Free The Glass Harmonica by Russell Wangersky Page A

shared his cell with an overweight convicted drunk driver serving his conditional sentence on weekends. “New guys with serious charges, we like to inch them into the regular population,” one guard told him, a rumpled old guy who walked down the range as if every shift was his last before retirement. Most of the guards didn’t speak to Ron unless they were telling him where to go or what to do, short, sharp sentences that involved the guards either pointing or flexing the muscles in their arms.
    Ron wondered what the drunk driver had done to earn a spot in a cell with a murderer. It must have been something good, he thought. Maybe the guy was mouthy on the first day in: whatever else the guards were, they certainly didn’t have short memories. You piss them off, Ron thought, and every other prisoner in for a weekend sentence would sign the book and be let out because the prison was full—and you’d find yourself at the end of a hall next to someone high on smuggled meds who spent the whole night bouncing off the inside of his cell like he was a rubber ball or something.
    Ron found it funny that the pudgy little drunk driver wouldn’t look at him, even when Ron tried to force him to talk. The guy just made himself as small and nondescript as he could on his bunk for almost every moment he spent in the cell.
    Too many nights watching The Sopranos or The Godfather , Ron thought. Too many movies.
    Sometimes he’d hear the drunk driver crying at night, and he couldn’t imagine how the guy could spend so much time feeling sorry for himself. One night the guy said something like, “Someone like me’s not supposed to be in here,” and Ron found the whole idea so funny that he almost laughed out loud. He’d already learned that, if you listen to them talk, everyone in jail is innocent.
    â€œYou and me both, buddy,” Ron had said, but his cellmate only looked carefully at the wall and pretended not to hear. Ron understood looking at the walls: they were heavily coated in thick blue paint, but get close enough and you could find spots where earlier prisoners had scratched messages right into the cinder block, carefully etched reminders scribed with unbent paper clips. Fight Back , a message near Ron’s head said, but the leg on the a was thin and filled with paint, so Ron read it as Fight Bock and spent the nights imagining Bock and getting ready to fight him.
    A couple of days after he talked to her on the phone, at a bail hearing that his lawyer told him was just a formality—“No way they’re letting you out,” the lawyer had said, and closed his briefcase like a door slamming—Ron had seen Liz leaving the courtroom with one of the cops, a lanky fellow named Ballard who’d been one of the guys in the room when they had first questioned him. Ballard had thick dark hair and a bushy moustache and, when he occasionally used it, a deep, flat voice where the lack of inflection made it sound like the police officer didn’t believe anything, not even his own words. His questions didn’t sound like they had question marks.
    Ron wasn’t sure if Ballard was an investigating officer or just a supervisor. He seemed to be there whenever they brought Ron into the interview room, a coil notebook open in front of him on the table in the back of the small room. Ballard only took a few notes, and Ron couldn’t remember seeing the officer blink or look away. He had a big square head that was almost set right into his shoulders, his neck practically invisible. Sometimes he’d step into a gap in the questioning and throw out one flat, expressionless sentence, and Ron was never sure whether he was supposed to answer it or just accept it. Other times Ballard would get up for no apparent reason and leave the interview room. And every time, a few minutes after he did, the interview would end, the other two police officers would turn off the video camera