by Candice Fox
Grace Slanter put her hands on the bar mat in front of her. ‘I know what I’m going to do,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘I’m going to get in my truck, go home, and get my rifle,’ she said. ‘I’m going to drive through the desert, around and around, night and day, until I find one of those fuckers. I don’t need to go for the top dogs. I just need someone. Anyone. I’m going to find an inmate in the desert and drag him back to Pronghorn. Nothing short of me personally escorting a dangerous inmate back through the gates of Pronghorn is going to fix how the world sees me after all this.’
‘Please don’t do that,’ Celine said. ‘You’ll get a flat out there in the middle of nowhere. You’ll run out of water and the buzzards will eat you.’
‘I’m doing it.’
‘This is not the Wild West. You are not a cowboy.’
‘I’ll be whatever I want to be, pilgrim,’ Grace drawled.
Celine’s phone buzzed again. She picked it up this time.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s me,’ John Kradle said.
There was a long moment of silence on the line. Kradle watched the old airfield attendant watching him, sitting in the desk chair as footage of the mass breakout at Pronghorn was playing on the news on the little television set over his shoulder, and waited for Celine to gather herself. He heard the crack and tumble of billiard balls, voices murmuring, the music of a bar. Probably a 24-hour place, he guessed. Then the grind of a door, and the background of the call went quiet.
‘That’s what you say to me?’ Celine’s voice burned like acid when she eventually spoke. Kradle imagined her standing outside a bar local to the prison, which was probably stuffed full of officers and other prison staff hiding from the press. ‘It’s me? Like you’re calling your fucking mama?’
‘Celine, I need you to listen,’ Kradle said.
‘No, you listen,’ she seethed. ‘And it’s “ma’am”, you inmate piece of trash. You better be calling to tell me where the hell you are, because—’
‘I’m out,’ Kradle said.
‘I know you’re goddamn out.’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘So I’m not an inmate anymore. I’ll call you Celine. I’ll call you Sugar. I’ll call you Queen Hellbitch. I’ll call you whatever I want!’ He pointed to the television set, which was displaying her image yet again, standing before the press with the photograph. ‘I’m calling to ask you if you’re out of your goddamn mind. I’m looking at you on a television screen right now holding a picture of me.’
‘How the hell did you get this number?’
‘You always divert the death row control centre phone to your cell when there’s a crisis,’ he said. ‘I must have heard you give out the number a hundred times over the past five years. I’ve had nothing to do but sit in that cage and listen. There’s a whole bunch of stuff I know about you, Celine. I know where you live. I know you’ve got a new boyfriend named Jake.’
‘You stupid motherfu—’
‘Listen!’ he snapped. ‘Just listen to me. I know you’ve got a problem with me. But you can’t send the entire country after me right now.’
‘Why in the hell not?’
‘Because I need to prove my innocence.’
She laughed, hard and angry. It was an ugly hacking sound.
‘Five years, and you’ve never said that in my presence,’ she said. ‘Not once.’
‘Would there have been any point?’
‘No.’
‘Well, at least you’re honest.’
‘I thought you were honest. I thought you were the only guy on the row who owned what he did,’ Celine said. ‘Man, all my career I’ve been listening to stories from inmates about how they were set up or mistaken for someone else or just plain wrongfully convicted. Never heard it from you, though. Now you’re out and you’re suddenly innocent? Oh, honey, spare me.’
‘Celine, I—’
‘If there’s one thing I know, John Kradle, it’s killers,’ Celine said. ‘They’ve got a way about them, and you’ve got that way.’
‘Look at you. You think you’re Nancy Grace or something. You’re not Nancy Grace, Celine. You’re just a glorified zookeeper from Bumfuck, Georgia.’
‘Just shut up.’
‘No, you shut up,’ Kradle said.
‘No, you—’
‘Somebody killed my son!’ Kradle roared. The words shot out of him unexpectedly, as loud and sudden as they were vicious, and for a moment there was silence on the line. The hand that gripped the phone beside his ear was shaking. The man in front of him was cowering in his seat. Kradle sucked in a long breath, then let it out slow.
‘Celine, I didn’t kill my wife, or my son, or my wife’s sister,’ he continued. ‘I came home from work that day and I found them all dead and the house on fire.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Celine said. She didn’t sound sarcastic or mean. She just sounded as though she was listening. It gave him strength.
‘Now that I’ve got a chance to find out who did it,’ Kradle continued, ‘I’m going to use it. You don’t have to help me, but you do need to back off me. There are six hundred guys on the loose, and I’m the least dangerous of them all. It would be real good for me if the authorities were tied up chasing those other guys so I can get my job done.’
‘Kradle,’ Celine said, ‘I’m not going to sit here and argue with you about what kind of monster you are.’
‘I’m not a monster. I’m innocent.’
‘Tell me where you are, and I will send the police to pick you up.’
‘You should know that I’ve got a very dangerous guy with me,’ Kradle said. The old airfield attendant sitting close by seemed startled by the words and glanced towards the windows, out into the dark. Kradle lifted a hand, made an It’s okay gesture. He closed his eyes and pictured Celine on the other end of the call. ‘I can’t let this guy out of my sight. He’ll hurt someone the second he gets a chance. I’m going to try to set him up for capture when the time is right. That should show you I’m on the right side of this thing.’
‘Who is it?’ Celine asked. ‘Who’s with you?’
‘A cold-as-ice, shitballs-crazy psychopath,’ Kradle said. ‘That’s who.’
‘Which one?’
Kradle hung up. The old man was trembling gently in his seat.
‘He’s out there. He won’t come in,’ Kradle said. ‘But just in case, is there anywhere you can hide?’
‘The bathrooms, I guess,’ the old man said. Kradle walked him to the men’s room off the side of the office and listened while he locked himself in. Then he jogged out into the darkness, found Homer waiting at the corner of the huge hangar, the roller door pushed open and the little aircraft waiting inside, silent and black-eyed like birds in their nests.
‘We’ve gotta go,’ Kradle said. He fished a key out of the pile in his fist, matching a handwritten label on a yellow plastic tag with the tail numbers of a nearby Cessna. He pointed to the plane, and Homer gave him that gap-toothed grin.
‘Coolest guy in the world,’ the serial killer said.
1999
She pinched the tobacco between her thumb and forefinger, flicked out the rolling paper with a touch more flair than she probably needed to, and laid the little caterpillar of brown fibres down in its thin, dry bed. Three boys, all cousins of hers, crowded in to watch her lick and roll the cigarette. Celine put the smoke to her lips and lit up. Their eyes were big and wild with excitement. It was a thrilling display on many levels. They were all farm kids, and lighting a match for any reason in a barn full of hay was like flipping the bird to Jesus Christ.
‘This is just a regular smoke,’ Celine explained coolly. ‘But you can put other stuff in, if you want.’
‘Like what?’ Tommy asked.
‘I don’t know. Rosemary. Weed.’
‘You don’t smoke weed,’ Samson sneered.
‘Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.’ Celine looked at the brat and shrugged. ‘How would you know, you little pecker
head?’
‘You haven’t even smoked that yet.’ Samson pointed at the cigarette blazing in her fingertips. ‘We haven’t even seen you inhale. You’re pretending.’
Celine inhaled a lungful of smoke, let it trail out slowly for a while. When she got bored of that she blew a smoke ring. The boys cooed in admiration. They heard the last few steps of an adult crunching through the dry grass outside the barn and Celine did everything she could to hide the cigarette without looking panicked. The door flew open, and Grandpa Nick stood there in his grey coveralls, a big rifle hanging at his side.
Celine would wonder later whether she really saw him considering his next move as he looked over the three boys and the teenage girl huddled on the hay bales, or whether the tiny pause he gave in the doorway was something she had added to her recollection. Maybe he stood there for an eternity, his wide shoulders rimmed in red afternoon light. Or maybe he’d already decided how it would all go. Had known for months. Maybe he was already commanding her to go up to the house as his big, hard palm shoved open the door.
‘Your mother wants you.’
Celine grunted in derision as she slumped past him. Technically, she wasn’t talking to Grandpa Nick. He’d been sour from the moment they arrived in their rickety van, her younger brothers tumbling out and running into the woods before they could be tasked with unloading any luggage. Grandpa Nick had barked at her for dragging her wheeled suitcase up the porch, letting it clunk loudly against the freshly varnished steps. When he got into his moods he trudged around snapping at people; a giant, swirling dark cloud that had terrified her as a small child and depressed her as a teenager. He was going to say something snide about everything she received for Christmas. She would have to kneel there under the tree and receive his commentary, box after box, on her pathetic obsession with technology and her narcissistic need for clothes. She was everything that he hated – a walkman-toting, blue-haired, skimpily-dressed back-chatter who, if she didn’t kill them all burning the barn down with a cigarette, would corrupt all the little males in the family with ideas about loose, smart-mouthed women with expensive taste. And there were a lot of little males to protect. Her two brothers, Paulie and Frankie, and Samson, Tommy and Benjamin, her cousins.
Celine’s uncle Charlie had all the maturity of a fifteen-year-old. He was sitting on the back porch steps, reading the cartoon section of a newspaper in the sunshine, when she reached the house.
‘You’ve gotta talk to the old man,’ Charlie said, without looking up.
‘He’s an asshole.’
‘Yeah, but Christmas dinner hasn’t even begun yet,’ Charlie said. ‘Genny and your mother have only just started on the onions, which means we’re about four hours out. Somebody will fight at dinner. You know they will.’
Celine rolled her eyes and lit her cigarette again.
‘So we gotta go in with a clean slate,’ Charlie continued. ‘We can’t start the dinner fighting, or by the end it’ll be war.’
‘You’re just worried about yourself,’ Celine said. ‘Don’t make like you’re trying to look out for the family.’
‘Of course I’m worried about myself. I don’t need any awkwardness ruining my Christmas. I wait all year for fucking Christmas, and I just want to get through it without Nanna blubbering all over me.’
Celine gestured towards the barn at the end of the long, dry field. ‘I’m seventeen. He can’t talk to me as if I’m five.’
‘You’re still pissed about the fence.’ Charlie glanced at the little picket fence by Celine’s hip. Three Christmases earlier, Celine had decided she would surprise Grandpa Nick by painting the fence he’d just built around the driveway. He’d come home from the store and leaped from the truck, already blasting her. She hadn’t primed the wood. She was using paint she’d found in the shed, and it was interior paint, water-based, when she should have used exterior oil. The drips and lumps she was leaving everywhere were going to ruin the look of the precise mitre joints he’d cut. ‘I might as well have nailed the thing together from driftwood!’ Celine had looked up to see the whole family assembled silently on the porch, an audience to her roasting. Nanna Betty had made Grandpa apologise in front of everyone at dinner that night. He’d sulked for three days afterwards, until Celine’s parents decided to leave.
‘I’m not pissed about the fence,’ Celine lied. ‘It was years ago.’
‘You’ve got to go easy on Grandpa. He’s upset about your father.’
‘Dad’s not gonna die,’ Celine said. ‘He told everybody so. It’s a slow-moving thing. It’s going to eat up his liver one bite at a time, and maybe he’ll need a transplant in, like, ten years or something. But it’s not that bad. It’s not cancer.’
‘If you had a kid you’d understand,’ Charlie said. ‘Doesn’t need to be cancer to get you upset.’ He beckoned for Celine’s cigarette, glanced towards the house to make sure Aunty Genny wasn’t watching.
Three gunshots. Sharp, propulsive cracks that rippled up the field and over the house like a wave. Celine and her uncle looked down towards the barn.
‘They’re shooting apples again.’
‘He’s trying to run down that old rifle,’ Charlie agreed, drawing hard on her cigarette. ‘Nanna wants him to get rid of it, but it won’t go for much, so he’s having some fun. He’s got rid of a lot of stuff the past few months. The shotguns and the musket are gone.’
‘Why?’
‘Meh. Old people do that. They get rid of stuff.’
‘She better not get rid of any of her earrings,’ Celine said. ‘They’re supposed to be mine.’
More shots. They watched the barn, the gnats swirling in the light. The cows in the paddock by the barn were restless, trotting away from the noise, up the hill, towards the tree line.
‘See, he always used to invite me to do that.’ Celine waved angrily at the barn. ‘I love shooting apples. He knows it. Fucking asshole.’
Charlie shrugged, finished the cigarette. He got up and went inside. Celine was rolling another cigarette when her grandfather emerged from the distant barn door. She refused to meet his eyes as he walked towards her. She lit the cigarette and doused the match on her terrible paintwork on the picket fence.
‘I want you in the house,’ Grandpa Nick said. He smelled of cordite and his silver hair was messed up. Celine waved her cigarette clutched between two fingers.
‘I’ll finish this first,’ she said.
Grandpa Nick licked his dentures thoughtfully, watched the dogs in the field rushing to the barn to investigate the activity. He nodded, shouldered the rifle, a small smile on his lips. He’d made some decision.
‘Suit yourself,’ he said, and went inside.
CHAPTER 11
John Kradle thought about killing. About whether Celine Osbourne really did know killers, whether she had spotted something in him in the half-decade they’d spent together as jailer and captive that the jurors and judge had also seen. That the media had seen. That Christine’s mother had seen as she stood spitting and crying with fury in the dock, reading her victim impact statement about losing two daughters and a grandson by his hand.
You’ve got that way, Celine had said.
Homer Carrington was asleep in the copilot seat of the Cessna as they rumbled and shook through the cold, hard sky over Nevada. The plane was a single-engine thing, tiny, designed for personal use, so small and rickety it wanted to yaw sideways through the sheets of air with Homer’s substantial weight on one side. A bike with wings – something that could be brought down by an encounter with a large bird in the right circumstances. The sunrise was lighting the angles of Homer’s placid, clumsily handsome face a searing orange. Kradle had made no call signs leaving Wagon Circle, no reports of his passage on the airwaves, so he had to keep his eyes locked on the unmoving brown horizon for other small aircraft approaching, unaware of his presence. But he could not stop glancing at the seatbelt buckle by Homer’s hip, clicked into place, safe and secure.
Kradle had only
to unbuckle the belt, reach across his passenger and unlatch the door, then tip the yoke and Homer would fall to his death.
Problem solved.
Logically, it made sense. Kradle couldn’t do what he needed to do in Mesquite while dragging a serial killer along with him. Homer was distinct-looking, unpredictable, physically uncontrollable. Kradle might as well have been accompanied by a Siberian tiger. At any moment, Homer could see through the pathetic mob-money story and kill Kradle, or veer off to target an innocent bystander, and there would be little Kradle could do to stop him.
But pushing him out of the plane would mean killing him. It would mean being the executioner of another human being, bypassing the sentence that had been handed down to Homer to die by lethal injection in front of his victims’ families after saying his final words to them. They wouldn’t get to see justice done. He wouldn’t get his last rites. And there was always the chance that Homer would fall on someone, or survive the fall somehow – or, worse, grab onto John, grip his way back into the plane and strangle him in his seat. Kradle glanced out his window at the earth passing below. Desert, cracked and ridged by sun and time and wind, the occasional town or snake of highway.
But it would be so easy, Kradle thought.
Three movements.
Buckle.
Door.
Yoke.
Kradle unbuckled Homer’s seatbelt, just to see what it felt like. The killer stirred and stretched in his seat. ‘Are we there yet?’
‘Ten minutes or so,’ Kradle said. ‘Get ready to run.’
They approached the airfield from the south. Kradle saw it as a thin strip of blackness in the distance.
‘How do we know they won’t be waiting for us?’ Homer asked. ‘Did you tell the guy at Wagon Circle where we were going?’
‘Of course not,’ Kradle said. ‘But they’ll know where I’m going. Little plane like this can only go so far without refuelling, and I’ll bet a good portion of inmates who go on the run head straight home. But there are a few airfields in Mesquite. They probably won’t be manning every one. We’ll take our chances.’