Detective Boyle removed his sweat-stained cowboy hat and swept the palm of his free hand over the few strands of hair that spanned the width of his sun spotted scalp. He then released the hat and allowed it to sit loosely on top of his head.

Beneath an unbuttoned crumpled tweed jacket, a powder-blue button-down shirt was stretched tight over his distended belly. The thighs of his khaki-colored slacks were splotched with greasy fingerprints.

In a matter of minutes, the phone would ring. Immediately following that call, I’d be released. When Boyle realized I was walking out and there was nothing he could do to keep me, he’d grow angry. That anger would gnaw at him. It would likely cause him to question his own existence. Ultimately, it may force him to consider an early retirement.

I offered him an expressionless stare. Seemingly unaffected, he looked me over before giving the hat’s brim a sharp tug and walking out the door.

While Boyle did whatever detectives do when they left their suspects to dwell on the inevitable, I surveyed the ten by ten concrete room. The pale-yellow walls were supposed to comfort me; make me want to talk. I laughed to myself at the thought of it.

Adorned with nothing more than a steel table and two matching benches, the windowless interrogation room was as no-frills as it could be. I glanced at the camera fixed high on the adjacent wall and wondered who—if anyone—was watching. While I pondered the actions that brought me to being handcuffed to a table in Fuckwater, Texas, Boyle reentered the room.

He placed his thick-fingered hands on the edge of the table and flexed his aging biceps.

“I can’t find a damned thing about you in the system, so I’m guessin’ this is your first run-in with the law,” he said in a slow, southern drawl. “Let me explain how this works. I’m gonna ask questions, and you’re gonna answer ‘em. I need you to help me understand what happened. You slip her some dope of some kind? Gave her somethin’ that killed her, that’s for damned sure. Tell me how this all came to be, will ya?”

I hadn’t spoken to him yet, and I had no plans to start.

“You gonna talk, or just keep starin’ up there at that camera?” he asked.

I dropped my gaze until our eyes met.

“Murder isn’t somethin’ we take lightly in Texas.” He crossed his arms. “If you tell us the truth at this juncture—the entire truth—the prosecutor will recognize that you were willing to cooperate. He’ll consider it at sentencing.”

There was nothing he—or anyone else in his police department—could do to keep me. I knew it. He, on the other hand, didn’t.

He brushed the underside of the hat’s brim with the pad of his thumb. His wiry brows knitted together. “If you continue to sit there with that smug look on your damned face, the prosecutor will make sure you’re on death row before this year ends. If you cooperate, you’ll get to spend the rest of your life with the prison’s population, eatin’ zoom-zooms and wham-whams.”

I stared blankly, knowing no matter what response I gave, he wouldn’t like it.

His fist came crashing down onto the table. “Do you not understand the mile of shit you’re in, son? Right now, you get to pick your destiny. Life, or death. Which will it be?”

Death. I was no stranger to it. Administering it was my specialty. In my days on earth, I’d witnessed the dying draw their last breath more than sixty times. Sixty-six, to be exact. Even so, there were questions that rattled around in my head when it wasn’t filled with thoughts of lackluster police departments in dusty little west Texas towns.

Beyond the last heartbeat, the human brain can survive for four minutes. I wondered if the fear of dying dissipated during those last few ticks of our life’s clock. When the realization of death was so certain that we could taste it, did a calmness wash over us? Or, did we mentally thrash about no differently than if we were drowning? Was man’s will to survive during those final seconds as strong as it was throughout the lifetime that led him to that moment of dying? Each time I took a life, I pondered those same thoughts.

I glanced at my watch.

Despite his statement in support of the contrary, my destiny wasn’t in Boyle’s—or the prosecutor’s—hands. Before the sun sank behind the Mesquite-lined horizon, he would unlock my handcuffs and release me without a single criminal charge being filed.

The door opened slightly. A gray-haired man poked his head through the opening. His paper-thin eyes peered in my direction. He exhaled an audible breath and met the detective’s curious stare.

“I need you to come out here for a minute,” the man said, his drawl just as thick as the detective’s. “I’ve got a...” He cleared his throat. “There’s something I need to explain to you.”

Boyle gave me a lingering look and turned away. After the door closed behind them, bits and pieces of a muffled one-sided conversation could be heard.

“Release him?” Boyle bellowed, his voice echoing throughout the corridor. “Let him go?”

“You can uncuff him or I will, but he’s walkin’ out of here.”

“I don’t give a shit if word came from the President of the United fuckin’ States,” Boyle retorted. “I ain’t lettin’ him go, Griff.”

“I can’t begin to act like I know what’s going on,” the gray-haired man explained. “Because I don’t. Ain’t got a damned clue. But, if that man isn’t walking out of here in the next five minutes, I doubt either one of us will be collecting a paycheck next month.”

“So, we’re just supposed to act like he didn’t do it?” Boyle asked.

“He didn’t do it,” the man responded. “I don’t know much, but I know as sure as I’m standin’ here that it would behoove the both of us to come to believe that.”