Jack Daniels and Associates: Snake Wine by Bernard Schaffer Page A

food for the day. She sliced carrot sticks and cucumbers and packed them in a ziplock baggie to take with her to work, telling herself that even if she was making herself ill by not sleeping she would at least try to eat right.
    At five in the morning, she took a shower and did her hair, taking her time to blow dry and brush it out and do it nice. She picked out a blouse, blazer and skirt for the day, then took the time to iron them until each crease was sharp enough to cut someone with.
    She left the house at six thirty, picking up coffee and a newspaper and two aspirin powders. She didn't know if it was the caffeine or the aspirin, or maybe both, but the headache slowly subsided, a distant beat of jungle drums getting softer and softer as you floated downstream.
    It wasn't so bad getting up super early, she thought. The day hadn't even started, and she was more productive than usual. Maybe I'll try this not sleeping thing full time, or at least until they lock me away in the loony bin once I start hallucinating.
    The sun was rising into the sky as she pulled into the courthouse parking lot. It was empty, save for the personal cars of the overnight guards, and their windows were covered with dew. Jack sipped her coffee and spread the newspaper across her steering wheel, starting at the first page.
    Reading the newspaper was something she'd always thought cops did. So was drinking coffee and smoking. For that matter, so was telling dirty stories and laughing about them, then taking a quick look around to see if anyone who shouldn't be hearing them was listening. That was how Jack heard all her first and finest curse words. Nobody could curse like cops. Not sailors, not construction workers, not nobody.
    Jack remembered all the handsome detectives sitting at their desks back when she was kid, typing their reports on the huge old Olympia typewriters, making their bells ring with every carriage return, cursing bitterly whenever they messed up a word. "Hey, kid," they'd say to her. "You looking for your mom?"
    They smelled like hair products and aftershave and gun leather. Some of them even wore hats, the old fedoras like detectives did in the movies.
    Jack's fate had been sealed from the start. She was police all the way through and had been as long as she could remember.
    Somehow, sitting in her car, drinking her coffee, reading her newspaper, it all reminded her of those throwback cops of bygone days. They'd worked their cases and made their pinches and nothing had slowed them down. I'm cut from that cloth, she thought. If somebody zapped me through a time machine, I'd walk right into one of those offices, grab a desk and start punching up reports. Jack pulled the rearview mirror down and checked her face. She took a good, long look at it and thought about those old cops, and she knew that if somebody had messed with one of them, they messed with all of them.
    Nobody is taking my partner from me, she thought. Nobody.
     
    Jack was sitting in the courtroom at the prosecutor's table, waiting as people began to file into the court room. She was there when the tipstaff arrived and the bailiff and the sheriff's deputies. She was there when Alan Davidson came into the court carrying his briefcase and there when Keenan Marvin was brought in, shuffling uncomfortably in his leg irons. Jack reached into her pocket and shut down her cellphone. She'd heard stories about Judge Ceparullo seizing people's phones if they rang in court, and she couldn't afford to lose hers.
    The judge entered the court and the bailiff tapped the podium with the gavel and said, "All rise."
    They all stood up.
    The judge sat down.
    They all sat down.
    Judge Ceparullo looked at the empty seat next to Jack and said, "I don't believe this shit." He immediately covered the microphone in front of him and said, "Strike that. Lieutenant Daniels, where is Mr. Roth?"
    "I don't know, your honor," Jack said.
    Ceparullo sighed and said, "Put this on the record. All parties