Dangerous Attachments (Dr. Sylvia Strange Book 1) (10 page)

Sylvia nodded. She pointed to the dark palm print, fingers outstretched, pressed over the sandstone. She moved her arm six inches to the right. "There's a snake," she said. Jaspar stared at the zigzag lines. "And I think that's a man."

Slowly, Jaspar took in the magic of the rocks. Moments before, there had been only shadows. Now spirals, horses, and lizards appeared. There were dozens
of pictographs and petroglyphs; he lost count as the ancient forms multiplied and it seemed as if bare rock was nonexistent.

They circled and climbed and hunted for new rock creatures. As they searched, Jaspar had questions. "Are these very old?"

"Very."

"A hundred years old?"

"Some are even older."

"How much older?"

"Hundreds and hundreds of years."

"How many hundreds?"

"Ummm, at least six or seven."

Jaspar pressed his own hand against the rock. They had circled back to find the first palm print. It floated on the sandstone fifteen feet above their heads. A raven cawed from his perch at the top branches of a piñon. Wind whistled down through the boulders, carving and blasting bits of stone. With each gust, a crevice widened, a crack deepened. Sylvia stood shivering, eyelids closed. Everything was ancient in this place, and everything was somehow sacred. The raven squawked and Sylvia opened her eyes.

"I wish my daddy could come here," Jaspar said.

Sylvia took his hand. The therapist in her knew the appropriate answer, but the woman chose silence. The raven cawed again and soared out of view.

Jaspar led the way back to the car. When he bent down to scoot under the wire fence, he let out a cry. For a moment Sylvia was sure he'd been cut on the barbs, but he opened his dirty fingers and displayed his found treasure. Instead of an arrowhead, it was a seashell. Sylvia stared at the perfect pink-and-brown spiral. She
wondered where on earth it had come from. When she looked up, Jaspar was smiling at her. His face was streaked with dirt, his skin glowing from sunshine, and a snowflake—seemingly as out of place as the shell—stuck to his cheek and melted instantly.

T
HE RUMOR BEGAN
like a glint of silver on the edge of the horizon, a whispered wave building muscle and speed: the riot was coming. Inside the medium security South Facility an agitated whitecap licked at the cinder-block corners of the barbershop, the store, and the chapel. At the maximum security North Facility, a prefab fortress constructed in response to postriot litigation, a floundering, watery panic flooded pod after pod of the twelve housing units. Inside Main, by the time inmate Daniel Swanson reached the hospital, CB-4 and CB-5 were engulfed in a tidal wave. Inmate Swanson had cut off his own penis with a file. This was not news—it was Swanson's second attempt at self-mutilation. What had started the wave, what set off the panic, was the fact that Swanson's severed penis had not been found.

During yard time, inmate Swanson was in the habit of leaning against the chain-link fence near the baseball diamond, conversing with Jesus. He'd chosen that spot to perform his amputation. No one knew how long he'd been there, fingers like a clamp on the metal fence, blood draining from his crotch, down his legs, staining the brown, stubby grass.

Rosie watched as Swanson was placed on the stretcher and wrapped with blankets. "Take it easy, Daniel," Rosie said. "You're going to be okay."

"I want it back," Swanson cried. "He said I couldn't, but I want it back!"

"Who said?" Rosie asked. She was crouched, holding his hand, keeping pace with the stretcher.

"J-J-J-Jesus said." Swanson swooned.

A line of inmates had gathered ten feet away from the scene. White and brown skins were polarized and Rosie saw jittery eyes staring from impassive faces. She whispered to one of the C.O.s, "Get Swanson the hell out of here, and get Colonel Gonzales. Now!"

A two-hundred-pound Anglo inmate raised his fist like a flag. A second man—this one skinny and white—parroted the militant gesture.

Rosie recognized them both as members of the pen's smallest major-league gang, the Aryan Brotherhood. The ABs stood opposite four wiry homeboys. Rosie started to ease her way toward the chain-link fence, and she signaled the C.O.s on the field to move with her.

Two of the C.O.s walked directly toward the first line of inmates; Rosie swore under her breath and whispered, "Back off, guys."

But they didn't.

The sun glinted off something metal; Rosie could see it in the skinny white inmate's hand—she prayed it wasn't a shank.

She heard barking dogs—reinforcements on their way—too distant to save this moment. Without another thought Rosie called out in a loud, clear voice that nobody could miss. "Well I'll be damned. . . a penis!"

It was oddball enough to throw the tension off center for twenty seconds while everyone regrouped. By then the metal gate opened, whistles blew, and the dog team was on the field.

Rosie walked calmly out the gate, stumbled on asphalt, and almost wet her pants. She didn't notice the
lean, blond inmate who watched the action from a distance, but Lucas Watson noticed her.

One hour later, Main Facility was under a twenty-four-hour lockdown. During the shakedown, no evidence of the missing penis was found.

O
N
W
EDNESDAY, THE
parking lot of the penitentiary was full—the usual result after a lockdown when all privileges had been suspended. Billy Watson joined the steady flow of visitors.

The large visitors' room was crowded and noisy. Billy got a Pepsi from the machine, sat in one of the vinyl chairs, and drummed his fingers. Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" was playing in his head. Even though it was cold, some couples and little kids stayed out in the yard that butted up against the room. Billy watched a baby crawling on dirt. Then he turned to stare at the guard standing on the other side of the grilled doorway. As if on command, his brother appeared. The guard ran his hands over Luke, under his arms, between his legs. The whole time, Luke didn't look up. His hair was matted over a thick scab, and a long gash mapped his cheek.

"I got my eye on you," the guard said.

When Luke was inside the grill, Billy pulled him toward two chairs in the far corner. They sat. "What happened? What did they do to you?"

Lucas ignored the question and peered intently at Billy. "I need you to do a job."

"Whatever it is, no problem." Billy squirmed against the hard plastic chair. He would do anything to please his bro, but Luke was different now. He seemed all dried up like a husk of something. Billy forced himself to look
straight at his brother. Those blue eyes took him right back to when he was five years old. Little Billy's chore:
You will keep that dog chained securely to the post, otherwise he will kill the chickens
. That was a job Billy was proud of—until the day he forgot to double-check. They found the chicken house filled with blood and feathers; feathers stuck to the dog's mouth when Duke beat the whimpering animal to death.

Lucas took the whipping for his brother, same as all the other times. Billy remembered. He squeezed the chair with his fingers and asked, "What you want me to do? Name it."

Lucas smiled, and leaned close to whisper what was needed. He smelled sour and sickly.

Step by step. They went over it together, and then Billy repeated the plan just to make sure it was in his head. He was concentrating so hard, he almost forgot to give Luke the pictures of Sylvia Strange.

T
HE SNOW STOPPED
the next morning. Before dawn, Billy left the house his old man had bought in Bernalillo eighteen years ago—right after they'd moved from the adobe—the suicide house.

He pushed the Corvette to sixty-five on the dirt and skidded around the corner heading south toward Albuquerque. The old van was shit, but the 'vette was cool. He was following the river now, his eyes open for cops. He knew where they hung out, and they knew him. Mostly, they left him alone.

Billy lit up a cigarette and sucked on a can of Budweiser. It would be a good day to rip off a car. A fat, black raven spread its wings and flapped away from a fresh kill on the shoulder of the road. Bare cottonwoods
draped the river, and the water flowed brown and rough.

He passed a sign that read
DRIVE SLOW AND SEE OUR TOWN NOW, DRIVE FAST AND SEE OUR JUDGE LATER.

P
ERIMETER LIGHTS STAYED
on all day at the penitentiary. The daylight was gone by 5:15, when Lucas Watson swallowed a razor blade. Although his manner was passive, his blood pressure was high and he showed signs of anxiety. The PNM nurse decided that transporting Watson to St. Vincent's Hospital in Santa Fe was a good idea. Arrangements were made, and the hospital was warned that the penitentiary was sending an inmate for X ray and treatment. This inmate could be considered dangerous. C.O. Salcido and a rookie C.O. named Barclay escorted a handcuffed Watson to the emergency room at the hospital. ER was backed up with a three-car collision and a drug overdose—a lively Thursday night. Dr. Paul Huffy placed Watson in a private examination room along with the two correctional officers.

"He swallowed a razor blade?" Huffy queried curtly.

"A safety blade," Salcido clarified.

The doctor was exhausted, worried about a three-year-old with severe scalp lacerations, and the razor blade was a standard inmate trick; it usually did surprisingly little damage.

"Most likely it's going to pass on its own," Dr. Huffy said as he left the room.

The three men sat waiting, Watson on a bed and the two C.O.s propped on hard metal chairs. At 6:45 a young woman offered coffee to the two C.O.s. With orders to Watson to stay put, they left the room.

Dr. Huffy took time between setting a broken arm and stitching head lacerations to check on the prison inmate. When he opened the door, he found himself alone with the handcuffed Watson, who was sitting quietly on the bed.

"Oh, Jesus!" Huffy's cheeks shivered when he bellowed, "Where the hell did those guards go?"

Watson shrugged his shoulders.

"Only in Santa Fe!" Huffy snapped in disgust. Just last week two felons had stepped out of a sheriff's transport vehicle while it idled at a stoplight. Cuffed and shackled, they'd still managed to evade recapture for three days. He slammed the door and returned less than a minute later with both C.O.s looking sheepish.

At 7:59 Watson complained that his hands were numb. His movements were sluggish and sickly, and he seemed to be in some pain. C.O. Salcido refused to remove the inmate's handcuffs.

Five minutes later, Watson asked to use the toilet. Both C.O.s accompanied him to the bathroom two doors down and then waited in the hallway. Nurses bustled by, rolling patients on gurneys. A female doctor was speaking Spanish to a child. The same young woman who had brought the officers coffee stepped out of an office and smiled at Salcido. "It's a zoo tonight," she said.

C.O. Salcido heard a dull thud. He wrenched open the bathroom door. Lucas Watson lay rigid on the floor in a puddle of his own vomit. Great shudders wracked his body, his lungs sucked air, his eyeballs bulged out and rolled up under his lids.

"Shit! Get him out—" Salcido began, but he was silenced by the great noise of wrenching metal, shat
tered glass, and screams. Forty yards away, a pickup truck had just smashed through glass and plaster and slammed into the lobby adjacent to the emergency room.

C.O. Salcido yelled to a nurse for help with Lucas Watson. A woman dressed in surgical greens responded. She pushed her way into the bathroom as C.O. Barclay restrained the seizing inmate.

Even over Watson's harsh, guttural spasms, they heard the explosion of gunshots from the lobby. A woman shouted, a child screamed. C.O. Salcido charged into the conflict like a snorting bull.

C.O. Barclay watched Salcido disappear, but the nurse's order brought him back to attention.

"Get the cuffs off!"

"I can't—"

"Get them off before he dislocates both shoulders."

Barclay groped for the keys on his belt. Sweat ran down his face and throat as he tried to fit the key into the cuffs.

The nurse glared at Barclay. "Keep him down! He'll thrash his head!"

"I can't do both—" The key turned and the cuffs came off. "Oh, shit, he's turning blue!" Barclay moaned.

"Keep him still! I'll be right back." The bathroom door closed hydraulically behind the departing nurse.

C.O. Barclay clamped one hand on the jerking inmate's shoulder, the other on his hip. He wasn't ready for the shock of impact when Watson's body bucked and cracked upward. Barclay's jaw snapped behind the force of Watson's skull. Barclay gulped blood.

"Fuckin' pig!" Watson grunted as he jammed his head into the lumpish guard a second time.

"Ummmmph," the breath shuddered out of Barclay like air from a pierced inner tube.

Watson closed his fingers around Barclay's neck and dug his nails into skin. He leveraged his weight and smashed the C.O.'s head into the edge of the toilet.

Barclay went limp.

At the same instant, the nurse stepped through the door and saw a blood-soaked inmate staring back at her with white eyes. She stiffened in fear, but Lucas had her by the hair before she could scream. His body poised like a hitter, hands clamping hair instead of a bat, he slammed her into the wall and she went down.

He stuffed the unconscious C.O. into the shower stall, tore off the nurse's surgical top, and left her limp body where it had fallen. He slipped her shirt over his head, opened the bathroom door a crack, and peered out into the hall. He could see two nurses huddled behind the reception counter, their attention riveted on the sliding glass doors and the lobby directly beyond.

For an instant he stared, too. Under the glaze of fluorescent lights a bright yellow pickup truck looked like it was eating its way through plaster. A doctor, her white coat flapping, yelled orders. Two or three other people huddled over someone on the glass-strewn floor.

Lucas forced himself to walk out of the bathroom, and ten feet down the hall, he slipped into a curtained treatment bay.