Page 4 of Devil's Iris
The male officer twists around to face me. “Ma’am, you need to calm down, you?—”
Ma’am? “I’monlytwenty–three!” I wail, thumping my head against the window. Have I aged that badly? I’ve always thought that taking on so much responsibility after Dad disappeared and Mom spiraled into addiction made me mature quickly, but did it make melookold too? Do I look like some weathered old woman?
The car hits a pothole, and my head slams against the window hard enough to rattle my teeth. The sharp pain snaps me back to reality.What the hell am I doing right now?I can’t go to jail. If I go, that means Ethan is going as well. I need to pull myself together.
“My brother and I are innocent,” I say as calmly as I can. “We just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. If you had come to that… place an hour earlier—or any other time—we wouldn’t have been there.”
Oh, why couldn’t they have done that? Why couldn’t the universe have cut me this one break?
The officers exchange a glance. “You have the right to an attorney, you know?” the female officer says. “If you’re trulyinnocent, you won’t get locked up. You’re just being detained right now.”
An attorney. Right.
I sigh heavily. I’m not going to have a job when this nightmare ends. And because we live hand to mouth—my hand to three mouths—I have zero savings.
“If you can’t afford one,” the male officer adds, “the state will assign one to you.”
The final nail in my coffin.A state-assigned attorney. Some overworked, underpaid public defender who’s going to do the bare minimum. I’m going to rot in jail.
“But it’s not necessary if you’re innocent,” the female officer says, exchanging another glance with her partner. “You only need an attorney if you’re charged with a crime.”
I bite back my response. No point in explaining that innocent people get railroaded by the system every damn day.
The rest of the drive, I stay silent, clutching what’s left of my composure. I don’t even know which precinct we’re going to, but I breathe a small sigh of relief when we turn towards East New York. The hole exists in this weird border territory between Brooklyn and Queens, so the cops could have been from either borough.
At least if I'm going to jail, it will be on the soil I’ve spent my whole life on.
We pull up in front of the small, unremarkable police station building, and I’m herded out with the rest like sheep to the slaughter.
I’ve never been inside a police station before—unless you count what I’ve seen on TV—so I glance around with morbid curiosity, meeting the stares of several officers who are eyeing our group with obvious disgust.
“I’m innocent,” I blurt to the nearest cop, a tall man holding a stack of paperwork.
He immediately looks away, pretending he didn’t hear me.
My stomach twists.Of course he doesn’t believe me.Then I realize how this must look. I’m the only woman out of about a dozen or so men who were just arrested in a trap house. They probably think I’m the house whore or something.
I sigh, my shoulders sagging.
We are led into an open area filled with rows of cubicles where some exhausted-looking officers sit typing away at their computers, chugging coffee like their lives depend on the caffeine.
Beyond the cubicles are two small holding cells. One is packed to the brim with women in various states of drunkenness—some slumped against the wall, others yelling curses or giggling uncontrollably. The other cell has only a handful of men, most of them silent and sullen, sitting with their heads down like they’re trying to disappear into the benches. The guys from our group are taken to the male cell while the officer holding me casts a look of weary exasperation at the chaos in the women’s cell.
“You think there’s space to squeeze one more in there?” he asks the room in general.
What? If I get stuffed into that sardine can, I swear I’m going to pass out. Am I about to add fainting to my growing list of firsts tonight?
“No,” someone answers, and I glance back with gratitude. It’s the female officer who arrested me. “You can just cuff her to the chair over there.”
The man holding me—Detective Granger, according to the ID badge hanging from his neck—guides me to said chair and unlocks my right wrist, hooking the cuff to the armrest.
Great. Now what?I slump back, taking in the overcrowded and noisy station.
“Do you think he might be innocent? They were friends, after all. How could he kill that poor boy?”
My head snaps towards the officer who just spoke. He’sstanding a few feet away in front of a coffee machine, speaking to another officer. I quickly avert my gaze so they don’t think I’m trying to eavesdrop. They’re probably talking about one of the guys in the male holding cell.
“Did you see the look in that fucker’s eyes when we arrested him? He did it. And I’m going to be on the prosecutor’s neck to make sure he rots in jail,” comes the response—not from the officer beside him, but from someone across the room.
