Free Bad To The Bone by Katy Munger

one is
going to believe me. Don't you see? I'm the perfect fall guy. I'm a
black man and she's what she is. And now she has you to tell the
world I had a motive. No one will stand up for me. My own people
abandoned me when I married her. I have no one to believe me.
Except for you. You have to help me. You have to. I don't have
anyone else." His voice broke and he began to sob, his shoulders
heaving with every ragged breath. "My daughter can't be left with
her. She'll destroy Tiffany. You can't let her do this."
    "Mr. Price," I began, but, at long last,
without so much as a warning cough, four cops burst into my office.
Two of them jumped on Price and knocked him to the ground. He hit
his head on the chair on the way down, triggering a fresh flow of
blood from his scalp wound. He started to struggle and two more
cops piled on him. They grabbed his arms and jerked him upright.
They threw him against a wall, kicked his legs apart and cuffed his
hands behind his back.
    "You're making a mistake," he started to
say, but one of the cops kneed him in the soft spot of his left
calf and he almost crumpled to the floor.
    "That's enough," I said more loudly than I'd
intended. The cops stared at me. "You have him. Now get him out of
here. He's sick. He needs help."
    They took turns dragging him through our
outer office. Price dwarfed the officers and their vague fear made
the four men even more aggressive. They prodded and jerked him
along. Price alternated between trying to struggle and allowing
himself to be dragged. It was pitiful and it was pathetic. It left
a bad taste in my mouth. It wasn't anything I ever wanted to see
again.
    "Don't you get it?" Price shouted as the
cops threw him out the front door. "It was too easy. The way you
found me. She knew where I was. She set you up, too. She's using
you. Just check the court papers. You'll see it's a lie." His voice
faded as the cops hustled him into a waiting squad car.
    "God almighty," Bobby said. "What the hell
was he saying to you? I was ten seconds away from busting in with
my shotgun when the frigging cops arrived."
    "I don't know," I said, my stomach filling
with an acrid dread. "But I got a real bad feeling that what he was
trying to tell me was the truth."
     
     
     

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    "You
can't."
    "I can."
    "You can't."
    "I can," I told Bobby. "And I am."
    "There's no percentage in it. All you're
going to do is lose us more money."
    "Bobby," I explained. "This isn't about
money. This is about some skinny, chicken-necked little twat
thinking she can make a fool out of me by batting her eyelashes. If
even a little bit of what Robert Price says is true, than that
woman sat there in my chair and dredged up some perverted version
of sisterhood to get me to help her send an innocent man to jail.
She is going to pay for that. No one takes me for a fool. No
one."
    "Sheesh," Bobby grumbled. "That's if what
Price said was true. Remind me to stay on your good side."
    "Want to stay on my good side? Help me get
to the truth."
    "Me? No way." He rummaged around in a
shopping bag on the floor and came up with a box of Little Debbie
Raisin Cakes, which he placed on his desk as reverently as if it
were the golden ark. He selected four of the cakes for a snack.
"All that excitement is bad for my heart," he confided.
    "I'm gonna be bad for your heart if you
don't help me."
    "What can I do?" he asked indignantly.
    "You can find out who the court reporter was
on the Price versus Bledsoe custody case. I want to talk to
them."
    "What was wrong with the court papers? You
saw them."
    "I saw them, but they may be fake. And I'll
bet you dollars to doughnuts that the actual court papers are
sealed. Otherwise, she'd never risk passing off phony ones as
genuine. It would be too easy to check."
    "This is why I never had children," Bobby
said. "It brings out the worst in people." But he reached for the
phone anyway, leaving me to ponder the horrifying thought of little
no-necked, roly-poly Bobby D.'s