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arrest.”
    “Warrant for what?” Ronnie asked softly.
    “Outta that bed,” the cop said instead of answering. “And if I even think I see a weapon, you’re dead.”

 
    EIGHT
    I N THE INTERROGATION room of the Midtown precinct station Ronnie, with one hand manacled to the floor, sat on a metal chair, at a metal table.
    Both the table and chair were painted a drab green.
    Ronnie could hear the heartbeat of his dream resounding softly from the corners of the cell.
    Reese Blanders, a uniformed police sergeant with many medals, was questioning him. “You know you’re going back to prison, don’t you, Ronnie?” the cop said. His tone was matter-of-fact, like a weatherman predicting showers.
    Ronnie wondered if Ma Lin was like that when he’d slaughtered his victims for the state.
    “I know I am,” Ronnie replied, “but I don’t know why.”
    “Kidnapping,” the cop threw out, “maybe rape and battery.”
    Ronnie looked up to see what was in the policeman’s eyes. This was new for him. In all his twenty-six years of brutality, he could never look an authority figure in the eye: not his minister, his teachers (except Miss Peters), or even white men or women in business clothes.
    “What you lookin’ at, Bottoms?” the policeman asked as a threat.
    “I don’t know what to say, man. I just got out of Rikers a day and a half ago. Lorraine checked us into that hotel. The desk clerk asked for my name, and I gave it to him.”
    The policeman stood up and slapped Ronnie—hard.
    The young man saw the blow coming, could have evaded or blocked it, but he didn’t. He felt the jolt and allowed the pain to enter his system like any other form of communication—man to man.
    The sergeant saw how passively Ronnie accepted the slap, and balled his fist. “If you don’t cooperate, this could get ugly, Bottoms.”
    “I was in jail, man. I just got out. I could see if I robbed somebody. That’s what I was in jail for in the first place—”
    The next blow from the enraged cop was much harder, causing a sharp pain in Ronnie’s jaw. The young man lowered his head, groaned, and then raised it up again. He had to squint past the agony to see into big Blanders’s eyes.
    “She’s in the next room, Ronnie,” Blanders explained. “Now that you aren’t there to intimidate her, she’ll tell us everything.”
    “Her tellin’ what’s true is only good for me, brother,” Ronnie said, and Reese socked him again.
    The pain from the second blow took precedence over any other thought. It whined through his senses like an off-tune violin being played by a deaf monkey. The dissonant chord of pain brought tears to the thug’s eyes.
    “Now you gonna cry like a baby?” the cop asked. “The cameras are off, Ronnie. I can do what I want.”
    It was as if there were four people sitting at the green metal table in the gray interrogation room: Ronnie and his physical interlocutor, the pain from his broken jaw and his mother’s heartbeat making the room they were in sound as if it were a chamber of her heart.
    “I got tears in my eyes, man, but it’s from hurt not fear. I ain’t afraid’a what Lorraine might say. She was with me because she wanted to be. I did not kidnap her. Damn, man, I saved her life.”
    At that moment the heartbeat of his long dead mother combined with the pulsing pain in his jaw. There was something exquisite about the sharp ache compounded with the memory of love. Ronnie took in a deep breath. This was enough to loosen his grip on consciousness. Much later, in the hospital room, he remembered toppling over, falling in an arc because of the anchor of his chain.
    *   *   *
    “Y OU HAVE NO excuse to hold my client,” a man’s voice complained, “much less torture him.”
    “He got his injuries resisting arrest,” another voice said.
    “The woman you arrested him with, the one you said he kidnapped, will testify that there was no struggle whatsoever and that your men had cuffs on my client in