Resurrection Express (2 page)

Merrick enters the cell, cuffs my hands behind my head and tells me I have a visitor. I don’t say a word to him. I never say much to anybody in this place, not even in the classes, and especially not in group therapy. When you’re silent and dangerous, they always assume the worst. Merrick and the other hacks just know I’m smart.

I go quietly, even though I don’t want to, even though I don’t like surprises. Sometimes the hacks will deliver you right to the bull queers. That doesn’t happen when you pay the right guys. It doesn’t happen today.

Merrick marches me through the shock corridor and off the main causeway. A steel door with a lock older than I am clatters open and sunlight hits me in both eyes like a searing sucker punch. It’s seven thirty in the morning. The cons are all doing chow shifts in the mess hall. We’re moving across the yard now, towards the main administration building. Only trustees get to walk around in there, and I’m no trustee, not yet. I still don’t say a word.

A few more doors, a few more locks.

A long gray corridor that leads to a small white room.

In the center of the room is a woman smoking a cigarette at a brown table behind a wall of six-inch bulletproof glass.

•  •  •

S
he looks about mid-forties, green eyes, a shock of blonde hair shot through with elegant gray, brand-new suit jacket pressed like sharp black armor over a white shirt with a rigid collar, buttoned almost to her neck. An air of mystery looming in a halo around her face. Something familiar, something alien. Some papers spread on the table. An open briefcase at her elbow. Hard glints of metal in the briefcase, maybe a handgun.

On my side of the glass, there is a thick steel chair bolted to the floor that Merrick tells me to have a seat in. He cuffs my feet to the chair, through a loop that runs to a chain attached to the steel on my wrists. I could get free of the bracelets easy in two minutes. The leg irons would be a bigger challenge. By then, I’d probably be dead. So I settle in. Merrick leaves us alone together in the room.

The woman behind the glass doesn’t smile at me.

“I thought you’d look younger,” she says.

Her voice is focused like a laser beam, all precision syllables and cold logic through the cheap tin speakers that separate us.

I don’t say a word. She drags on her cigarette.

“It says in your file that you’re thirty-three years old. Is that true?”

I just look at her.

The lady smiles a little now, sensing my game. “Okay . . . you don’t have to talk to me. Not yet. But you’ll want to talk to me soon. I promise.”

She ruffles through the papers.

“You had a pretty clean record before you went in here. One arrest for drunk and disorderly in Dallas. Your case was dismissed on Deferred Adjudication, but you never had the charge expunged from your record, even after your time as a soldier. I wonder why a pro like you would allow that to stay on there.”

Never thought it mattered.

I was a kid when that happened.

It wasn’t real.

She sees me answer the question without saying a word and gives me a long, serious glare.

“Look, Mister Coffin, I know what’s going on here, and I respect it. Your very survival for the past two years has depended on the cultivation of a certain
image
. But there’s no camera in this little room today, no cons. I’ve gone to great personal expense to arrange a private audience with you and I need to know if I’m speaking to the right man.”

I sort of nod to her.

Yes, you’re talking to Elroy Coffin.

Yes, I’m the guy who went in for seventeen counts of armed robbery.

Yes, I only went in because I tried to kill a man.

Yes, everything in your silly little file is true.

More or less.

“Okay,” she says. Then stubs out her cigarette on the table in front of her. I notice the No Smoking sign behind her for the first time, and I almost smile.

She doesn’t smile at all.

“Let’s talk about
family,
Mister Coffin. Let’s talk about why you’re here. I understand what made you want to kill someone. It’s the same reason I’ve used my own personal fortunes to lobby against gun control and death penalty reforms in Texas. I believe in punishment, when the punishment fits the crime. I don’t believe in second chances when it comes to the loss of someone you love. Do you know who I am?”

No. But you’re going to tell me.

She smirks at the other end of her cigarette. “I’m what you might call a . . .
concerned citizen
.”

That’s really nice.

“My fortunes were made in the building industry, private sector. My assets are recession-proof. I could buy the lives of a thousand talented young men like yourself. And I have. But one thing
money can never buy is
family
. The pain. You know the pain. You live in it here, in this place. You can never be free once that pain takes hold. No prison can compare to it.”

This lady has obviously never been in prison.

She’s also not a criminal psychologist—she’s a rich woman, a powerful woman. I would have known that before the first word left her mouth. The real question is: What the hell is a smart, tough cookie like her doing in a place like this? She could have sent an expert. A lawyer or a lackey, trained to deal with assholes like me. She either made those fortunes of hers by being really hands-on, or she’s not who she says she is.

But I don’t buy that. Not really.

See, the thing is . . . she’s right. About the pain. Nobody knows what the pain is like. Not until you lose it all.

Lose everything.

“I’m not just talking about the horror of lost family, Mister Coffin—I think you know what I mean. I’m also talking about very real
pain
. The bullet that went in your head. To be honest, I’m not only amazed you lived through all that . . . I’m also a little bit astonished that your faculties remain intact. You
can
still talk, right?”

I nod to her, almost shrugging.

“That’s miraculous. A nine-millimeter shot at such close range is usually lethal.”

Yes.

Yes it is.

“I’ve read your case files, studied your hospital psych reports. You made the wrong move because you were obsessed. When we become
obsessed,
Mister Coffin . . . all the best laid plans of mice and men go straight to hell. We see the prize just beyond our reach and it drives us mad.”

Yes.

Yes it does.

“The assault charges were nothing—they could have been bought. You had the money. Actually, I suspect you still have the money. They had you cold on the robberies. Why was that?”

You know already. You tell me.

“You were put here by the man you threatened. A man who was your own employer. The Travis County District Attorney’s Office knew you were set up. They even waved a deal in front of your face and you told them to go screw themselves. Those were your exact words. They wanted your father also and you wouldn’t roll over on him. I admire that. Family is very important to a person like myself.”

She pauses. A sly little smile crosses her lips.

“As a matter of fact . . . I’ve just come from a
meeting
with your father, Mister Coffin. He told me to say hello.”

Her words hit me like a wave, my eyes fill with shock.

And it just comes right out:

“Like
hell
you did.”

•  •  •

S
he’s one of those people who know everything. Every damn detail of my life, because she has the money to buy men like me. She reads the bullet points off like it’s the weekly plot synopsis for some soap opera, reprinted in boring English right out of the
TV Guide
. She knows about the five-man team my father put together more than ten years ago and the reputation we built, cracking safes and security systems. She knows how every generation does it a little better than the one before it.

Ringo Coffin, the old-school machine-gun bandit.

His boy Elroy, the high-tech future of criminal enterprise.

She also knows about everything before that—my bust when I was seventeen, my two years in the army, the
muay-kwon
martial-arts training in Nacogdoches, my honorable discharge, my four-year apprenticeship in Dallas with Axl Gange, the smartest
goddamn thief that ever lived, just before he was killed by David Hartman. Big-time shit kicking. Major blood and guts.

Hartman, the Monster.

God damn him.

The woman on the other side of the glass knows about the seventeen jobs I did for that bastard—me on the laptop, my father on the stick. Vaults filled with folding cash.

And, of course, she knows about Toni.

Who could get any man to believe she loved him.

Toni, our one-woman intelligence squad.

Who went with Hartman finally because men like him get what they want, one way or another.

Because Hartman told her I was dead if she didn’t.

I didn’t care, though—she was still my woman and I wouldn’t sign the papers. In Texas, you can’t get a divorce unless both parties come to terms in front of a judge. She begged me to do it, told me they would kill me. Said she was saving my life. I didn’t care. I would have saved her from him, just like she thought she was saving me, by being his woman.

Hartman, the pig.

God damn him.

I was circling his assets like a shark. His bank accounts and his foreign trust fronts and his contracts with government defense. If you see the leads, all laid out carefully, it all comes together. If you follow the rules and don’t get stupid, revenge can be yours. The rules are what kept my father alive for so many years, even after his fall. You go through channels. You plot it all with precision. You don’t get caught.

But then . . .

Two hundred pounds of meatball muscle stuffed into jogging sweats tried to kill me in my own house—a very ugly man with a red neck and a big gun, one of Hartman’s semi-pro gorillas. The kind of thug you only hire when you’re crazy and cheap. The guy’s
name was Fred Rogers—
Mister Rogers,
no kidding. I broke both of Fred’s legs and dumped him in a parking lot while he cried like a little boy. I told him I was sorry about this. Actually
apologized
to the son of a bitch. He just kept crying. He smelled like beer and mud and gutter trash. Disgusting.

In Mister Rogers’s wallet, I found a picture of my wife with her throat cut.

That was the end of best laid plans.

That was when the rage took me.

I started by kicking Mister Rogers all over that parking lot, the whole world falling from under my feet in one blazing moment of absolute despair and hopelessness, all good things blown away and replaced with unreason and straight solutions—the kind that fill your eyes with water and your face with blood, your entire life boiled down to one primal scream as you pound and pound and pound. Mister Rogers was almost dead when I left him. He swore to me that Hartman was the one who did Toni and I believed it. Dumb grunts like that never lie well when their bones have all gone south.

So I walked right up to David’s house empty-handed.

Broad daylight, no alibi.

I was going to kill Hartman with my bare hands.

To hell with the plan.

To hell with the rules.

To hell with it all.

A gang of his gorillas were watching a game in the living room when I kicked in the door. I could have taken all five of them easy, but one got the drop on me from behind, a lucky shot. My head still hurts when it’s cold outside. I smell gunmetal and roses when I think too hard about it. When I try to remember Toni’s face.

Toni was the last thing I was thinking about when they got me, the smell of her and the cold slash of the bullet overloading my sense memory channels like awful white noise on a psychotic
feedback loop, as the gorillas dragged me out of Hartman’s house, half-conscious and screaming.

They kept me under guard in the hospital, held me with no bail. I didn’t know anything about it at first. My heart stopped twice on the operating table. The bad mixture of drugs they gave me cooked what was left of my brain, almost turned me into a vegetable. It took me weeks just to uncross my eyes. As soon as I knew who I was again, I tried to escape from the ward, but that only made things worse. They cuffed me to the bed, gave me more drugs. I sat there for days, hallucinating my life and my talents and everything I ever cared about into some endless black hole. I almost never came back from that.

I can still smell the gunmetal.

Still smell the roses.

The scent of my ruined memories, like faint traces of ammonia and flowers, in the place where Toni used to be.

Her face, lost forever.

God damn them all.

The trial came and went quickly. I couldn’t buy my way out, they made sure. Hartman smiled across the courtroom and gave a little shrug, looking like some kind of fat demon in an expensive white suit. That crooked, greasy smile mocking everyone beneath his weight. His mean eyes, full of perverted genius. Even then, I hated looking into his eyes, because of the secrets he kept there, the things I’d seen him do. You only ever meet a few people in an average lifetime who are capable of anything.

And
anything
is a pretty scary word.

So I was up the creek. A washed-up thief with a steel plate in his head, a permanent reminder of that copper-jacketed 9-millimeter buddy that came and went—a magic bullet, they called it. They said I was lucky. I could have lost half my vision and my motor reflexes and everything that went along with it—my life, my profession. Everything. They showed me pictures of what happened to
Gabby Giffords—that congresswoman who almost got killed when some random maniac took a shot at her in a parking lot—and the doctors said her bullet was magic, too, but not like mine.

Magic bullets.

Real cute, assholes.

Dad set things up with the Fixer when I went inside, kept what was left of my own money safe. By then, I was back to near 80 percent with my hands and my mind, but so many things were still lost. I still couldn’t see Toni’s face. The most important face of my whole life, shot to hell in one terrible moment, my mind blown away and patched back together, the sickness that robbed me of damn near everything, leaving me with nothing.