I slept hard until the alarm woke me late in the morning. It was a struggle to find the clock. I fell across the other side of the bed, dry-mouthed, limbs hardly obeying my brain, and stretched about. Bizarre memories of the night before. At first I thought they were dreams. Then the shock of knowing it had happened.
Fifteen minutes later I was sitting on the toilet with my head in my hands, feet planted on the cold linoleum. I needed to go through with it. I got an old, forgotten condom out of
the drawer, ripped the plastic, and pulled it out. Ribbed, thin, those hopeful compromises between protection and pleasure. Shaky hands, each pill going in. Packed like a sock filled with gravel and tied off. I stood and leaned over, lifting a leg like a dog, and worked it into my body.
Then I put on my uniform and drove to Ditmarsh. All I could think about was the library. I had to maneuver myself there somehow before nine o’clock to do the drop. Getting out of my truck took a lot. Entering the north gate, smiling at Jones, and walking around the metal detector took everything I had. Jones waited until I was inside, then told me I needed to report to the Keeper’s office. Every muscle in my face stopped working. I was a small animal that had walked into a trap.
Keeper Pollock was in the office, and he made me close the door. Pollock was a white-haired buzz cut about six minutes from retirement. The kind of simple soldier who smoothed all nuance out of right and wrong and made rank, seniority, and loyalty the cardinal virtues of a well-served life. He told me Detective Melinda Reizner of the Pen Squad wanted to talk with me. I felt like a child moments from breaking down, confessing every wrong and begging for forgiveness. But instead I managed to ask why I was wanted.
“You got me. Maybe they want to ask you about your boyfriend, Hadley. We’re all wondering where love went wrong.”
I thought about the videotape evidence and MacKay’s take on why it hadn’t been turned over. I told myself the meeting
with Melinda didn’t have anything to do with the drugs inside me, and I headed off, stiff with a bravery I didn’t feel.
The Pen Squad was officed in a closed-off hall inside the old warden’s residence behind the infirmary. As a CO, I had never passed through the secure door before. I’d escorted inmates to the entrance but had always handed them off to one of the detectives or intelligence analysts within and then waited for the interrogation to be finished. In my experience, the inmates walked in full of bluster and walked out quiet and wary. Like everyone else, I assumed they were guilty or at least in possession of knowledge that made them complicit in whatever was being investigated. Like everyone else, I assumed they would quickly inform on one of their fellow inmates in return for some legal favor or break.
The young man who answered my buzz resembled a weak sister or a civilian visitor more than a plainclothes officer. He knew who I was. Detective Reizner wasn’t ready to see me. Fast-talking and harried, he shrugged with an empathetic smile. “You know how it is. We’re working late tonight.”
He showed me to Melinda’s office: a desk, a computer, and four filing cabinets. There were no frills. Zero personal touches. A long foldout table with an off-kilter stack of files, a video monitor, and a tangle of cables.
“Do you mind waiting a few minutes?” he asked.
I said I didn’t mind. He closed the door, gently but firmly.
The fluorescent lights sucked away all hope. I looked around the room for something to distract me. Memos on the wall, official notes about this and that. A chart listing inmate personal and family visits over the last three months. A statement,
copied from the plaque just inside the north gate, describing the offenses for which visitors could be arrested and charged. I saw an evidence box and peered inside. Filled with impressively creative homemade weapons. The long plastic tube with a brutal pointed end had probably been a plate stolen from the cafeteria, microwaved, melted, and folded repeatedly until it looked (almost laughably) like a death-dealing dildo. The short aluminum pipe and elastic band was a zip gun for shooting darts. What men will do with their free time. Jacked up on fear, greed, envy, and hate. Throw in a little mental illness, and stir.
I saw a file containing Jon Crowley’s autopsy report.
It was impossible to resist picking it up. It even allowed me to hope, almost rationally, that Crowley was the reason Melinda had called me in. The pages were meager, only a half dozen pictures, the details rough. Highly compromised liver function owing to long-term untreated hep C. A duodenal ulcer. So much for our prison health-care system. More germane to the events in question, partial hypothermia and acute asphyxiation. Third-degree chemical burns to his chest and face. One hundred and thirty-seven separate contusions.
Ten minutes later the door opened and Melinda appeared with an older woman at her side. “Oh,” she said. “They’ve got you in here.” Surprised to see me, but instantly changing gears, she threw around introductions. “This is Cynthia. Been around the longest and knows more about the work than the rest of us put together.” Cynthia, dressed in blue jeans and a plaid hunter’s shirt, told Melinda she was full of shit. Melinda looked more like a businesswoman running a
corporate division. She asked Cynthia if they could follow up later, and Cynthia left us.
Melinda closed the door, and the way she relaxed, a little downturn in her energy, gave me my second blast of hope. “Sorry. Busy day. You been in here before?”
“Deliveries only.” Tense and ready for anything, I kept myself friendly and humorous, eager to please. I saw inmates do it every day.
“Well, thanks for coming in. Some COs wouldn’t.” Melinda continued: “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the whole Crowley thing, but we haven’t slowed down since.”
Crowley. I could talk about Crowley. I’d thank God if I could talk about Crowley.
“But now I’ve got a new reason to chat.”
I waited, and wondered if my hand would shake if I lifted it to my face.
“What about?”
“You have a fan in here.”
“A fan?”
“Someone who wants to see you. Wants to see only you.”
I asked who.
“An inmate named Joshua Riff.”
“The kid from the infirmary?” The question sounded in-authentic in my own ears.
“Last night there was an incident.” Melinda hesitated, and I could see her composing a story. “The COs heard screaming, ran to his cell, found him in an agitated and destructive state. He refused to restrain himself, so they moved in to prevent self-injury and temporarily housed him in a safe room.”
Rubber walls, wrapped tight. Maybe even sedated. Probably softened up first.
“They searched his cell, standard procedure, and found something.”
She showed me the clear bag. A white plastic ball broken open, a pouch of white powder poking out.
“He admitted to the drugs. Says he was supposed to bring them to the library. We can’t get the details out of him, though. Who passed them on, how he got them, who he was going to give them to. He says he wants to talk to you.”
“The library.”
“A nice bit of intelligence to stumble on. We’d been keying in on the warehouse ever since we found a bag inside the southwest wall. We’ll get a camera on the library tonight and see if we can figure out the drop-and-pick patterns.”
A few hours later and it might have been me. I could picture the video of a blue-uniformed CO in the library, looking nervous, stumbling through a handoff.
“Will you talk with him? He’s scared and doesn’t want to say any more to us. But I want to find out what he knows, see what kind of trouble he’s in. We might be able to turn him into a regular informant.”
I didn’t want the assignment. Not this way. I wanted to walk.
“I know it’s not in your job description,” Melinda said, “but I figured you wouldn’t mind helping out. We won’t record it, so you’ll never have to worry about it showing up. Just a friendly chat, and maybe you can prime him to cooperate with us. He’s insistent on you.”
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t mean yes. I wanted time to think, but Melinda misinterpreted.
“Fantastic. I knew you’d be into it. Here’s the two-second course on interrogation. Say little, listen a lot. It’s difficult for people to stay quiet. It makes them uncomfortable. It’s human nature to want to fill the gaps. Good interviewers use that. You know what I mean?”
Nod.
“Then let’s get it over with. Do you need to pee?”
I said I did. I wanted the drugs out of my body, even if that was the worst idea in the world.
His face was puffy, a black eye and a thick lip you could put a steak on. Older than before, and younger, too. Our time in the car, so imprinted on my memory, seemed hazy to me now, different people in different times.
I needed to show him kindness. A mercy and decency I didn’t feel. “How is your face?” I asked. “Are you all right?” My head tilted with caring. My heart was stone. I hoped no one was watching. Melinda had said the camera was off, but a precise red-lettered sign on each wall stated, “You are being recorded.” I didn’t know whether to trust Melinda or the sign.
He looked up, blinking through the swelling. “Thanks for coming to see me.” His voice was tight with the hoarseness of exhaustion. “It’s not easy in here sometimes.”
“They don’t make it easy for a reason.” I kept my own tone dry and reasonable, but the harshness had crept back.
“I could use a little help,” he said. “I think I’m in over my head.”
Was it a con? The ones who were good at lies fooled you so completely you questioned reality in the aftermath.
“I don’t know, Josh. You seem to be handling yourself pretty well. Making friends.”
“What do you mean, friends?”
“Josh, they found enough cocaine in your cell to keep a range going for a week.”
“You think I knew that was coming?”
“Oh, someone forced it on you?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact.” A genuine laugh. Then his face got heavy again, and he lifted a shaky hand to his forehead.
“What is it?” I asked, irritated at the joke I didn’t understand.
“I need to get out of the infirmary and into population. I want to start my real time. I want to be on B-three. There’s some people there who will look out for me.”
I must have looked surprised.
“Crowley thought I was crazy to want out of the infirmary, too. He said I didn’t know how good I had it. But they got me in there for a reason.”
“Who’s they?”
He said nothing. I waited.
“Keeper Wallace, for one. Roy.”
“What are you talking about?” I wanted and didn’t want to know about Wallace.
Josh showed a sullen hurt.
“Roy isn’t sick. His ears bleed sometimes when he bangs his head. But he can do it whenever he wants, and the doctors can’t figure out what’s wrong, so they can’t let him out. But he’s really in there to put the squeeze on me. He’s always asking about Crowley. About the comic book I showed you in the car. He wants me to remember what was in it. And whether I tell him or not, I’m afraid I’m going to end up like Crowley or Elgin.”
“What do you mean like Elgin?”
Josh’s face tightened, a flinch of anxiety or fear. He didn’t answer.
“Josh, I don’t understand any of this. What does that comic book have to do with anything? Why would Roy or anyone hurt you for it?”
“Roy says the comic book is a treasure map.”
I sat back, the tired lines around my thirty-nine-year-old face a little heavier. I was flattened by the craziness of it, this silly boy’s adventure.
“A treasure.”
He nodded.
“Maybe that’s why your friend Crowley wrote ‘dig’ on the door of the old segregation hole.”
“He wrote dig?” His eyes widening.
“A treasure. Do you know how ridiculous you sound?”
“I don’t care if you don’t believe me,” he said.
Could I just leave Josh? I wanted to go. I wanted to walk straight across the yard and out the front gate. Get the hell out of Dodge.
“How can I believe you?” I asked.
Another shrug.
“If you want me to make this happen, you have to tell me what’s going on.”
“How am I supposed to tell you what I don’t understand?”
“Josh, you know more than you’re saying. We both know that.”
“Okay,” he said. “Here’s what I know. Roy isn’t Roy.”
I took a moment to answer.
“What do you mean by that?”
“You think Roy is this fat old man with one leg who smells bad and tells stupid jokes, but he’s in on everything. He arranges deals. He makes things happen. I think Crowley did drawings for him as a way of passing messages.”
“About what?”
“Money.”
For the first time, I got a vibe of truth in my bones. Not Brother Mike’s bullshit about a prophet in a prison, but that other profit.
“Money how?”
“I don’t know.”
“Christ,” I said, weary again, wondering how to get more out of him in the time we had left. “Do you think you could draw a little bit of it from memory, show me how it worked?”
Josh looked up. “I gave it to you,” he hissed. “If you’d believed me then, none of this would have happened.”
All kinds of accusation in those eyes, and a little shine of fear. He was begging me. I thought of a shoe dangling from a barred window, the beggar’s grate. I thought of hands outstretched and people in finery trying to avoid the touch. I had an insight then, a flash of understanding. The neediness for compassion was thicker than any need for money.
Something in me giving up, softening ever so slightly.
“Why do you want to transfer into B-three? That’s Fenton’s range. You really think he’s going to look after you?”
Josh just peeled the gauze off his forehead and balled it up in his hand.
“Said he would.”
“Who gave you the drugs, Josh? You have to give me a name.”
“I can’t,” Josh said. “I can’t rat on him.”
“Was it Fenton?”
Nothing more than an eyeblink, but I knew I was right, except I couldn’t do that to Fenton; my own complicity made it impossible.
“I understand,” I said. “You’re afraid. We’ll say it was Roy Duckett. You’ve had lots of contact with him. It’s plausible.”
“Okay,” Josh said. He winced, as if the reality of the compromise was painful to him. “That will work,” he continued. “I’ll make that work.”
“You don’t need to do anything,” I warned him. “You need to keep yourself alive and out of trouble.”
“I need to get into population,” Josh said.
“I’ll do what I can do.”
“Soon,” he said, and added, “Please.”