“Then start appreciating it.” Cannon looked at me with pity. “I wanted to help you. Maybe even right my wrong.” He sighed. “But you won’t take it. Keep seeing how all this protesting works out for you.” He gave me an ugly look and left the room.
I watched him go, and it made me happy for a moment, but then a white cop with a square head came in to take his place and he instantly punched me in the face. “Who do you work for?” he grunted.
Stars swam through my eyes. My jaw felt like it had been broken into three.
The cop said, in a calmer voice, “Just tell us and we’ll let you go.”
But I still couldn’t answer that. The hit made me too dizzy to even remember things.
“You don’t want to be free?” he asked.
“I am free,” I mumbled, drool coming out my mouth.
That’s what they didn’t see. I was free in a mansion. I was free in a cell. I would be free in Hell, if there really was a Hell. The only way I’d not be free is if I couldn’t see beyond the walls of their silly prisons, but my spirit itself could not be captured or chained. So, anywhere I went, I would be free.
The cop gave up on questioning me, eventually. He let me out of the interrogation room and shut me back in my cell.
I fell to my knees at my bedside and closed my eyes.God, I whispered.If I have to starve in jail, please let this be worth something to keep going, even with grief rearing through my throat. Show me how to stand up from a puddle of tears and keep going.
The next morning, I woke to a guard banging on the bars of my cell, screaming, “You have a visitor.”
I took another dreary walk through the hallway to the phone, which was on the wall inside a little booth. There was a glass panel, and on the other side was my visitor with another phone already pressed to her ear—Daisy.
I sat down and picked up the phone.
“How are you holding up?” she asked.
“I’m okay,” I answered. “I don’t know if they’ll lynch me, but for now, I am okay.”
“Don’t say that.” Daisy’s face, for a moment, looked fragile with emotion.
“I’m joking,” I said. “Dark, I know, but it helps sometimes.”
“I’m sorry, Nick. I should’ve never gotten you into this. I should be in there with you.”
“No,” I said. “You have to hand over the evidence we have for some journalist to publish an exposé about Buchanan and Gatsby,” I told her. “We have to expose him, and them, and only you can do that.”
“Nick, I don’t care about that anymore,” she said. “I care about getting you out of here right away.” She whispered the next bit into the phone, so her voice came in muffled. “There was a showdown between Jordan and another crew—they blame her for what happened with Pierre—and it attracted police attention. They found her hideout, took some of the money she had stashed, and now, she’s on the run. If they connect you to that,I don’t know what will happen.”
“I’ll get out of here,” I said, but the words felt more like hope than sureness. “But we have to finish the mission. The public has to know exactly what Buchanan has been doing so that all of the tension in the city can be put to rest. And when the day comes for my freedom, I’ll meet you and we’ll leave the city together.”
“We’ll get you out of here.” Daisy held the phone tight. “Whatever we have to do.”
The guard screamed, “Time’s up!” as he came to hang up my phone and escort me away.
26.
Each day, I did push-ups and sit-ups on the floor of my cell until my body screamed for mercy. I kept going anyway, stopping only when my muscles gave out.
I was midway through my evening sets when the guard appeared again, his boots heavy against the cement floor. “You’ve got another visitor.”
I wiped the sweat from my forehead, stomach churning. I wasn’t sure I could endure another lecture or thinly veiled threat. But when I stepped into the visiting area, I froze.
Jay Gatsby Sr. sat on the other side of the glass, his face exhausted, his features crumbling under the weight of grief. I didn’t expect any sympathy—I braced myself for the most verbally abusive encounter of my life. Yet when I picked up the receiver, he said nothing cruel.
“How you holding up in there?” he asked softly, his voice devoid of its usual bravado.
“I’m fine,” I said, though it wasn’t true. “As fine as I can be.”
