cell had a steel bench, a steel toilet, and a window the size of a cereal box.

At midnight I sat on the bench with my left hand open on my knee.

At 12:03 it closed.

"I touched you," I told her. "Today. I had my hand right on you."

It squeezed once.

"She keeps you in her pocket."

It squeezed once again.

"I'm going to get you out. I don't know how yet."

It squeezed three times, and then it held on, just held.

I fell asleep sitting up.

At seven the door buzzed, and Jesse was standing in the hall in his water plant shirt with a paper bag from the Hardee's drive-through.

He'd been in the lobby since two in the morning, waiting for the magistrate.

"Biscuit," he said, and handed me the bag. "Don't argue."

His truck was an old green Ford with a bench seat and a dog blanket on it, though he didn't have a dog.

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