Innocence (21 page)

“Including those in VDS.” It was a statement, not a question, and Kozlowski paid close attention to Miguel’s reaction.

Miguel hesitated. “Why do you ask?”

“They’re clearly dangerous,” Finn pointed out. “If one of them got angry with your brother, they might very well seek revenge.”

Miguel scoffed. “You’re right, Mr. Finn, they would. They would have had him killed. They wouldn’t take the time with the subtleties of framing Vincente. But yes, you are right, I’m sure he treated members of VDS if they needed medical attention. That is what doctors do.”

“Was he a member of VDS?” Kozlowski asked.

“No.” Miguel’s answer was emphatic, and Kozlowski could read nothing beyond indignation from his expression.

Finn let the answer sit, and Kozlowski thought that Salazar might augment his answer. He didn’t.

“Okay,” Finn said. He turned to Kozlowski. “Can you think of anything else that might be helpful?”

Kozlowski shook his head.

“Then I guess we’re done for now.”

Miguel said, “I’ll walk you out.”

They left the examining room and walked down the hall. Miguel opened the door to the waiting area. All eyes turned to look at the three of them, then quickly found the floor. Kozlowski got the distinct impression that he and Finn were not welcome in this place.

“
Está bien
,” Miguel said to the patients waiting. More quietly to Finn and Kozlowski, he explained, “They think you are the police. Most of our patients, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, are illegal. If it wasn’t for this place, they would never seek medical treatment. There are just too many dangers for them, particularly now that the government is cracking down.”

“How many patients come to this place a week?” Kozlowski asked.

“Nearly a thousand,” Miguel replied.

“That many?” Finn sounded shocked.

“Yes. Without us . . .” Miguel’s voice trailed off. He picked his way through the crowded room, nodding and smiling reassuringly to those who dared to look toward them. “In a way, this place is a monument to my brother,” he said.

“How so?” Finn asked.

“I saw what happened to my sister-in-law. How she died. It could have been prevented, but they were too scared to go to a hospital. When she died, a part of my brother died, and if it wasn’t for her death, my family never would have come to the attention of the INS. None of this would have happened. When I started as an intern at Mass General years ago, I lobbied for the supplies and funding to set this clinic up. I didn’t want what happened to my brother to happen to anyone else.”

They were at the door. “Your brother seems very proud of you,” Finn commented.

“I wish he could see it. I wish he could be a part of it.” Miguel reached out to shake their hands. “Please let me know what else I can do,” he said. “There is nothing I wouldn’t do to help my brother.”

Chapter Twenty-tw
o

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Joey Galloway ran his nightstick along the bars of each cell as he walked the forty-yard stretch. “Morning call, scumbags!” he yelled as he walked. “Stand at attention!”

He loved the rat-a-tat the nightstick made. It echoed with power and control. The only sound that pleased him more was the dull thud it made on those occasions when it smashed the knuckles of any prisoner stupid enough to grasp the bars of his cell as he passed. Most of them were savvy enough to avoid being hit, but every once in a while he got a newbie—a fish—unfamiliar with his brutal streak. He made sure they spent the week eating one-handed.

Galloway hated the convicts. Some of the other guards felt an odd kind of kinship with their charges, not unlike the Stockholm syndrome that sometimes develops between captors and their hostages. Galloway referred to those misguided coworkers as “the fairy patrol.” He would never fall into that trap; he took any opportunity that presented itself to torture those he’d been hired to watch over. It was the only way he knew to keep the separation between them clean.

He threw his shoulders back as he came to the end of the line. “Block Three, open!” he called out.

A buzzer sounded, and the steel doors rang out with a squeal as they slid open. “On the line, assholes!” he yelled.

In unison, the orange-clad men stepped out of their holes, putting their toes on the painted line that ran down the cell block.

“Okay, faggots! Chow time! You know the drill. Keep your shit wired tight and your hands to yourselves. Don’t piss me off, and I may let you live through this miserable fucking day!”

He turned and walked through the large metal gate at the end of the corridor, listening to the footsteps of the prisoners in line behind him. He smiled inwardly. Another day, another chance to fuck someone up.

z

Henry Womak had been incarcerated for most of his life, and there was no question that he was doomed to spend the rest of his days behind bars. He’d grown up in Dorchester, the son of an angry, unemployed dockworker. “Fuckin’ niggers stole my job,” his father used to say between beers in the morning. “Fuckin’ niggers stole my life.”

When busing came to his neighborhood in the late 1970s, Henry was seven. He was young enough that the first time he attacked a black boy with a baseball bat, he’d only been suspended. A six-month stint in a reformatory had followed the second attack two years later, and that was probably only because he’d shattered all of his second victim’s teeth against a brick wall. The boy had spent three weeks in the hospital. By the time Henry was eighteen, murder seemed more like career advancement than a crime, but it was the horrific nature of the murder that guaranteed him a lifelong stay in Billerica.

He’d seen the man as he was walking along the docks in South Boston, at a moment when the storm was already gathering force in his troubled mind. The man was black and wore the faded, beaten jacket of a dockworker. He was just getting off work and heading to his truck for the drive home to his family. It was a nice truck: a Ford F-250. Not new, but not old, either.

Whatever sanity that still struggled within Henry deserted him for good that evening.
Fuckin’ nigger like that with a new truck while my father sits at home sucking on a bottle and coughing up a lung?
Henry couldn’t live with it.

The man never saw Henry coming. Not that he could have protected himself if he had. Henry was crazed and wouldn’t have been denied his revenge without a bullet in the head.

The first time he’d swung the pipe as hard as he could. It slammed into the man’s stomach. The next three swings went to his head. There was some unintended mercy to that. The coroner said that the man had likely been unconscious when Henry stripped him of the short handheld grappling hook used by dockworkers and swung it at the man’s face. It caught him under the chin and drove itself though the flesh underneath the tongue, the point slipping out of his mouth and catching securely on the jaw.

Henry claimed he didn’t remember attaching the handle of the hook to the chain that ran off the back of the man’s truck. Or starting the engine. Or driving the thirty yards it took for the man’s jawbone to come loose and separate from his face. It hadn’t mattered, though. Memory be damned, he wasn’t sorry, and he wouldn’t say so. Not even his family felt any sympathy when he went away for good. They were too tired and scared to feel much of anything for him anymore.

And so it was with nothing but adrenaline-fueled anticipation that Henry approached Samuel Jefferson on Wednesday morning on the chow line. They were heading toward each other, and Henry slipped the shiv out of his pocket. It was made from a steel rod stolen from the metal shop, and had been shaped carefully into a six-inch knife. It was not nearly as effective for killing a man as a glass blade would be. Glass could be broken off into a man and left to continue wreaking havoc

after an attacker fled. But steel would work well enough for today’s purposes. Jefferson had given it to him the night before. Along with fifty dollars.

As they approached each other, Jefferson gave a nod.

Henry raised the shiv and drove it into the large black man’s belly.

z

A soldier. That was how Samuel Jefferson regarded himself, and a soldier doesn’t question orders. It made sense. The brotherhood had agreed to the plan and he had been paid well to execute it. He was a huge man with a prodigious gut. A smaller man might be at real risk.

He saw the blow coming and raised his arm instinctively to block it, relaxed as the redneck asshole’s hand passed through his halfhearted defense, and then felt the steel slip through the stretched skin of his belly, splitting him open.

Jefferson roared in pain, thrashing out as he went down, cuffing Womak hard on the ear. It felt good, and he could see the pain etched on the other man’s face.
Serves him right
, Jefferson thought. Orders or not, he had to send a message to anyone in the prison who might sense weakness on Jefferson’s part. Weakness was the only real sin behind bars. Everything else could be forgiven, but weakness was a disease that killed, and anyone seen carrying it was quickly culled from the ranks.

He even thought to get in another blow but saw the guards rushing in. He’d made his point. Better now to cover his wound and let the screws sort the shit out. This part of the job was done.

z

Joey Galloway was only a few paces behind Womak, watching him carefully. He saw the shiv come out as they approached Jefferson, and he quickened his pace. Not too much, just enough to control the situation before it got out of hand. He loved it when the cons went for

each other, particularly when he was there to wade in and got the opportunity to take someone out as a result.

Suddenly, Womak’s arm shot out and caught Jefferson in the gut. As the huge black man went down, he caught Womak’s head with a stunning blow that made Galloway smile. Got to hand it to the man, he was a bear.

Sadly, that was as far as he could let the issue go. There were too many members of the fairy patrol nearby who would intervene, and they could interfere with the plan.

He took three long strides toward the two men. Jefferson was on the ground, and Womak, though off balance, was standing over him, looking ready to take another swing with his homemade knife.

Galloway focused on Womak. He raised his nightstick high and swung at the arm that held the shiv aloft. The contact was solid, and Womak’s arm went limp, the blade skittering across the floor.

“You broke my arm!” Womak screamed. He fell to the ground, his arm hanging lifeless from his shoulder. He felt his bicep with his good hand. “You broke my goddamned arm!” he yelled again.

“Tragic,” Galloway replied. He walked to the other side of Womak as the convict squatted on the floor, and he swung his nightstick with brutal force at Womak’s other arm.

Womak let out another scream, this one reverberating off the walls like the sickening cry of a dying animal. “No! Please!” he yelled. He was lying on the floor, looking at both of his arms as they dangled like sausage strings. “I can’t move my fucking arms!” he screamed.

Just then the prison alarm sounded. “Lockdown!” one of the other guards yelled, and a unit of specially armed riot guards appeared, padded down like heavily armed umpires ready for a rumble. They weren’t needed, of course. The moment had come and gone, and the prisoners were filing back to their cells, far more sated with the violence than they ever would have been with the runny egg gruel that passed for breakfast.

“We’re gonna need two gurneys here,” Galloway said to one of the umpires. The man nodded and spoke into a radio.

Galloway crouched between the two men. A stream of blood ran from Jefferson’s stomach, pooling in a sticky smear beneath him. Womak looked helplessly at his useless arms, gasping for air. Galloway looked back and forth between them. “Well, gentlemen, it looks like you’re headed to the infirmary. Enjoy the spa time, my little faggots, because I guarantee that your next stop will be in the fucking hole. And you will stay in the hole until you’ve forgotten your own names, I shit you not.”

z

Vincente Salazar was alone in the infirmary when the riot horns sounded. He sighed as he went to one of the medical cabinets to prepare a crash cart for every contingency he could. Looking at the clock, he felt a light sweat break out on his forehead. It was only eight o’clock, and Dr. Roland was no doubt just beginning the second set of his weekly squash game. Every Wednesday Salazar reported early to the infirmary to take care of patients while the real doctor enjoyed a brief respite from the pressures of the job. It was unusual, but all the medical staff felt confident with Salazar on duty. If necessary, Salazar would have the guards page Roland, who could be there in fifteen minutes. Salazar could generally hold down the fort until then.

The door to the infirmary buzzed and then slammed open. Two men were wheeled in on gurneys, one pushed by a member of the riot patrol, the other pushed by Officer Galloway. Salazar was familiar enough with Galloway to recognize his cruel brand of psychopathology. He was as dangerous as any of the inmates.

Salazar was at the sink, washing his hands. He picked up a towel and headed over to the two patients. “What happened?” he asked no one in particular.

Galloway responded. “This guy,” he said, pointing to the white man lying on the stretcher he was pushing, “stabbed that guy.”

Salazar looked back and forth between the two men. The stab wound on the large black man was evident and would require immediate attention. He looked stable, though. The other man appeared to be in greater pain.

“What happened to him?” Salazar asked, pointing to Womak.

“He needed to be subdued,” Galloway replied. “He had a knife. I broke his arms.”

“Both of them?”

Galloway stared at Salazar without answering, daring Salazar to challenge his authority. Salazar was too smart to make such a mistake.

“Right. Wheel him into bay two,” Salazar said, pointing to a medical treatment area on one side of the room. “I’ll get the bleeding from the stab wound under control, then take a look at him.” He wheeled the stabbing victim over to a medical bay on the other side of the room. Pulling out some scissors, he cut off the man’s shirt. He pulled an overhead light toward the patient and focused it on the wound, snapping on some gloves as he took swabs to wipe away the blood. He was concentrating on his patient when he heard a commotion over in the other bay.