by Candice Fox
Celine’s phone rang and she grabbed at it. When she heard his voice on the line, her heart twisted in her chest.
Kradle stopped by the front of the warehouse and pulled his hand away from the wound in his arm. He couldn’t tell how bad it was. It looked deep, black, wet. There were people running from the office at the back of the packaging warehouse, having spotted the fray from the windows that looked out over the water. They were rushing to assist the man lying by the picnic table, bleeding his life away. If he were a religious man, Kradle would have said a prayer for the warehouse worker who had been brave enough to come and intervene as Homer swung wildly at him with the kitchen knife. But Kradle wasn’t the praying type. He could only hope the guy wasn’t dead.
‘Celine?’
‘Oh my god.’ He heard her muffle the phone with her hand. ‘It’s him.’
‘Listen to me,’ Kradle said. He limped across the warehouse parking lot between cars, heading for the road. ‘Homer Carrington just stabbed a guy behind the . . . the Resco Industries Packaging warehouse. It’s near the river. He ran off, heading north.’
‘Who’s the guy?’
‘Some warehouse worker who tried to save me from Carrington.’
‘Is . . . is he dead?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Stay there.’
‘I can’t. You know I can’t.’
He heard her cover the phone again, shout the story to someone. He could only assume she was surrounded by other fugitive hunters. She would be in the midst of it all, trying to undo what she could of the breakout. Celine took everything personally. He heard a car door opening and closing, an engine starting.
‘Celine? Celine?’
‘I’m here.’
‘Homer and I carjacked and robbed a woman named Shondra.’ Kradle headed down an alleyway at the end of a strip mall, his bloodied shirt causing a couple with a dog to scurry away to safety. ‘I don’t, uh . . . You’ll find her. She escaped from us. We stole two cell phones from her house. This is one of them. Homer might have the other one. He took everything we had – the whole bag. He might . . . I don’t know if the other phone works. It looked old. But you might be able to track him if he turns it on.’
‘Stay where you are, Kradle.’
The alley opened into another strip mall. He spotted a second-hand clothing store with racks of coats hanging in the sunshine. When he spoke again he heard an echo, as though the phone was on speaker.
‘I have to find the man who killed my son,’ Kradle said.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ Celine sighed.
‘Celine, I know your story,’ Kradle said.
‘What?’
‘I know what happened to you,’ Kradle said. He heard sirens. ‘My lawyer told me. He worked with your grandfather’s lawyer over in Georgia way back when. I’ve known for years, Celine. Are you there? Are you listening?’
‘You . . .’ She was having trouble breathing. He heard her gasp, her breath hitch. ‘You never said anything. You never—’
‘Listen, I get it.’ Kradle stopped and wiped sweat from his face. He was leaning against the window of a nail salon. A woman doing a pedicure just inside the window had stopped her work and was staring at him, open-mouthed. ‘What happened with your family . . . Of course you would hate someone convicted of a crime like mine. But I need you to take the emotion out of it now. I need you to put it aside. It didn’t matter if you believed me when I was on the row, but it sure as hell matters now. You can help me. I know you can.’
‘I wouldn’t help you if you were on fire, John Kradle,’ Celine said.
‘Take an hour,’ Kradle said. ‘One hour. Just do me that much, please. Take an hour, look at my case. Have someone look at it with you, someone who isn’t weighed down by the kind of history you’ve got. Your boyfriend or . . . someone. It doesn’t matter. You’ll see it if you open your eyes.’
There was no answer. John Kradle dumped the phone in a trash can and limped down another alleyway, slid through a gap in a chain-link fence and crossed the cracked concrete of an abandoned lot, passed threads of dry, brown grass hanging like hair over an old flight of steps. He found a public toilet block and walked into the cool, dark brick building to rest.
CHAPTER 17
Trinity Parker sat down across from Lieutenant Joe Brassen and took a moment to stir her coffee. She had requested many things since she’d arrived at Pronghorn to handle the breakout. The partition walls with the faces of inmates. A quiet space with a sturdy chair where she could take briefings from her section chiefs, sit and map out her forty-eight, seventy-two and ninety-six-hour plans, answer the odd phone call from Washington. Somewhere with a window, where she could look out over the press camped outside the gates. Truth was, she could have done without all those things. She wasn’t prissy. Trinity had squatted in broken-down houses in Detroit while hunting fugitives, shitting in a bucket and living on candy bars and bottled water, cockroaches crawling up her ankles. But what she couldn’t do without was strong, good quality coffee, and at the thirty-hour mark a proper machine had arrived and the whole catastrophe had seemed impossibly easier to handle.
She put down her spoon and glanced at Brassen as she lifted her cup. Trinity enjoyed dealing with people whose worlds were slowly crumbling. They were refreshing. Joe Brassen had to know he was on the verge of losing everything, of becoming one of the things he feared and dreaded most. An inmate. He was ripe for being taken advantage of. When someone is trapped in a grain silo, sinking desperately into the abyss with every movement, they’ll take anything offered to pull them out. They’ll grab at a red-hot poker. Trinity put her coffee down, smacked her lips and flattened her hands on the table in front of her.
‘Paint,’ she said.
‘Huh?’ Brassen gulped. He had been expecting a threat. A barrage of abuse. But not that word. Colours flushed through his face as he tried to find an emotion to centre on. Trinity took her time.
‘Black paint,’ Trinity said. ‘I know. I know. I could hardly believe it myself. But that’s what will be your undoing. That’s what will put you in a prison cell for the rest of your life. A three-dollar tube of acrylic paint, manufactured in China, imported to the US. Midnight True Black is the shade. Number 4035.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Brassen smoothed back his thinning black hair, then pushed his glasses into place from where they had slipped down his nose on skin greased by sweat. ‘I want my lawyer.’
‘The minimum security guys were happy enough to talk about where they got their black paint,’ Trinity said. She sipped her coffee. ‘They’re all snitches over in minimum. It’s the same in every prison. They’re in for short stints, so they don’t have time to get used to bad conditions. They want to be comfortable. They all pointed to a guard named Maria Dresbone who was bringing in their contraband black paint.’
‘What the hell’s that got to do with me?’
‘Maria was harder to crack,’ Trinity said. ‘You correctional officers are somewhat more loyal to each other. Who among you hasn’t snapped and slipped an elbow into an inmate’s face, and relied on your colleagues to keep quiet about it? But she turned you in eventually. Maria told me that you supply her and three other guards with contraband items for inmates in minimum because you alone are able to get those items through security. Your girlfriend is the Entry B X-ray operator. She hasn’t checked your backpack since you started dating six months ago.’
Brassen stared at the ceiling of the office they occupied – some pencil-pusher’s cluttered workspace inside the prison’s administration block. There was a model truck on the edge of the desk, sitting by a framed photograph of a young girl. Trinity pushed the picture with her fingertip so that it was at a perfect 45-degree angle to the edge of the desk.
‘The snitching inmates led me to Maria, and Maria led me to you,’ she said. ‘You work on death row. You’re the only guy who could have got that paint to Schmitz. My agents found other contraband items in Schmitz’
s cell. His pillow isn’t regulation, and there was a bottle of antibacterial nasal spray under his bed that wasn’t on his list of approved meds.’
‘Lawyer,’ Brassen growled. It was the weak sound of a cornered animal, a hollow warning.
‘If Burke David Schmitz kills again, and he will . . .’ Trinity began.
‘I want my lawyer,’ Brassen said.
‘You don’t get a fucking lawyer,’ Trinity snarled, leaning forwards in her chair. ‘Not here, not now, not until I decide you deserve one. I’m the person who decides everything you get from this moment onwards, you gormless, knuckle-dragging sack of turds. You assisted a known neo-Nazi terrorist in escaping custody! You can sit here and tell me everything you know, or you can sit in a cell in Gitmo for the next three years while they burn out your eyeballs with strobe lights and blast the Sesame Street theme song until you chew your own tongue off.’
Trinity leaned back in her chair and drained her coffee cup while Brassen stared at her, his eyes wide with visions crowding in of orange jumpsuits, hoods, electrodes. The images, Trinity knew, would be competing with hopeless dreams of safety, of his plywood trailer stuffed to bursting with cans of Bud and bags of Cheetos, a mixed-breed dog in there somewhere, probably something beefy, a pit bull or ridgeback with a big underbite of crooked teeth. It would sleep on his bed and be named something stupid: Blaze or Dagger or Harley. Trinity knew Brassen would choose the right path, choose the trailer and the dog over Gitmo and the orange jumpsuits and hoods. She just didn’t know how long that was going to take. She put her feet up on the desk.
‘I don’t care about the paint and the pillows. I want to know what else you were bringing in for Schmitz.’
Brassen looked at his hands on the edge of the table. The thumb of one hand was rubbing the knuckles of the other so vigorously that the skin was becoming pink and raw.
‘Gun magazines,’ Brassen said. ‘Candy bars. Letters.’
‘Are you a neo-Nazi, Brassen?’
‘No,’ the big man continued. ‘Not, like, uh . . . I mean, I don’t like Black inmates. That’s all. The Black inmates are worse than the white ones behaviour-wise, and that’s just plain old fact.’
Trinity waited for Brassen to get uncomfortable and fill the silence. He did.
‘Like, if you got a shank on the pod, you know it belongs to a Black inmate,’ Brassen said. ‘They get here, and it doesn’t matter what crime they’re coming in for. They weapon up straight away. I think it’s just the violence in them. And that’s my opinion.’ Brassen sniffed. ‘It’s a free country, and I’ve got a right to my opinion.’
Trinity stared at him.
‘What, uh, what Schmitz did was terrible, though.’ Brassen cleared his throat loudly. ‘I mean, all those people down in New Orleans. The shooting. Nazi or not, you can’t—’
‘What did they offer you?’ Trinity said. ‘And what did you bring?’
‘Nothing. I don’t—’
‘What was in the letters you brought him?’ Trinity said. ‘You mentioned letters. Stands to reason they would have contained communication Schmitz wanted to get past the censors. I assume you snooped.’
‘I didn’t snoop. They told me not to.’
‘They told you not to, or they offered you money not to?’
Brassen wiped sweat from his neck with the collar of his shirt.
‘Those letters will be gone,’ Trinity said. ‘Schmitz took a box of belongings with him when he escaped. I need something else.’
Brassen gave a long, heavy sigh. ‘I want to make some kind of deal with you here.’
‘There’s no deal. You give me what you have, and you hope that this time tomorrow somebody isn’t waterboarding you,’ Trinity said. ‘In fact, I’ll see to it that if you’re waterboarded, it’s a Black man who does it.’
‘You guys don’t really do that kind of thing.’ Brassen ventured a small laugh.
Trinity said nothing.
‘I let him use a cell phone,’ Brassen said.
Trinity sat forwards. ‘Where’s that phone now?’
‘I was supposed to get it back from him. Yesterday morning. I never let him keep it because of the shakedowns. I’d give it to him and let him have it overnight. He must have taken it with him if it’s not in his cell.’
‘Do you know who he was calling?’
‘No.’
‘Do you remember where and when you bought the phone?’
‘Yeah.’ Brassen nodded, took his own cell phone out of his pocket. ‘And I have the number saved, too. I put it into my phone in case I had a night off and I needed to tell Schmitz there was going to be a shakedown.’
Trinity took Brassen’s phone from him, sat with her feet on the desk and her elbow hanging off the side of her chair while she opened the device. On the wallpaper screen was a picture of a big, ugly dog sitting on the porch of a plywood trailer. She smiled to herself.
By the time Celine and Keeps arrived at the waterfront, the place was a swarm of people and vehicles, a concentrated hive of activity reminiscent of the chaos that had descended on Pronghorn after the breakout. It was early afternoon, the sun beginning to fall. Celine pressed forwards through a group of people in grey coveralls with ‘Resco Warehouse Crew’ embroidered on the breast pocket to find them clustered around a dead man lying twisted on the thin grass. She discerned from the sobbing account of a big man in a trucker cap that a couple of guys had been on their way to the picnic table from the warehouse for a smoke break, when they’d noticed two men getting into an argument. Whether Nugent, the skinny, bald man on the ground, saw that there was a knife in the fray before he ran forwards to help was unclear.
‘He just ran up there and the guy jammed the knife in his guts,’ the big man said. ‘Oh, Remy. Man, he’s dead. He’s dead.’
Celine found herself being pushed back by the hands of a police officer. There were sirens on the wind, onlookers assembling in the warehouse parking lot, frowning, arms crossed, murmuring to each other the way that strangers do when presented with a public spectacle of tragedy, sharing information, awe. Celine noticed a spot of blood in the grass at her feet. She let the cop push her back until she noticed another one, then turned and started following the dark splotches on the ground.
‘Let’s go, Celine.’ Keeps took her arm.
‘He went this way.’ Celine pointed at the blood. ‘Come on. Come on.’
‘No, we’re going.’
‘We can follow—’
‘We’re going!’ Keeps barked. For an instant, Celine saw the inmate in him again. The prisoner defending himself against the other dangerous men stuffed behind the wire, bottled rage carefully pressurised and stored until it was needed. He pulled her out of the crowd and she tried to build her fury to match his, to fight him, to make him continue doing what she needed him to do. But she was so tired, and the night was not far away.
‘You’re exhausted.’ Keeps pointed at her chest, accusatory. He turned the finger on himself. ‘So am I. They’re about to lock down this whole goddamn suburb to try to find those guys. I’m not spending my first night as a free man in Mesquite.’
‘We can just follow the trai—’
‘What are you gonna do?’ Keeps threw his hands up. ‘You’re what – five foot nothin’? You’re gonna chase down a pair of murderers and wrestle them to the ground yourself? Is that the plan? Because I sure ain’t helping you. I don’t like you enough to do what I’m already doing, let alone messing with some fugitive psychos.’
‘Keeps—’
‘You might have been the big, tough officer with all the power over these guys while they were behind steel mesh and bulletproof glass, Celine. But right now you ain’t nothin’.’
Celine looked at the blood on the ground at her feet. Homer’s blood, or Kradle’s blood, or the blood of a murdered man, the first confirmed casualty of the men from her row. Her men. The ones she couldn’t keep contained.
‘Get in the car,’ Keeps said. ‘We’re going home.’
An hour and a half of heavy silence, the road roaring beneath them, the red sun creeping towards the rocky horizon through the windshield. When cars blasted past them, Celine saw one law enforcement vehicle after another – slick tan FBI vehicles and sheriffs’ cruisers, the occasional border patrol car probably carrying officers who had been called in to assist. She slept thinly for a while, and switched wordlessly with Keeps at some unmarked point in their journey, the two passing each other at the back of the car in the warm, windy desert without meeting each other’s eyes. He started texting someone maybe twenty minutes from home, and she wondered if he was trying to organise a pick-up. It made her a little sad, but she didn’t know why, exactly. She had lied, manipulated and bullied him into helping her for an entire day with no tangible reward, on a mission that meant nothing to him. If he could beg his way onto someone’s couch, away from her and her desperate, angry, stupid need to find John Kradle, then she believed wholeheartedly that he should.
He surprised her as she pulled onto her street, sitting up in his seat to examine the narrow Spanish-style homes drifting by, their stone-and-succulent gardens and darkened windows.
‘So is there a boyfriend?’ Keeps asked.
Celine laughed with surprise. ‘You heard Kradle say that?’
‘I heard it. You got your phone turned all the way up.’
‘It’s loud at Pronghorn. You can barely hear yourself think.’ She took her phone from the centre console and tapped the button on the side to turn it down.