Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley

Author:Leila Mottley [Mottley, Leila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

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Lived here my whole life and never been in OPD headquarters. The building is larger than any other one in the area, plopped between Jack London Square, Chinatown, and Old Oakland. It hovers in the center of the city like a camera hidden in plain sight. All the cop cars emerge out of the headquarters, swarm the area.

I’ve never paid any attention to the building, though. Hoped there’d never be any reason to walk inside these doors. Inside, everything feels metallic even though it’s not. Even the windows feel like they’re made of metal, a thin kind that disguises itself as glass. I want to tap on it to see if it feels like metal too: cold and impenetrable.

They made me ride in the back of the car on the way here and I’ve been in the back of a cop car more times than I’d like, but this time I felt more like criminal than victim or woman. Jones kept her body turned halfway toward me in the passenger seat the whole time, stared at me through the metal bars that make up the partition. No way out.

My shoes squeak through the lobby, past uniforms and more uniforms, following Harrison to the elevator. I always take the stairs because you can’t guarantee the doors are ever gonna open again when you step into an elevator and my legs are more reliable than any machine ever could be. But Harrison steps in first, puts his arm through the doorway to keep it open, and waits for me and Jones. The moment the doors shut and he presses the button, I think my eyes might split themselves open.

“I ain’t done nothing.”

I haven’t spoken since we got in the car and they both look surprised that I got words, stare at my lips.

“We’ll talk about it when we get in the office.” Detective Harrison is trying not to look at me. Probably part of the bad-cop act.

Jones stares straight into my eyes, but I don’t even think she’s looking at me. I swear her eyes have blurred and I am just fuzz or the kind of portrait that has no distinct lines. Girl with her mouth open.

I make my hands into fists just so I can feel my nails digging into the palms, know I still got claws. “You arresting me?”

“If we were going to arrest you, we would have started with that.” Jones is already bored with me.

We step off the elevator into a hallway indistinguishable from any other office building, except there are security cameras lining the ceiling and it is too quiet. Phones ring but there are no voices. Harrison leads us down the hall, past doors and more doors, all the way to one with interview written in heavy type on the front.

This room looks just like every other interrogation room they ever showed on CSI or Law & Order. After Daddy got out, he’d sometimes talk about how the cops brought him in these rooms,

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