Property of the State Read online

  She let out a long sigh and hung her head a little bit. She knew damn well I was right. “Let’s just say, it’s complicated, and you probably wouldn’t believe my story even if I told it to you,” she replied with a forlorn look on her face.

  “I’m sure. You’d probably feel the same way about my story because sometimes even I can’t believe it,” I replied.

  “Well, it was nice meeting you, Misty,” she said as if she was about to go somewhere.

  “Huh? What do you mean ‘was’?” I asked. “Looks to me like we going to the same place right about now . . . county lockup.”

  “You’ll see,” she replied, and then she smiled once again, like she knew a secret I would never find out.

  Then she did that weird thing again where she held up both of her hands with the handcuffs and put them to her mouth. It looked to me like she took something out of or put something in her mouth.

  I crinkled my brows, but I didn’t dare ask her what she was doing. I just wanted to mind my damn business. I just wanted to go home, honestly.

  “I’m glad you didn’t ask any questions,” Shelby said after a few long minutes.

  “What you do is your business, I’m no snitch,” I said nonchalantly. I wasn’t about to let her drag me into anything illegal she was doing or about to do.

  “Well, I appreciate that, and you’ll find out soon enough what’s going on,” Shelby said cryptically. “Just understand that I don’t have anything to lose. That’s all I’m going to say about it,” she said with a lot of mystery behind her words.

  “What does that mean?” I asked. I wanted to know.

  “I murdered my parents and I’d do it all over again,” she blurted, changing the subject.

  “Oh my God! Are you serious?” I asked her, feeling my eyes go big. This bitch was crazy. I thought what I was in for was bad, but at least mine was self-defense. This was crazy. Who has the guts to kill their fucking parents? Well, unless they’re pedophiles or physically abusive. Other than that, you’ve got to be a very sick individual to commit a heinous crime such as that.

  Instead of responding verbally, she nodded her head kind of somberly. Shit, she looked really sad, like her life was surely over, and I kind of agreed. I thought that murdering your own parents was as low as you could go. I immediately reflected on my crime and suddenly my whole mood changed.

  “You all right?” she asked me in a weird tone.

  I don’t know exactly how she wanted me to react to her telling me she had murdered her own parents. I turned my focus back to her and said, “Not really. I can’t imagine what would make someone kill their own parents. I’m in here dying to see my mother one last time, so I just can’t understand it. I know people with terrible parents, and they wouldn’t dare kill them. So . . . no . . . I’m not all right.”

  “I guess you’d have to know my story before you could judge me, right?” she said, and then shrugged her shoulders like she didn’t care. “Every parent is not the same. I may look like I had it all, but you have no idea and neither do these people trying to keep me locked up for the rest of my life. I won’t let them do it. I’d rather die.”

  I shook my head and then I turned my focus away from her. I was no longer in the mood to talk to her. I had enough problems of my own. And I had already made up in my mind that this chick, Shelby, was crazy as hell. The one thing I didn’t need to do was get into it with anyone crazy.

  I could hear the two cops up front having a conversation, but I couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying. Periodically I noticed the woman look at us through the rearview mirror like she was making sure we hadn’t jumped out, which would’ve been impossible, anyway.

  After a long period of driving, I saw Shelby start to nod, her head jerking down and then back up. I just chalked it up to her being tired. I noticed that the van had slowed down. I leaned to my left and looked straight through the windshield and saw that we had come upon railroad tracks. The gates were down on both sides and the lights flashed on and off, but there was no train in sight.

  I heard the female cop sigh really loudly while the male cop made a loud outburst. “Dammit, I thought we would make it around it. This could be like an hour sitting here,” he snapped.

  “You think it takes that long?” the female cop asked him.

  “Hell yeah,” he replied, annoyed.

  As the van came to a complete stop at the railroad tracks, I went to say something to Shelby and noticed that she was hanging way over at the waist. The only reason she hadn’t slid to the floor was the fact that she was chained to the seat in the van.

  “Shelby?” I called to her in a harsh whisper. I didn’t want to be loud and bring attention to us back there. She didn’t answer. “Shelby,” I called her again, this time a little bit louder. Still, nothing. Then, as I listened to the cops complaining, Shelby’s body started to jerk. I jumped back.

  “Oh my God!” I gasped. “Shelby!” I called out, this time louder and with more force. I didn’t care if the cops heard us.

  “What the hell is going on?” the male cop called back to me.

  My body started trembling as I watched Shelby’s body convulse and white foam started bubbling out of her mouth. “Fuck! Shelby! Oh my God!” I screamed this time. Now I really didn’t care. Something was definitely wrong with this girl.

  Both cops turned in their seats at the same time.

  “What the hell are you screaming about, inmate?” the female cop yelled out.

  “You better shut the fuck up if you know what’s good for you,” the male cop followed up.

  All of a sudden, we all seemed to hear a strange sound at the same time. Shelby’s body started convulsing even more violently, causing a loud banging in the van.

  “Help! Help her!” I yelped. Not only was white foam bubbling all over Shelby’s face, blood started to leak out of her nose. “She’s dying! Help her! Oh my God!” I wailed. I started stomping my feet, the only power I had to make them understand that something was seriously wrong.

  I saw the male cop scramble out of the driver’s seat. I continued to scream, and so did the female cop, but only she was telling me to shut up and calm down. She tried to be the voice of reason, but I was too inconsolable to listen to her. There was a damn girl dying right in front of me, as if I hadn’t seen enough death and destruction in my life. I watched in shock; and my heart was beating so fast, it hurt. I looked over at Shelby with a look of pure terror etched on my face.

  “Oh my God . . . she’s dead! I know it!” I screamed out. I was nervous as hell because we were helplessly shackled in the back of the van with no way for me to help her and no way for her to be saved. The inside of the van suddenly grew overwhelmingly hot and the air felt stiff. I heard another loud bang on the van, and I started saying a silent prayer that they were going to help her. This would be a fucked-up way to die for anyone, even an inmate that these cops cared nothing about.

  The back doors to the van flung open. I jumped so hard, I almost pissed and shit on myself. The male cop was standing there, breathing hard with a beet-red face. “What’s going on, inmate!” he screamed.

  It was clear that he didn’t believe me and thought maybe we were just trying to make a distraction. I mean, who could blame him? Convicts do it all the time in the movies. But this time was the real thing.

  “See for yourself! She’s dying!” I belted out. I was crying by then. Seeing someone die like that was a crazy experience. The male cop scrambled his ass into the van. He looked horrified. He pushed Shelby back up into a sitting position. I was in shock, to say the least. Her face was completely different. She had foam coming out of her mouth, blood out of her nose, and her eyes were all white. She looked like the girl in the movie The Exorcist. My heart dropped and I quickly closed my eyes. I knew that if I didn’t, nightmares of her face would haunt me for months, just like Terrell’s did.

  “What happened here?” the male cop asked me.

  “How am I supposed to know?” I replied
with an attitude. “She was sitting over there one minute, and the next minute, she was nodding and then this. I have no fucking clue what happened, but I will tell you being in here with a dead person is not cool for me.”

  “Did you see her take something?” he asked, his voice getting a bit more frantic. He needed answers.

  I thought about what I would say, and whether I should tell him about seeing Shelby fiddling with her hands and handcuffs, but I didn’t want to be set up to be any kind of witness. The cops and the feds had set me up one too many times and I didn’t trust their asses as far as I could throw them. And that wasn’t very far.

  “I told you what I saw! I saw her sitting here one minute, and the next minute, she was like that!” I screamed out. That was it, I almost fainted right there in that van. Sweat broke out all over my body. This girl was dead, right then and there, right in my direct line of vision, and we seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. How much more drama can I take?

  “I feel a faint pulse. We need to call a medic!” the male cop yelled up to the female as he touched Shelby’s neck.

  A feeling of relief came over my entire body and my nerves kind of simmered down a little bit. I was hoping Shelby was still alive and it seemed that she was . . . for now.

  “I’ll call for one, but that means we still have to wait for this train to pass!” the female cop yelled back.

  “Looks like you’re going to have to sit in here with her until we can get a medic to come. If she dies . . . well, then . . . she dies,” the male cop said, then shrugged his shoulders like he didn’t give a damn about Shelby.

  There was complete silence. If this was any indication of what I was in for, I didn’t know what I would do with myself.

  After what seemed like an eternity, an ambulance finally showed up. “One female, no pulse!” the first medic yelled out.

  I wanted to scream, Of course, she doesn’t have a pulse now! You bastards took forever to come save her! But I just sat there, shaking and looking at Shelby. Her lips had turned completely purple and so did her fingernails. They took another thirty minutes before they even unstrapped her from the van seat. This is how messed-up they treated inmates, like we weren’t even human beings.

  After what seemed like forever, they finally took Shelby’s cold, dead body out of the van in a black body bag. They pulled it right past me with no regard for my mental state at that point. They left my ass, shaking, crying, and in handcuffs and shackles. No one even cared. To them, I was just another fucking criminal awaiting my fate for killing a nigga. It didn’t matter that I was trying to defend myself. All they knew or cared about was throwing another black person in jail so they could throw the book at you.

  “Hopefully, we make it to county with at least one,” the asshole male cop joked with his partner.

  “She looked spooked, so we better hurry up before we have a cardiac arrest on our hands,” the female cop joked back.

  I didn’t find anything about what they were saying funny. I also didn’t find anything about my situation funny. Little did I know, life had just begun to get interesting for me.

  2

  UP A CREEK

  My arrival at county finally happened. I was completely shaken up by the time I got there, and being there didn’t help at all.

  “Open eleven!” a female correctional officer yelled at the command station.

  She was one evil bitch. I had watched her push another girl down on the floor and kick her because the girl wasn’t moving fast enough. That was an eye-opener for me. I tried to be as quiet as possible when she processed me, but it was immediately apparent that the wicked CO couldn’t care less that I was crying and shivering after she’d stripped me of all my clothes and humiliated me by making me bend over, spread my ass cheeks, squat, and cough.

  I could swear the evil bitch even had a tiny smile on her face as she violated me, forcing her gloved, sausage-shaped fingers into my mouth and roughly running them around the inside of my mouth until I almost gagged. I knew she took sick pleasure in lifting my breasts up and probing my scalp as if she was sure I had stashed something nefarious in those places. All of this so she could put me in a county jail uniform and give me an inmate number. They surely tried to dehumanize you. It was an inmate control tactic.

  “Run the gate!” the CO yelled again. This time, her fat-on-the-bottom-skinny-on-the-top ass shoved me toward a cell. It was dark and dank. The acrid scent of piss and mold assailed my senses. The cell block wasn’t pretty, but it was much quieter than the holding cell I’d been kept in at the precinct before I was transported to county to await court. The quiet around me didn’t fool me, though; I knew this was the calm before the real storm. After the CO damn near threw me into the cell, the door shut behind me. The loud screech and clang of the metal caused my heart to drop into the pit of my stomach. Something about the sound was so final. If I hadn’t known it before, I knew then that I was locked inside this jail and I wasn’t getting out anytime soon. There is a different feeling of dread when you feel your freedom being snatched away. It was what I imagined zoo animals felt every day of their lives—trapped, captured, and hopeless. I shivered just thinking about it.

  “When will I get a chance to make a phone call?” I asked the CO before she got a chance to fully walk off. I needed to call my mother. I needed to tell someone about what I’d been through so far. I also needed help.

  “When the next shift says you can,” she grumbled barely above a whisper as she undid the leg irons from my ankles.

  “And when will that be?” I asked.

  “When it changes,” she continued sarcastically.

  She was being a real asshole right now. I wanted to give that bitch a piece of my mind, but I decided against it and slumped my shoulders with disappointment. On the other hand, I wanted to ask her why she was so nasty. I didn’t want to be there as much as she didn’t want me to be there messing up her day. I also wanted to tell her I was an innocent victim and that there was a complete explanation for what happened. But I’m sure she heard that every day from every inmate she processed.

  “Can you give me a time?” I pressed. I was kind of desperate to see if I could get in touch with my mother. At this point, my mother was the only person on the outside that could help me. Someone had to corroborate my story about killing Terrell in self-defense.

  “Honey, you shouldn’t be worried about the time. After looking at your arrest sheet, I see you ain’t gonna have nothing but time, so sit your ass down and be quiet. The noisy ones get the noisy-one treatment, and the quiet ones get what we let them have. Remember . . . I told you that,” the bitch CO warned. With that, she stalked off as if she needed to make a point with her body language.

  I sighed loudly. This was going to be a long prison term if I had to judge what it would be like from that CO’s behavior. County was only the first stop. It was where I’d be housed for the minimum of a year and a day, and after trial and conviction, I’d be sent to prison . . . real prison. I stood up against the cell bars as if I was expecting someone to come save me. I really wanted to cry.

  “You might as well take a load off, because it’s going to be a while before you see the next CO,” a voice with a heavy Southern drawl said from behind me.

  Startled, I let go of the bars and whirled around in the direction of the voice. My eyes popped open when I noticed a broad-shouldered, stout woman standing in the shadows of the cell. My heart galloped in my chest. She’d scared the shit out of me.

  When the woman moved into the little bit of light, I gave her a quick once-over. She had a short, masculine haircut, a square chin, thick furry eyebrows, which seemed permanently furrowed, and muscular arms that made me think she did one hundred push-ups a day. If the stranger didn’t have such huge breasts, I would’ve mistaken her for a man. She was what we called in the hood a butch.

  Great! They had locked me up with a butch who was probably going to kick my ass every day until I got out of there. I played it cool. I nodded
at her, but didn’t say anything. The butch bopped in my direction. She walked just like a guy.

  My stomach lurched and I felt like I had to vomit. I swallowed hard. I didn’t want no smoke with this butch. I’d heard so many horror stories of how these types of women bully more feminine women like me while behind bars. I said a quick prayer. I didn’t need to get on this woman’s bad side. I started thinking that maybe if I was nice, she’d be a good ally to have if we ended up in the same place later on.

  I took her advice and took a seat on one of the hard metal planks that extended from the cell’s left wall.

  “What you in for?” the butch asked, getting a little too close for comfort.

  She smelled like hospital antiseptic and cigarettes. The combination went straight to my stomach and I felt nauseous.

  “Murder,” I blurted without thinking twice. I just wanted her to back up off me, and if confessing to a murder was what I needed to do, then so be it.

  She seemed stunned by my answer, and her caterpillar eyebrows shot up on her face. “Me too!” she exclaimed.

  A cold chill shot down my back. “Self-defense or intentional?” I asked. I wanted to make sure she wasn’t crazy, but I also needed someone to identify with my situation and what happened with Terrell and me.

  “They trying to say that I put out a hit on my girlfriend. But I didn’t do it,” the butch replied. Her facial expression was cold and blank. “I didn’t do that shit, man,” she followed up, still with no real emotions behind her words. She scrubbed her hands over her face roughly. “I got set up. Somebody set me up to take the fall. I wasn’t even fucking with that bitch no more.” I couldn’t tell if she was telling me the truth or not, but I wasn’t about to make her think I doubted her, so I just stayed quiet.

  “What about you? Who you killed?” she asked me.

  “My ex-boyfriend,” I said.

  The butch jerked her head back slightly and smirked.

  “But I had a reason,” I added, hurrying up to clarify. “He was abusive, and I just got tired of him putting his hands on me. I was sick of him, but what happened was really an accident. I wasn’t trying to kill him.”