Gravewriter (15 page)

He halfheartedly raised his right hand to be sworn in, like a recruit being forced to volunteer for some hated assignment.

The witness looked about thirty-five years old. He was unshaven and his stringy black hair was tangled. His face was sunburned and peeling, possibly from an outdoor detail, such as picking trash along Route 95. He was barely five-five and couldn't have weighed more than a buck twenty. Still, Billy doubted that many men in the cell block messed with Lawrence Home. He was the sneaky-strong, wiry type, in good shape and hardened from a lifetime of street fights. As
the prosecutor stood to begin his examination, Horne's lips puckered and his left eye narrowed. Though he was Dillingham's own witness, Home seemed to be readying for a bitter argument. He looked like a man accustomed to throwing the first punch.

“Mr. Home,” Dillingham began, “are you currently a resident of the Rhode Island Adult Correctional Institutions?”

“The slammer?” he said. His demeanor brightened and he chuckled. “Yeah, I'm
residing
there for another eight to ten.” He looked up to share the joke with Judge Palumbo, who stared through him as though he weren't there.

“Did you at one time share a cell with Garrett Nickel?”

“For three years, up at the Supermax, till we broke out.”

“That would be the state's High Security Center, in Cranston, correct?”

“Call it what you want.”

“At any time was a third inmate assigned to the cell with you and Mr. Nickel?”

Horne grimaced and stretched his jaw. He nodded toward the defense table. “Yeah, that little son of a bitch.”

Martin Smothers bounced up. “Your Honor!” he objected.

Judge Palumbo calmed Martin with a nod and pushed him into his chair with the slightest gesture of his hand. “The record will show that the witness indicated that the defendant, Mr. Shadd, was his cell mate,” the judge ordered. “Extraneous comments about his momma will be stricken from the record, and the jury will disregard. Move along, Mr. Dillingham.”

“Mr. Horne,” Dillingham continued, “can you tell the court about the first time you met the defendant?”

“Can I tell the court?” Home repeated, looking around, seeming surprised by the question. He gave a little shrug. “Yeah—what the hell. I can tell it just like it happened.”

Seated on the floor, Larry Home gently dragged a string through the one-inch space under the cell door. The string had been painstakingly braided from threads pulled from a towel. The line was twenty-five feet long, long enough to reach two cells over. Nobody fished better than Larry. He would weight the end of the string with a paper wad and then flick it with a finger, casting it under the cell door, where it would extend as far as twenty feet. That was far enough to tangle it with somebody else's fishing line, and to make a person-to-person prison connection.

The odor of dinner arrived in F Block a few minutes before the meal.

Garrett Nickel reclined on the lower bunk and inhaled deeply. “It's the fuckin' meat loaf again,” he predicted. “Hurry up and get the line in before it gets here.”

“The meat loaf is made from ground kangaroo and rotten tomatoes,” said Larry.

“Yeah, retarded kangaroo.”

The skinny new guy said nothing. He sat on his footlocker, feet on the floor, his head leaning back against the concrete wall, eyes staring through the building.

The stencil on his jumpsuit read:
“SHADD,
Peter J.”

The cell was about twelve feet square. It had been designed as a double room, but a prison-population boom had forced in a third bunk, crudely welded atop the other two. There was one metal toilet, a small vanity with cold running water, and three footlockers.

The cell door was steel, with a thick glass porthole. Below the porthole, the door had a horizontal trap just wide enough for a dinner tray. On the wall opposite the door, sunlight entered through a tall, narrow window, about seven inches wide, made of thick glass. Through it, the inmates could see a seven-inch slice of freedom beyond
the prison yard and a twenty-foot chain fence. They could see the former state insane asylum—now abandoned—a gloomy redbrick fortress filled with nothing but old screams. And beyond that, civilization: streets and stores and cars zooming along, drivers oblivious to the eyes on them.

All three men wore bright orange jumpsuits. Orange meant troublemaker; among Rhode Island prison inmates, the men in orange were thought to be the most dangerous, or the hardest to tame. They were held in lockdown in their cell, except for two showers a week.

Larry pulled a battered copy of
Newsweek
under the door. “Got it,” he said.

“What does it say on page thirty-three?” Garrett asked.

Larry flipped through the magazine and then read the handwritten scrawl. “ ‘We have our people on the outside looking for your guy.… Will advise.… Stay tuned.' ”

Garrett clapped twice. “Excellent!” He walked to the window and peered out.

On the tiny window ledge, Garrett had left a shampoo bottle nearly full of pink-tinted sour milk, topped with mold green curds ripening in the evening sun.

With no ventilation, the cell was humid.

Garrett unbuttoned his jumpsuit to the waist and slipped his arms out of it. He had been on a long, hard diet. His body had eaten whatever fat it had stored and then had begun consuming raw muscle; the veins in his arms bulged just beneath the skin.

Garrett pulled out a six-inch shank from his sock and sharpened it against the concrete wall, grinding lazily in little circles. He soon tired of the work. “Where's my Bible?” he asked. Before anyone could answer, he grabbed the book from his bunk and flipped through it until he found a tiny envelope of white powder. He dumped the powder on the book cover, scraped the drug into a line with the envelope, and snorted it.

He gasped hard, like a pearl diver breaking the surface after two minutes underwater. “Whew! Nothing better for losing weight,” he said.

Larry Home had been on a crash diet, too. But he was built smaller than Garrett and didn't need to lose as much. Still, Larry hated to deprive himself. He was envious of the new guy—he was already skinny enough.

A door buzzed down the hall, opened, and then slammed shut.

The chow was coming.

Garrett stashed the shank in his sock. “See if it's Flagg,” he urged.

Horne grabbed his own King James Bible off his footlocker, a book identical to Garrett's, and yanked out a bookmark—a shard of plastic mirror half an inch wide and eight inches long. He slapped down the book, dived to the floor, and crawled to the bottom of the door. With his cheek on the concrete, he slid the mirror under the door and peeked into the hall.

“It's him,” Larry confirmed in an excited whisper. “It's Frank Flagg.”

Garrett rushed to the window and grabbed the bottle of rotten milk. With a hearty wet snort, he opened the bottle and drooled into the mixture.

A stench filled the cell. Peter grimaced.

Garrett pressed his palm over the bottle. “A good bacteria cocktail starts with whole milk,” he informed Peter matter-of-factly. “That's the food—that's what bacteria eat. You add two teaspoons of blood as fertilizer and then seed it with the snot of a man with the flu.”

“Rat shit works, too,” Larry offered.

Peter tensed and looked around the cell, peering into the corners.

Larry laughed. “I think the new guy is afraid of rats,” he said. “I guess we cancel our summer barbecue.”

Garrett shook the mixture. He said to Peter, “Nice hot weather like this, mmmm, they grow good in five days.”

Peter nodded.

“Spitting in here really had nothing to do with the recipe—that part's personal,” Garrett confessed.

Larry climbed off the floor, saying to Peter, “It's your first meal with us—always ask for extra salt.”

Peter sighed. He spoke his first words since being transferred from the medium-security prison half a mile away. “Is the food that bad in this building?”

“Who knows,” Garrett said. “I only eat the crackers.” He stepped beside the door and waited with his hand over the bottle.

The door trap creaked open.

“Chow time,” said Flagg.

Franklin Flagg was about forty-five, heavy-browed and snaggletoothed. He wore a sand-colored jumpsuit from the minimum-security building down the road, and served meals in High Security on work detail. He pushed a covered aluminum tray to Larry through the opening in the door.

“I want extra salt,” Larry said.

“I know, I know. It's on there.”

“The new guy wants extra salt, too.”

“Fine.” He pushed a second tray through. Larry set them on the bottom bunk and turned back to take the third.

Once the food was inside, Garrett leaned to the opening. He said, “The cops gave us a shakedown last week.”

Flagg said nothing for a moment, and then: “Oh yeah?”

“Somebody told them I had a contraband: they ripped the cell apart.”

“Huh.”

“I barely had time to flush three grams of snizzle down the shitter. Do you know how hard it is to get that real Colombian shit into this building?”

“I don't need trouble,” Flagg said. “I've done my time, every
minute of it. I did six years in this building, and then worked my way down to minimum security by avoiding problems. In twenty-four days, I get paroled out of the system. I don't want to start nothing with you.”

“I know somebody has been watching me,” Garrett said. “You spying on me, Flagg? Is that how you won parole? Because I saw you in the rec yard. I saw you in the law library. I saw you looking at me at Bible study. And I'm seeing you right now.”

“Look, Garrett, I got a lot of jobs around—”

Garrett jammed the bottle into the opening and squeezed.

Flagged shrieked, gagged, turned to run, skidded, slipped, crashed to the floor. “Help me!” he cried.

Garrett doused him with the putrid stream and then shoved the empty container into the hall. “Next time,” he growled through the slot, “I stuff your heart in the bottle.”

He yanked the trap shut, turned away from the door, looked to heaven, and shouted over Flagg's muffled cries, “ ‘And the captain of the guard took Jeremiah, and said unto him, the Lord thy God hath pronounced this evil upon this place!' ”

“Amen!” said Larry.

Then Garrett asked cheerily, “So what's for chow?”

“Are you kidding?” Peter asked. He held his nose. “I can't eat after
that.”

Larry uncovered the meals. “Uh, you can thank us later,” he told Peter. The meat loaf was a steaming gray lump. The waxed beans might have actually been made from wax. Each tray also had one large wheat cracker, a battered apple, and a carton of milk. “You'll find that the meat loaf tastes like Jimmy Hoffa,” Larry warned.

Garrett passed his nose over the food and sampled the aroma. “Mmmm,” he said, mockingly. He bit into a wheat cracker and then collected three paper packs of salt from each tray.

“At least we got extra salt with the new guy here,” Larry said.

Garrett opened the salt packs three at a time and dumped them into an empty milk carton.

“Don't you guys eat?” Peter asked.

“Not lately,” Garrett said. He reached into his jumpsuit, briefly pulled out his cock, and squirted bright yellow piss into the carton.

“What the hell is that for?” Peter stammered.

Garrett adjusted his jumpsuit and then went to the window and stirred the mixture with an old toothbrush. “The salt is a corrosive,” he explained. “And the piss is acidic.”

He dipped the brush in the mixture and then carefully painted the metal frame around the window.

“How long you been doing this?” Peter asked.

“Two years.”

The three men were silent as Garrett slathered the frame with piss brine. “How much longer?” Larry asked finally.

Garrett put the carton aside and retrieved the shank from his sock. He probed the frame with the sharp tip. “Hard to say,” he concluded with a shrug. “There's some softening. I'd say a couple weeks, three at the most.”

“Uhhhhh!” Larry moaned. “Three more weeks on this fuckin' diet.”

“I
'm glad you came back.”

“I'm sorry about the way I left last time,” Billy whispered.

“Think nothing of it,” the priest said.

“I didn't wait for my penance.”

“I'll sentence you to ten thousand Hail Marys if that would ease your conscience,” said Father Capricchio. He chuckled.

Billy blew out a long breath. The silk screen bulged against it. “There's balance in the universe, isn't there?” Billy asked. “Hypothetically.”

Father Capricchio's eyebrows climbed his head. Billy was here for business. He took a tug off his diet Moxie and considered the question. He began, “I guess that depends—”

“Because God puts things into balance,” said Billy, interrupting. “There's the right amount of mass and energy in space, the right mixture of air and land on earth. When there is
crime—
let's call it sin—”

“Let's.”

“—isn't there an equal amount of justice somewhere to counteract it?”

“God plays fair, if that's what you mean.” Father Capricchio said. Billy had lost him.

“No, what I mean is—what if an innocent person is about to be harmed, while a guilty person goes free? Wouldn't God approve if somebody, um, righted the scales?”

Father Capricchio felt a chill, like a cool, damp wind. He squirmed in his chair, then said gravely, “You speak in terms of man's law, not God's. Our laws are fallible—for example, sometimes we let the guilty go free because we're not sure they're guilty.”

“Reasonable doubt.”

“There is no doubt in God's law—whatever errors we make with human justice, God will correct on His timetable.”