When the police arrested him they found everything. They found his drugs and his cigarettes, they found his works. They found his chewing gum and his lighter and his loose change. They found his gun where he left it, tucked under his car seat. They laid everything out on the hood of his car and they laughed. Goddamn, they said, we got you. We got you good.
It was broad daylight and he was wasted, he was gone.
The trial took up an afternoon, and Jenny wasn’t in court to see it. His family wasn’t called. He didn’t have a lawyer and he was guilty and the whole thing took a couple of hours. He spent that night in the county lock-up and the next morning they shipped him out of the county lock-up and off to Centinela. He was dope-sick the whole time, shaking and throwing up. It hurt him just to move.
The transport bus was a modified GMC school bus, with plexi-glass safety windows and a cage built right inside, and the prisoners sat there and looked straight ahead, avoiding eye contact and shivering in the heat. He was the only white guy on the bus, except for the driver and the heavy-set guard, and wire mesh separated those two from the prisoners. The guard was gripping a rifle in his two hands, and was joking with the driver about something. Some sports thing from the night before.
The prisoners weren’t too dangerous anyway, not now, inside the cage with their wrists and ankles shacked together like they were. They couldn’t even smoke.
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