by Candice Fox
‘You’ve got this all worked out,’ Homer marvelled. ‘I never spent a minute thinking about my escape plan.’
Kradle had spent every minute thinking about it. It was all that kept him alive after the second year. That, the slow trudge of the appeals process, and trying to annoy Celine Osbourne in a new way every single day that she worked. He had tidbits of information he’d been able to gather that would aid his escape hidden all over his cell, and at night he fell asleep thinking about each one, making sure his plan was ready should the opportunity ever arise to use it. He had his lawyer, and the lawyers and family members of other inmates, smuggle tiny pieces of his plan to him once a week or so. The distances to airfields. The contact details of key people needed for his mission. Known locations for sleeping rough, where he might blend in with homeless men in Mesquite. Kradle built his escape plan because there was nothing else he could build on death row; because every day on the row was about being broken down so that when they took you to your death you were cowed, numb, submissive. Nobody wanted to see a grown man kicking and screaming and crying as they strapped him to the table. Not even the victims’ families wanted that.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Homer asked. Kradle had to shake himself out of his dreams about escapes and executions.
‘Huh?’
‘Why’d you get into the mob?’ he asked. ‘Like, have they done a diagnosis? Are you a “natural born killer”?’
‘Oh, uh.’ Kradle shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘They did a psych test on me to see if I was fit to stand trial. Didn’t find anything.’
‘I love psych tests.’ Homer smiled. ‘They’re so interesting. The last one I had, they asked, “When you stand at the edge of a tall building or a cliff, do you think about jumping off?” I mean, what does that mean? What’s the right answer?’
‘Beats me,’ Kradle said.
Don’t, Kradle told himself.
But then he did.
‘What do you think’s wrong with you?’ Kradle asked.
‘Look’—Homer shifted sideways a little so that he was facing Kradle—‘this is going to sound crazy.’
‘Lay it on me,’ Kradle sighed.
‘When I was a kid I went camping with my dad a lot,’ Homer said. ‘We would go out into the desert, just him and me, get away from Mom and my sister. You know. Guy stuff. Anyway, one of these times, I woke up in the morning with this itch in my ear.’
Kradle gripped the yoke in front of him, pursed his lips.
‘So my dad looks in there,’ Homer said. ‘And what does he see? A black widow spider.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Yeah.’ Homer sat back in his seat. ‘I wanted him to get it out. I begged and begged him. But he said it was too dangerous. If he tried to grab it, it might turn around and bite me. I’d be dead inside of ten minutes. Plus, my dad was really good with animals. He would have wild birds, rabbits, foxes coming into our yard and eating out of his hand. So he tells me the spider in my ear canal is a good thing. He can control it. If I’m ever bad, he’ll just tell it to bite me and that’ll be it. Game over.’
Kradle looked over at Homer. The bigger man was watching his eyes carefully.
‘You serious?’ Kradle asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘And how old were you when he was telling you this?’
‘I don’t know. Eight? Nine? Doesn’t matter. What matters is that it was true. He could control it. He had it under full control in a matter of days,’ Homer said. ‘Every time I was thinking about acting up, I’d feel this tickle in my ear, and I’d look over and my dad would be watching me. He’d tap his ear and I’d know to behave myself.’
Kradle said nothing.
‘Problem is, my dad died about five years later,’ Homer said. ‘Brain aneurysm.’
‘So . . .’ Kradle struggled.
‘So nobody’s controlling the spider,’ Homer whispered.
‘Haven’t you had medical exams during your incarceration?’ Kradle asked. ‘Hasn’t anyone looked in your ear in all these years?’
‘Oh, yeah.’ Homer waved dismissively. ‘Doctors have looked. They always say it’s just dermatitis in there. They give me creams to put on it. I never do.’
A shot of adrenaline hit Kradle’s system as the radio in the console crackled.
‘This is Mesquite Municipal Airport, Mike-Foxtrot-Hotel. Aircraft on bearing oh-three-five call in, please.’
‘What’s the plan? Are we literally just going to run?’ Homer was gripping the frame of the door, watching the earth rise slowly beneath them.
‘That woodland there, behind the airfield.’ Kradle pointed. ‘That’s the highway just beyond it.’
They aligned with the strip. Homer tugged on his seatbelt to tighten it, found it unbuckled. Kradle swallowed hard.
A dog.
A big brown-and-black creature rushed out of the grass at the edge of the woods, heading for the strip, barking at the plane. Kradle shifted upwards in his seat as the flaps on the wings ground slowly down to ten degrees on either side of the fuselage. The wind roared as the drag increased. The dog got to the edge of the runway and barked soundlessly at them.
A man ran out of the woods to retrieve the animal. He was shrugging off a blue jacket with white lining, which he dropped in the grass. Kradle had seen those jackets before.
Kradle flicked the flaps off and tugged back on the yoke. The nose of the plane lifted, sinking his stomach. He held on as the g-force ripped through him. They turned away from the runway, only blue sky visible through the windshield.
‘You see that?’ Homer was twisted in his seat, looking back.
‘The jacket.’ Kradle nodded. ‘It’ll have US Marshal written on the back.’
‘Goddamn dog just saved our bacon.’
‘Yeah.’
Kradle looked down as they turned. More marshals were walking out of the woods with dogs, the game over. He searched the land for a spot to put the aircraft down, but every street was littered with cars, the highway surprisingly busy with morning traffic.
‘They might send jets after us,’ Homer said.
‘This is not a movie,’ Kradle reminded him.
‘Just put us in the desert,’ Homer said. ‘We need to get grounded, right now.’
‘We can’t be out in the open,’ Kradle said.
He spied a field sectioned off with wire fences, surrounded by trees. Kradle turned the yoke in front of him. ‘Get ready.’
The plane shuddered downwards. The brown strip of dirt and gravel cleaved the entire rubbish dump in two, like the trunk of a pale tree rimmed with branches that fed out into the piles of car bodies, broken and rusted whitegoods, twisted scrap metal lying like fields of thorny brambles. It was a rough landing. He consoled himself as the tyres bounced twice on the earth that it had been two decades or more since he’d flown. The plane slowed, rattled violently, twisted sideways and slammed into a pile of rubbish, the wing crumpling, the windows and windscreen blowing out. He pulled himself out of the craft as a bunch of refuse workers abandoned their truck nearby and started running towards them.
‘Are you guys o—’
Kradle heard the men calling, but their voices drained away as he limped into the rubbish mounds, running awkwardly towards the fence line. His lungs were full of the thick, sour smells of rotting fruit, fermenting meat, lawn clippings and spoiled motor oil. Homer was ahead of him, leaping a washing machine like an Olympic hurdler, crashing through valleys of plastic bags, cardboard boxes, tin cans, corrugated iron sheeting. He slipped and stumbled on a flat stretch made from cardboard boxes and Kradle almost caught up to him. Something slashed at Kradle’s thigh – a bent tube sticking out from the ruined body of a bicycle. Homer was halfway up the fence and waiting for him when Kradle heard the sirens on the highway in the distance.
CHAPTER 12
Celine walked into the break room, poured herself a black coffee and stood watching the TV mounted above the staff bulletin board in the corner as she
drank it. Footage was playing of officers escorting inmates back into the prison through the huge gates, a symbolic gesture for the cameras, no doubt. There were few she recognised. She opened a tab on her cell phone and looked at the New York Times home page, which was keeping a tally of inmates escaped and inmates returned. So far 291 inmates had been returned to the facility of the 653 set free. Most had been rounded up on the roads to Vegas and Utah, in the desert, or in the houses most immediate to the prison – little farmhouses dotted throughout the desert wilds. With almost half of the inmates captured, Celine supposed she should be feeling pleased. But the Times was also reporting six common assaults, seventeen robberies, two hostage stand-offs, nine sexual assaults and fifteen carjackings overnight. Two competing groups of criminals had engaged in a shootout in a diner in Meadows Village, leaving five escapees dead and patrons terrified. Not a single death row inmate had been recovered, unless Celine counted Willie Henderson, which she didn’t, because the man had never left the building.
The Times had also managed to snag interviews with officers from Pronghorn about the moments after the hostage call began playing over the PA system.
I know how bad these guys are. I see what they do to each other. I know what they’ll be wanting to do out there. But I also know my family was in danger, and there was nothing else I could do. I’ve got one daughter. You’d have done the same thing if it was you.
Everybody around me was releasing inmates. It didn’t seem like my efforts would mean anything.
What if I kept the inmate back that they were looking for – the terrorists? What if he was in my cell block?
All the sources were anonymous. Celine couldn’t understand that. Nobody who had willingly let inmates go from Pronghorn would be keeping their jobs. There would probably be a couple of spectacular firings, but most would be shipped out quietly over the next year or so, as officers were trained to replace them.
She checked her watch. At 6 am, inmates scheduled for release that day would be let out. Unless the release schedule was delayed because of the breakout, and no one had told her. She imagined they would be driven into town and released in some inconspicuous backstreet so that the journalists waiting to interview them about their experience of the breakout would be left empty-handed.
Celine had never released an inmate in all her years on the row. This was where all hopes of walking free on the earth were abandoned.
She’d slept for an hour inside her car in the prison parking lot after leaving the bar. Dreams of her grandfather’s farm and Kradle’s words on the phone left her shaken and restless, the nap fitful and sweaty.
Somebody killed my son!
Kradle had said nothing about his wife or sister-in-law, Celine noted. But there were plenty of reasons for that. Family annihilators had strange ideas about their work, about the act of killing and the act of giving mercy. Maybe murdering his son had been so different an act from what Kradle did to his wife and sister-in-law that he just plain wanted to blame it on someone else. Celine didn’t know. She tried not to rationalise the deeds of the men on the row. They didn’t work with adult-level logic, were more like beastly children stomping on snails and then trying to talk their way out of being sent to their rooms.
‘You stink,’ someone said.
Celine turned and looked Trinity Parker up and down. The US Marshal was immaculately dressed and smelled of perfume. Celine sipped her coffee.
‘I said, you stink.’ Trinity wrinkled her nose. ‘I told you to go home, freshen up. What did you do instead?’
‘I stayed here for a while,’ Celine said. ‘Checked some stuff off. Then I went driving around looking for inmates. Then I went to a bar. You want to know what I had for breakfast, too?’
‘No. I want to know that you’re ready to get to work.’
‘Is that what you call it? Work? Because being physically assaulted is something I usually do in my spare time.’
‘I’m hearing your poor-man’s Scott Peterson tried to land a plane in Mesquite early this morning, just like you told me he would,’ Trinity said.
‘So I was right about that.’ Celine shrugged. ‘Any chance I might be right that he’s got Schmitz with him?’
Celine had called Trinity as she stood outside the bar, told her about Kradle’s claims to have a dangerous psychopath in his company. Trinity had hung up on her and failed to answer her text messages.
‘You’re not really naive enough to believe Kradle when he says he’s got an important inmate he’ll help you capture, are you?’ Trinity gave her a sad look. ‘Come on. He wants something from you, and that’s his only currency.’
‘Where’s Kradle now?’ Celine asked. ‘Did they catch him?’
‘My guys are chasing him down as we speak.’
Celine felt a cold shot of exhilaration pass through her.
‘Moving on to things that are actually important,’ Trinity said. ‘Your instincts about Kradle and his movements were right. Maybe you are valuable to me. I want to use whatever intel you have to find Burke David Schmitz before he shoots up another mass gathering.’
‘Why would I help someone who popped me in the guts less than twenty-four hours ago?’ Celine asked.
‘You needed a smack to wake you up,’ Trinity said. ‘I was making a kind gesture, trying to communicate with you in your own language. People from your station in life only understand high-stakes situations through pain. You’re like dogs. A dog barks too much, you don’t plead with it. You smack it on the nose.’
‘My “station in life”?’
‘Farm people.’
‘Oh. I see.’ Celine nodded. ‘You did some creative googling in the night, did you?’
‘Sure did,’ Trinity said. Celine bit her tongue so she wouldn’t lash out, turned away, felt that old, hard, protective smile creep onto her face. She set her features and turned back.
‘It was interesting reading,’ Trinity continued. ‘You’ve been through some stuff. I have a little more respect for you now. But don’t get excited. It’s microscopic.’
‘You don’t want to go soft on me because of what happened to me,’ Celine said. ‘Turn your back on me and I’ll bite you, just like any other dog would.’
‘So, let’s try to make this as brief a liaison as possible,’ Trinity said. ‘We snag the Nazi, maybe round up your family killer on the way, and then we’re done.’
‘Done,’ Celine confirmed.
Trinity offered her hand. Celine begrudgingly shook it.
Walter Keeper was standing at the counter in the administration office near F Block when Celine and Trinity arrived at the large, secure glass doors. He was wearing a singlet and dusty, baggy jeans that hung precariously on the upper curve of his butt, the pockets bulging as he stuffed them with items handed to him through the screen over the counter – keys, wallet, phone, smokes, a little black book and a huge black watch. Celine stopped Trinity outside, in the shadow of the chow hall. The two women heard a cheer and looked through the barred windows to see someone drawing a cross through the image of an inmate’s face that was pinned to one of the partitions. Slowly, the wall of faces was becoming a wall of giant red crosses.
‘This will probably be touch and go,’ Celine said. ‘Let me handle it.’
‘Come on.’
‘Some dogs are so used to getting smacked they don’t even feel it anymore,’ Celine said. She left Trinity standing there and went inside, then stood, waiting, while Keeps signed his release forms.
‘Oh, Death Row’—Keeps nodded to her—‘you look at that light?’
‘Yeah, and I found something,’ she said. ‘So I want you to come and tell me where else to look.’
‘Nah, man.’ Keeps smirked, handing the clipboard back across the counter. ‘That’s a favour done. So you owe me a favour when I get back. I’m not spending my first minutes as a free citizen hangin’ out with some screws inside Pronghorn. No offence. I’m getting on the release bus and heading into town so I can grab me a big, juicy b
urger and an ice-cold beer.’
‘I’ll pay you.’
‘Lady, you couldn’t afford ten seconds of my time in here beyond what the state sentenced me.’
He walked out the back doors of the administration block. Celine followed. The gravel crunched beneath their feet. A pair of guards was marching a group of twelve inmates towards the yards.
‘Have fun out there, Keeps!’ an inmate called. ‘I sure did!’
Keeps waved.
‘You got someone waiting for you on the other side?’ Celine asked.
‘Nah. I’m freestyling it.’
‘No family? No girlfriend?’
‘Nope.’
‘So, what’s the plan?’
‘I told you, girl. Burger. Beer. In that order.’
‘Let me get this straight. You’re going to use what cash you have in your wallet to get a burger and a beer, and then you’re on your own. No accommodation. No job. No plans.’
‘People like me don’t need a plan.’ Keeps pushed his glasses up onto his nose and grinned. ‘We hustle. We get lucky. Don’t worry, pretty lady. I’ve done this a thousand times.’
‘How about this.’ Celine stopped him before he could reach the caged passage to the outer perimeter and, beyond it, the bus and the back gates of Pronghorn. ‘First, you stop with all the pretty lady, girl, honey pie bullshit. Then you give me twenty minutes of your precious time over on the row in exchange for these.’
She pulled a set of keys out of her pocket, jangled them. Keeps spied the car key fob and frowned.
‘What?’
‘My car’s out on the lot,’ Celine said. ‘Blue Caprice. I’ll write down my address. You go get your burger and your beer then you can head to my place. Have a shower, watch some Netflix. Eat whatever you want from the fridge. And you can stay there for . . . let’s say a week. Better than a dive hotel or a crowded shelter.’
‘Ma’am.’ Keeps shook his head, laughed, flashing big white teeth. ‘You must be high as all fuck. You don’t know me. What’s say I don’t go to your place and clean you out? Strip your car. Sell your stuff. What’s say I don’t have all my friends there waiting for you to come in the door so we can cornhole your silly ass? Oh, damn, you need to not be givin’ the keys to your life to convicts you just met.’