___________________________
There is only one thing more dangerous than a paranoid fool and that’s a paranoid fool with a weapon in his hand.
Trenton Fillmore was dead and I was in seclusion. Confined to a special holding cell – a cement cube with a bedroll and a narrow band of glass bricks high up – while the powers-that-be determined my guilt, or innocence, or whichever meant less paperwork.
Sometimes, redemption is as elusive as a rainbow’s end: no matter how far we chase it down, it will always remain tantalizingly out of our reach.
Four long months had passed since I’d invoked a death sentence on
Jacob Klaussner
– aka Jack Heckscher, my friend, my confidant, my nemesis. Sixteen weeks of mental mangling and hand wrangling. But my deliberate killing of Jack Heckscher wasn’t the reason I was here. Not fully, anyway. Not by a long shot.
My obsessions will be the death of me.
On the run-up to the fatal face-off with
The Maestro
in Florida, I’d shot a federal agent. Not any old federal agent and not by accident. I’d shot Mason Stone, the Special Agent in Charge of the resurrected Piano Wire Murders. Basically, my level-headedness had gone AWOL and I’d shot him in the chest – on a whim and a fear of exposure. Point blank. Not once or even twice. A full clip, with every gunshot a nail in my coffin.
How do you come back from something like that?
Luckily for both of us, Stone had been wearing a Kevlar vest at the time. He’d survived the bullet barrage and the swollen waters of Pine Island Sound with severe bruising and cracked ribs. He’d gotten away with it. I hadn’t. Sometime later, I’d been arrested for my impulsive madness, processed and packaged off to the nuthouse for the criminally insane.
The deal was, I’d do two favors: one for Mason Stone and one for myself.
For my part, I’d undergone group counseling, one-to-one therapy sessions, intensive psychiatric reconditioning and enough psychological intervention to make my head spin like Regan’s in
The Exorcist
. Subtly bombarded with every silent letter P in the dictionary. Worn this thick skin of mine a few microns thinner. Whether or not any of it had penetrated my thick skull was anyone’s guess.
For Stone’s part, I’d gone undercover and befriended Trenton Fillmore.
Distantly, I heard an exchange of hurried dialogue in the hallway outside. Heard the voices fade as their owners retreated.
I got up from the bedroll and started pacing the cell.
I’d done a lot of standing still since I’d exacted merciless retribution on those responsible for the cold-blooded murder of my wife. How did I feel about it? I didn’t. I had thought I’d feel vindication, maybe even victorious. I was wrong. Vengeance had left me vacant, emotionless. Worst of all, the closure had left me directionless.
What use is a firework once it has lit up the night sky?
One emotion I did feel was anger.
Not simply because I was now holding the can for Fillmore’s murder, but because my friend had been killed and I couldn’t fix it. Not while I was locked up in solitary. Maybe not even when I was released back into the main prison population. Not without freedom to move, to investigate, to ask awkward questions, to do what I did best: rattle cages.
Someone had gutted Fillmore like a fish and left him to bleed out. I didn’t know who, or why. But I’d find out, somehow.
More than anything, I wanted to know why Fillmore – my buddy – had lied to the warden about me. I wanted to know why he’d expressed fear for his life, and at my hands.
There was a dog-eared book on the bedroll. One of the classics. Something by Hemmingway. Left here to keep an insane inmate from going stir crazy. I could see a giant marlin and a small boat on the worn jacket. I picked it up and turned to the first page.
A former internee had scrawled the words
‘You’re in deep shit now, brother’
in what looked and smelled like old feces.
Out in the hallway, the voices came back.
I heard the lock mechanism rotating. I closed the book as the door squeaked open. The short, rotund outline of Case Manager Bridges filled the doorway, the makings of a snarl pulling at the edges of his fleshy jowls.
“Who were you expecting,” he said without preamble, “Santa Claus? Come on, get your shit together. It looks like Christmas just came early for you, Quinn.”
___________________________
Freedom is a state of mind.
Physically, I was free. Not just out of solitary confinement, but the whole pig-on-a-skateboard shebang. Mentally, it would take time ripping down the razor wire.
“For the record,” I told Bridges as we headed through the bleached underground tunnels leading to Building One, “I didn’t kill Fillmore.”
“Not for me to think one way or the other. That’s between you and your maker, Quinn. Now keep your voice down; we don’t want anyone getting ideas.”
It was after hours, Christmas Eve – everybody locked down early for the night and listening out for sleigh bells.
We came to a small inspection room connected to the Receiving and Discharge Unit. I’d been here previously: the first day I’d arrived at Springfield. It was a basic frisk-down area. Empty trays for personal effects stacked on a bench. Latex gloves and tubes of K-Y jelly. All the fine trimmings one would expect in such a swanky establishment.
A sour-faced attendant handed me a plastic packet containing my regular day clothes and basic effects – a wallet, a watch, house keys, that kind of thing – confiscated on my arrival back in August. He huffed and puffed as I stripped out of the prison-issue khakis. My release was keeping him here after hours, and he was making a point of showing his impatience.
“Seems you got friends in high places,” Bridges commented as I climbed into a navy-blue polo shirt and stone-washed Levis. “They must have pulled some long strings to get you out during the holidays.”
I laced up my sneakers. “They’re the same ones that landed me in here.” I thrust out a hand. “You take care of yourself, Bridges. No hard feelings.”
“None taken.” A little uncertainly, he accepted the farewell handshake. His fistful of rings felt like a knuckleduster. “I’ll be heading back home for the holidays myself first thing in the morning. My folks live in Pasadena. I hear you’re heading out that way. Let’s do our best not to bump into one another.”
The attendant cranked open the steel door leading to the processing station and ushered me through.
There was a woman in a dark gray business suit pressed up against the chest-high counter, signing a discharge sheet under the sleepy gaze of a disinterested processing officer. She was in her late-forties. Rust-red hair falling in thick swags over trim shoulders. Freckles peeping through light make-up. One of those hour-glass women who hadn’t bought into the size zero hard-sell.
“Be right with you, Gabe,” she called without turning.
I knew her, I realized.
Had
known her – a lifetime ago. Wasn’t sure if I still wanted to.
“Rae? Libby Rae Burnett? Is that really you?”
She glanced my way as I approached, hazel eyes twinkling in the fluorescent light. She was twenty years older than the last time I’d seen her. But middle age had been kind. That, and maybe one or two carefully-placed fillers.
“Hey.” She smiled one of those fulsome, lips parted smiles that pulls one from your own face and doesn’t give it back.
But it was all a sham, for the benefit of the processing officer; I could see darker undertones creeping through. Worst still, I knew why.
“Rae, what are you doing here?”
She pushed the paperwork at the attendant, then flashed another perfunctory smile. “Isn’t that obvious? I’m breaking out some crazy as a run-over dog celebrity cop. Now what’s with the face?”
“Because I just realized you sold your soul and became a Fed.”
She peeped at the FBI badge hooked over her breast pocket, as if noticing it for the first time. “Well, would y’all look at that: so I did. Then, again, so did you. And I reckon that makes us even.” Her nose wrinkled. Freckles gathered. “Hold that thought.” She balled a fist, pulled back her arm, and slugged me on the nose. “Now we’re even.”
___________________________
Team Tennessee. That’s how Libby Rae Burnett had once described our breakneck relationship. Bullets in the same magazine.
For almost two years, Rae and I had partnered out of the same Memphis precinct together, as green-gilled beat cops – twenty-five years ago – when life hadn’t been any less of a quagmire, we’d just had more strength to wade through it.
We were in the backseat of a black sedan as it sped west, away from the federal prison, cold rainwater sluicing round the fenders. I was out and feeling the chill. Night had settled over Missouri like a wet blanket. Crystalized sleet peppering the windshield. Not many vehicles on the road; everyone home early for the holidays.
I was massaging the bridge of my nose. “I get it, Rae. You’re still angry. It’s understandable. I guess I owe you an apology.”
Rae’s body language was all four-letter words. “What I need is for you to give me an explanation. Didn’t you ever think about me?”
“More than I should.” It came out before I could stop it.
Rae’s stony expression softened for a moment, but only a moment. Then the drawbridge pulled itself back up.
“What’s the real rub here, Rae? You didn’t come all this way to give me a good old-fashioned Tennessee ass-whoopin’.”
“I didn’t?”
“No. I know you better than that. You’ve had twenty years to hunt me down and blacken my eyes. This is Stone’s idea, isn’t it? He knows about our past. That’s why he sent you here. It’s all part of his control mechanism.”
“Gabe, you’re paranoid. Coming here was my idea. At first, Mason refused to go along with it
because
he knew our history. I had to employ all my southern belle charm to persuade him otherwise.”
I smiled darkly. Rae could always charm jumpers down from the roof.
“But I’m beginning to think it was a bad idea,” she finished.
“Attacking me?”
“No, having good intentions to mend fences.”
I sighed. I caught a glimpse of headlights picking out rain-soaked trees and sagging power lines. “Rae, I know my faults. Springfield introduced me to every one of them. I run away. Always have. I erect barriers and pigeonhole problems. Professionally, it’s served me well. Emotionally, it’s ruined relationships. I’m trying to change.”
“And I’m happy for you, Gabe. It sounds like the Fed Med did its job.”
Rae’s gaze was paralyzing, as it always had been.
“How did Stone take the news about Fillmore?”
“Not good. He was madder than a wet hen – especially considering they’d already shipped the body out to the Greene County Medical Examiner by the time I got here.”
Fast work, given it was Christmas Eve.
“Rae, you do know I didn’t kill Fillmore?” There was enough graveness in my voice to give Vincent Price the chills.
For a moment she looked out through the window at the falling sleet. Then her eyes found mine and I could see her jury was still out.