James Murphy was arrested on a Wednesday.
He was sitting behind the wheel of a rented Ford Taurus, key in the ignition and engine running, but only so he could keep the air conditioner on. The car faced south, sun shining in through the passenger window as midday gave way to evening. A park lay to his right, a well-kept hundred acres of grass, playground equipment, walking paths, and benches shaded by the dense leaves of summer trees. But none of that was of interest to him. Nor were the shadows stretching long in his direction and growing longer as the sun made its descent.
He was watching an estate several hundred yards to the south, watching cars enter and leave. He’d crossed the border into Juarez around nine o’clock Monday night, but spent no time there. Instead, he drove straight through, heading west to La Paz, the place his sister had been living before her dead body turned up in El Paso.
It was a thirty-minute drive from Juarez.
You passed through empty desert along a two-lane strip of faded asphalt. Wild shrubs and cacti dotted the landscape on either side of you. Headlight beams splashed across roadkill, guts spilled out like tangled rope. Aside from the road you were traveling on, you saw no signs of human life. Almost half an hour passed before La Paz came into view in the distance, flickering dim in the night. Five minutes after that you turned right onto Avenida Hidalgo, and as soon as you did, you were in La Paz, a nondescript Mexican town of interest only because it was home to the man you blamed for your sister’s death.
He’d checked into Hotel Amigo, where he was now staying, and after taking a shower and changing clothes, walked across the street to Los Parados, a local dive bar he’d seen while parking. It was dark inside, only neon beer signs and a lamp above the scuffed pool table illuminating the place. About two dozen people inside, either sitting at small round tables or the bar; a couple drunk men throwing darts against the far wall. He sat on a duct-taped stool at the counter and poured a few beers down his throat, staring at nothing and thinking about his sister. He wondered if she’d ever come in here, wondered if she ever sat where he was sitting.
A prostitute, perhaps forty, approached him. She said he was handsome and asked if he had a room across the street. He told he wasn’t interested. She pretended to be offended, hoping he’d buy her an apology drink, but when he didn’t, she moved on to the next guy. After an hour he went back to his room and lay down, hoping to get some sleep, but ended up staring at the ceiling, listening to Mexican television until sunlight broke through the window.
Since then, he’d spent at least twenty cumulative hours parked here, watching, but hadn’t seen Alejandro Rocha. Others had come and gone, but Rocha remained unseen, hidden behind the walls of a house larger than the apartment complex James had lived in before joining the Marines, all twenty-five units, the house itself hidden behind a sturdy stucco wall and wrought-iron gate, set at the back of a long cobblestone drive bifurcated by a fountain, a small nude boy pissing into a cast stone bowl.
He looked through his dirty, wiper-streaked windshield, watching as cars and trucks entered or left the estate, looked through binoculars to see the faces of the people in those vehicles, hoping each time the face he saw belonged to the motherfucker he wanted to kill. But each time he saw someone else, someone he didn’t recognize. He’d been hoping to find some sort of pattern in Alejandro Rocha’s behavior, but he hadn’t seen Rocha at all.
He glanced now to his passenger seat and the jug of water sitting there. He picked it up and took a drink. He thought about the M40A3 sniper rifle wrapped in a blanket under his hotel room bed.
Once he knew more about Rocha’s behavioral patterns, he’d bring it out, set up a good distance from the man’s estate, anywhere from five to eight hundred yards, kill the son of a bitch, and be gone before anyone even knew what had happened. Before the mist of blood hanging in the air had even settled to the ground.
He’d imagined squeezing his trigger dozens of times since he learned of his sister’s death, since her body had been discovered next to a dumpster in El Paso by two boys taking a shortcut to school. He imagined the view through his scope, imagined squeezing his trigger and feeling the rifle kick against the crook of his shoulder. The head snapping back. The skull opening, exploding outward, ejecting a messy triangle of brains, blood, and bone shards.
Two blue-and-white police cruisers turned left off the cross street to the south and rolled toward him, their light bars flashing. The lead car rumbled past, swinging left to block him in from behind, while the other car pulled up to his front bumper and stopped only after it made contact with the Ford Taurus.
James keyed off the engine and put his hands on the steering wheel, in plain sight, hoping to keep everything cool.
A uniformed police officer stepped from each vehicle. They wore navy pants and light blue shirts with navy pocket flaps and shoulder straps. Their badges caught the fading sunlight as they walked toward him, right hands resting on their duty weapons. One was tall and thin and clean shaven, the other short and heavyset with facial hair trimmed into a Van Dyke.
“Good afternoon, sir,” said Van Dyke in English, squinting down at him.
“Something the matter?”
“There any reason you’ve been parked here for the last several hours?”
“It is a park.”
“It’s suspicious is what it is.”
“In what way?”
“Why are you parked here, sir?”
“No good reason.”
“You were parked here yesterday as well.”
“Did someone complain?”
“This is a good neighborhood, the wealthiest citizens of La Paz live near here, and strange cars make them nervous. We’ve received several phone calls.”
“I haven’t done anything illegal.”
“Nobody accused you of illegal activity, sir. Why would you mention it?”
“You’re the police.”
“We’ll need to see your driver’s license.”
James unfolded his leather wallet, slipped his license from its sleeve, and held it out pinched between his index and middle fingers. Van Dyke yanked it away, held it about a foot in front of his face, and squinted at it.
“Austin, Texas.”
“Yes, sir.” He’d been living in El Paso for the last month, since he’d returned from Afghanistan, but his license still listed the address at which he’d lived before joining the Marines six years earlier.
“What brings you to Mexico?”
“Had a little time off from work, thought I’d check it out.”
“What sort of work do you do?”
“Marine Corps sergeant.”
“Stationed at Fort Bliss?”
“For the time being. Got back from Afghanistan last month.”
“Fort Bliss is an Army base.”
“Marine Corps detachment.”
Van Dyke handed James back his license. “Step out of your vehicle, sir.”
“I’m not sure that’s necessary.”
“We’re gonna search your car.”
“No, you’re not.”
Van Dyke thumbed the strap off his holster. “I wasn’t asking permission, Mr. Murphy. Step out of your vehicle.”
“No. Last time I checked it wasn’t illegal to sit in a parked car. You’ve got no probable cause to search my vehicle.”
Van Dyke drew his duty weapon, aimed it at James. “Step out of the vehicle now, and keep your hands visible. My reason for searching your car is that I choose to. You’re not in the United States and you’d be smart to remember that.”
James hesitated a moment before he pushed open the door and stepped out onto the street, hands raised to his shoulders. Van Dyke turned him around, kicked his feet apart, and frisked him, finding nothing.
“Stay here,” he said to James. To the other cop he said, “Buscar el coche.”
James sat on the hood of the car and waited for the harassment to be finished.
The thin cop searched the interior, coming up eventually with several computer printouts of articles about Alejandro Rocha, but nothing more. He pulled the key from the ignition, walked around to the trunk, opened it, and searched inside.
“Qué chingados,” he said, holding up two bricks of what looked like cocaine.
James stood up and said, “Now, wait a minute. Those aren’t mine.” But even before the words left his mouth, he knew there was no point in speaking them. The cocaine had been planted and the only people who might’ve done it were the cops about to arrest him.
“We’re taking you in,” Van Dyke said, his duty weapon raised. “Turn around and put your hands on the hood of the car.”
“I’m not sure I’m gonna do that,” James said.
“You will unless you want to get shot. Turn around.”
“We all know those drugs were planted.”
Van Dyke swung his weapon toward James’s left temple.
James reached up and grabbed the wrist, pulled the gun out of Van Dyke’s hand, and turned it around on him. He did this on instinct, without thinking of the consequences, and as soon as it was done he regretted it. It put him in a situation even worse than his last one. He was sure his license plate had been punched into the system. If he killed these men, La Paz Police Department would trace the rental car back to Hertz, which would trace it to him, and he’d end up going down for murder instead of drugs. Not exactly an improvement.
Now he needed to figure out how to extract himself from this situation.
“Why don’t I just get in my car and drive away?”
The thin cop stepped around the trunk with his own weapon raised. In poor English, he said, “Drop … or I … shoot you.”
“Your hand is shaking,” James said. “You’ll miss. Why don’t you drop your weapon and let me leave?”
“No,” the thin cop said. “Do as I say … or die.”
Either James overtook these men, which might lead to one or both of them getting killed, or he let himself be arrested—those were his choices—and though part of him leaned toward overtaking them, consequences be damned, he knew he needed to think about his reason for being in Mexico. He was here for Alejandro Rocha, the man responsible for his sister’s death, and he didn’t intend to leave until the man had paid for it.
“Okay,” he said. He leaned down and set the gun on the asphalt.
As soon as he did, Van Dyke kicked him in the face, bloodying his nose. “That’s for pointing my own gun at me, pendejo.”
James had to resist the urge to fight back, and instead let Van Dyke grab his right wrist, twist his arm behind his back, and slam him down onto the car hood. His cheek lay against the hot metal. Sweat dripped from his nose. Van Dyke slapped a handcuff around his right wrist, pulled his left arm behind his back, and cuffed that one too. He pulled James up, walked him to the police cruiser parked behind the Ford Taurus, yanked open the rear door, and shoved James into the backseat. He slammed the door shut.
* * *
Van Dyke drove him to La Paz police station, which was located in an all-purpose municipal building, a sign on the beige-painted stucco façade reading MUNICIPIO DE LA PAZ, and on each glass door a vinyl sign identified the organization behind it, including, on the third door from the left, POLICIA. The building sat at the end of Calle Tortuga on the west end of town, several dust-covered police cars parked along the shoulder of the road leading up to the building. There was an empty space right out front. Van Dyke pulled the cruiser into it. He killed the engine, pushed out into the bright, hot day, stood a moment under a Mexican sun that had melted a hole in the blue firmament, and pulled open the back door. He grabbed James by the shirt collar and yanked him from the cruiser. Pushed him toward the police station, up the steps, and through the glass door. The door sighed shut behind them.
Tepid air blew from several vents, making the station almost comfortable.
The desk sergeant glanced up at them with low-lidded eyes, stared a moment, and looked back down to the manual typewriter in front of him, tapping out his words slowly and with great force to ensure each whack marked all three carbon copies. Yellow, pink, blue.
Van Dyke led him past the desk sergeant and a squad room littered with cheap fiberboard desks—and a few disheveled cops—to a room containing only a metal table and two foldout chairs. He shoved James into the room and yanked the door shut.
A moment later it locked with the solid metal clack of a dead bolt.
* * *
Almost an hour later, a man of about fifty, with a thick comb of a mustache that covered his upper lip and deep crow’s feet around the eyes, walked into the room. He wore a brown suit. His black hair was greased back except for a strand that hung loose over his right eyebrow, curling back up on itself like a fishhook. He nodded at James and without a word unhooked the cuff from his left wrist. He sat him down in one of the foldout chairs and clasped the loose cuff around a thick steel staple welded to the edge of the table. Sat down across from James, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and stuck one between his lips. Lit it with a scratched Zippo, took a deep drag, exhaled through his nostrils. He held the cigarette pinched between index finger and thumb. Used his teeth to peel a flake of dry skin from his bottom lip and spat it to the floor.
“I’m Detective Ernesto Huerta and I have many questions for you, James Murphy.”
“I don’t have any answers. The cops planted that cocaine in my trunk.”
Detective Huerta waved away the statement with a lazy sweep of his left hand, as if shooing away a fly. “My questions don’t concern the cocaine in your trunk.”
“What do they concern?”
“Your interest in Alejandro Rocha—and the rifle my men found in room two thirteen.”
“You searched my hotel room?”
“We’ve been aware of you since your arrival, Mr. Murphy. La Paz isn’t a town people regularly visit. What’s your interest in Rocha?”
“Who?”
“Don’t pretend you know not whom I speak of.”
“I’m not pretending.”
“You had twenty-seven news articles about him in your car.”
“I might have heard of him.”
“So what’s your interest?”
“I don’t see how that’s any business of yours.”
“It is if it’s related to the rifle.”
“I’m licensed to carry that gun.”
“Not in Mexico. Drug and weapons charges are very serious business. Especially with the amount of cocaine found in your trunk.”
“I told you already, those drugs were planted.”
“That argument will not go very far with a judge.”
“How’s it going with you?”
“What’s your interest in Alejandro Rocha?”
James only stared. Said nothing.
“This will go better if you cooperate.”
“I’m not interested in cooperation. Not with the bought-and-paid-for cops of La Paz Police Department.”
“Trust me, Mr. Murphy, you do want to cooperate. You want to do this the easy way.”
“You don’t have a clue what I want,” James said. “If cooperating with you is the easy way, I’ll go the hard way.”
Detective Huerta shrugged. “So be it. I’ll take you to La Paz City Jail where you’ll be held until your trial’s finished, at which point you’ll either be moved to one of the long-term blocks at the jail or transferred to Cereso state prison in Juarez. Your conviction, however, is not in question.”
“When can I expect the arraignment?”
“It could be ninety days; it could be six months. There’s no hurry to get this done. But it doesn’t matter. As soon as you’re there, prison will be your home until you die. You fucked with the wrong individual.”
“I didn’t fuck with anybody.” But James now regretted allowing himself to be arrested. Rocha must have seen James—or been told about him—and sent the police out to bring him in. A man watching his estate was a man worth taking an interest in, and cops were good at getting information out of people. They’d already learned more than he wanted them to know, and they’d surely pass along what they’d learned to Rocha.
“You said you wanted the hard way,” Detective Huerta said. “You’ll get it.”
* * *
Detective Ernesto Huerta shoved James into the back of a black sedan, slammed shut the door, and got into the driver’s seat. Started the car and slid it into gear. The fan belt squealed. He looked in the rearview mirror at James and James looked back. Detective Huerta slipped a cigarette between his lips and set the end on fire. Cracked his dust-covered window and blew smoke out the side of his mouth.
“You still have a chance to talk.”
James continued to stare into Detective Huerta’s eyes in the rearview mirror. His lips remained sealed. He blinked.
“Okay,” Detective Huerta said.
He pulled his foot off the brake and moved it to the gas. The car eased forward. He drove them south along Tortuga until they hit Calle El Tule, where he made a right. They headed west through the desert toward a crescent of large brown hills and continued on for another ten miles before driving into the desert valley at the base of those hills.
The jail came into view in the distance, wavering unsteadily behind heat vapors. Several low cinder block buildings surrounded by guard towers. Three rows of chain-link fence topped with razor wire. If you made it over the first fence you’d still have two more to get past, a gap between each of them. No chance of doing that before one of the towered guards saw you and put a .308 Winchester into your back.
James felt his stomach go sour.
* * *
Detective Huerta pulled the car up to a cinder block building with TRATAMIENTO hand-stenciled above the rusting metal door. He stepped outside, walked to the car’s back door, swung it open. Pulled James out, took him into the building, and handed him over to two guards.
“You’ll regret not talking,” Detective Huerta said. Then he was gone and the rusting metal door latched behind him, the light from outside cut off.
The two guards took his personal property, including his watch, his wallet, his cell phone, and his clothes (except his Puma sneakers). They took him to a shower and handed him a hotel-sized bar of soap. He stood under the cold spray and washed for five minutes before one of the guards shut off the water, soap still in his hair and under his arms. One of them tossed a scoop of delousing powder onto his head and another onto his groin. It stung his eyes. He wiped the powder away with a threadbare towel. The second guard yanked the towel away and handed him a gray jumpsuit. He put on the jumpsuit and his shoes. They walked him out of processing and handed him over to another guard and, in Spanish, told the guard to take him to Block A, cell 16. The guard shoved him forward and marched him down various corridors. A few inmates shouted at him:
“¡Yo cago en la leche de tu puta madre!”
“¡Cagaste y saltaste en la caca!”
“¡La concha de tu madre!”
But mostly they just looked out through their bars in silence.
Finally they reached his cell. The guard shoved James inside and swung shut the barred door. It hit with a loud but hollow clank and latched.
In English the guard said, “You should be careful in here, bolillo. People die.”
He pivoted and walked away. The echoes of his footfalls, loud at first, faded to nothing.
James turned in a slow circle, looking at his cell, taking in his new surroundings. The cell was about eight feet deep and six feet wide. He could stretch out his arms and touch each wall with his fingertips. The walls were cinder block. Several of the previous inmates had carved their names or initials into them. Others had carved or written crude phrases: ME CAGO EN LA LECHE, TENGO GANAS, and VETE A LA VERGA CULERO. Against the back wall was a steel toilet and a basin. A barred window above the toilet looked out on a lamp-lit yard. A cot against the left wall held a folded white sheet, a thin blanket, and an uncased pillow. The pillow was ringed with yellow sweat stains. A metal desk sat against the right wall, bolted to the floor, a chair pushed up to it. He walked to the desk, shoved the chair aside, and pulled open the single drawer. Inside he found a pad of paper, a rubber band, and a metal pen casing from which someone had removed the ink tube, and a small spring.
He pushed the drawer shut and walked to the cot. He unfolded the sheet, threw it over the cot’s thin mattress, and tucked it in. Draped the blanket over the sheet and put the pillow at the head of the bed. Lay down and looked up at the concrete ceiling. Thought of his time in boot camp, sleeping on the cots in the barracks there. This was very similar—and totally different.
People die. That was what the guard had said, and he knew it was true. Everyone born would one day die. Like his sister had died.
He thought about his history with her.
He was four years old on the day she screamed into the world. He remembered being in the delivery room—his parents had wanted him to understand what was happening—and believed now her birth was his earliest memory. It wasn’t clear in his mind. Rather than being a mental movie, the memory was a series of out-of-focus still photographs. Yet he remembered.
There he was, four years old, standing at the foot of his mother’s birthing bed. There was his mother with her legs spread, knees bent. A thatch of wet blond hair sticking out between his mother’s legs: just that disembodied blond hair tinted pink with amniotic fluids. Layla’s purple face pushed out from between their mother’s legs, eyes and lips shut tight, face like a prune. A doctor holding her, so tiny. His father with a large pair of scissors cutting the umbilical cord, a shocked expression on his face, as if he’d just witnessed something he was not prepared for.
James loved her from the beginning. He gave her bottles, played with her on the carpeted floor, napped with her in the crib even though he was a big boy and slept in a bed.
He was also protective of her. He was going into fourth grade as she was entering kindergarten, and on the first day he insisted on walking her to class, and she hugged him tight and cried, and he told her it would be fun. At the end of the day she said he was right. The first day of school had been fun. They’d sung the alphabet song and played kazoos and she’d made new friends, Brynlee and Caydence, and they’d get to see each other tomorrow. He walked her home, holding her hand the whole time. He was only nine, but her hand felt small in his.
They talked about everything. Siblings who were close could discuss matters with one another they’d never bring up to their parents or their friends from school. He had a bond with his baby sister that combined familial love with absolute trust, and because he was four years older, she often talked to him about her troubles and asked him for advice.
He did the best he could for her. He helped her with schoolwork he’d already had to do. He took her to the park and pushed her on swings. Later, when she had boyfriends who treated her poorly, he bloodied their noses and bruised their ribs.
Yes, he’d been protective, but he hadn’t saved her.
If he hadn’t been in Afghanistan, she might have come to him for help, and he might have been able to protect her from the people who’d dragged her to her death. But he’d been gone when she needed him most.
So he knew full well the guard’s words were true. People die.
But he knew something else as well, something the guard hadn’t said, which was that sometimes those deaths must be paid for. Everybody died but not every death was equal. Some lives were stolen, as his sister’s life had been stolen, and even though a stolen life couldn’t be recovered, you could make someone pay for it.
He had every intention of making the man who took his sister’s life pay in full.
It didn’t matter that he was in jail. He would find a way.
He had to.
* * *
James woke up to the sound of his cell door swinging open. Two man-shaped shadows entered the room. Dark silhouettes, bulky. They grabbed him and pulled him from his cot. They threw him down. He whacked the side of his head against concrete, then looked up at the silhouettes. His left arm was asleep. His fingers tingled and ached as blood returned to them. He asked what the hell was going on.
“You have a visitor,” one of the men said in Spanish.
Footsteps echoed in the corridor outside his cell. A man appeared in the unbarred doorway. He was backlit by dim yellow bulbs in the hall. He said in Spanish that he wanted the light on in this cell. One of the guards told him all the lights were connected to the same circuit, that the only way to turn on this light was to turn them all on.
“Then turn them all on.”
“Yes, sir.”
One of the guards left, his footsteps, loud at first, fading as he walked to the end of the corridor. The naked yellow bulb in the ceiling flashed to life, as did the bulbs in every other cell in this block, humming with electricity. Other inmates cursed and shouted. The guard standing over James yelled for them to shut their bocas malditos.
James looked from the guard to the man standing in the doorway. He recognized him immediately. He’d seen his picture illustrating dozens of news articles. Alejandro Rocha. He was handsome, about forty years old, and stood five ten. He had prominent cheekbones and a widow’s peak. His brown eyes were almond shaped. He wore a tailored seersucker suit, white, a white cotton shirt, a baby blue tie, baby blue pocket square, and baby blue socks. His hands were clasped behind his back. A smirk touched his lips.
“Mr. James Murphy,” Rocha said in unaccented English. “I have a few things I’d like to discuss with you. May I enter?”
James sat up, nodded.
Rocha entered the cell, glanced at the guard, told him in Spanish to get out and shut the door. The guard did as he was told. Alejandro Rocha’s organization wasn’t as large as the Juarez cartel, but it brought in millions of dollars a year, and a percentage of his income could easily buy a town the size of La Paz—law enforcement officials, politicians, and anybody else who might need to hear a monetary argument to see things his way—and he’d used his money to do just that. It was the only way for an illegal operation of that size to function.
James knew this, but watching a prison guard take orders from a man who deserved to be behind bars put a coil of rage in his belly, and as he watched Rocha sit casually on the edge of the cot and cross his legs, that coil tightened, the pressure increasing.
“I understand you’ve done some research on me, Mr. Murphy, but did you know that I’m an educated man?” He looked at James, waited for a response.
Through clenched teeth: “No.”
“Business degree from Harvard. I’ve done so well in business, in fact, that I finished paying off my student loans years ago.” He smiled. “My education paid for itself. The American dream realized in Mexico.”
It was the smile that did it. How smug it looked plastered on the tan face.
The coiled pressure couldn’t be contained.
James dove for him, shoulder slamming into Alejandro Rocha’s stomach. The air escaped Rocha’s lungs and he doubled over while the momentum of the blow slammed him back against the wall. He whacked his head on a cinder block. James got to his feet and swung, punching the son of a bitch in the nose. Blood poured from his nostrils, ran over his mouth, dripped onto the white shirt. James swung again.
The cell door opened. Both guards rushed in. They grabbed James by the arms and flung him away. He whacked his head on the steel toilet and dropped to the floor. The guards moved in on him, drawing their saps.
“Stop,” Rocha said in Spanish. “We’re fine. Leave us to our conversation.”
He pulled the blue pocket square from his coat, snapped it open, and wiped at his bloodied face.
The guards left the cell again, shut the door.
James pushed off the floor and sat down on the edge of the toilet. He looked across the small cell to Alejandro Rocha. The man blew his bleeding nose into the pocket square, folded it, and slipped it away.
“I admire a man who’s in touch with his emotions. So many men are closed off, but I’m going to have to ask you to refrain from violence for the time being. What’s your interest in me, Mr. Murphy?”
“There’s nothing interesting about you.”
“You did a lot of reading up for a man with no interest in who or what I am.”
“I’ll read a bottle of toilet cleaner if I’m taking a shit and there’s nothing else handy.”
“You may choose to deflect, Mr. Murphy, but eventually I’ll get to the bottom of this matter.”
James thought: You’ll get to the bottom of a hole in the ground, and I’ll cover you in dirt, you motherfucker.
He said: “Why did you have me locked up?”
“I like to know where a man is when I have questions for him. Did you intend to use the weapon the police found in your hotel room on me?”
“It was for protection.”
“A sniper rifle for protection?”
“I like to keep danger at a distance.”
“Who are you working for?”
“Amway. I was hoping you’d want to host a party. I think your estate would really impress people. I’m not saying we should lie, but maybe imply that Amway got you the place.”
Rocha smiled without humor. “I see. So this conversation is going nowhere.”
“You’ll get where you’re going faster by running on a treadmill.”
Rocha got to his feet. “Very well. But you need to understand something. I can make the charges against you disappear. It’s nothing to me. I mutter a few sentences and you’re free. I’m also more than willing to buy my way out of trouble. I assume you have access to the people who hired you. I believe turnabout is fair play. But so long as I have questions about your intentions, so long as I don’t feel safe with you walking the streets, you’ll remain behind bars.”
“Or you’ll have me killed.”
“Don’t be foolish. I know better than to burn a book before I’ve read it. Of course, if a book is very tightly bound, sometimes you do need to break the spine to get at the information you want. I suspect we’ll be talking again soon.”
Alejandro walked to the cell door and told the guards to let him out, which they did. The door swung shut again with a metal clack. Rocha looked at him through the bars. “Try to stay safe, Mr. Murphy. Many terrible things can happen in jail.”
He turned and walked away, his footsteps echoing loud in the otherwise quiet corridor. The guards followed behind him. James stood at the cell door and listened until he heard only silence. He walked back to his cot, lay down, stared at the ceiling.
He wondered how long it would be before Rocha grew impatient and decided to kill him. He wondered what he’d do about it, what he’d be able to do about it.