The Four Stages of Cruelty (23 page)

Melinda poured us tall coffees and added the kind of cream that doesn’t go bad even if it never sees the inside of a refrigerator. She swiveled back and forth on her chair, eager for information.

I was bone tired the moment I got out of the room with Josh. It wasn’t healthy feeling this way, a plodding heaviness in my step, the ribs in my chest all sunken from the weight of lousy posture. My hearing wasn’t right, as though my ears had popped without my noticing and had failed to recover.

“I’m not sure I understood everything he was trying to tell me.” I stopped as though confused. “Can you even rely on an inmate informant?” I was trying to figure out what to say and how to blame Roy, and I needed some way to explain my reluctance. “They’re born liars. They’ll tell you whatever you want to hear.”

“Sure, they will,” Melinda said. “But how does the old saying go? Crimes committed in hell don’t have angels as witnesses. The great big magical secret to all successful detective work is finding someone who will tell you what actually happened. Then you corroborate with evidence. But nobody trades information for free. They want leniency or special favors, and sometimes they want you to turn a blind eye to their
own illegal activities. There’s always a risk you can get played. But I get my best leads from inmates, or from people around the inmate with an ax to grind.”

“What kind of ax?”

Melinda grinned. “Had a good example last week. I got a call from a woman telling me a shipment of drugs will be coming into Ditmarsh through a visit to a particular inmate. Sure enough, the inmate she mentioned has a PFV scheduled with a different woman that very afternoon. After it was over, we put the inmate in detention and waited, and retrieved a tube of pills once he dispelled.”

I tried not to think about the condom of drugs in my pocket, wrapped in tissue like the dirty aftermath of illicit sex. Practically the same contents, as though it were a missed delivery rescheduled. “But what was the motive of the person who called the information in? Does that ever factor into how you handle it?”

Melinda hesitated, parsing her thoughts.

“You’re asking me if I was doing someone’s bidding, maybe hurting the competition on behalf of some rival distributor for example? Of course I question everyone’s motivation. In the case I just mentioned, the motive was pretty clear. The caller was the inmate’s wife. She ratted out her husband because of the girlfriend. But it comes down to basic principles. How can it be bad to stop a shipment of drugs, regardless of who is behind the information?”

Case closed. So black-and-white when viewed from Melinda’s perspective. Such a tangled mess when viewed from Ruddik’s.

“So what did Josh tell you?” Melinda asked. “Anything worth acting on?”

“He told me the drugs came from Roy Duckett.” I was stuttering, hesitant, trying out my line in real time, obviously lying. But she kept listening.

“He said Roy’s been forcing a number of vulnerable inmates to bring stuff in, and he has people outside putting pressure on family members, too. Josh was an easy target.”

Melinda said nothing for a moment, the information working its way through some algorithm inside her head.

“Roy Duckett. It’s never who you expect, is it?” she said finally.

I nodded, worried that I’d strained credulity. I talked fast, pushing us forward. “I guess so. There’s something more. Josh asked for a favor in return. I thought you’d be okay with it, so I said we’d make it happen. I should have asked first.”

I could see the uptightness sneak into her expression.

“What is it?”

“In exchange for that information, he wants to be moved out of the infirmary and into general population, on B-three, where he has some friends.”

She took it well.

“Not in protective? That doesn’t sound very safe.”

“He thinks the opposite. He thinks there will be less suspicion if he goes public.”

“Maybe. Usually these guys want to run and hide.”

“I guess he’s tired of hiding.”

“Okay. Let me make some calls. We’ll get Josh out and lodge Duckett in dissociation while we start questioning him,
figure out who else is involved. But Kali”—she gave me one of those locked-eye looks—”this is really helpful. This is the kind of teamwork we need between investigations and corrections. I’ve been pushing for better cooperation for three years, and you’d swear by the response I get that I’m trying to investigate COs. This is a start, Kali. You and I can make a difference. Spread some success around.”

I shook her hand, wondering how hard you press a grip when you’re betraying someone’s trust.

By the time I was done with the Pen Squad, my shift was half over. Keeper Pollock asked me loudly, and in front of the others, if I’d be available for my duties now or whether I’d applied for a new job. I knew he didn’t have the balls to ask much in the way of detail. But my status as a snitch among the COs had been announced.

When some of the longest hours of my life finally ended, I walked out into the parking lot, opened the truck, and sat inside. The engine groaned, and the heater jetted cold. The condom of drugs was still in the tissue in my pocket. I couldn’t go to the library. They knew about the drop. I couldn’t bring the drugs back inside. I’d have a fucking heart attack. I opened the glove compartment, wedged a map and a manual over top of them, and slammed it shut.

When Ruddik answered the phone, he could tell I was upset. He wanted to know what was going on. I told him about the Pen Squad calling me in. He waited for more. I told him that I’d carried the drugs inside, found out the library was under surveillance,
and backed off. He told me not to panic. We’d come up with a plan. I didn’t tell him about what I’d done to Roy Duckett. Instead, I told him what I’d learned from Josh about the comic book.

“He said it’s about money. He said it was a way of sending messages.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Ruddik said, respect in his voice. “That’s interesting.” And he stopped talking, as though lost in thought.

I got tired of waiting for Ruddik’s contemplation to come to an end.

“What next?” I meant the drugs. I meant me extracting myself from the tangled web of my own lies.

He told me to go home and get some sleep. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to pull that off.

A jack showed up at his drum and tossed him a canvas bag.

“Pack your shit up. You’re moving.”

He’d fantasized about the ways a transfer would solve all his problems. In the whirling part of his brain, the desire was part of a desperate calculation. Roy was trying to use him, and Roy knew too much about him. Seeing Roy with the
drawings in his hand had spawned in Josh the worst kind of panic. But getting rid of Roy was only a partial solution to his problems. He needed to align himself with someone else. So he locked onto Fenton as an alternative protector. Fenton had sent Deanna. Fenton liked him. Fenton might be the only one who could stand up to Roy.

But now the reality of leaving the infirmary made his stomach sink. Could he make Fenton understand it hadn’t been his fault the drugs were seized? He hadn’t ratted Fenton out, thank God for that. Fenton might even appreciate that Roy was the one getting the blame. Josh wanted to deliver that news firsthand. He crammed clothes and letters and boots into the bag and prayed he was doing the right thing.

The jack avoided the yard and walked him through the tunnel. Josh had never been in the south tunnel before. The hallway was wider than he would have expected. Their footsteps echoed. He wondered why he felt so isolated and buried; then he realized there were no cameras. A jack could do whatever he wanted with an inmate down here. Josh kept his gaze dead forward but felt the jack’s presence behind his right shoulder.

The gate sprung them into the main hub. The hub was empty of inmates. A group of jacks stood next to the bubble. He and his jack took the tunnel into B block. As they neared the entrance, the noise got worse. All the inmates were in their cells, but the block was a stadium of noise: music, singing, talking, whooping, swearing, clanking. Every sound thudded off the steel and concrete.

“Oh, you’re not going to like this.” The jack laughed softly to himself.

The third-level hallway was narrow, less than six feet across, marked down the middle by a peeling white line. On the right was the long row of cells. On the left was a railing separating the hall from the floor below. The floor above extended up and over, like a cliff ledge that could collapse. The smells. Body odor. Cooked food, rank dampness—all mixed into air that was bone cold. The doors were not covered, as they were in the infirmary. They were just bars. You could see into every house if you wanted to. Some of the men looked up and glanced at him. A few wolf whistled. Most ignored him, doing their thing, reading books, writing letters, playing paper chess with someone next door, fixing a shoe, taking a shit. He looked for Fenton but did not see him.

They stopped before an empty drum. Seeing it, Josh’s heart dropped even further. Soiled sink and toilet. Peeling paint. Broken shelf leaning against the wall. The thin mattress was warped like a slice of dry toast and stained with shit or dark blood in the middle. He looked back at the jack, wondering if this was some kind of cruel hoax. But the jack pushed him in, then got his face into Josh’s. Clean-shaven but ill-looking, black whiskers in his nostrils, lower jaw smaller than normal, an overbite.

“You little shit fucker. You make me waste my fucking time carrying your leash over here and now you don’t want to run into your new home?”

He slammed the bars shut and keyed the lock.

“Don’t choke on any cock.”

Alone, Josh felt the weight of the bundle he carried a hundred times heavier than before. He put it down and leaned
against the wall, staring at the bed. By the look of the dust bunnies and dead roaches, no one had swept the cell in months. The toilet was filled with a yellow-brown slurry that didn’t stir when he pushed the handle. He lifted the mattress with the toe of his sneaker to investigate a big lump. There was a dead rat stretched lengthwise and wedged against the wall. He stared at it, unable to believe what had befallen him, and slunk down the wall into a crouch.

The grub buzzer sounded an hour later, and the bolts clanked back. A half step behind, Josh stumbled out and lined up with the rest of the men, hands dug into his pockets. He didn’t know the routine, but his body followed. The jack shouted orders, and the line began to move. He’d never eaten in the mess hall before. The line stayed single file right up until the chow counter. He didn’t see Fenton, an absence that was drawing him into panic. No one spoke to him, though he sensed looks. He grabbed an open seat at a table and regretted it immediately. A retarded man sat opposite him. A scared-looking man two seats over. A table for rejects and outcasts. Thirty-five minutes later, when the line got back to the block, there was free time. Some of the men sat in their cells with the doors open. Others hung out in the hallway or in the small rec room at the far end of the block. Josh flipped the mattress up and stared at the dead rat, wondering what the fuck to do about it. He found a piece of cardboard in the trash bin and used it to slide under the sodden, heavy body, fearful that it would roll into his hand and touch his skin.

He walked out of the cell with it and headed back to the trash bin in the middle of the range.

“Yo.”

He looked over at the sound, the voice of a young man standing next to one of the cells in the middle of the range.

“Don’t you put that fucking rat in my fucking garbage can. That belongs in your drum.”

Josh stopped, sensing that everyone surrounding him was watching. He heard a few dark chuckles but knew it was no joke. Wordlessly, he turned and walked back to his cell, still carrying the rat.

“Yeah, just flush it down your toilet,” someone else said.

That night he threw his arm over his eyes and told himself not one fucking tear. He knew if he started, he might never stop.

In the morning he wrapped the rat in his worst T-shirt. When he walked out with everyone, hands shoved into his pockets, bleary-eyed, stomach in pain, aching to use the bathroom, he carried the rat under his clothes. He hunched over slightly so that no one would notice the bulge in his gut, feeling the weight of the rat against his skin like a thing that could still shimmy and move. He ate breakfast with the rat resting under his sweater on his lap, trying not to retch. When he got out into the yard, he let it drop to the ground, and he walked away, swallowing the saliva that ran freely in his mouth.

I had two days off and nothing to do but think—about Fenton and the drugs, about Josh and Roy, about the comic book and the Ditmarsh Social Club. I tried the number of the couple in the BP who’d passed me the drugs. I wanted to explain, without providing any detail, why I hadn’t gone through with it yet. But the number didn’t work, like it had never existed. What made everything worse was the disconnect with Ruddik. Since my talk with Melinda he’d stopped answering my calls. Normally, I anticipated rejection as a natural matter of course. If I ever liked a guy and let myself ease up around him, I knew he’d back away from me soon after. But this wasn’t some boyfriend-girlfriend bullshit. This was real commitment, based on my willingness to sacrifice my entire fucking career for his machinations. I got tired of ringing him from pay phones and started thumbing my cell phone at random spare moments, hoping to catch him. Going silent was the worst thing he could have pulled on me at this particular moment. I was sitting on a Baggie full of pills, waiting for my next shift, wondering what the hell to do. I called him three times the night before my day shift, then a dozen more times the next morning, from the moment I woke up at 5:00 until I pulled into the parking lot at 7:30, finally leaving him a message. I stuck to the anger and fought down
the paranoia. It was probably something stupid, a lost phone or low battery. But why hadn’t he contacted me?

I left the drugs in my truck, then walked into the north gate. Somehow that day I needed to make contact with Fenton and explain to him personally why I hadn’t made the drop. I wanted the drugs out of my life. I worried that going to Fenton had been a serious mistake. I knew he played people. And once I did one job for Fenton, he’d compel me to do others. Julie Denly had probably moved stash for him, too. Julie would have done anything for Fenton.

At Keeper’s Hall, I checked the board, hoping to see a little color-coded dot next to Fenton’s name, a doctor’s visit or a counseling session, some break from routine that would allow me to approach him more easily. Then I couldn’t find Fenton’s name at all. Keeper Pollack came around the corner and greeted me with his usual cheer, like all was forgiven between us.

“The coffee’s for shit,” he told me, shaking the pot. “I been waiting for Cutler to bring me my latte, but he ain’t showed up yet this morning.”

Then I saw Fenton’s name. His tab had been pulled off B block and slapped onto dis.

“I see you had some action in dis,” I said, as casual as I could manage. I needed to find out why Fenton had been transferred, but Pollock went on about Roy Duckett instead.

“Oh, you know,” Pollock said. “That fucking Wobbles sure can complain.”

“I thought he was in the infirmary,” I said with all the false naïveté I could garner.

“The Pen Squad sent him to dis,” Pollock confirmed. “Said they got enough drug-related suspicions on him to warrant a little isolation time. The warden okayed it personally. Called Wobbles an imminent threat to the security of the institution. I had to laugh. The only security Wobbles imminently threatens is his own fucking balance.”

Pollock liked his joke enough for both of us.

“What about Billy Fenton?” I asked. My voice was fine, but my face had flushed up. The questions were above my pay grade. I had no official reason to care who was in dis. Wallace would have stared me down and told me to get out on my beat, but Pollock didn’t mind talking.

“Fenton. Now there’s a happy camper. Wobbles flew a kite on Fenton, and we found a whole shitload of contraband in the laundry cell on B-three, exactly where Wobbles said it would be. Don’t think I’d want to piss off Billy like that. Bad move from a Darwin standpoint.”

He grinned at his own morbid take. “That’s not the real excitement around here, though, or haven’t you heard?”

I had no interest in more gossip but forced myself to ask. Pollock showed me the city newspaper, tapping the local section with a thick finger, and let me read for myself. Another article by Bart Stone. A corrections officer, name withheld, currently working at Ditmarsh Penitentiary had once been arrested for downloading child pornography.

“Oh fuck,” I said, not even knowing why I felt such unease. “Who’s our diddler?”

Pollack just grinned. “You’re going to love it.”

And I waited, knowing I was not going to love it.

“Our own superspy, Michael Ruddik. He missed his shift yesterday, and I haven’t seen him yet today. Doesn’t have the balls to show his face.”

I leaned against the counter, as if a cramp had hit me in the stomach.

“Another demonstration that informants of any stripe are a species not to be trusted,” Pollock continued. He got on his high horse about sticking together, watching each other’s backs. I withstood it until Cutler showed up with the Keeper’s latte, taking an earful about being late.

I sat in the gym nest watching the inmates leap or loaf on the basketball court. The younger or smaller ones played all the time, energized and spunky, chasing the loose ball, clapping sweat-darkened backs. Every so often one of the hefty king shits would arise from his recline and muscle into the game, lumber for a few minutes, and swat a smaller player down with a move that would earn a suspension in college ball but was hardly worth protesting in the Ditmarsh gentlemen’s league.

The news about Ruddik had left me sick, but I needed to deal with my own problems for the moment. A week after I ask Fenton for a job, I fail to come through on my end of the deal and he ends up in isolation. I needed to explain matters to him, immediately and without delay.

When the buzzer sounded, I stood and hollered, “Chow up!” The basketballs got released to the floor, scooped up, and loaded into the bin by a punk I pointed to. The inmates lined up and walked to the locked fence, waiting docilely for my God-given okay. I spoke the magic words to my radio,
and the door unhinged. The gym emptied and became silent, except for the clank of weights behind me in the weight pit.

I knew Harrison would keep hauling and clanking. He was a plate-pumping fool who always ignored the buzzer to get in one or two more reps. It was the kind of behavior that could piss you off if you were a con-hating hard-ass. Otherwise it wavered on the shit scale somewhere between mildly annoying and almost endearing. The inmates who cared about some hobby or self-improvement strategy were always a little easier to empathize with. An interest in life beyond the next meal or the next minute made them seem almost human.

On a normal day I would have kept the rest of the inmates waiting until Harrison was ready, yelling down at him from the nest to join them. Today I decided to accidentally forget about Harrison until everyone else was gone. I unlocked the door of the nest and walked down the steps into the weight pit.

There were no cameras in the weight pit. It was dank and dark. The stench rose up at me—moldy rubber, metal, and sweat. Harrison lay on the bench pressing a metal bar upward, arched down by the weight of the giant disks on each end. “Almost there, Officer,” he grunted, and I watched him heave the truck axle up and down another five times, breath hissing with each hoist, squeezing his elbows tight on the last one and flipping the bar off the back of his fingers to clatter on the rests. He sat up and twisted his head one way and then back. His neck, shoulders, and chest were ripped with muscles, his biceps like round shot puts below vein-ridged skin, his knuckles callused. He was blind in one eye and missing
an ear, the eye punctured and the ear ripped off his head in a fight. I approached him from the blind side and sprayed his face.

With surprise and the right tools, it’s easy to take down a big man. Harrison collapsed onto his hands and knees and tried to crawl away. I leaned over him and brought the baton down on his shoulder repeatedly, like I was walloping the dust out of a carpet roll, then kicked him in the ribs, the air grunting from his chest. I clamped my hand down on the radio and called hoarsely for help, the pepper spray getting to me. By the time Johnson and Tesco arrived, I had already zip-cuffed Harrison’s hands behind his back and smeared pepper spray from the palm of my hand across my own eye. The welt came up immediately, a watery red furrow, as if I’d been clobbered or scratched bad. Johnson and Tesco were all business. Tesco kept his knee on Harrison’s testicles while Johnson checked my condition. I was all right, I told him. “Big boy went apeshit on me when I told him to give it up.” Harrison, slobbering, was barely coherent. “She jacked me,” he protested. So Tesco raised himself up and fell back down, his knee blading into Harrison’s balls, and Harrison rolled over, threw up, took a shot to the back, and collapsed in his own puke.

“He’s mine,” I choked. “I’m taking him to dis.”

“Attaboy,” Tesco said.

Johnson and Tesco lifted Harrison to his knees and told him to get up. Harrison didn’t comply, so Johnson thwacked him in the kidneys with his baton. Harrison arched his back, struggled in the cuffs, and finally hauled himself to his feet.
The boys loved the weight pit. It was the best no-camera room in the house.

I got a grip on Harrison’s thumb, rather than the zip cuffs themselves, and twisted it on a hard angle to get him walking. Like a blind mule, he stumbled into the wall and up the stairs, hunched over, steps thudding. I tried not to listen to him sniff and moan.

Pushing Harrison before me, I entered the receiving zone of the dissociation range, an octagonal space with two other doors and a glassed-in cage on a platform. One hallway led to the standard isolation cells, one to the internal evidence rooms.

Two COs looked down from inside the glass nest. I recognized Droune, but not the other, and hoped my relationship with Droune would allow me to skip the procedural route and get inside alone.

“Got a parking space?” I asked.

Droune leaned down into the microphone. “That’s a ten-four, Officer Williams. You got number seventeen, clean and waiting.”

The door before me clicked.

“But not too clean,” Droune added.

I pushed Harrison forward, and the hall became noise, as if a stereo volume knob had been spun to the right. I could discern protests at bad treatment, lack of food, demands for shower or yard time, lawyers, and mail. I directed Harrison along, counting off cells, feeling vulnerable even though the
door slots were shut. Each door had three slots, one at eye level for communication, one at waist level for cuffing hands, and one at the ground for shackling ankles.

Cell seventeen was waiting for us, the door cracked ever so slightly. I prodded Harrison, a soggy wall of flesh, with the end of my baton. There was a narrow metal bench inside, barely wide enough for his girth, and a chrome sink and toilet unit built into the wall. Nothing else. It was a shit existence. An isolated, mind-numbing, life-sucking waiting room. And it would be Harrison’s home for the next six to ten days for striking a CO and failure to comply with a direct. He turned around, expecting it to continue, this psychotic bitch in a uniform who’d taken him down on his blind side. His lips and cheek were swollen, his skin crusty with puke and rubbed raw from the spray, a bright purple lump rising from the top of his forehead. I hadn’t done my case against Hadley any good. One more testimony to add to the witness list, if Hadley’s lawyer ever heard the rumor. For the first time in my CO career I wished I could utter the word sorry. Any trust between us annihilated, Harrison waited for me to step forward and continue the ass kicking I’d started at the gym. I stepped out and closed the door instead, opened the waist slot, and told Harrison to stick his hands through the opening. A few seconds later I heard his back thud against the door, and his hands groped with the opening and popped through. I disengaged the zip cuffs and released him, then walked away, listening to his denials and protests spray after me like an unlocked hydrant.

Four cells back down the hall, I stopped and listened at the door. The cameras were on the hall, and the COs in the glass
nest would be watching me, deflated and then perplexed to see me walking out so promptly from Harrison’s cube, no blood on my stick, no wet strands of hair in my eyes. I didn’t have time to worry. I opened the face slot and saw Fenton lying on the bench, one knee raised, watching me.

“Even in here I recognize those catlike steps,” he said.

The words wouldn’t come at first, and then I forced them out.

“I had nothing to do with this, and I don’t know why you’re in here.”

He did not nod or blink or indicate in any way that he believed me or cared.

“The library was blown. I couldn’t go.”

“Those pills. Have yourself a party. I don’t even want to look at you.”

“Give me another chance,” I whispered. How far I had fallen, begging an inmate to deliver his drugs.

“Aren’t you sweet,” he said. “I almost wish I could give you a hug.”

He didn’t move, didn’t smile. I closed the eye slot and walked down the hallway as fast as possible. Some of the voices hissed at me. They’d figured out a female was on deck. They talked about how bad they were spanking it that very second. I’d heard it all before, but the Greek chorus of loathing was as menacing to my ears on this occasion as it had been on my first day on the job.

“Officer Williams!”

The voice spiked out above the others, more unwanted attention. But I knew who it was, and I judged through the cacophony
where the sound was coming from. The voice seemed to know I had slowed.

“You need someone to steer you right!”

I was at the slot, and I shot it aside.

Roy stood at the back of his cell, good leg and peg leg splayed.

“All right, then you tell me!” I yelled, but I could barely hear my own voice.

Roy tilted his head back and bellowed at the moon, “Shut the fuck up, you goddamn fucknuts!” so suddenly and with such volume that the command drove my face back inches from the door.

But then, behold, with a few protests and grumbles, the shouting lulled like the release of crashed glass. No keeper, no warden, no cocked shotgun amplified over a megaphone had that kind of imperial authority.

I think Roy read the startled blink on my face, because he tried to shrug it off. “What do you know? They listen!” Pleased as punch, his smile back, as if we were the oldest of friends and this the most coincidental of meetings.