Page 38 of Ruined

Tell her everything, while still sitting in an interrogation room with a two-way mirror. This is another fake.

“What’s your deal?” I ask. “You work in admin, I guess? Police chief’s assistant?”

Her expression falls, along with the facade. “Hey, you’re good! How did you know?”

“Lawyers don’t have such good nails,” I say.

It’s true. The admin for a precinct like this has a lot of time during the day to sit outside the chief’s office and make sure her nails are on trend. Lawyers have French manicures.

“Aw, thanks!” She looks pleased and relieved. “I told them this wouldn’t work.”

“Yeah. And it’s illegal. They’ve made you a criminal. Ironic, huh?”

She pales at that and rushes out of the room.

“You can get me my real lawyer whenever you like. I’ll know it’s the real deal, because I’ll be walking out the front doors of this piss-ridden station within minutes, if not seconds of their arrival. You’ve got fuckin’ nothing and we all know it.”

At this point, I don’t think they’re going to get a lawyer for me. They don’t care about my arrest. I’m nothing. I’m probably what Bobby used to be: a kill target.

They are desperate for intel. They don’t care that my charges and potential conviction won’t stick. They’ll try every trick in the book just to get something out of me.

That doesn’t scare me. I know as long as I keep my fucking mouth shut, I’ll be fine.

* * *

“Don’t want to talk? That’s fine. You’ll enjoy the cells.”

I am put into a puke green institutional-looking cell with a shitty thin plastic mattress, no pillow, and a toilet that hasn’t been cleaned in months.

They’re going to try to break me, which strikes me as very funny, because I broke a long time ago. Lying back on the mattress, I let my hand drift down my stomach and I find that scar. It’s the center of my universe. It is the wound around which my world revolves.

Much has been taken from me, and what abides is a beast that no longer cares for the laws of men. I will hold out against these interrogations not merely because of some concept of loyalty toward Angelo, but because I no longer consider myself to be of this world.

They leave me in the cell for longer than they should without food. But there’s water in the sink over the toilet, and I can live for weeks without food. There’s some small part of my mind that yearns for Angelo to rescue me, but I know better. In this world, when someone is this deep behind concrete walls and bars, doors that lock with keys carried on the belts of people who have elected to stand between the worst of the world and the rest of it, there’s no easy escape, and there’s even less chance of rescue.

“Eat, Inmate Cooper.”

Someone shoves a tray through the slot in the door. It falls to the floor. I am not going to eat here. I don’t want their food. I don’t want anything from them. I can sustain myself.

I might very well spend the rest of my life here in rooms like these, mostly alone. I know that fear is what they intend to stoke inside me. I know they intend to drive me mad from it and watch me break.

I can predict their next moves, because I was one of them. I imagine I will languish here for seventy-two hours at least. They will be impatient, but three days is a very compelling number. It’s the one that will feel most satisfying to them.

Seventy-two hours is not long, all things considered. It is a blink of an eye in the length of a life. So I lie on my little mattress and I wait for the hours to pass by.

* * *

On the third day, they finally stop fucking around and send an actual agent in. He sits down in the chair opposite me with a heavy seat, making the legs of the chair scrape on the ground where the tube has come through the shitty institutional rubber stoppers. Funny how small details like that stick out at times like this. I’m hyper-vigilant, ultra alert, and in survival mode.

“I’m Agent Sheffield,” he says. “We’re investigating the death of Agent Palmer, who was shot in a diner recently.”

I keep my expression completely neutral.

“We have reason to believe you were the one responsible for his death.”

I say nothing.

“Agent Cooper…”

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