Part 11 (2/2)

It was only when he got to the infirmary that he allowed himself to slow down. The gate pushed open. It shouldn't have been open. Why was he able to walk right in? The cells were completely dark. Only a single row of fluorescent lights to show his way. There was no one at the CO desk, no one in the common room, no nurses. How would he get into his own cell? He desperately wanted to find his bed bunk, splash water on his face to steady his racing heart, and sleep. His cell door was open. It shouldn't have been open. But he didn't go inside. Instead, he walked to the end of the hallway as though compelled, turned the corner into the cavern of the intensive care wing, each bed in its alcove, and saw the cage surrounding Elgin's bed.

”If it isn't himself,” Roy said.

The cage door was open, and Roy sat on the edge of Elgin's cot, weighing it down. Josh looked to his left and his right. There was no CO anywhere. Vague memories of a party somewhere. Fenton f.u.c.king someone. He couldn't put the pieces together.

”They took his leg off today, can you imagine, and still our friend promises us the hurt.”

With horror he gazed down the torso. Amputated? The blanket on the bed was suspiciously flat on the left side, but Elgin was awake, his uncovered eye darting back and forth between them. His arms were bound by the Velcro restraints attached to each side of the bed. Josh imagined Roy slipping the restraints on while Elgin was sleeping, then sitting patiently and waiting for him to wake up.

”What a surprise to see Crowley's little b.i.t.c.h,” Elgin said.

Roy shushed him.

”We've been talking, Lawrence and me. He's filled with bitterness. All the pain he's caused in this world and he wants to cause more. He hates you something awful, Josh. It's remarkable, really. He thinks you're going to finish Crowley's work and that means you need to be stopped. Do you want to tell Josh what you said you'd do to him a few minutes ago?”

”f.u.c.k you, Wobbles, you c.o.c.ksucking-”

Roy ripped the bandage off Elgin's face and shoved it deep into his mouth. The mottled spots of blood made Elgin look like a motorcycle crash victim, all road rash. His good eye bulged with anger. His body undulated against the restraints, working them.

”You needed to go through me,” Roy was saying. ”No one gets into the City without me.”

Elgin bucked and lunged, thrusting upward. He struggled to open his mouth around the cloth.

”What are we going to do with you, Lawrence?” Roy asked. His face was the picture of reasonableness. And he put his big, meaty hand across Elgin's mouth.

Josh had never seen a hand so large. It filled the trench between Elgin's chin and the tunnels of his nostrils. It embraced Elgin's face and suctioned down on it. It became the center of stillness in a writhing, bucking, undulating ma.s.s.

”There, there,” Roy said.

The calm voice distorted Josh's understanding of what was happening. The frantic, biting, lunging force on the bed, each thrust to the sky more violent, more hate-filled.

”Shhhh,” Roy was saying. ”Don't fight it. There ain't nothing you can do.”

And Josh, without understanding whether he was commanded, bidden, or destined, threw himself over Elgin's body, weighing it down, knowing then and there that he was eternally d.a.m.ned, wanting it to be over as quickly as possible, wanting Elgin to die. The wind must have been howling outside, the snow pounding down like hail. The world was a cesspool of seething hate.

The body burst upward with a violent thrust for air. Roy whispered into Elgin's ear, calming him, telling him it was going to be all right. And for a second Josh thought it was true; the great m.u.f.fled howls were gone, the rolling chest was becalmed, but the air was polluted with a stench, a foul mixture of p.i.s.s and s.h.i.+t.

Josh fell back, still feeling how Elgin's heart had beat wildly, begging for release before stabbing upward with one last electric jolt. All of it over now, the calmness back. Roy undid the Velcro restraints and tsked about the raw welts on the forearms, rearranged the sheet, tucking it under Elgin's torso with a grimace. He replaced the bandage on the half of Elgin's face, like a badly fitted toupee.

”If I were you,” Roy said, ”I'd be in my crib an hour ago.”

20.

I didn't remember driving home. I wasn't aware of the world around me until I pulled into the driveway. I was awake but moving without thought. Inside the house, I pulled off my boots and parka. In the kitchen the cat's water bowl was filled with bloated pellets of food. The fridge was leaking again, and I stepped in the pool of water with my sock foot. I stripped in the bedroom, folding my uniform over the dresser, feeling sallow and flabby, and put on a s.h.i.+rt, sweatpants, and slippers.

I fired up my computer. It took a long time to start. I looked at the business card, blank except for a strange URL, one of those nonsensical number-letter strings that spam addresses sometimes use, and a pa.s.sword: NOYFB. I launched the browser and typed in the address.

A s.p.a.ce came up for a pa.s.sword, and I typed that in, too. The screen flickered and changed, and a video screen popped up. I watched it load and I hit the play b.u.t.ton. A home movie started up. Credits came on, ”Midnight Walk” appearing in bold white font, like words on a computer screen. Then PowerPoint candy canes and mistletoe came fluttering down the screen like snowflakes. The screen blinked, and suddenly a subt.i.tle appeared: ”Produced by the Ditmarsh Social Club.” A symbol below like a trademark. Three inverted triangles, encircled, the glaring pumpkin face. What the h.e.l.l was the Ditmarsh Social Club?

I felt a pin-size hole in my stomach, the beginnings, no doubt, of some kind of terrible gut-eating cancer. The person holding the camera strolled the hallways of Ditmarsh. A row of covered cell doors with wide slots at waist and floor level. The dissociation unit. The camera stopped before a cell, and a hand knocked almost politely on the metal door. In response, other hands from within were thrust out and cuffed. The door opened, and a CO went inside, visible only from the chest down. A minute later an inmate emerged in shackles. Worse, I realized, he wore ski goggles with aluminum foil in the eyes. He had on heavy ear protectors, the kind airplane flagmen wore to block out all sound. Blind and deaf, he was led forward by the arm, a troop of six unidentified COs surrounding him. A voice called out h.e.l.lo, a m.u.f.fled echo. A door opened. The camera was outside. It was nighttime. The camera panned up. The walls of Ditmarsh were revealed from inside the yard. There was no snow. Stars in the night sky above. I heard a voice. ”f.u.c.k, it's cold.” I didn't recognize the person who spoke.

The scene cut. A door opened to a roomful of people, one of the meeting rooms in Keeper's Hall. Party whoops welcomed the camera. The camera swiveled back and forth as though greeting people on the left and the right. Then it was placed on a tripod. A face peered into the camera as if to set it properly. I recognized Droune. Then it was back to legs.

It was as though I were watching a frat party. Typical macho CO behavior. The alcohol was flowing, the voices were loud and raunchy. If Ruddik wanted to prove to me that the guards jerked off on company time, brought in liquor and music, well then he'd proved it, but that was hardly my business.

Then some of the behavior started to get outlandish. One of the COs had dropped his pants and was shuffling around the room. I saw what must have been a female CO doing a slow grinding dance to the music, like a stripper, and wondered if it was Connie Poltzoski, a gruff woman in her early forties. A hard drinker and smoker. Debasing herself in front of a roomful of ten or twelve men. None of it looked good on camera to someone like Ruddik. But I kept watching.

The video changed again. The party must have ended or become subdued. I could hear footsteps and voices with clarity. The camera was picked up this time and thrust into a hideously made-up face. Lipstick-smeared mouth. Dark mascara eyes. A scared look. When the camera pulled back, I recognized the inmate. What was his name? The transvest.i.te called Screen Door, wearing a strapless c.o.c.ktail dress. She was slender and timid but still looked gangly and manly, awkward on high heels. The camera tilted up and around, and I saw that every CO in the picture was now wearing a hood. I was so startled by the transformation that it took me a moment to understand. The hoods were gray flannel. They were loose. They slumped to the shoulders and needed to be adjusted and s.h.i.+fted often.

I watched helplessly as the hooded COs converged on Screen Door. They forced him to stand on a chair in his high heels. The camera panned up, and I saw that Screen Door was wearing a bedsheet rope around his neck. His eyes bulged in terror. He was crying. The m.u.f.fled voices told him to shut up. One hand held a Taser close to Screen Door's body, and Screen Door leaned away from its touch, as if he could imagine it going off at any moment. I heard someone spitting obscenities. Screen Door was guilty of numerous crimes. He was a pipe-sucking h.o.m.o. He didn't do what he was told. He needed to be dealt with. The chair was kicked away. For one awful moment Screen Door was suspended in the air, and then he collapsed in a heap on the floor. The laughter overwhelmed the sound of the video.

Then they pulled him up and noosed him again, even as he begged for his life. The screams were horrible. The chair got kicked, and he fell the same way, and to the COs it was just as funny, even as Screen Door coughed and spit. After he was mock executed a third time, a CO lifted him up and embraced him with his arms. Then he spoke and told Screen Door that he'd been saved, that he was born anew. Someone laughed and told him to sin no more. I didn't recognize any of the voices.

The screen blackened. Somewhere in the darkness I heard a car honk hysterically, and I realized the new year had begun.

STAGE III.

21.

Ruddik wouldn't tell me what it was about. He wouldn't even tell me where we were going. He asked me to meet him at a McDonald's parking lot off Route 36 at eight-thirty in the morning, the second day of the new year.

I slept badly and woke early. Driving east, I watched the sun rising fast, changing from a dispersed haze to an intense but distant orb. The snow had receded from the road and become a grimy nothingness on the shoulder.

The McDonald's, just off the exit ramp, was adjacent to a strip mall that included a sport store, a tax attorney's office, and a Chinese restaurant. I was ten minutes early and feeling coffee-deprived, so I nudged into the drive-thru line. Naturally, as soon as I was locked into the decision, cars in front and cars behind, I noticed Ruddik sitting in a vehicle I didn't recognize, a silver Ford sedan, parked next to the Dumpster, staring forward, waiting. The sense of screwup came over me, like I was late for a job interview. I tried to catch his eye, wis.h.i.+ng I hadn't committed to the drive-thru, but he didn't see me. I tapped the horn, but he still didn't look over, and I got an annoyed stare in the rearview mirror ahead of me.

When I had finally been handed a large coffee black, I was two minutes late. I rolled through the parking lot, saw an empty spot four over from Ruddik and an old couple in a car going for it, cut them off in a move that was half vindictiveness, half desperation, and suffered their glares as I locked up and walked over to Ruddik's car.

I sank deep into the seat. There were some food wrappers on the floor at my feet, but it was a clean car with a rental smell. ”You got stuck in that lineup,” he said. So he had seen me. ”I thought we'd drive together the rest of the way.” I nodded. He was dressed civilian. Jeans and a golf s.h.i.+rt under a fleece sweater. His hair looked good, like he'd just gotten it cut.

”Whose car is this?” I asked as we hit the on-ramp and cruised back on the highway.

”It's budgeted to the investigation,” Ruddik answered. ”We leave it at that parking lot for special occasions.”

A car budgeted for special occasions. And who is we? I still didn't know, but Ruddik had an air I didn't recognize in him, a calm professionalism and confidence, a hint that the uptight righteousness he displayed in uniform was an act. I didn't ask him anything. I saw a briefcase on the backseat. Saw the gun in the shoulder holster inside his sweater. I wondered if that was special duty or just typical macho s.h.i.+t. Unlike most of the male corrections officers, I didn't carry a gun on civilian time. For some reason, we were ent.i.tled to carry, even though we had to check our weapons as soon as we stepped foot inside the prison. It always struck me as the height of lunacy-pack a gun while you're out with your family at Applebee's just because you can, store it in a gun locker when you get to work so the bad guys don't wrestle it away from you.

We got off the highway, headed north on a county road, then wound our way west again around White Wolf Lake before turning into a suburb marked by one of those tony stone gates. Large houses, spread duly apart, lots of trees, plenty of judicious speed b.u.mps, the glimpse of a golf course.

<script>