"Go, look at him again. Maybe it will help." The sergeant took me to the room with a glass wall, through which I could see my attacker talking to a cop. The diamond hunter was wearing blue jeans, a white t-shirt, and the nicest facial expression.

The sergeant picked up the receiver and listened to it for a couple of minutes, then turned to me with a sad smile.

"He says that he never attacked you. He says that he wanted to take a cab, and approached you, and you attacked him and hit him in his face. He says that you ripped off your earrings when the police car showed up."

"What?" I choked on my own saliva. "Wait. I was standing there, next to my car, having coffee. Then I opened the car door, he pushed me inside, smashed my face against the steering wheel, ripped off my earrings and took off. Now, he's saying that I attacked him? This is the most blatant lie I have ever heard in my life. What about the cop in the car? He saw…"

"He saw you jumping inside the cab and trying to drive away," the detective said.

"What about the guy I ran over? Maybe he saw something?" I was grabbing at the last straw, and the detective knew it.

"Maybe," Sergeant McAfee said, looking at me with fatherly compassion. "A very slight possibility. But we can't talk to him right now. He's got a brain concussion and right now he's sleeping in the hospital."

For lunch, I got a cup of weak coffee and a doughnut. Then Sergeant McAfee took me to the City Courthouse. We waited for half an hour for the judge to call my name. The judge, enormous in his black robes, observed me through his round glasses, then moved his glasses to the tip of his nose and observed me from above them.

"Okay, what do we have here? Rachel Rydal. Thirty-five years old. Physical assault on a man, disobeying a police order to stop and get out of the car, an attempt to escape from the police, in the process of which another man was hit and run over and was injured. What is this, ma'am?"

"I don't know," I said. "The black guy pushed me inside the cab and ripped off my earrings."

"Do you work?"

"Yes. I drive a cab." Hot tears ran down my face as freely as if the judge had just opened a faucet.

"Where are those earrings?" the judge asked. The sergeant produced a plastic bag with my jewelry. "Where did you get them?"

"They were my wedding present."

"Are you married?"

"No, your Honor. Divorced. One child."

The judge snorted, flipping through my case pages. "Okay, Ms. Rydal. Bail is set at nine hundred ninety-nine dollars. Find a lawyer, will you?"

Being unable to produce a thousand dollars, I was locked up in a cell at the police station for the night and had another weak coffee and a glazed doughnut for dinner. I needed to get out of jail while I could get through the doors. One permitted phone call was used to call my friend Kathy, who drove all the way from Montgomery County to pick up Iris to stay with her, until she gets money to bail me out. The idea of calling my parents never even entered my mind, since my dad had a serious heart condition, and I wouldn't be able to explain to him how just a brief involuntary encounter with another human being turned me from a nice, reliable, hard-working woman into a criminal.

Exhausted, I instantly fell asleep, and woke up in the morning to the voice of a police officer calling my name. For a moment, I couldn't recall what day it was and where all my furniture had gone.

"Rachel Rydal, you have somebody waiting for you." The young, handsome cop opened the cell door. I stepped out into a hallway while he was fastening handcuffs on my wrists and asked him if Kathy had paid the bail.