by Candice Fox
He was sitting at the back of the bar, a corrugated iron and scrap-wood affair close enough to the river that it always stank of fish guts, when he saw the ad she’d placed in the classifieds section. He had been thinking he would need to do a few jobs before he could get away into the weeds again for any decent period of time, but he hadn’t been looking for the kind of work she was offering. He was more of a porch-painting, beehive-removing, motor-oil-changing sort of guy. Most of his clients were old ladies who had deathly concerns about getting up a ladder. But he was intrigued, so he used the phone behind the bar to call her.
When he heard her voice, like a bass guitar wire thrumming, he decided he was going to do whatever he had to in order to get the job.
‘What kind of camera do you have?’ she asked.
‘Well, here’s the thing,’ he began. Marty, the bartender, sweat beads sticking in his arm hairs, rolled his eyes as Kradle made the play. He’d take his pay in advance, go get the camera, then do the job. Christine wasn’t buying it, so he shrugged casually, as if she could see him through the phone. The shrug was really for Marty.
‘I’m not trying to scam you, lady,’ Kradle said. ‘I’m going to hang up now. If you get any interested parties who already have a camera, fine. If you don’t, come down to the bar on Second Street and you can see what you think of me face to face.’
‘What’s the name of the bar?’ she asked, but Kradle hung up, because he’d said he would, and the place didn’t have a name anyway.
An hour later, she was there, wearing a flowy, leopard-print number that made Marty hang his head back and look down his nose, like he was trying to decide if he was really seeing what he was seeing. Kradle didn’t know what kind of fabric it was, but he did know Southerners didn’t wear it. He could see sweat rolling down her sides through the oversized armholes. He could also see her lacy pink bra. She asked Marty if he served daiquiris, and he laughed and laughed before putting a vodka Coke in front of her.
‘So you didn’t get ten other guys wanting to come help you catch demonic activity on film?’ Kradle asked when she sat down.
‘You can stop right there,’ Christine said, pointing a finger at his face. She pushed back her brown curls, composed herself. ‘I won’t work with anyone who doesn’t take my profession seriously.’
‘Wait, so you mean the demon thing is real?’ Kradle said. ‘I was sure it was a cover.’
‘A cover for what?’
‘Porn.’
‘Oh, Jesus.’ She shook her head. ‘No, honey, it’s not porn.’
‘Well, whatever is it, I’ll try to take it seriously, then.’ He hid his smile with difficulty.
‘The couple I’m providing consultation to live over in Erath,’ she explained, her eyes locked on her drink, defensive. ‘They’ve had an entity threatening them for some weeks. I haven’t confirmed it’s demonic, because I haven’t visited the residence yet. I’m just guessing. Could be we’re dealing with a returner, not an outer-worlder. But I need to film all my interactions with the dwelling and its inhabitants, because the footage can sometimes prove useful in analysis of the entity’s residency.’
‘So what happened to your last camera guy?’ Kradle asked.
‘He got scared off.’ Christine looked at him, challenging.
‘Well, it would take a hell of a thing to scare me off,’ he said. She thought that was just the funniest thing anybody had ever said; kept saying, ‘Hell of a thing,’ and clapping. Marty gave a big, long sigh and poured himself a big, long whisky.
It was supposed to be just a fun way to spend his afternoon. An easy four hundred dollars and a job that maybe wouldn’t get him filthy with oil or covered in bee stings. But she liked to talk, and it had been a long time since he’d listened to anybody, so he sat in the bar with her all night, feeding her vodka Cokes and nodding along to her tales of ghosts and bogeys and possessed people. He learned the difference between a returner and an outer-worlder, and left pretty convinced that the previous camera guy hadn’t been scared off by anything supernatural. The plan was to get a cab to a pawnshop to look at cameras, but then they figured it was too late and the place would be closed, so they ended up arriving at midnight at the little dock where he’d parked his houseboat.
When he woke up in the morning he expected her to be gone. Instead he walked out onto the back deck and found her there, sitting on the plastic chair, buck naked and dangling a handline in the water.
CHAPTER 6
Kradle was thinking about his houseboat as they hit the base of the mountains and pockets of shade began flooding over him. Long stretches out of the sun bathed him in coolness, or the illusion of coolness to a mind desperately trying not to focus on fire, burning, searing, bones cooking down to ash. The threat behind him urged him on. The man named Homer kept maybe ten yards back, his head down and his long legs crunching into the dry earth. Kradle would just get himself into the safety of his memories – of the Louisiana rain hammering down on the corrugated-iron roof of the houseboat, slapping into the surface of the river, drumming against the windows where he kept his little jars of nails and screws and hinges on the tiny kitchen windowsill – when he would hear Homer cough or sniff or mutter to himself. A zing of electric terror would erupt in his chest and he would glance around.
‘Let’s talk plans,’ Homer said eventually. Kradle waited until the big man was beside him. They had stopped in the shade of a rocky overhang.
‘On the other side of these mountains is an airfield.’ Kradle pointed. ‘That’s where we’re headed.’
‘Why?’
Kradle thought about lying, but the seconds were pressing on and Homer’s shockingly big hands were hanging there, and Kradle couldn’t keep the words from tumbling out of his lips.
‘Because I’m hopping a plane,’ he said.
‘You’ve thought about this before.’ Homer gave a wry smile, waggled a finger at Kradle. ‘This is a great plan. How far to the field?’
‘We’ll take a break at sunset, try to catch a couple of hours’ sleep,’ he said. His mouth was painfully dry. ‘Our priority has been getting out of sight and into the hills. But we don’t want to stay here too long. The rocks will hold the heat of the day for a while, make it harder to track us with thermal cameras. But when they cool we’ll be easy to find. So by daybreak we want to be back in civilisation.’
Don’t ask me, Kradle thought. Don’t ask me where we—
‘Where are we flying to?’ Homer asked.
‘We’re not flying anywhere.’ Kradle straightened and looked Homer dead in the eyes. ‘We’re going to split up.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Homer gave a boy-next-door smile, dripping with sweetness. He gestured to the mountains. ‘This is the kind of plan that has taken time to think through. You’ve been lying in your cell, putting this together for months, maybe years. I want to be with the guy who has a plan, because I don’t have a plan.’
Kradle drew a long breath. ‘Maybe you should just come up with one of your own.’
‘You got a map in that bag? I bet you’ve got one.’ He pointed to the pillowcase hanging over Kradle’s shoulder.
‘No,’ Kradle said.
‘But you’ve got water.’ Homer nodded to the bag. The big guy folded himself down like a tall clothes rack collapsing for storage under a bed, until he was sitting on a rock. ‘You were the guy who was smart enough to grab water before rushing out into the desert. I bet you there wasn’t another man in E Block who grabbed water before heading out. I sure didn’t.’
Kradle felt another sharp prickle of energy in his chest, tight and hard. Homer was from E Block, but he wasn’t from the row. There was only one other section in E Block besides death row, and that was the special housing unit. The SHU housed guys who were so violent they couldn’t be moved without hand and leg irons, a shock belt and a spit hood. Kradle had never seen the special housing unit, but he’d heard there were rarely any guys assigned to it at Pronghorn. They had more appropriate facili
ties for that kind of inmate on the other side of Vegas. Frankie Buchanan had gone to special housing only a week ago, after he lured an officer to the front of his cell and tried to spear him in the chest with a splinter of wood he’d broken off a chair in the visitors’ centre. Buchanan was gone now, shipped out to face a rape charge in Minnesota, Kradle had heard.
‘Give me the water,’ Homer said.
Kradle handed over the water bottle. Homer sipped some and handed it back. Kradle thought he might vomit if he tried to swallow any, so he just held the bottle.
‘We better stay hydrated,’ Homer mused.
Kradle looked at the mountains, thought about making a run for it. But he wanted to know what kind of beast he was dealing with before he annoyed that beast, and before he lost sight of it. You don’t kick an alligator in the face and then leap into the water. He sank onto a rock and put the water bottle to his lips.
‘I don’t think I’ve seen you on the row,’ he said, forcing a sip.
‘I’m new. Only a week in. Maybe that’s why.’
‘What’d you do?’
‘I ran over a cop.’ Homer rolled his eyes. ‘I wouldn’t be on the row if it had just been some random dude. But I was in a car chase and they threw the road spikes out for me. I hit the cop when I swerved to try to avoid the spikes. It wasn’t my fault. It was an accident.’
Kradle nodded casually and crumbled a wad of dried sand in his fingers, but his mind was whirring. He’d heard that story. That was Frankie Buchanan’s story. The guy had occupied the cell two down from Kradle’s a few years earlier, and they’d exchanged origin stories, the way inmates did with anyone who lingered within earshot for a few months or more.
Kradle tried to tell himself that it was unlikely Homer had snatched the tale from Buchanan in the SHU and was now using it as a cover. More likely it was just a coincidence. It was a pretty common story. Kradle reminded himself that guys got into car chases. That cops threw out road spikes during those chases. That guys ran over cops. It happened. There was no reason to jump to conclusions. As long as Homer didn’t say he was driving a stolen van filled with televisions, everything would be—
‘See, I had all these flat-screen televisions,’ Homer said.
Kradle hung his head.
She walked into Kradle’s cell and sat down on the rack, feeling the thin mattress compress and the steel bones of the bed dig into the backs of her thighs. Celine wondered where John Kradle was now, whether his sorry ass was riding in one of the cars stolen from the parking lot with a bunch of other scumbags, headed for Vegas, or if he was going to try to disappear into Utah or California. Celine knew the answer lay here, among his things, and she would do whatever she could to find that answer.
On the shelf by the desk, items were lined up in a single row. Envelopes organised into a cardboard shelving unit, a shaving mirror that reflected her worried, battered face, bottles of toiletries, and a stack of noodle packets a foot and a half high. Celine took the little handmade mail organiser and sat it in her lap. There were three sections labelled with marker. Hate. Marriage. Lawyer. She pulled out the papers in the thickest section, Marriage, and opened the first envelope. The writing was bulbous, juvenile, some of the ink pink and some of the i’s dotted with little hearts.
Dear John,
I read about you in the Chicago Tribune. I wanted to write and tell you that as soon as I saw your face in the picture, I felt a weird connection to you. My name is Debbie, and I think I can understand what you did.
Celine’s fingers gripped the paper unsteadily, as though they were numb. She skipped ahead through the letter.
Because if we got married, I could take care of you in there. I could send you commissary, books, whatever you want. I would understand you and come and visit you, and . . .
Celine tore the letter to shreds and threw the pieces on the ground. She took another letter from the stack and pulled it open. A picture of a tubby woman in a lime-green bikini fell on the floor at her feet. She flicked the folded piece of notebook paper hard, so that it snapped open.
Have you heard that song, ‘I Knew I Loved You Before I Met You’? It’s by Savage Garden. I’ve included the lyrics on the second page. John, that’s how I feel about you. Please write back so we . . .
Celine scrunched the letter into a ball and hurled it onto the floor. She shoved the organiser and the stacks of letters off her lap and onto the concrete. One letter remained on her lap, a small envelope slipped from the Hate folder. The paper was scrawled over with large, clumsy lettering in thick black marker.
You’re a sick dirty fuck. Anyone who kills there own family has a special place in hell waitin for them. Kid killers are the worse kind of scum. Your gonna burn for eternity John Kradle. Fry fry fry. Scream scream scream.
Celine felt her heartbeat slow. She hadn’t realised there were angry tears on her face until she heard a noise outside the cell and came back to herself, sitting there reading an inmate’s mail. She swiped at her face and nose and went to the entrance, poked her head out.
‘Hey,’ she called. The small, wiry man jolted at the sound of her voice. He was two cells down, looking at a notice on the wall, his hands clasped behind his back as if he were touring an art gallery. He pushed a pair of glasses up on his nose and adjusted the shirt of his uniform.
‘Ma’am.’ He nodded.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Oh, I, um . . .’ He jerked a thumb behind him, but there was no one there. Celine and the man were alone on the row. Henderson had been taken to the infirmary and no other inmates under Celine’s charge had been recovered yet. ‘Warden Slanter sent me just to, uh . . . You know. To check that everything is okay here.’
Celine looked at the guy. There were prison tattoos crisscrossing his dark skin, the name ‘Kaylene’ scrawled across his jugular. His guard’s uniform had no name badge and was unbuttoned to the middle of his muscular chest. He was in his thirties, but looked slightly more worn than that. Celine sighed with exhaustion and put a hand on her baton.
‘Put your hands on the wall, inmate,’ she said.
‘Oh, damn.’ The guy slumped, dejected.
‘You know you could get twenty-five years for impersonating a correctional officer.’ Celine took the cuffs off her belt as she walked towards the prisoner. ‘Where did you get the uniform?’
‘When everybody ran out, a guard from my block left the door to the staff room open and I saw it hanging over a chair,’ the inmate said. ‘I think it’s actually a lady’s uniform.’
‘Well,’ Celine said, ‘there’s going to be so much goddamn paperwork after today, and you’ve done such a terrible job of making like a guard anyhow, that I don’t think I could bring myself to write this up.’
‘You’re very kind, ma’am,’ the inmate said. He put his wrists out and Celine cuffed him.
‘Who the hell are you?’
‘I’m Walter Keeper. People call me ForKeeps, or just Keeps sometimes, if they’re in a hurry.’ He brandished a tattoo on his wrist. 4KEEPZ.
‘Where are you from?’
‘Minimum.’ Keeps shrugged guiltily. ‘I’m scheduled for release tomorrow, so I wasn’t going nowhere today. I was pretty tempted, though! I’ve been counting down the hours since last Wednesday. Got twenty-one hours to go. And that’s not nothing.’
‘So to burn a few minutes you dressed up like a guard, thereby committing a felony, and came over here to death row?’ Celine said. ‘You would have got less jail time for escaping than for—’ She stopped, shook her head. Every now and then she found herself trying to explain to inmates the stupidity of their crimes, and had to remind herself it was a fruitless exercise. ‘Never mind.’
‘I just always wanted to see the row, that’s all,’ Keeps reasoned. He looked around. ‘Figured it was the only chance I could get without killing somebody.’
Celine smirked in spite of herself. She felt dried blood crackle at her temple.
‘Well, this is it.’ She gest
ured to the corridor around her. ‘You had a good enough look?’
‘Sure.’
‘Let’s go, then.’ She took his arm. They walked down the hall, Keeps leaning forwards and glancing into every cell as they went.
‘Somebody pop you on the way out then, huh?’ he asked.
‘I got in a little tussle,’ Celine said. ‘I’m fine.’
‘You got all kinds of serial killers and shit up in here?’
‘Not anymore.’
‘Man, this is some extraordinary business,’ Keeps said. He shook his head. ‘All those guys out there running around at the same time? I’m kind of glad I’m still in here where it’s safe.’
‘The world is upside down today,’ Celine said.
‘Inside out.’
‘Yeah, inside out.’
‘They’ll be looking for an inside guy, right?’
Celine stopped walking. Keeps was peering into Henderson’s cell, eyeing off an unopened box of commissary sitting on the bunk.
‘You know anything?’
‘Nah, nah,’ Keeps said. ‘Just seems like something too big to organise from the outside, though. Too many chess pieces. You know what I’m saying?’
‘Yeah.’ Celine nudged him on.
‘Best way to catch a snoop is to send a snoop after him,’ Keeps said, sounding hopeful.
‘Well, it won’t be you. You’ll be out of here legitimately in twenty hours and fifty-five minutes.’
‘Yeah, but I’m always looking for jail credit.’ Keeps shrugged. ‘Might be able to use the brownie points the next time I’m in.’