Chapter 6: Booked

I got out of the truck with my hands where he could see them.

"Shea, no!" Roisin was out of the passenger side, her face white. "She didn't do anything! That woman hit me!"

"Ma'am, step back."

"There were twelve people in that shop!"

"Roisin." I turned around and put my wrists behind me myself. "Call the shop customers. The nurses. Get their numbers."

"And then what?"

"Then make a pot of coffee. I'll be back for dinner."

The cuffs went on cold.

The landlady was shouting about the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and her late husband the deputy.

The taller officer put his hand on my head and folded me into the back of the cruiser.

He wasn't rough about it.

He looked embarrassed.

"Who filed it?" I asked through the grille.

"The victim. With her father's lawyer."

"The victim slapped a pregnant woman first."

"That'll come out," he said, not believing it.

The precinct was the one on Gibson Street, a brick box with a flag that needed replacing.

They took my belt and my bootlaces and my phone.

The desk sergeant typed my name with two fingers.

"Occupation?"

"Custodial," I said.

He snorted.

"Says here you put a man on his knees at a party in Brookline." He looked me over. "What, with a mop?"

The officer beside me coughed.

"I'm putting janitor," the sergeant said. "That's what she said, right? Janitor."

"That's what I said."

They took my fingerprints on a glass screen, all ten, rolled one by one.

They took my picture against a height chart.

Then they put me on a steel bench in a room with a window into the hallway.

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