The Greatest Lie Part 19

"You mean the snitch they call El Lobo."

"You are the one who fucks him. Don't think we didn't hear you when you serviced him in his cell." He spit at me.

I flinched away and avoided his spittle. "It's true, I knew him from before. But back there in the cell, he forced me. The guards gave me to him like a trophy as a reward for all of his snitching. I think that he snitched me in there."

"I have suspected him. He lives too well. But how do you know ?"

"By his own careless boasts. He knew in advance that I was going to be arrested. He arranged to have me to be brought to him. He knows what I am accused of, even though it occurred halfway around the world. How would he know these things unless the Feds told him? And why would they tell him, unless he was informing for them?"

The Mexican kid looked at me with cold, merciless eyes. "If you are we, we will do what we must."

The van ground to a halt, and they led the young Mexican away. I wondered if I had planted the seeds of Miguel's destruction. Part of me hoped, for my sake and Alyssa's, that I had.

The phone booth had glass walls. I could see the other inmates going though stages of emotional breakdown as they talked to loved ones from behind prison walls. The black woman next to me seemed not to be talking at all. She only wept inarticulately, ceaselessly. I wondered what tragedy was unfolding over that phone line, and what trifling offense had put her here. One out of every hundred Americans is in jail. Horrible as it was, mine was a common plight.

"Hi Mom, it's me."

"Oh my God, I've been a wreck worry over you. You haven't been answering your email or phone. Where are you?"

"Do you want the good news or the bad news first?"

"Oh dear, just tell me."

"OK, I am in LA, but I am in the women's Federal Detention Center at the corner of Temple and San Pedro."

"Why are you in jail? Oh, darling, what have you done?"