Chapter One

I CAN TELL YOU FROM EXPERIENCE that a jail cell is not a place you'd like to visit. Now, I'm no Papillon, and the police station serving the Sixty-eighth precinct in Brooklyn, New York, is no Devil's Island, but it sucks just the same. To give you a mental picture, for the past thirty minutes I've been sitting on a concrete bench staring at (1) a prehistoric toilet that is no doubt infested with E. coli and gonorrhea, (2) a very large, possibly mutated cockroach snacking on a green potato chip, and (3) an entire wall devoted to words and phrases that would put even Howard Stern under the table.

I'm waiting for my father to show up and bail me out. However, the two police officers who slapped the handcuffs on me outside the Century 21 department store are having a difficult time tracking him down. My dad is a doctor-ob-gyn, to be precise-so at the moment he could be delivering a baby, performing a hysterectomy, or doing some other procedure on a woman's body, which is something I'd rather not think about. Especially after reading Memoirs of a Pervert on the aforementioned wall.

Outside my cell, the nice cop, Officer Burns, hangs up the phone. "Hey, Dylan, looks like your dad will be here in twenty minutes."

"Oh, okay," I say. "Thanks, thanks a lot."

The not-so-nice cop, Burns's partner, Officer Greenwood, arches an eyebrow like he's never before met such a polite juvenile delinquent, then pours himself a cup of coffee. He dumps in a buttload of creamer and stirs. I can't help myself. "Um, sir . . ." He looks up. "You might consider switching to milk or half-and-half. That stuff you just used, it's got a lot of tran