Chapter One

"Freeze! Hold it right there. Hands over your head."

I stood petrified, only one thought crashing through my mind. Now what?

A nightmare was unfolding before my very eyes. I couldn't grasp that it was actually happening, but it was—and mere feet from my front door. I could not concentrate on anything other than those drawn guns.

Two officers threw me to the ground. A knee smashed into my back, and my wrists were slapped into cuffs. One policeman underhooked my arms and picked me up while reading me my rights.

Defiantly, I did what I had been taught since childhood: I played ignorant. "Hey, man, what's goin' on? What's all this about?"

The one thing flashing through my brain was the advice of my sister Billie Jean, a streetwise hustler as cool as they came: Junior, once you tell a lie, you've always got to stick to that first lie. Even in the back of the cop car, I insisted, "I have no idea what you're talking about. You've got the wrong guy."

I was convinced no one could identify me. I was wrong. When they put me in a lineup at the station, I was instantly picked out.

Well, so much for ignorance. As it turned out, it wasn't even a stranger who identified me but, of all people, my boy Zach's girlfriend, who had decided to cash in on the five-thousand-dollar reward and rat us out.

I was doomed.

Even without Robin's big mouth in the mix, it would have been just a matter of time before my boys and I were caught. After all, we had painted ourselves into a corner within the Houston metropolitan grid.

I was thrown into Harris County Jail with a ba