Tortured Teardrops

by P. D. Workman

Tamara let herself be pushed again toward that alcove. That blind corner.

  “It was a misunderstanding,” Tamara whined. “It wasn’t my fault. I never meant to…”

  “You’re so full of crap,” Waterson exploded. “Maybe you didn’t choose to sit there at our table, but you didn’t have to do what you did. That was a mistake. A big mistake. And you’re going to pay for it.”

  Waterson gave her another push. She stopped for a moment, as if realizing that she wasn’t supposed to be confronting Tamara herself. The Sharks would have a plan of attack, all worked out and scripted. But with Tamara showing up like that, landing in her lap like ripe fruit, Lewis wouldn’t expect Waterson to just ignore such a happy chance.

  Tamara smiled at the ripe fruit metaphor, seeing Lewis and the others again, breakfasts in their laps, sticky and greasy and soiled.

  Waterson saw the smile and there was a split second—a flash when she stopped, thinking that maybe she shouldn’t do what she was doing. But Tamara was there. She was right there, isolated, defenseless, in a blind corner, practically begging Waterson to teach her a lesson. Waterson gave Tamara one more hard shove, driving her into that alcove, her back banging into a closed and locked door, cornered and completely at Waterson’s mercy.

  Waterson wound up, telegraphing her punch, wanting Tamara to suffer in anticipation. But the blow never landed. Tamara moved inside Waterson’s reach, getting up close to her and bringing the shiv in home under the bigger girl’s ribs.

  Waterson looked shocked. She reached for Tamara’s hand, instinctively trying to remove the thorn and cover the wound. But it was too late for that. Tamara knew where to strike.

  There was blood on her hand, warm and sticky. But there was no spray, like when Zobel had been slashed. All of the damage was deep inside; the blood dripped from the wound, it didn’t spurt.

  Waterson grasped Tamara’s hand with more strength than Tamara would have thought she would have, trying to pull her away. Tamara obliged, pulling the shiv from the wound and watching Waterson fold over, gasping and groaning, trying to hold the life force in and failing miserably. Waterson was on her knees and then on the tile floor, with barely a protest.

  Tamara’s head spun. It was like she was two different people. The one who knew what she had to do to protect herself and make sure that no one came after her and the one who was horrified and sickened by it. That was what they had driven her to. That was what they had made her into. It was their fault.

  Tamara waited in the silent hall, weighing her next action.

  In the end, she decided to stay there. She would watch and wait and see who came down the hallway next. Another Shark, a guard, or an inmate not associated with the Sharks, and she would react accordingly. Tamara went into the restroom and stood just inside the doorway, holding the door open so that she wasn’t visible from farther down the hallway, but would be able to see who was coming.

  And just like a higher power was watching over her, the next person along was Tabby. How perfect was that? Tabby was both Waterson’s enemy and Tamara’s.

  Tabby first saw Tamara, standing in the doorway, and then Waterson’s form lying in the alcove. The two sights at once were apparently more than she could process, because she got stuck looking from one to the other and back again, her mouth open, voiceless and paralyzed.

  “She’s faking,” Tamara said. Ridiculous, of course, given the amount of blood pooled around Waterson and the shocking blue pallor of her skin, but Tabby wasn’t thinking straight. It was just one more wrench thrown into the gears to prevent Tabby from sorting out what was going on in the split-second she had. And she made the wrong choice, turning toward Waterson to make sure that she was really, truly dead or dying, and that she wasn’t somehow a threat, just lying in wait for someone to come along and fall into her trap.

  The shiv was still in Tamara’s hand. She patted Tabby on the back. She buried the shiv as far as it would go, not sure how far she had to drive it in to hit something vital from that position. And in a moment, Tabby’s body was over Waterson’s.

  Tamara moved quickly, patting at Tabby to find the weapon that she knew the girl would be carrying. She wouldn’t be a cat without claws. There wasn’t time to think through if the scenario would make sense or not, she just pressed both shivs into both girls’ hands, contaminating them both with the fingerprints and blood of the other. She pushed the bodies around the best she could, both of them bigger and heavier than she was, so that it would look like they had been fighting each other.

  Her heart was pounding hard and fast. Tamara went into the bathroom and washed up at the sink, getting every speck of blood off of her hands and checking her uniform for any telltale spatter. Then she made herself scarce.

  7

  TAMARA DIDN’T THINK it would be very long until the bodies were discovered. She had been lucky not to be caught in the act; it was a well-trafficked hallway with the restroom right there. As she fled the scene, she was expecting the general alarm bell to ring any minute. But it didn’t. She was several halls away before she forced herself to slow down, to walk at a normal pace and breathe slowly and evenly as if she weren’t running for her life. Waterson and Tabby. A two-for-one. She’d never anticipated being so lucky. And a clean getaway.

  If Glock and Vernon could only see her now.

  For a minute, that thought sent her into a tailspin of shame and self-disgust. She clenched her fists and ground her teeth, reminding herself that she had done what she had to survive. She had struck first because that was the only way for her to go up against the Sharks. Eliminate one of theirs before they could get on solid footing.

  It had worked out even better than she had expected. Throwing suspicion elsewhere. Making the Sharks and the TMJ look at each other instead of at Tamara. No one was going to suspect Tamara of killing both of them.

  She paced up and down an empty hallway, waiting for the general alarm to sound, hardly believing that they could take so long to find the two girls.

  And then screaming. Distant, but unmistakable—a girl’s shriek. Tamara steadied herself, one hand on the wall, trying not to see the bodies again in her mind’s eye. She had done what needed to be done. Waterson and Tabby wouldn’t haunt her dreams like Corinne and Julie. They weren’t innocent. They could just as easily have killed Tamara.

  The general alarm came a long time after the scream. Maybe it was only thirty seconds while a guard hurried over to see what she was screaming about and hit his panic button. Then the loud siren whooped and Tamara heard the electromagnets on all of the hallway doors release, and the heavy doors fall together to seal off every section of the wing. It was only a matter of time. The guards would sweep each section to gather up all of the girls and take them all back to their cells. It was a general lockdown and would probably last at least two days while they investigated.

  Two more days locked in her cell. Tamara was not looking forward to it, but it was two days that she would be safe. At least she didn’t have a cellie to share the air with, both of them going stir crazy.

  Tamara paced up and down the hallway between the sealed security doors, unable to stay still. She tried to breathe evenly, but found herself gasping like an asthmatic. Her head spun. She felt sick to her stomach. She shouldn’t have eaten lunch before putting her plan into action but, having missed dinner the day before, she couldn’t risk being reported for missing another meal within twenty-four hours. Dr. Eastport was nothing to be scared of, but spending time in the infirmary would be seen as weak. It might even be seen as running away from the Sharks, not just weak, but a yellow coward.

  It was Gomez who conducted the sweep through the hallway Tamara was stuck in. He punched his code into the keypad to unlock the door and scowled at her. “What are you doing all the way over here?”

  Tamara glanced around. He was right. It wasn’t close to her cell or the common areas or the classrooms. It wasn’t close to any of the areas she should legitimately be in.

  “What happened?” s
he asked, throwing a quaver into her voice. “I heard screaming. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know where to go. I just wanted… to get away, somewhere safe.”

  He motioned to her impatiently. “On the wall,” he instructed, not deigning to tell her what was going on. Maybe he knew that two girls had been killed and maybe he didn’t, but he wasn’t giving Tamara any information. Tamara turned her back to him and put her hands on the wall, feet spread apart and back, the movements routine, automatic. She felt calmer as he checked her position and then patted her down. It wasn’t just the usual quick once-over, but a thorough search, one that would have turned up any weapon, if Tamara had still been carrying one. Then he pulled her hands behind her, one at a time, with a pause in between, and Tamara could picture him checking her hands for anything unusual. Any cuts. Any smears of blood. Anything that would indicate she had just been in a fight.

  “What happened?” Tamara asked again, trying to keep him distracted. “Someone was screaming. Was there a fight?” She forced a little laugh. “Or did someone see a spider?”

  Gomez snorted. It was a running joke in the facility since Cammy, former leader of the Sharks, had one day triggered a general alarm when an eight-legged critter had landed on her pillow. Big as a dinner plate, if she were to be believed, but Tamara figured it was probably nothing more than a regular house spider. Cammy had been a big girl, with broad shoulders and prominent muscles. Tamara was pretty sure that she must have had to take steroids to get that cut. When she’d asked Glock about Cammy, Glock had said that Cammy was ‘about as tough as she looked.’ And she looked plenty tough. But apparently scared of a critter no bigger than a dust ball.

  “No spider,” Gomez told Tamara. He pulled her away from the wall and started back toward her cell.

  “Is it bad, then? Is it something really bad?”

  “Just shut up, French. You know I can’t tell you anything.”

  Tamara let him push her along until it looked like he was going to take her right through the crime scene. She resisted.

  “Keep going.”

  “Something is going on,” Tamara insisted. She couldn’t see it through the window of the next security door, but she pretended she could, because there was no other way to tell him that he was about to make a huge mistake by taking her through there.

  Gomez moved past Tamara, still holding on to her arm, and pressed his face up to the window, straining to see whatever it was that Tamara had seen. They couldn’t really see anything, but Tamara could hear someone barking orders and a bustle of noise that just wasn’t routine for juvie. Gomez clicked the radio on his shoulder, still straining to see through the door. They could see a couple of the security staff farther down the hall, but most of the activity was around the corner.

  “Clear me for corridor three-west,” Gomez said into his radio. He released the button and waited for a response.

  “Negative,” the response came back. “Three-west is quarantined.”

  Gomez swore. “Couldn’t tell me that ahead of time, could you?” he muttered. But he didn’t say it to the guard in the control room. He looked around and took Tamara back to the last door they had come through, punching in his code again to backtrack and detour around the restricted corridor. Tamara watched his fingers fly over the keypad. Normally, she didn’t pay much attention to the security codes that each of the guards used to access locked areas. Normally, she wasn’t in an area that was locked, and if a guard had to use his code, it was a quick, one-time affair. But Gomez had to take her through a dozen doors to get her back to her cell. They should have switched to a swipe card or a proximity key. That was what a lot of the prison facilities were doing. But cards and keys could be grabbed by inmates and a memorized numeric code could not.

  Eventually, they returned to Tamara’s cell and Gomez motioned her in.

  “General lockdown,” he explained. Not that she needed any explanation. Tamara had been there long enough to know the sound of the alarm and what it meant.

  “How long?”

  “How do I know that? My job right now is to get everyone back to their rooms. I haven’t been told anything else.”

  “Did somebody get killed?”

  She knew it was a mistake before the words left her mouth, but she couldn’t stop them. Gomez looked at her, frowning, brows drawn down.

  “Did somebody get killed?” he repeated. “Nobody is saying anything about anyone getting killed. Obviously whoever was screaming was alive and well.” He gave her another long stare before closing her cell door and checking the handle to make sure that the latch had engaged properly. Tamara looked at the security keypad on the inside of her cell, and lay down on her bunk.

  8

  “FRENCH! FRENCH, WAKE up! Hey!”

  Tamara tried to pull away from the insistent shaking. She had slept through reveille bell again. That shouldn’t matter, though, because they were on general lockdown and breakfast would be brought to the cells rather than taking it in the canteen. But maybe he was waking her up because he had brought her breakfast.

  Tamara tried to rub her eyes, but the guard had a firm grip on her bruised left arm, and Tamara couldn’t pull away.

  “I’m awake,” she groaned. “Just leave it there.”

  “Wake up!”

  Tamara wanted to turn over and go back to sleep again, but she felt like she was floating. She wasn’t even lying in her bed. She tried to force her eyes open to get her bearings. They were heavy and sticky with sleep and didn’t want to open in the brightness of the room.

  Tamara squinted and blinked, trying to clear her vision and get her eyes open wide enough to take in her surroundings.

  “What—?” She shook her head. “Where am I?”

  He gave her another shake for good measure, squeezing the tender bruise. “You’re sleepwalking.”

  That didn’t make any sense.

  Eyes still squeezed most of the way shut, Tamara looked around. She was in a corridor. Not in her cell. How could she be sleepwalking in the corridor?

  “Where am I?”

  “Three-west,” the unfamiliar guard growled.

  “Three…” Tamara trailed off.

  “How the hell did you get here?”

  “I… don’t know.”

  “You’re not allowed to be here.”

  She didn’t know why he felt the need to tell her that. Obviously, she wasn’t supposed to be there. She was supposed to be in her cell, asleep.

  “You brought me here,” she said.

  “I didn’t bring you here. You were wandering. Sleepwalking. On your own. Nobody brought you here.”

  “But I can’t…” Tamara shook her head, trying to wake herself up and make sense of the situation. “I can’t… the doors are locked.”

  “Well, that’s what I thought. But apparently, you can walk through locked doors. Or jimmy them. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

  She tried again to pull her arm out of his grasp. “Let go. You’re hurting me.”

  He released her, his face twisted into a sneer. Then he saw the black and yellow bruise, and didn’t ridicule her for being oversensitive. Tamara used both hands to rub her eyes.

  “Can I go back to my room?”

  “I’d like to see how you’re getting through those doors.”

  Tamara walked up to the nearest locked door and looked at it. She tried the handle, but it was locked, as it was supposed to be. She pressed random numbers on the keypad.

  “I don’t know how I got here,” she repeated. “You must have brought me.”

  “I didn’t.” His voice was a growl.

  Tamara looked at her hands and wiped them on her uniform. “This place creeps me out.” The bodies and blood had been cleaned up. There was no crime scene tape. Smudges of fingerprint powder were the only evidence there was a crime scene. Still, Tamara didn’t want to be there.

  She could still see where the girls had been.

  Waterson’s eyes when she realized she’d
been stabbed.

  The guard grabbed her by both shoulders. Tamara realized that she had been tipping over, nearly fainting. She righted herself, trying to focus on staying balanced instead of the flashbacks.

  “I’m just tired. I need to go back to bed…”

  The guard relented. He punched his code into the keypad and the door unlocked. They walked in silence back to Tamara’s cell. Tamara watched as he punched the last keypad to open her cell door. She walked in, heading for her bed. She had no clue what had just happened. She just knew she wanted to get back to sleep.

  She knew he was still standing there, even after she climbed into bed and pulled the blanket over her head. She could feel him watching her.

  He stood there for a long time.

  The second wakening was not identical to the first. Rather than a hand on her arm and commands to wake up, she was being pushed into the wall, into position to be frisked. Angry curses.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  Tamara should have been the one asking, but she was not. Voices on the radios, but no general alarm. The unit was already under lockdown; there was no benefit to sounding the alarm. More feet and voices. Tamara was being held in position and didn’t try to look around. She tried to pry her eyes open to see where she was, but she didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to hear that she was in three-west again.

  The night security was a skeleton staff. Funding cut-backs meant as small a payroll as possible, so after lights-out, they didn’t have the forces to handle anything other than routine disturbances. A fight between cellmates, somebody sick with the flu or appendicitis, a greenie crying for her mama.

  “What are we supposed to do with her?” one of the guards demanded.

  “She’s not trying to escape. She’s sleepwalking.”

  “Sleepwalkers can’t unlock sealed security doors!”

  Someone snickered. “Apparently…”

  “She won’t stay in her cell. She should be put in the isolation unit.”