Excerpt from Down the River unto the Sea by Walter Mosley, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The next morning I'd make my report…and get back to the docks, where the real crime was happening.

* * *

When I opened my eyes, Monica Lars, my wife at the time, was already awake and making breakfast for her and Aja-Denise Oliver—our six-year-old daughter. I awoke to the smell of coffee and the memory of Nathali kissing my spine in a place I could not reach. I'd left her when my shift was over. I'd showered and changed at the station and got home in time for a late supper.

Drowsing for the last time in my morning bed, I took in a deep, satisfied breath; then the doorbell rang.

The bedroom of our Queens home was on the second floor, and I wasn't due in to work until the afternoon. I was naked and very tired; anyway, Monica knew how to answer a door.

I stretched a bit, thinking how much I loved my little family and that a promotion to captain was not an impossibility once I single-handedly busted the largest heroin ring to ever exist within the borders of the greatest city on earth.

"Joe!" Monica yelled from the entrance hall, which was downstairs and all the way at the front of the house.

"What?" I bellowed.

"It's the police!"

The one thing a cop's wife never says is, It's the police. That's what criminals and victims of criminals say. Sometimes we said it about ourselves while pointing a service revolver at the back of some perp's head. The mayor called us the police and now and then the newspapers did, but a cop's wife saying it's the police would be like my black-skinned grandmother calling out to my ex-sharecropper grandfather that it's some Negroes at the do'!

I knew there was something wrong and that Monica was trying to warn me. I had no idea that that would be her last loving act in our marriage or that her call heralded the end of any kind of normal life I could expect.

* * *

After the arrest, my union-supplied lawyer informed me that the prosecutor said there was a small sign posted next to the front door of the Park Slope brownstone. It read, PROPERTY UNDER ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE, so I had no expectation of privacy.

"Ms. Malcolm said that you presented her with the choice of either going to jail or performing fellatio," Ginger Edwards explained.

I'd been at Rikers for only thirty-nine hours and already four convicts had attacked me. There was a white adhesive bandage holding together the open flesh on my right cheek. I broke the slasher's nose and knife hand, but the scar he gave me would last longer.

"That's not true," I said to Ginger.

"I saw the tape. She wasn't smiling."

"What about when she was kissing me?"

"Nothing like that."

"Then the tape was doctored."

"Not according to our guy. We'll look deeper into it, but the way it stands they got you on this."

Ginger was short with light brown hair. She was slender but gave the impression of physical strength. In the middle of her thirties, she had a plain face that wouldn't look much different in twenty years.

"What should I do?" I asked the diminutive white woman.

"I'd like to float a plea with no jail time."

"I'd lose everything."

"Everything but your freedom."

"I need to think about this."

"The prosecutor intends to bring rape charges."

"Come back day after tomorrow," I said. "Ask me about a plea then."

Ginger's eyes were also light brown. They opened rather wide when she asked, "What happened to your face?"

"Cut it shaving."

* * *

I decided to take my chances with the system. In the next two days I got into half a dozen fights. They'd given me a private cell, but on the fourth morning of my incarceration, a crazy-looking fellow named Mink splashed a bucket of urine through my cell door. Mink was gray-eyed with olive skin and kinky blond hair.

Excerpted from Down the River unto the Sea by Walter Mosley. Copyright © 2018 by Walter Mosley. Excerpted by permission of Mulholland. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.