States of Grace by Mandy Miller (top 100 books of all time checklist .TXT) 📕

Her escalating rant is cut short when the guard rushes in. In a flash, he uncuffs her hands from in front and recuffs them behind her back and to the back of the chair .Without warning, the memory of Reilly floods in, his pinning my arms behind my back so hard I had no choice but to sink to my knees in the road, the taste of whiskey coming back up my throat.

I gasp for breath. “I…I can’t…”

“Ms. Locke, Ms. Locke. Are you okay?” the guard asks, dipping his head to my level. “Maybe that’s enough for now?”

I suck in a gulp of air and attempt to refocus. “Sorry. No. Yes. Fine. I’m fine.”

The guard steps to the door. “Maybe I should call the psych unit, get something to calm Miss Slim.”

The reminder that of how it feels when you no longer have, and may never again have, control over anything, what you wear, eat, hear, or inject into your veins, turns the blood in mine to ice. “No. Leave her be. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to leave, okay?”

“Whatever you say. It’s your funeral,” he says, a comment which makes me want to tell him to mind his own damn business.

“Someone’s out to get me. They want to kill me. I need to tell you what happened,” she says before the door’s completely closed.

“Look at me, Zoe,” I say, ducking my head to her level. “Look at me! I need to tell you something. Something very important.”

She wipes her nose on the shoulder of her jumpsuit, avoiding eye contact.

“Do not speak to anyone, and I mean anyone, about your case,” I say, enunciating every word as if it were its own sentence.

Silence.

“Do you hear me?”

Screeching like a strangled cat. “I didn’t do it! I wasn’t there!”

“I said—Do you understand?” Finger under her chin, I angle her blotchy face up. “I mean it. Not to anyone in here, no matter how much you want to. Not to any guard or investigator. Not to any cell mate. Not to anyone, no matter what they promise you. And say nothing, not even hello, ever, to any cop. Do you hear me?”

The spark of recognition in her face at the word “cop” stops me cold. “You didn’t speak to the police, did you?”

She closes her eyes. “They asked me a lot of questions.”

“Who? When?”

“The cops. When they arrested me. At school. In the principal’s office.”

My hearts lurches. “Did you say anything?”

She gives me a lopsided grin. “No.”

“You sure?”

A little light comes into her eyes, enough for me to see they’re green, like malachite, with flecks of gold. “Yes, I’m sure. I watch TV. I’m not a total idiot.”

“Good,” I say, trying to laugh, but her self-professed clear-headedness is disturbing. “So, again, nothing to anyone, okay? Not even on the phone, not even your parents. Not one word.”

Her eyes flit back and forth, as if she’s looking for an escape hatch to return her to her real life, the one where she goes to movies and the beach, where she’s what Manny said she is—a kid.

“I’ll be back in a couple of days.”

“A couple of days? You’ve got to get me out of here!”

I squeeze behind her to the door. “I’ll set a bond hearing,” I say, willing the guard to hurry.

“What? What’s a bond hearing?”

“It’s where a judge decides if you should get out or if you should stay locked up until your trial.”

“Trial? But I didn’t do anything!”

I let my tone soften. Even if she did do it, I need this case, need her to trust me. “I’ll do my best to help you. That’s why your folks hired me.”

Her shoulders sag. “It’s always about money. You’re getting paid, so you have to act all like you care and shit.”

I pull a business card from my jacket pocket and drop it on the table. “Call me collect if you need to talk. Any time, day or night.”

“Why? Like you said, you don’t want to hear the truth. You don’t care about my story. Get out of here and leave me to die, why don’t you?” she says, straining forward against the cuffs.

I pick up the card and drop it into her chest pocket and slip out into the corridor.

“Have a good night,” the guard says. “At least what’s left of it.”

“Same to you,” I say, but the sentiment is nothing more than automatic, my thoughts consumed by the hope that Zoe didn’t notice how much my hands were shaking when I dropped the card into her pocket. A scared defense lawyer is no good to anyone, least of all a kid accused of murder. Least of all myself.

Chapter 6

“Hurry up, man! You’re driving like my grandma. Don’t give these Hajjis a chance to get a bead on us, dude.” Corporal Garcia claps Sergeant Jones, the driver of the Humvee, on the back and they both laugh with the carefree ease of friends cruising Main Street on a Saturday night looking for girls.

Not one to miss a rare moment of levity in this hell hole, I ignore the racial slur and add my two cents from my post in the back. “Yeah, Jones, get a move on, soldier. You keep driving this slow, I’ll be on Social Security by the time you get us back to base.”

The remark might rankle some superiors, but months of driving around Iraq with Jones, hunting bad guys together, has made rank irrelevant and irreverent banter our only relief from war. Our shtick is I razz Jones about his by-the-book nature, and he keeps a close eye out for me, the only female MP in Muleskinner Squadron, 3rd Cavalry Regiment, United States Army. The entire 3rd left Fort Hood in January 2004 for Kuwait, then ended up here, Fallujah, after four private military contractors were killed and their corpses dragged through the streets then hung from a bridge over the Euphrates. Now we’ve got a front