Bad Moon On The Rise (39 page)

He waved a hand dismissively. “You
would have done the same for me, babe.” But then his face clouded
over as he remembered something. He spoke to Shep. “They’re not
confiscating my hot dog gun permanently, are they?” he asked
anxiously.

“
I’m sure it’s safe and
sound in an evidence envelope somewhere,” Shep answered. “I’ll make
sure it gets back to you.”

A sense of humor, too? I was utterly
and completely in love.

“
I saw you in the prison
yard with all of your pals,” I told Bobby. “How do you do that?
Making friends wherever you go?”

“
Some people just have
charisma," he confided. A biscuit later, he added: ”I’m thinking of
going to law school. Lot of those guys in there need a good
lawyer.”

“
You think?” I asked as he
tackled the final chicken biscuit. I’d thought of trying to snag
one myself but didn’t fancy having my hand bitten off.

Shep’s phone rang, and he was on his
way, striding toward the prison gates before he’d even answered it.
He shot me a glance and this time I knew to stay put without being
told. As Bobby dug into his biscuits-and-gravy with a groan of
pleasure, I sat in the front seat of Shep’s car and watched as
glossy black sedans slid sleekly past us like sharks on the prowl.
They parked near the prison gates and a clan of well-dressed SBI
and FBI agents sprang from the cars. I guess looking sharp was an
additional “fuck you” to the guards they were about to arrest, a
subtle reminder that the finer things in life would soon be
completely out of their reach. They had betrayed the
code.

I caught a glimpse of startled
comprehension on one guard’s face as the mod squad checked in. Then
I climbed up onto the top of the car and trained my binoculars on
the women’s wing of the prison, hoping for a glimpse of what was
soon to happen.

“
What are you doing up
there?” Bobby finally thought to ask. He eyed the hood like he was
planning to join me but wisely ditched the idea. The car would have
flattened like a pancake.

“
You missed a lot, Bobby,”
I told him. “A hell of a lot. But, basically, they’re arresting
some of the guards.”

“
No shit? You got ’em?”
Bobby’s face beamed with pride. “That’s my girl. How long are they
going down for?”

“
A long time,” I promised.
“Shep says they’ll be charged with drug manufacturing, illegal sale
of narcotics, sexual assault, interstate transportation in aid of
racketeering and spitting on little old ladies each
Sunday.”

“
Not bad,” Bobby admitted
as he licked the corners of the gravy container, seeking out every
last drop. “That sounds like a good twenty years each.”

“
Some will cut deals,” I
predicted. “But the ones who used the girls for prison booty will
be going down. Shep promised.”

“
Well, if it’s prison
booty they want, it’s prison booty they’re going to get,” Bobby
predicted. He did not like women to be abused. He loved women in
all of their shapes and sizes. “Course, they are likely to be the
booty next time around.”

“
Do you hear that?” I
asked him.

We both froze. In the stillness of the
day, we could hear a growing roar inside the prison walls. It
started out as a low buzz and grew in volume.

“
They’re making ‘em do the
perp walk,” Bobby guessed. “They’re parading them down the block
halls.”

“
Oh, man, I almost wish I
could be inside to see it.”

But, in the end, I didn’t have to go
back inside those dreadful, soul-numbing walls. Instead, the prison
came to me. The door to the exercise yard on the female wing of the
prison opened and hundreds of prisoners streamed out, many of them
whooping, hollering and high-fiving one another.

“
Hmmm,” I told Bobby.
“Something tells me more women were forced to play ball than I
thought.”

“
It’s just fresh blood,”
Bobby said. “Something to break the day up. Unexpected
entertainment for the masses. Those bastards deserve it,
though.”

I trained my binoculars on the
exercise yard doors and saw Alldread, the female guard who had shot
me a knowing glance one day in the hall when one of the guards had
emerged, red-faced, from a bathroom, followed by a pretty prisoner.
Alldread had let the prisoners out to witness the coming spectacle
of the guards being marched to the SBI and FBI cars and I couldn’t
say I blamed her. She probably wanted the men arrested as much as
any of the prisoners, even if she was keeping her face carefully
neutral amidst the chaos. I wondered if she had guessed my
involvement in their arrest. I probably would never know. And it
was okay. If she lumped me forever as just another prison loser
rotating in and out of Silver Top, one who had managed to escape
but would be back soon enough, that was okay with me. It still put
me on the right side of this particular battle.

Some of the women had run to the fence
nearest the entrance gates and were crowding each other for a
better view. Black, white, short, tall, old, young—you name it.
They were as different from one another as a box full of buttons.
But, at the moment, they were exulting in a common
victory.

A roar went up from the exercise yard
as the front gates of the prison opened and an agent pushed the
first guard-turned-prisoner, his arms handcuffed behind his back,
into the parking lot. The guard stumbled, regained his footing and
looked around, confused at the sounds that greeted him. He saw the
exercise yard full of jeering women and shrank back, as if afraid
they might break through the fence. But the agent behind him shoved
him forward, hard, to make room for the next guard being
perp-walked out. A fresh cheer went up and it got personal. This
guard’s name was Dennis, it seemed, and he was a favorite of the
crowd—at least when it came to suggestions for his punishment. Some
of the women were very creative when it came to kitchen utensils. I
thought of the public hangings of old and figured Dennis was
getting off easy with this dose of public humiliation.

In the end, four more guards were
arrested as part of the drug ring, including a few I was sad to
see. They’d seemed okay on the inside. But you can’t pick your
villains any more than you can pick your true friends.

“
Don’t know why they don’t
just turn right around and stick them in the other wing of the
prison,” I called down to Bobby. “It would save us all a lot of
time and trouble.”

“
And deprive these fine
women of their revenge?” Bobby was waving to the cheering female
prisoners. They, although clearly perplexed at what a male prisoner
dressed in a Death Row jumpsuit was doing lounging in the parking
lot, were nonetheless waving enthusiastically back. “Some of them
dames are not bad looking,” Bobby said, gesturing for my
binoculars.

“
Get your own peepers,” I
told him as I searched the crowd, not sure of who I wanted to find.
Until I found her. There she was: my former cellmate, Risa Foster,
standing away from the rest of the crowd. Her fingers were hooked
into the heavy metal of the chain link fence. She was staring not
at the guards being dragged unceremoniously to the official cars,
but at me. I waved at her, jumping up and down to make sure she saw
me. She stared back, hesitantly at first. But as my waving and
jumping grew more frantic, her face broke out in a huge smile and
she held one hand above her head before she waved it once, just
once, in salute. It was the first time I had ever seen her
smile.

“
She sees me,” I told
Bobby excitedly, “She sees me.”

“
Who sees you?” Bobby
asked as he peered into the corners of his Bojangles box, hoping
for a scrap of more breakfast.

“
My guardian angel,” I
explained. “She saved my ass.”

“
I’m the one who saved
your ass,” Bobby pointed out. “At great cost to my
personage.”

“
Yes, you did, Bobby D.,
my truest friend. Yes you did!” I knew I was yelling, but I didn’t
care. I was overcome by a tide of exultation rising in me. I was
free. I was standing on the roof of a car, under an endless blue
sky, breathing in fresh mountain air, and no one, no one at all,
could take my freedom away from me.

“
I love you Bobby D.,” I
yelled down from the roof. “You are my dearest friend, my truest
friend.” I thought of him, terrified and cold in the woods,
surrounded by yapping dogs, sacrificing his Little Debbie cakes for
me. “You gave up your freedom for me. You are the best friend a
girl could ever have.”

“
Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Bobby
replied, unimpressed. “You get a girlfriend while you were
inside?”

“
Don’t ask, don’t tell,” I
answered. “Why do you ask?”

“
There’s an arm trying to
semaphore some sort of message out of a window on the second
floor,” he explained. “I’m pretty sure she’s trying to say ‘Are
your melons fresh today?’”

“
Peppa!” I exclaimed. I
focused the binoculars on the second floor windows, counting down
until I found my cell. Sure enough, one window over, a sturdy brown
arm was dangling outside the bars, waving back and forth in the
sunlight. I could not see her face, but I knew it was Peppa. I
waved back frantically and almost knocked an eyeball out with the
edge of the binoculars.

“
You cave that roof in and
that sheriff is going to stick you right back inside where you and
your melon-squeezing friend can get better acquainted,” Bobby
warned me.

“
He’d never do that to
me,” I hollered down.

“
You sure about that?”
Bobby yelled back.

I was sure.

Peppa gave me a big thumb’s up. I gave
her the same signal back and blew her kisses, letting her know I’d
never forget her. That someone outside knew she was
there.

The cheering had slowed and become
garbled as the women took up some sort of chant. It was hard to
hear at first, but then it grew louder, took hold, solidified, grew
in volume and became a disciplined roar. I grinned as I realized
what they were chanting and fought back the sudden
tears.

“
Who the fuck is Elsie?”
Bobby yelled at me over the din.

“
Not Elsie,” I shouted
down at him, the tears streaming down my cheeks. “They’re chanting,
‘L.D.’ That’s me: Little Debbie, L.D. They’re chanting for
me.”

And they were. All of those beautiful,
forgotten, down-trodden, flawed, struggling, unseen women were
chanting my name. I stood tall, waving back my thanks, letting
their recognition wash over me. It was, hands down, the proudest
moment of my life.

 “
Yo, Beauty Queen!”
Bobby was yelling up at me. “Get down off your float. Your
boyfriend is heading this way.”

 “
He’s not my
boyfriend,” I explained as I slid down the windshield and hopped
from the hood. No sense taking chances—I had, perhaps, bumped into
the brackets holding the flashing lights to the roof and I just may
have loosened them a teensy little bit.

“
You sure he’s not your
boyfriend?” Bobby asked as Shep broke away from the agents and
headed our way, a grin on his face.

I watched him striding across the
parking lot, those long legs eating up the distance between us, the
sun glinting off his sunglasses. My heart started to hammer in my
chest and it had nothing to do with claustrophobia.

“
Oh god,” I said, feeling
a little dizzy. “Maybe you’re right.”

“
He damn sure looks he’s
heading our way for a reason,” Bobby said. “I don’t think it’s me.
I’ll just wait in the back seat while you two suck
face.”

As Bobby wedged himself into the back
seat of the squad car, I leaned against the front grill, waiting
for my future to arrive.

“
It’s over,” Shep said
with a grin. “It’s over.”

“
I never want to hear
those words come out of your mouth again,” I told him.

“
Stay with me for awhile,”
he asked as he reached me. He stopped abruptly, standing shyly by
my side. He looked up at the sun as if we were discussing the
weather forecast. “I got some time off, Thanksgiving’s coming in a
couple of weeks, it’s supposed to snow again in a few days and my
cabin is pretty great when it snows. Just stay.” He looked down at
me and smiled, sending those laugh lines crinkling out from the
corners of his eyes. I wanted to lean over and lick them right off
his face.

 “
For how long?” I
asked.

“
Hell, I don’t know.” He
laughed. “As long as you feel like it. I’ll take you for as long as
I can get you.”

Well, okay then. Who could argue with
that? After all, there was an entire box of condoms under the front
seat that needed testing. Just thinking about it was making me as
weak as a crack-addled kitten.

“
I think I will,” I said.
“Who’s it gonna hurt?”

“
Exactly,” Shep agreed. As
he pulled me to him, I caught a whiff of pine and soap. It robbed
me of all common sense.

“
Just promise me we can
keep this to ourselves for a little while,” I said. “I don’t want
everyone on the mountain staring at me every time I step foot out
of the cabin door. It makes me feel like such a
Jezebel.”