Memphis Streets 4: Skeletons

Chapter 26- Brielle

"You're making a big mistake! I didn't kill my parents!" The expressionless cop then ignores my pleas and jerks me toward a small, isolated room.

The humiliation of being arrested at the funeral home extends to being fingerprinted and shoved in front of a camera for my first mug shot. Last year, I was hauled in for questioning over a Vice Disciple and Cartel Lords shootout at The Med, but I was never arrested.

An arrest is a permanent record—proof that I'm headed down the wrong road fast. Now I'm a statistic. This can't be happening. I'm trying to be strong, but I'm overwhelmed with a sense of helplessness and that things happening to and around me are constantly out my control—and I'm sick of it.

"I'm innocent," I shout.

"That's what they all say," the cop says, giving me a final shove into the room. "Take a seat."

I whip around and then suppress the instinct to lash out and knee this asshole's balls up to his throat. "Take. A. Seat," he repeats, gritting his teeth. Defiant, I glare at him with my chest heaving.

Unimpressed, the cop shoves me into the chair. "Thank you," he sneers and then walks behind me to unlock my cuffs.

"Now. Can I get you some water? Soda?"

"No." He shrugs and walks out.

There's a loud click when the door closes behind him, letting me know that it's useless for me to make a run for it. My gaze sweeps around the small room. A nervous twitch thumps against my temple. I rub my hands and wrists to massage the pain from the last few hours—and to give me something to do with my hands. All this room is missing is an iron bed and a straitjacket for me to feel like I'm back in the mental hospital. I sit still as the minutes tick by.

They're probably watching me behind the glass. That's how they do it in the movies—let your guilt eat at you until you're ready to confess everything you've ever done your entire life. The thing is, guilt eats at the innocent, too. If I'd never entered the Douglases' lives. If I'd never hooked up with Dice. If we'd never gone to the prom. If Dice and I had never had that fight with them the night I left. If. If. If. Damn. Why didn't I ask for that glass of water? I lick my lips, but my mouth remains as dry as the Sahara desert.

The door bolts open and that walrus-looking lieutenant, Andrew Blalock, waddles in, looking cranky as fuck.

"Ah, Ms. James. Glad to see that you could make it, seeing as how you missed your appointment the other day."

I frown and then vaguely remember the lieutenant talking and handing me his business card the night my world burned to the ground. My guilt reverses itself and my anger roars back

"You have no right to fuckin' arrest me. I didn't kill anyone."

"Like you didn't try to kill your sister, Le'Shelle, a few months ago?" He slaps a thick folder onto the table.

"It took four orderlies and two nurses to pull you off of her and take the bloody knitting needles from your hands." My hands ball on the table as I remember the feel of those needles.

Instant recall has Le'Shelle's body fighting and struggling between my legs. Before my homicidal lust completely takes over me, I snap out of it and remember where I am. "That was different."

His bushy eyebrows jump comically. "Different how?" I grind my teeth. I'm tempted to snitch all the horrors my wonderful sister has put me through—but that war is between me and Le'Shelle.

"That's what I thought," Lieutenant Blalock pulls up a chair, and when he squats to sit, his knees crack in protest.

"Tell me what happened. To your parents."