Bear
sprang and caught me, knocking me against
Marlboro Man,
who toppled and
broke.
Lifting me completely off my feet, trapping my legs so I couldn’t
kick, Bear clamped me against his body, holding me like a human sacrifice. “You
want her to suffer?” he said, panting. “Pick up that leg bone there.”
Eyes
glittering with malice, Vanessa snatched up the horse’s cannon bone, shattered
at the knee by one of her stray shots. It must have weighed thirty pounds, but
Vanessa hefted it as easily as though it were a cookie spatula. I saw my own
death coming at me in slow motion; Vanessa would whale away at me until I was a
bloody pulp, and when they found my body, it would look as though I’d been
pulverized by plastinated sculptures.
With
the skill engendered by years of swinging golf clubs, Vanessa leaped forward
and brought the cannon bone crashing down toward my head. Lotsa muscle, lousy
aim—she smashed Bear’s crazy bone. He shrieked in agony and dropped me.
As I stumbled away, Vanessa attacked again, bringing the bone down against my
shoulder with an impact that staggered me to hands and knees. She straddled me,
arching the cannon bone back for a killer blow. Torquing my body, I grabbed a
fistful of Vanessa’s skirt, yanked it with all my strength, and hauled her off
balance. She crashed to the floor, toppling poor old
Archer,
whose body
parts scattered like flung dice.
But
Vanessa was the Energizer Bunny of crazed in-laws, single-mindedly bent on
destroying me. Twisting around with remarkable agility, she flailed at me with
the cannon bone, landing a blow on my ear. My skull exploded, the pain making
me wild.
Growling
like an animal, I clamped my jaws around Vanessa’s hand and bit so hard my teeth
jarred. She squealed in pain and dropped the bone. I jerked her up by her hair
and got so far in her face we were bared teeth to bared teeth. “Listen, you
insane hag! I didn’t kill your idiot son. But guess what—I’m keeping your
dog!”
Foolishly,
I’d forgotten about Bear, who now lurched up behind me swinging a plastinated
lung, intent on turning my brains to sushi. Releasing Vanessa, I scrabbled
frantically for a weapon, snatching the first thing that came to hand—the
broken-off end of the archer’s bow. I swiveled and jabbed blindly, driving the
jagged wood into Bear’s flesh with all my strength, puncturing his thigh.
Shrieking, he floundered backward into the remnants of the horse and rider
sculpture. It wobbled, tottered, and swayed. Bones cracked, muscles split, and
laminate coating crackled like snapping wood. Then, twelve hundred pounds of
dead horse collapsed onto Senator Stanford Brenner.
Suddenly
the room was filled with people. Where had they been when I was being mauled by
psycho-senator? Labeck hauled me to my feet and clutched me to him, hugging me
so tightly I couldn’t breathe, babbling incoherent stuff into my hair. Eddie
hovered around anxiously, patting my back. Cops, museum security, emergency
techs, firemen, camera crews, reporters—all came crowding into the
exhibit, coughing and getting soaked and scoping out what I was wearing. Which
was basically nothing.
Labeck
took off his torn, bloody tuxedo jacket and draped it over me. The surge of
gratitude I experienced felt almost like love.
Amid
the smoke, the confusion, the milling bodies, and the wreckage, it might
even have been possible to slip
away again. Rico had somehow managed to insinuate himself into the
mob—his chauffeur’s uniform made him look sort of official, like the
dictator of a minor banana republic. He came up to me and whispered, “The
limo’s just out back. C’mon, Maze—
echa la cookie.
”
I
admit I was tempted. But that wasn’t the plan.
It was time for
Phase Three of Operation Payback
.
I untangled
myself from Labeck and spoke to Rico. “Get Eddie over here. The two of you are
going to walk me over to the man in the dark suit.”
“No
way, Maze—that guy’s a porker.”
“He’s
Irving Katz. He’s a federal porker. You and Eddie are going to turn me in to
him.”
“Screw
that.”
I’d insisted on
just one thing in our whole scheme: surrendering myself to Irving Katz, the
only person I trusted to be immune from Brenner contamination.
I
stood on tiptoes and kissed Rico’s baby-faced cheek. “You and Eddie are going
to split the fifty thousand reward. It’s for college. Use it for anything else
and I’ll break out of prison again and beat your pimply little butts.”
Escape tip #33:
It’s not what you know;
it’s who’s on your side.
That’s life. You’ve got the smoking gun,
the wreckage of a dozen once-human bodies, and the Real Murderer—and
you’re still the one who goes to jail.
The
prison staff punished me for daring to escape. I’d made them look foolish,
eluded capture for a week, and drained the money the warden had earmarked for
redecorating her office. I was hauled back to Taycheedah the night of the
museum massacre, given an ice pack for my bruised shoulder, a bandage for my
ear, and an aspirin for my throbbing head. Then they shoved me into
Rehabilitative Seclusion. In the old, unenlightened days, Rehabilitative
Seclusion was called Solitary Confinement, but we live in more humane times and
the euphemisms are more sophisticated nowadays.
Different
name, same game.
No
mingling with the other inmates—the staff didn’t want me made into a
hero. No exercise period, television, books, or newspapers. The cell was eight
by ten feet, windowless, virtually airless, furnished only with a bunk and a
toilet. Meals were delivered through a hole in the cell door. I wasn’t
restricted to bread and water, but RS is a long way from the kitchens and the
food was always cold by the time it got to my cell. I refused to eat most of it
anyway, on the theory that the staff had probably spit in it.
I
wasn’t physically abused, but my female guards were cruel in that quietly
vicious way only women can manage.
Where’s
your Mazie-mania now, bitch?
I
seen you on TV, prancing around practically naked.
You still
stink like cow crap!
I
let it all float over my head. When you’ve been buried alive, almost
electrocuted, practically incinerated, and nearly brained with a horse hock, everything
else shrinks to mere inconvenience. I ached all over. My mosquito bites itched.
My sliced hand throbbed. My shoulder was turning the reddish purple of grape
jelly.
And I missed
Bonaparte Labeck with an ache that was as much physical as emotional.
Pacing the
closetlike confines of my cell, I worried about the men, boys, and dog in my
life, marveling over their courage in helping me, wondering how much trouble
they were in, and praying that Muffin hadn’t been returned to Vanessa.
If there were any
justice in the world, Vanessa would be here in Taycheedah, wearing a neon
orange jumpsuit and fending off the advances of Mona the Monobrow. She and I
could swap beauty tips:
Pumice that dry, flaking skin off your heels with
recreation yard dirt
.
Condition your dull, lanky hair with Crisco oil
swiped from the kitchens.
And what about
Bear? Had he survived?
Dead
was good, but second best would be shackled
hand and foot in a cell with a dozen other drug-dealing, pedophile murderers.
I
was sitting up on my bunk, scraping the margarine off my lunch bread to use as
elbow moisturizer, when a guard unlocked my cell door and Winnifred Stuckey,
the Assistant Warden, strode in. She was a tall, stoop-shouldered woman with
scraggly orange hair scraped back by a plastic headband. “C’mere, you,” she
ordered, crooking her index finger.
I followed
Stuckey down miles of corridors. An inmate was listlessly mopping a floor in
the E wing hallway, her dreadlocks swinging into her face as she worked. She
looked up dully, but when she saw me, her face suddenly brightened.
“Mazie
Maguire!” she said. “Hey, Maze—how you doing?” She fist-bumped me.
I
bumped back, realizing as we touched how much I’d missed simple human contact.
Annoyed, Stuckey ordered the inmate back to work. But word grapevined up and
down the hallways; prison news travels even faster than Twitter. By the time I
was hustled down the next hallway, women’s faces were pressed up against cell
windows. Whistles, cheers, war whoops.
“Way
to go, girl!” That was Tina Sanchez, beaming ear to ear. I hoped we’d be
reassigned as cellmates.
“
Nice work, babes!” A double thumbs-up
from Vicki Jean the Boosting Queen.
“I wormed the warden’s computer for you,”
Vonda the Virus informed me.
“Don’t
sign anything without an attorney present!” Liza Loonsfoot, jailhouse lawyer.
Winnifred
Stuckey, who now looked as though she were chewing a giant wad of aluminum
foil, opened a door and shoved me into a room. I blinked. The room was filled
with bright daylight. I was in the Unrestricted Visitors Room, which meant
there was no security glass between inmates and visitors. You could sit and
talk on the kind of furniture they have in motels where the television is
chained to the wall.
A man was
standing at the window on the far side of the room, looking out onto the
grounds. He turned when I came in and walked toward me. It was U.S. Marshal
Irving Katz.
“Miss
Maguire.” He held out his hand and I shook it, surprised. Last time I’d seen
him, the night I’d turned myself in to his custody, he’d been stiff, cool, and
still royally pissed at having had to chase me all over the state for six days.
Now he was relaxed and smiling. He looked like a guy who’d picked a ticket up
off the sidewalk and discovered he’d won the Powerball. He’d ditched the suit
and was wearing khakis and a black knit shirt with a U.S. Marshal’s Office
logo
on the chest. I was starting to like the Zorro mustache.
As a favor to
him, I decided to stay downwind. I hadn’t been allowed a shower, shampoo, or
change of underwear since I’d been thrown into RS. I was wearing paper slippers
and a moss green gown designed along the lines of those Snuggle-sack blankets
advertised on late-night television.
The sharp dark
eyes skimmed over me. If there really was such a thing as X-ray vision, Irving
Katz had it.
“I’d like to
speak privately with Miss Maguire,” Katz said, turning to Stuckey.
She bristled.
“It’s against the rules. She’s an escape risk.”
“I’ll
take responsibility for her.”
Stuckey left,
muttering about regulations, and Katz turned to me. “You’re not going to try to
escape, are you?”
“I
never rule it out.”
Katz laughed. It
made him look younger. “It wouldn’t be very smart, considering how close you
are to being released.”
My heart started
thumping wildly. I tried to calm down, reminding myself that
close
could
mean anything from weeks to years. Wrangles over jurisdiction, delays on legal
technicalities, Brenner money jingling into the right palms . . .
“Released?
Seriously? I’ve been in RS, nobody’s told me anything, I don’t even know what
day it is.” My words tumbled out in an angry torrent. “Is Ben Labeck all right?
And Rico and Eddie? What happened to—”
“It’s September
fifteenth. Your friends are fine. Mister Labeck has been a constant thorn in
the warden’s side and a pain in my own posterior. He’s been here every day,
raising hell and demanding to see you.”
“He was
here
?
Ben Labeck was here?”
“He’s practically
staging a sit-in in the warden’s office. I wouldn’t be surprised if he tries to
parachute in next time.”
I could feel
myself flushing scarlet. Labeck was such a dope! He ought to be getting on with
his life, finding a nice girl who knew a hundred different ways to cook with
maple syrup. I might be stuck in prison for years. But the thought that he was
trying to see me, that he still cared for me, filled me with such a fierce,
giddy joy that I actually felt dizzy.
“Maybe you better
sit down.” Katz looked slightly alarmed.
I shakily lowered
myself onto the visitors room sofa, which was upholstered in a bristly,
barf-colored fabric that scratched the backs of my thighs.
“So what else do
you want to know?” Katz asked, settling himself across from me in a torn vinyl
armchair.
“What
about Brenner? Is he dead?”
Katz came as
close to squirming as was possible for someone with his self-control.
“Not dead. He’s
on an island in the Caribbean.”
“He’s in the
Caribbean
?”
I could feel my eyes about to shoot out of their sockets.
“The night of the
museum gala—”
“The night
he tried to
kill
me, you mean. I should have jammed that stick up his—”