Thriller (34 page)

I hope, them ropes?”

“I done it myself,” I says.

“You comfortable?” he asks.

“Shut your gob and untie me,” I says. “You get the last payment?”

He cut through the ropes with his knife. “Ten more guineas,

as promised.”

With my hands free, I stood and rubbed my wrists. “A lot of

nonsense for twenty guineas,” I says. “Particularly since the contents of that box must be worth a hundred times that.”

“Twenty guineas is better than nothing, which is what the box

was worth to us if we couldn’t get it open. And we got it without fear of a hanging, or having to do business with a fence. Not

bad in my thinking.”

He was right, too. That Farting Dan was a practical fellow, and

a clever one. I’d have never thought of this plan on my own. But

that was Dan. Always thinking. And always farting.

As a deputy U.S. marshal tasked with transporting inmates

and hunting down fugitives, Gregg Hurwitz’s protagonist,

Tim Rackley, finds himself in and around prisons on a daily

basis.
The Kill Clause
, Rackley’s first thriller, begins with

Rackley learning about his seven-year-old daughter’s murder.

From there, he’s drawn into a shadowy commission of men

seeking justice outside the law.
The Program
brought Rackley inside a deadly mind control cult, when he was tasked

with retrieving the missing daughter of a powerful Hollywood producer. For research, Hurwitz went undercover into

mind control cults and submitted himself to cult testing.

Troubleshooter
, the next Rackley thriller, opens with the

leader of an outlaw biker gang pulling off a daring freeway escape while being driven from sentencing to prison. Clearly,

the Rackley series grapples with issues of vigilantism—justice

versus the law—each book offering Rackley’s ever-evolving

perspective. In the course of researching each of the Tim

Rackley books, Hurwitz himself spent time behind bars, getting to know the men and women who keep the prisons running.

Dirty Weather
was inspired by them.

He was handsome in a dirty sort of way, lank hair shoved back

over his ears, muscles firm beneath a white button-up shirt he

wore untucked with the sleeves cuffed past the forearms. He’d

slipped into Frankie’s Furlough quietly, a swirl of biting wind

from the still-closing door conveying him to the far end of the

bar. The rickety building stuck out from a snowdrift off the interstate as if hurled there. The interior smelled of sawdust, which

layered the floor, soaking up spilled booze and the melted sludge

of tracked-in earth.

Home to truckers, twelve-steppers who’d fallen off the staircase, and most often, correctional officers, the Furlough had

been something of a roadside institution ever since Frankie had

taken his pension from the big house and parlayed it into four

walls, a roof of questionable efficacy and a red-felt pool table.

He’d done well for himself, too, though it wasn’t apparent from

the looks of the place.

The surrounding landscape had been stripped bare by winter,

trees thrusting like forked sticks out of gray rises of snow. Few

signs of life persisted in the stretch of Michigan freeze: a liquor

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store across the frontage road, a long-closed diesel station, a

sloped gravel turnoff for runaway semis. And then a stark tenmile crawl north to the only employer of significance in the

county, the Upper Ridgeway State Men’s Correctional Facility,

which rose from behind a stark shelf of white cedars like a secret no one had bothered to keep secret.

Laura finished twirling a pint glass on a towel, her attention

drawn back to the stranger at the end of the bar. He’d walked

with a slight limp, which interested her. Also, he kept his gaze

on the lacquered birch veneer instead of on her breasts (her

most attractive feature were she to judge by the eye traffic of Furlough’s fine patrons) or her rounded but still-firm thirty-sixyear-old ass. Her face wasn’t bad either, this she knew, but it had

collected age around the eyes and at the line of her jaw. And the

skin of the neck. Nothing to be done there. His face, by contrast,

was more youthful—she put him in his late twenties—but it was

quite pale, almost unhealthily so, as if he were used to living in

a warmer climate.

Between small, measured sips, he turned the bottle in his

hands as if he’d never seen a beer before. Contemplativeness, in

Frankie’s Furlough, was something of a rarity. In contrast, Rick

Jacobs was all swagger, shooting solids against Myron’s stripes.

Barrel chest, thermal undershirt, beard, weekend game-hunter—

Rick was a carbon copy of a carbon copy. Ever since he’d joined

up with the Asphalt Cruisers, Rick asked people to call him

Spike. Despite his efforts, the nickname hadn’t taken. He had a

penchant for racist jokes and loud belching, and the tremors hit

him if he got forty waking minutes from a bottle of Glenlivet.

That’s why he was here, even during a blizzard that kept the entire county shuttered in except for Laura, who would’ve burrowed through snow with her bare hands to get some fresh air

after playing nurse, and Myron, who Rick had no doubt bullied

into playing sidekick. Just good country people, Rick and Myron,

quick with a grin and a left hook.

Rick paused, his ass in front of the fire that Laura persistently

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kept going. Her father had built the brick hearth with his own

two hands, an act of masculine creation he reminded her of at

least once a week, even though he’d rarely gotten around to

using it when he was running the show. He didn’t believe in burning resources; this was a hewn-featured man, powerful even in

his decline, who still banged about the house wearing the Shetland wool sweater he’d bought on a trip to Montreal during the

1967 Expo.

The stranger caught her next glance and flared a finger from

the bottle. She headed over, trailing a soft hand along the bar.

“Another?”

“Nah, just a pack of Reds, please.”

“No boozing and cruising,” she said, sliding the cigarettes across

the bar. “Smart choice. You’ll wind up on the
other
side of the bars.”

He leaned back, a faint grin etched on his face. “Is it that obvious?”

She leaned over the bar (giving him a chance for an eyeful of

cleavage, which she was pleased he didn’t capitalize on) and

peered at the baton ring protruding from his belt. “Plus the Galls

boots. Dead giveaway. I been working here a long time. And

though you’re cute”—this widened the smile—“I know the template. Newjack or transfer?”

His eyes, faded blue, took on a hint of playfulness. “How do

you know I’m new here?”

“Because I haven’t seen you. Hell, we
are
called the Furlough.

Even the prisoners know about us. That’s what we get for being

on the thoroughfare.” She tossed the stale popcorn into the trash

and slotted the wooden bowl back into the cupboard. “So, I’ll ask

you again, hotshot—Newjack or transfer?”

“Newjack.” He extended a callused hand. “Brian Dyer.”

“Laura Hillman.” She pointed at the neon sign hanging over

the rust-stained mirror. They hadn’t had it serviced in years, so

it read,
F nk e Furl gh.
“Frank’s daughter. Been around a few

blocks a few times.” She cocked her head, letting a tangle of hair

cross her eyes. “Still embarrassed?”

264

“Why would you say that?”

“No blazer, no bad maroon tie, no gray slacks. You changed

after shift in the lockers even though the draft in there can make

your”—a delicate tip of her hand—“retract inside your body. It

can catch you a lot of static in the world, being a correctional officer, so you’d rather leave the uniform behind the gates.”

Again he smiled, and she felt something inside her warm. A

part of her that hadn’t felt comfort—or hope—in a long time.

Though the fire was a good fifteen feet away, a drop of sweat hung

at his hairline. She liked that he sensed the heat so keenly.

He bobbed his head. “What else? I mean, aside from the fact

that you’re clearly smarter than me. Is there a Mr. Laura?”

Rick strolled to the near side of the pool table, overchalking

his cue. Myron had stumbled out, heading home to get his

nightly tongue-lashing from Kathy over with, so Rick was burning his remaining quarters chasing trick shots. He’d started staying right up until last call ever since Laura, in the wake of her

father’s latest heart attack, had taken over weekends.

A loud click of the pool balls and Rick cheered himself heartily.

Laura leaned forward, lowering her voice. “I look bad in blue, so

I married into the family tradition instead. Fresh out of high school.

Mr. Laura had just graduated the Academy. And you know what

they say are the first three things you get when you become a CO.”

“A car, a baton and a divorce,” Brian replied.

“We gave it the obligatory two years. Since then, I’ve been a

lonely girl.”

“Not so lonely,” Rick offered from where he was leaning over

the thirteen, which had evaded the corner pocket for three shots

running.

“Thank you for that,
Spike
.”

He grumbled something and got back to chalking.

“What’s with the tattoo?” She rested a hand on the faded blue

ink on Brian’s forearm, and he jerked ever so slightly at her

touch. His skin was warm and soft, and the feel of it against her

palm was inexplicably thrilling.

265

Behind them, the pool cue clattered to the worn velvet, and

Rick said, “Fuck this, then.” A brief howl of wind as the door

banged the chimes, hard, and then they were alone.

“The tattoo,” Laura said, tracing the dip of the inked woman’s

waist with a thumb.

“I don’t remember getting it.”

“Sounds like a sailor story.”

“Not quite.” Brian looked away, his mouth firming, and she

sensed sadness there, and anger. “It was during an eight-day

drunk…”

Her voice was quiet and a touch hoarse with the premonition

that she might regret her flippancy. “After what?”

“My wife. Three months pregnant. Drunk driver. High-school

sweetheart, for what that’s worth. We’d been together four years,

were just starting to really fight good—you know, baby’ll help

things—but she was part of me.” He tilted his beer bottle to his

lips, but it was still on empty. “Another sob story. Just what you

need in a place like this.”

Her hand still rested on his arm and it felt awkward to withdraw it now. She liked the feel of their touching, the feel of him.

The seam of their skin was slightly moist, their sweat intermingling. She struggled for words that wouldn’t sound trite. She

thought about fetuses, the crunch of car metal, Brian’s faint limp.

“How do you get back from that?”

“Am I back?” He laughed a real laugh, like he was enjoying himself. “It put me down for a good while and when I got up, I enrolled

in the Academy. You can go either way after a thing like that. The

line is—” he held up his hand, thumb and forefinger, measuring a

quarter inch. “I thought a little order would help me pull it together

and I was right. So order I’ve got. I spend my time in a place where

guys keep Clubs locked on the steering wheels of their cars that they

park in the shadow of a wall tower. Guy I work with—Conner?”

“Sure, I know Conner.”

“He welded a hasp to his lunch box so he could keep a tiny

lock on there. No shit.”

266

“Sounds like Conner all right.”

“It’s being locked in paranoia. But you know what? I’d be

lying to say I don’t take comfort in the metal. All those right angles. And the bells, set your watch to them. I’ll leave someday,

I’m sure, head somewhere warm, and I bet I’ll miss it all. It’s

like…armor, almost.”

“And you needed armor.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I did.”

She found herself close to him, a foot maybe—he’d been

speaking quietly and drawn her in, and there was an instant

where she thought she’d just keep leaning until their lips met.

His heaviness seemed to match the weight of her disappointments. A single child raised motherless in a frozen plain. She’d

tried to get out, even to Detroit, but she’d chosen young and then

her marriage had dissolved, leaving her mired like a shot bird.

Twenty years old then and she’d never found it in herself to risk

again.

She’d gone to Florida once—Disneyworld with Sue Ann—but

as for spreading her wings, well, she’d always stayed in her childhood bedroom, except for during her brief marriage. And even

then she’d made it not ten miles, just across the gully. A decade

and a half ago, now. And so she’d spent her years since laughing

with the truckers, shooting stick with the COs and taking the

occasional roll in the sheets just to get some warmth inside her.

Her indiscretions bought her snickers in church and criminating looks from her father, exaggerated into a kind of horror now

by his palsied left cheek and the white film ringing his lips. It

stung her deep and hard, the murmur that preceded and followed

her, but she’d long resolved herself to getting what sustenance

she could where she could, and to hell with the rest of them.