Just as I got to sleep after our night out with Jeffcoat, someone banged on the front door.
“Police, open up.” The voice was deep, unfamiliar. I couldn’t believe it. Jeffcoat had already blabbed.
I peeked in on Red Eye before I answered the door. He was wide awake, chambering a round into a Glock under his pillow.
“Get in the closet,” I said.
He climbed down gingerly, pulled all the blankets, sheets and pillows off the bed and stuffed himself inside the closet, Glock and all.
“Winter, we’ve got a warrant for your arrest. Open the door or we’re coming in.” This was a different voice, one I recognized. Officer Carter. Something was wrong here. The Oakland Police didn’t announce themselves. I tiptoed over to the door and checked the peephole. Carter and a short, well-built Hispanic stood alone on the front porch. More weirdness. The OPD came through your door in numbers, not in pairs. Overkill was the name of their game, even more so when dealing with ex-cons.
“Let me get dressed,” I said.
“Later for that,” Carter said, “open up now.”
At least I sleep in boxers when I’m alone in the bed. As soon as I opened the door Carter’s hand was in the middle of my chest driving me backwards until I stumbled and fell, not more than five feet from where Prudence had laid on the carpet. I hoped I wouldn’t end up in the same state. They say history has a way of repeating itself. At least I could swim a little bit.
“Hands behind your back,” Carter shouted, “you know the drill.”
His heftily muscled partner had a big black automatic trained on my forehead.
I rolled over and Carter put on the plastic cuffs. If experience was anything to go by, I’d probably lose the feeling in my hands after a few minutes. Lots of fond memories were coming back.
The two pulled me to my feet and read me my rights. I was under arrest for obstruction of justice—helping people enter the country illegally. I had no idea where this came from. Could have been Olga, but if this had to do with immigration I expected the Feds. At this point, though, jurisdiction questions wouldn’t help. It wasn’t like I had a choice. Didn’t matter that much anyway. The locals gave you less time but the Feds served better food. Some Fed joints even had free soda machines.
Carter’s partner stuck his head in the door of the second bedroom. All he saw was an empty bed. And I’d wondered why Red Eye took all the blankets with him. Sometimes I didn’t give him the credit he deserved.
Middle of the night isn’t my favorite time to be arrested. The holding cells are always filled with the nightly cohort of drunks and defeated street brawlers soothing their wounds.
I had to climb over a guy who called himself “Crazy Jerry,” just to get myself a little piece of plank bench to sit on. Jerry boasted that this was his “golden anniversary”—his fiftieth drunk and disorderly arrest. I hoped he wouldn’t piss in his pants but the stains on his jeans didn’t suggest the odds were in my favor.
I sat there in my boxers until some Skinhead offered me a t-shirt. I didn’t like his politics but I was freezing my ass off so I took the shirt. Three hours later, just after dawn, our sack “breakfast” arrived—balo-ney sandwich, a mustard pack, an apple, a pack of cheese crackers and a half pint of warm nonfat milk produced in a prison farm near Fresno. I finished it all off in five minutes. It took them a whole day to give me a picture ID, have some nurse ask me if I heard voices and get my county issue clothes—an orange jumpsuit, a T-shirt and the black canvas shoes that we call “Jap flaps.” It had been several years since I’d had the pleasure of looking down at my leg and seeing the word “prisoner” in six-inch black letters.
When I got to court the following afternoon, the DA said I was a notorious trafficker who had served federal time.
“He’s a definite flight risk, your honor,” he added. “The state opposes bail.”
Justin, my youthful public defender who had introduced himself to me about three minutes before the hearing, leaned over to me and asked what I had to say in reply. After our conversation, Justin managed to point out that I was a “homeowner and lifelong resident of Oakland.”
“Except for his time in federal prison,” the judge interjected.
“Yes, your honor,” Justin said, “but that was more than a decade ago.”
The judge, a man in his fifties with a brown mustache and a horseshoe hairstyle, asked Justin various questions about my employment and other sources of income. Justin and I had more little conferences. I told him about my transport business and several other ventures involving “printing and publishing.” There were grains of truth imbedded in the information I supplied but I wasn’t ready to give him the whole picture. What was I supposed to do, say I did matchmaking for crackpots in Idaho looking for desperate young Filipina women? The fact that I owned two trucks didn’t leave the judge overwhelmingly impressed. I didn’t mention they were sitting in a wrecking yard being sold for spare parts.
“I’ll set bail at $50,000,” he said, drawing his gavel down and looking through the papers for the next case.
Even though a parolee isn’t supposed to have contact with inmates, Red Eye came to visit me after court. We spoke through a metal screen in the visiting area. He said he’d already talked to Jerry Carney, a former heavyweight boxer who ran a bail bond business. I knew some of Jerry’s associates from my time in the Feds.
“Jerry says you’ll be out by the end of the day,” Red Eye told me.
“And you’ll get violated for coming here,” I told him.
“My PO’s cool,” he replied. “Don’t trip.”
It took an extra twenty-four hours but the following day I was shedding that jumpsuit for the Bermuda shorts and Walter Payton T-shirt Red Eye delivered.
My next task was to scrap that wet-behind-the-ears public defender and get a real lawyer. We call public defenders “dump trucks.” I didn’t want to become a freshman lawyer’s dumped load, especially since I still didn’t know exactly why I’d been charged, let alone what the evidence was. I did know one thing, though: I didn’t have long to figure it all out before the whole house of cards crashed down on me and Red Eye.