A trusty stopped the food cart by our cell door and slid Styrofoam cups of black coffee and paper plates of hash browns and scrambled eggs through the iron slit in the door. Spud carried them to the bench and put a cup of coffee in Cotton’s hand. “The trusty said if we eat up, we can get seconds.”
Cotton pressed the back of his wrist in each eye and stared at nothing, a wisp of steam rising from his cup.
* * *
THAT MORNING MR. Lowry came to the jail and got us released. No effort was made to find out who had attacked us, or at least none that I knew of. Spud had to surrender his battery-operated radio to the deputy from whose desk it had been stolen. Wade Benbow had me brought to his office before I was given back my possessions and allowed to leave the building. He was typing at his desk.
“The waitress at the café left a note for you,” he said. He handed me a folded piece of paper.
“What’s this about?”
“I wouldn’t know. I didn’t read it.”
The paper had been torn from a spiral notebook. The message was written in pencil: You don’t know what you’re dealing with. Call me. It was signed Jo Anne McDuffy, with a phone number under the name.
“Kid?” Benbow said.
“Sir?”
“Walk away from this. Don’t let a bump in the road put you in Cañon City.”
Cañon City was the joint. Two busloads of dirty cops in Denver had just been sent there.
He resumed typing as though I were not there.
* * *
IT WAS SATURDAY, and the rain was still falling, and clouds of white fog were rising from the downtown storm sewers. Cotton and Spud followed Mr. Lowry back to the farm in the truck, and I stayed in town and called the number Jo Anne McDuffy had given me.
“It’s Aaron Broussard,” I said inside the phone booth. “Can I see you?”
“See me?” she asked.
“To talk about the fellows who attacked my friends and me. You said to call you.”
“I didn’t say anything about you seeing me.”
“Well, I’d like to, anyway.”
“It’s not a very convenient time.”
“How about tonight?”
“I have to work.”
“Miss Jo Anne, I’m no trouble.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“Who’s that?” said a man in the background.
“No one,” she answered.
“I can’t just walk away from what those fellows did,” I said.
“Why do you call them ‘fellows’?”
“My father never let me use the word ‘guy.’?”