Chapter 1

Ray’s arms extended forward, as if he were typing on a computer. His hands were cuffed to the table. His shoes and socks had been confiscated, on the grounds of safety, and so his feet were bare, sticky on the cold floor. Silently he sat brooding, struggling to slump into the bench’s backrest.

Orbiting Ray was Officer Apples.

Officer Apples was in a tizzy. His bloodshot eyes were widening, ready to jump off his face. The veins on his neck popped and cabled. The twin tufts of salt and pepper hair hugging his head moved and flopped like a flightless bird’s wings.

Clucks were sounding from the corners of the officer’s mouth. It was part of his procedural method, this morbid stridulation. And the sharpness of the air, the vacuity in Ray’s gaze only egged it on...

Officer Apples hammered at the bone-gray table with his nightstick, finding an almost tribal rhythm. The officer repeatedly rapping and whacking the table like he was after a mole. Despite the thickness of the A/C’s frigid blast, beads of perspiration dotted the officer’s furrowed brow and rivulets of sweat streamed over his ruddy skin; his cream-white dress shirt becoming mottled by damp spots.

Officer Apples jerked his neck from side to side, grinned, and then let his smile die, spasming with anger as he resumed shouting accusations, threats of long-term imprisonment and jailhouse justice, and with each blast of invective, he looked less like a cop and more like a drill sergeant drunk on rage.