by Candice Fox
‘I do.’
‘And that’s hard, you know?’
‘So hard,’ Kradle agreed.
‘Some people would call me brave just for bearing it,’ Homer said. He drew a long, shuddering breath, his grey eyes fixed on the building across the plain. The two men watched a car roll into the parking lot, the sound of the tyres popping on the gravel reaching them where they hid.
‘So we take out this guy, get the keys, and we’re gone.’ Homer put out a fist. Kradle reluctantly bumped it with his own.
‘Sounds like a plan,’ Kradle said. ‘But, look. Why don’t you let me get the guy. I know what I’m looking for. You keep a lookout from the hangar.’
Homer grinned and slapped Kradle’s back, rising and jogging low across the perimeter in the direction of the hangars. Kradle watched the killer go, then ran off towards the car taking its place in the lot.
The guy was old. Small. The kind of man who tucked neatly into the passenger seat of light aircraft, who walked under wings to inspect rivets in ailerons without having to double over. The kind of man whose windpipe Homer Carrington would crush like a straw in his fist.
Kradle followed the old guy from his car to the building and stood in the shadows, waiting for him to unlock the door, thinking about how birdlike the people who hung around planes could be – like dog people who ended up looking like their pets, or subconsciously chose pets who looked like them, whatever the situation was. Kradle hadn’t seen a dog in five years. Nervous thoughts like this fluttered through his tired brain as the man opened the door. Kradle stepped forwards, tightly focused on his task and yet fighting the urge to be distracted, to not do the terrible, terrible thing he was about to do.
‘Jesus!’ The old man stepped back, spying Kradle’s reflection in the glass door just as he pushed it open. He gave a startled laugh. ‘I didn’t see you, I—’
‘I’m sorry.’ Kradle grabbed a handful of the man’s shirt. He realised with horror that the words that were coming out of him were the same ones Homer had spoken to him in the cave as his fingers wound around John’s throat. ‘I’m really sorry. I’ve got to do this.’
The guy went rigid. Kradle had seen people do that before. Freeze up. Lock down. He’d been in jail in Mesquite before he was sentenced, and some junkie psycho had taken offence to the way another inmate was looking at him across the shower room. He’d beaten the guy to death right there on the tiles, and the officer who had been allocated to the pod hadn’t been ready for it. He’d been on the job for less than a month and had just frozen up and huddled into a corner of the room, watching the beating with eyes big, howling.
Kradle marched the airfield supervisor into the cluttered office behind the reception desk and sat him in a desk chair he found there.
‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ Kradle said, knowing that these were the wrong words – the words robbers and killers spoke in movies before they shot you – but not knowing what else to say. ‘I just want the keys to a plane.’
‘Okay,’ the old guy said. ‘Okay. Okay. Okay.’
He didn’t do anything. Just sat there, staring at the floor, probably figuring Kradle might not kill him if he didn’t look at his face. His fists were balled, clutched against his crotch. Head down. Arms locked in. True terror. The body protecting all its vital organs. Kradle didn’t even have a weapon. He didn’t need one. This guy had seen the news, had probably been glued to it.
‘Open the safe and get me the keys.’
‘Okay,’ the man said.
‘Get up. Do it.’
‘Okay.’ The guy finally moved, stiffly, as if he was wounded. ‘Please don’t hurt me. I have a wife. Her name’s Betty. I’m Roger, and—’
‘I’m not going to hurt you. I don’t want to know your name. This isn’t . . . You don’t have to convince me.’
Kradle wanted to say so much more. That he didn’t hurt people. That he’d never hurt anyone. That the whole goddamn reason he was standing there scaring the life out of an innocent stranger in an airfield in the middle of nowhere was because he’d never hurt anyone, and if he could just prove that he could go home. Not back to Mesquite, but all the way home, back to the little houseboat in the swamps, with the rain and the wild green avenues through the weeds, the huge blue skies hard as glass. Back before Christine, before Mason, before Audrey, before he stood over their bodies lying sprawled in blood on the floor of his home.
Focus, he told himself. Focus.
He switched on a small grey television set that sat on a desk at the side of the room as the shaking, panting old man unlocked the safe. When the screen awakened, he saw his own face. His eyes. A folded piece of paper. Celine Osbourne was showing his photograph, her mouth twisted and mean.
‘We have reason to believe that John Kradle plans violence out there . . .’
‘What the fuck?’ Kradle breathed.
‘Any information leading to the capture of this man . . .’
The old man was standing, holding a fistful of keys, looking at Kradle’s image on the television set. Kradle took the keys from him and stuffed them into his pocket.
‘You got a cell phone?’ Kradle asked.
CHAPTER 10
Celine pushed open the door of the bar and found the timeless portal she’d been searching for. Here, it wasn’t early, lightless morning. It wasn’t Day Two of the worst thing that had happened in Celine’s career. It was just a darkened bar, and inside she found about a dozen other Pronghorn employees taking advantage of the refuge from misery, where they could drink away their memories of the past twenty-four hours while the rest of the world headed to breakfast.
Celine took the stool next to Warden Grace Slanter and pulled it close to the bar. When the bartender brought her a glass of wine, Celine drew in a long, deep sip and felt microscopically relieved. Warden Slanter hardly acknowledged her presence. Grace’s fingers were shaking as she pulled a cigarette from a cloudy brass container and stuck it between her lips. She took a matching brass lighter from her breast pocket and flipped the grinder a few times, unsuccessfully. Eventually the young bartender, a woman with a shaved skull tattooed all over with purple flowers, came and lit the warden’s smoke with a match.
‘I’m sixty-five,’ Grace said, as though they’d been talking for hours already. ‘That Trinity Parker woman didn’t say it, but there’s no denying it. That’s old. But I’m not your average sixty-five-year-old. I can still put my ankles behind my head, same as I could when I was fifteen.’
Celine choked on her wine. Grace didn’t notice.
‘But sixty-five is old in the public eye,’ she continued. ‘You get to my age, you’re supposed to be raising grandchildren and pruning pimpernels.’
‘What?’
‘It’s a flower.’
‘I’m more of a cactus person.’
‘I’m old, I’m a woman, and I’m Haitian,’ Grace said. ‘So there are multiple groups of people out there relying on me to not look like the world’s biggest fuck-up at the end of all this. Parker was right about one thing: it’s all on me. I want to bring some of those guys home and save face, and I also want to show up Ms Thing for underestimating me.’
‘All right. Good.’ Celine took the piece of paper she’d confiscated from Kradle’s cell and smoothed it out on the bar top. ‘We start here. I found this in John Kradle’s cell this morning. These are airfields. I think – no, I’m certain Kradle would have spent the day walking to one of these.’
‘Wagon Circle.’ Grace put a finger on the paper. ‘We can drive there. Forty minutes, maybe.’
‘No point,’ Celine said. ‘We don’t know if he’s headed there, or if he’s at Willie McCool or Brandon. He might have been and gone already, especially if he caught a ride. I looked at the CCTV. He left by the back, walking north, but that doesn’t mean anything. In any case, I know where he’s going. He’s going to Mesquite.’
‘Why?’
‘These guys who kill their families, it’s all about ego for them. He
wants to go back to his own territory. Back to where the most meaningful thing he ever did in his whole miserable fucking life happened,’ Celine said. ‘There are plenty of targets for him there. The lawyer who represented him. His prosecutor. His in-laws. The neighbour and friends who testified in his trial. This is not over for Kradle.’
‘So what can we do?’
‘I’ve called in the Mesquite cops,’ Celine said. ‘They’re overrun, but they had a little time for me, being a fellow law enforcement officer. The chief said they’re going to station some guys at a couple of the airfields nearby, wait for the plane to come in. I figure we go there once they’ve grabbed him, bring him home naked and hogtied to a pole like we’re leading the village to a roast.’
‘Great image.’ Grace nodded, blew smoke across her whisky glass and sipped it. The two women looked around the bar at tables of Pronghorn guards and other workers. Celine could feel the tension in the atmosphere. Even though there were officers in the dim, smoky room who had personally surrendered to the demands of the caller – Mike Genner from tower six playing pool by the men’s room, Susan Besk tearing a coaster to shreds as she sat at the end of the bar – it was Grace who was getting the nasty sidelong glances. Grace’s leg was jogging furiously, her knee knocking against the underside of the bar.
‘So you’re pretty sure Kradle was behind all this?’ she asked Celine.
‘What?’ Celine looked at her boss. ‘No. I mean, that’s obvious. It’s got to be Schmitz or Hamsi, right? Only one of them would have the kind of resources to pull something like this off.’
‘Wait, so why the hell are we talking about this Kradle guy?’ Grace gestured to the paper. ‘Who is he?’
‘He’s the family killer.’
‘Oh, lord no.’ Grace leaned back on her stool. ‘Celine, I’m talking about going for the organiser. The motherfucker who called me this morning. I want to get hold of him and the inmate he wanted released. I want to get them before Parker does.’
‘Yeah, sure. You want to go for the top dog. Undo it all. Be the redeemed hero.’
‘That’s right.’ Grace slammed her empty glass down.
‘So it’s personal.’
‘It is.’
‘Well, if you want to work on that, we’ve got to work on this, too, goddamn it, or I’m out.’ She tapped the paper.
‘Why?’
‘You know why,’ Celine snapped.
Grace looked away. Celine saw something in her eyes, a subdued horror, that she’d witnessed in the eyes of just about everyone who had heard her story over the years. Pictures were swimming in Grace’s mind. The bare imaginings possible for someone who had not experienced what Celine had.
‘Because it’s personal,’ Grace concluded.
The tattooed bartender topped up Celine’s glass with a splash of dark, cheap wine. A gnat almost immediately kamikazed into the glass. Celine fished it out and flicked it away.
‘Okay. We’ve got to wait on Kradle,’ Grace said. ‘If you’re right, he’s in the air or soon to be so. So let’s talk Hamsi and Schmitz.’
Celine put her elbows on the bar and cradled her face in her hands. Her jaw ached from grinding her molars all day and night. Her mind wanted to turn towards home, to her shower, her bed. She turned it instead to Abdul Hamsi, the quiet, neat man who occupied the cell seven down from the control room on death row. She could see the bare shelf over the little iron desk, the legal papers stacked in a box under the bunk. He was the only inmate on Celine’s row who hadn’t decorated his cell with any photographs or pictures of people. John Kradle had been forbidden to keep images of his victims, but he’d at least propped a Christmas card from his lawyer above his bed: a picture of Conan O’Brien in a Santa suit.
‘It’s not Hamsi,’ Celine said finally.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because the guy’s a loser.’ She blurted out the words, working on instinct, too tired to measure what she was saying. ‘His own lawyer thinks so.’
Grace raised an eyebrow. ‘It’s death row. Aren’t they all losers?’
‘Look, I approve the visitors for these guys, right?’ Celine said. ‘Every inmate has a lawyer. Even the serial killers. Even the guys who are flat out of appeals. An inmate might sit on the row for fourteen years, and in that time he’ll probably sue the prison a dozen times for being issued a crumbled cookie, or because he got a paper cut from prison stationery. I know Hamsi’s lawyer. Known him for years,’ Celine said. ‘He’s a guy named May. And he’s that kind of lawyer, the one who’ll take a child killer’s claim for two hundred bucks’ compensation because he cut his toe on a sharp tile in the shower room. He’ll work the claim so he can get his ten per cent.’
‘Okay,’ Grace said. She didn’t sound convinced. ‘So May, a clear deadbeat, thinks Hamsi’s a loser. How does that help us?’
‘Because if Hamsi was an important ISIS terrorist, he’d have a good lawyer,’ Celine said. ‘His associates would have paid to rush through his appeals. He’d be suing the prison at every opportunity, trying to get himself moved somewhere cushy by being a nuisance. May or someone better would be there at the prison for him every day, seeing what he needs, passing messages.’
‘And May’s not doing that?’
‘No,’ Celine said. ‘May doesn’t even answer Hamsi’s calls.’
‘So ISIS or Al-Qaeda or whoever sent Hamsi out to bomb the Flamingo Casino has abandoned him?’ Grace snorted. ‘Tragic.’
‘Maybe.’ Celine shrugged. ‘Or maybe they never sent him.’
‘I thought ISIS claimed responsibility for it, though,’ Grace said. She had taken out her phone and was tapping through internet search results for Hamsi. Celine glimpsed familiar images from the time of the failed bombing. Crowds evacuating the casino. People crying in the street. Duffel bags being approached by bomb specialists in huge, puffy green suits. ‘They said they wanted to kill infidels in a hotbed of gambling and debauchery. I remember. I’d been at the Flamingo the week before for a girls’ weekend.’
‘I reckon they just claim responsibility for everything,’ Celine said. ‘Even for failed attacks. Any publicity is good publicity. They want you to think they can get that close to killing hundreds, even if their guy stumbled at the finish line. No – if I had to guess, based on how lonely Hamsi is, I’d say he was just a pathetic no-hoper who watched a few recruitment videos, read Bomb Making for Dumbassess and thought he’d give his life some meaning. Hamsi doesn’t even order commissary. He eats the prison food. Most people wouldn’t feed their dog that garbage.’
‘Hey’—Grace looked up from her drink—‘I approved the winter menu myself.’
‘You tasted it, or you looked at a list on a piece of paper?’
Grace said nothing.
‘Sorry, boss,’ Celine said. ‘One of the C Block lieutenants got drunk and ate a chunk of nutraloaf on a dare at the Christmas party last year. He found a whole human fingernail in it.’
‘Oh, Jesus.’ Grace covered her eyes. ‘This is all my fault.’
‘Oh, come on. The food’s meant to be bad. It’s prison, not the Ritz.’
‘It’s not just that. It’s the whole thing,’ Grace said. ‘I don’t know who’s in my prison. I don’t know my family killers from my terrorists. I don’t know what these guys are eating. What my staff are doing. What we’re trained for and what we’re not.’
Two guards standing at the bar smirked, obviously eavesdropping. Celine glared back at them.
‘You couldn’t train anyone for what happened yesterday,’ she said loudly.
Grace held her head in her hands. ‘The past five years or so it’s been all about numbers on paper. Inmates in and inmates out. Safety checks, dental programs, minimum staff to inmate ratios, goddamn waste disposal and energy incentives. I’ve got to keep the prison population above six hundred and six inmates at all times or I lose my laundry allowance. In February, I delayed a guy’s release by a day so that two hundred other guys could have clean underpan
ts that week.’
Celine didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing.
‘He lost a day of his life because management were beating my ass down about the budget.’ Grace stared at herself in the mirror behind the bar. ‘I’ve thought about that guy maybe a dozen times since. I don’t even remember his name. But I remember I cost him a day of his life.’
Celine’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She didn’t recognise the number, figured it was probably a journalist. She tucked the phone away.
‘Don’t let it be Schmitz who’s behind this,’ Grace said. She shook her head sadly. ‘I don’t know everybody on the row, but I know that guy.’
Celine pictured Schmitz the last time she had really looked at him; stopped to check all was well in his cell rather than just breezing by, trying to avoid him, the way a person does when they notice a spider in their bathroom but before they are prepared to do anything about it. She’d taken the late shift last night to cover for a staff member who needed to go home to be with a sick baby. She remembered she’d cautioned Kowalski about his television being too loud. Took a towel Kradle had hung over the middle bar on his cell door and threw it at him. Ten cells up the row, she’d passed Schmitz’s cell. He’d been sitting on the end of his bed, staring at the floor, hands between his knees. The mass killer’s close-cropped blond hair had been sparkling in the night lights in the corridor, as if he’d just rinsed his head in the sink. There had been a shoebox on the desk.
‘He packed his things,’ Celine said.
‘Hmm?’ Grace looked to be on the edge of drunkenness, her eyes lazy and unfocused.
‘Schmitz. He had a box on the desk last night when I saw him. He’d packed his things because he knew he was getting out the next morning,’ Celine said. ‘It was him.’