by Stephen King
“Janker agrees in absentia,” Judge Silver replied. “Having saved his incompetent bacon in my courtroom on more than one occasion, I can say that with complete confidence. I order Evie Doe to be transported to Dooling Correctional immediately, and held there for a period of . . . how about forty-eight hours, Lila?”
“Make it ninety-six,” Barry Holden said, apparently feeling that he ought to do something for his client.
“I’m okay with ninety-six, Judge,” Lila said. “I just want to get her someplace where she won’t hurt herself anymore while I get some answers.”
Linny spoke up. In Lila’s opinion, she was becoming a bit of a pain. “Will Clint and Warden Coates be okay with a guest camper?”
“I’ll handle that,” Lila said, and thought again about her new prisoner. Evie Doe, the mystery killer who knew Lila’s name, and who babbled about triple-doubles. Obviously a coincidence, but an unwelcome and badly timed one. “Let’s get her in here long enough to roll some fingerprints. Also, Linny and I need to take her into one of the holding cells and put her into some County Browns. The shirt she’s got on has to be marked as evidence, and it’s all she’s wearing. I can’t very well take her up to the prison buck-ass naked, can I?”
“No, as her lawyer, I couldn’t approve of that at all,” Barry said.
3
“So, Jeanette—what’s going on?”
Jeanette considered Clint’s opening gambit. “Hmm, let’s see. Ree said she had a dream last night about eating cake with Michelle Obama.”
The two of them, prison psychiatrist and patient-inmate, were making slow circuits of the exercise yard. It was deserted at this time of the morning, when most of the inmates were busy at their various jobs (carpentry, furniture manufacture, maintenance, laundry, cleaning), or attending GED classes in what was known in Dooling Correctional as Dumb School, or simply lying in their cells and stacking time.
Pinned to the top of Jeanette’s beige smock top was a Yard Pass, signed by Clint himself. Which made him responsible for her. That was okay. She was one of his favorite patient-inmates (one of his pets, Warden Janice Coates would have said, annoyingly), and the least troublesome. In his opinion, Jeanette belonged on the outside—not in another institution, but outside altogether, walking free. It wasn’t an opinion he would have offered to Jeanette, because what good would that do her? This was Appalachia. In Appalachia, you didn’t get a free pass on murder, it didn’t matter if it was second degree. His belief in Jeanette’s lack of culpability in the death of Damian Sorley was the sort of thing that he wouldn’t express to anyone except his wife and maybe not even to her. Lately Lila seemed a little off. A little preoccupied. This morning, for instance, although that was probably because she needed some sleep. And there was that thing Vanessa Lampley had said about an overturned pet food truck on Mountain Rest Road last year. How likely was it that there had been two identical, bizarre accidents months apart?
“Hey, Dr. N., are you there? I said that Ree—”
“Had a dream about eating with Michelle Obama, got it.”
“That’s what she said at first. But she just made that up. She actually had a dream about a teacher telling her she was in the wrong classroom. Total anxiety dream, wouldn’t you say?”
“Could be.” It was one of about a dozen default positions he kept ready for answering patient questions.
“Hey, Doc, you think Tom Brady might come here? Give a speech, sign some autographs?”
“Could be.”
“You know, he could sign some of those little toy footballs.”
“Sure.”
Jeanette stopped. “What did I just say?”
Clint thought about it, then laughed. “Busted.”
“Where are you this morning, Doc? You’re doing that thing you do. Pardon me for, like, barging in on your personal space, but is everything okay at home?”
With a nasty internal start, Clint realized he was no longer sure that was true, and Jeanette’s unexpected question—her insight—was unsettling. Lila had lied to him. There hadn’t been a crash on the Mountain Rest Road, not last night. He was suddenly sure of that.
“Everything’s fine at home. What’s the thing I do?”
She made a frowny face and held up her fist and ran her thumb back and forth over her knuckles. “When you do that, I know you’re out there picking daisies or something. It’s almost like you’re remembering a fight you were in.”
“Ah,” said Clint. That was too close for comfort. “Old habit. Let’s talk about you, Jeanette.”
“My favorite subject.” It sounded good, but Clint knew better. If he let Jeanette lead the conversation, they would spend this entire hour in the sun talking about Ree Dempster, Michelle Obama, Tom Brady, and whomever else she could free associate. When it came to free association, Jeanette was a champ.
“Okay. What did you dream about last night? If we’re going to talk about dreams, let’s talk about yours, not Ree’s.”
“I can’t remember. Ree asked me, and I told her the same thing. I think it’s that new med you put me on.”
“So you did dream something.”
“Yeah . . . probably . . .” Jeanette was looking at the vegetable garden rather than at him.
“Could it have been about Damian? You used to dream about him quite a bit.”
“Sure, about how he looked. All blue. But I haven’t had the blue man dream in a long time. Hey, do you remember that movie, The Omen? About the son of the devil? That kid’s name was Damien, too.”
“You have a son . . .”
“So?” She was looking at him now, and a bit distrustfully.
“Well, some people might say your husband was the devil in your life, which would make Bobby—”
“The son of the devil! Omen Two!” She pealed laughter, pointing a finger at him. “Oh, that’s too funny! Bobby is the sweetest kid in the world, takes after my momma’s side of the family. He comes all the way from Ohio with my sister to see me every other month. You know that.” She laughed some more, a sound not common to this fenced and strictly monitored acre of ground, but very sweet. “You know what I’m thinking?”
“Nope,” Clint said. “I’m a shrink, not a mind-reader.”
“I’m thinking this might be a classic case of transference.” She wiggled the first two fingers of each hand in the air to make quotation marks around the key word. “As in you’re worried that your boy is the devil’s child.”
It was Clint’s turn to laugh. The idea of Jared as the devil’s anything, Jared who brushed mosquitoes off his arms rather than swatting them, was surreal. He worried about his son, yes, but not that he would ever wind up behind bars and barbed wire, like Jeanette and Ree Dempster and Kitty McDavid and the ticking time-bomb known as Angel Fitzroy. Hell, the kid didn’t even have enough nerve to ask Mary Pak to go to the Spring Dance with him.
“Jared’s fine, and I’m sure your Bobby is, too. How’s that medication doing with your . . . what do you call them?”
“My blurries. That’s when I can’t see people just right, or hear them just right. It’s all kinds of better since I started the new pills.”
“You’re not just saying that? Because you have to be honest with me, Jeanette. You know what I always say?”
“HPD, honesty pays dividends. And I’m being straight with you. It’s better. I sometimes still get down, though, then I start to drift and the blurries come back.”
“Any exceptions? Anyone who comes through loud and clear even when you’re depressed? And can maybe bootstrap you out of it?”
“Bootstrap! I like that. Yeah, Bobby can. He was five when I came in here. Twelve now. He plays keyboards in a group, can you believe that? And sings!”
“You must be very proud.”
“I am! Yours must be about the same age, right?”
Clint, who knew when one of his ladies was trying to turn the conversation, made a noncommittal noise instead of telling her that Jared was approaching voting age, weir
d as that seemed to him.
She thumped his shoulder. “Make sure he’s got condoms.”
From the umbrella-shaded guard post near the north wall, an amplified voice blared, “PRISONER! NO PHYSICAL CONTACT!”
Clint tossed the officer a wave (hard to tell because of the loudhailer, but he thought the uni in the lawn chair was that asshole Don Peters) to show all was cool and then said to Jeanette, “Now I’m going to have to discuss this with my therapist.”
She laughed, pleased.
It occurred to Clint, not for the first time, that if circumstances were entirely different, he would have wanted Jeanette Sorley for a friend.
“Hey, Jeanette. You know who Warner Wolf is?”
“Let’s go to the videotape!” she responded promptly, a spot-on imitation. “Why do you ask?”
It was a good question. Why did he ask? What did an old sportscaster have to do with anything? And why should it matter if his pop culture frame of reference (like his physique) was a little out of date?
Another, better question: Why had Lila lied to him?
“Oh,” Clint said, “someone mentioned him. Struck me funny.”
“Yeah, my dad loved him,” Jeanette said.
“Your dad.”
A snatch of “Hey Jude” came from his phone. He looked at the screen and saw his wife’s picture. Lila, who should have been deep in dreamland; Lila, who might or might not remember Warner Wolf; Lila, who had lied.
“I need to take this,” he told Jeanette, “but I’ll keep it brief. You should stroll over there to the garden, pull some weeds, and see if you can remember what you dreamed last night.”
“Little privacy, got it,” she said, and walked toward the garden.
Clint waved toward the north wall again, indicating to the officer that Jeanette’s move was sanctioned, then pushed ACCEPT. “Hey, Lila, what’s going on?” Aware as it came out of his mouth that it was how he had started many a patient conference.
“Oh, the usual,” she said. “Meth lab explosion, double homicide, doer in custody. I collared her strolling up Ball’s Hill pretty much in her altogether.”
“This is a joke, right?”
“Afraid not.”
“Holy shit, are you okay?”
“Running on pure adrenalin, but otherwise fine. I need some help, though.”
She filled in the details. Clint listened, not asking questions. Jeanette was working herself along a row of peas, pulling weeds and singing something cheerful about going uptown to the Harlem River to drown. At the north end of the prison yard, Vanessa Lampley approached Don Peters’s lawn chair, spoke to him, then took the seat as Don trudged toward the admin wing, head down like a kid who has been called to the principal’s office. And if anyone deserved to be called in, it was that bag of guts and waters.
“Clint? Are you still there?”
“Right here. Just thinking.”
“Just thinking,” Lila repeated. “About what?”
“About the process.” The way she pressed him took Clint aback. It almost seemed like she had been mocking him. “In theory it’s possible, but I’d have to check with Janice—”
“Then do it, please. I can be there in twenty minutes. And if Janice needs convincing, convince her. I need help here, Clint.”
“Calm down, I’ll do it. Fear of self-harm is a valid concern.” Jeanette had finished one row and was working her way back toward him along the next. “I’m just saying that ordinarily, you’d take her to St. Terry’s first to get her checked out. Sounds like she whammed her face pretty good.”
“Her face isn’t my immediate concern. She nearly tore one man’s head off, and stuck another guy’s head through a trailer wall. Do you really think I should put her in an exam room with some twenty-five-year-old resident?”
He wanted to ask again if she was all right, but in her current mood she’d go ballistic, because when you were tired and ragged, that’s what you did, lashed out at the person who was safe. Sometimes—often, even—Clint resented having to be the safe one. “Perhaps not.”
Now he could hear street sounds. Lila had left the building. “It’s not just that she’s dangerous, and it’s not just that she’s off her gourd. It’s like—Jared would say, ‘My Spidey Sense is tingling.’ ”
“Maybe when he was seven.”
“I’ve never seen her before in my life, I’d swear to that on a pile of Bibles, but she knows me. She called me by name.”
“If you’re wearing your uniform shirt, and I assume you are, there’s a name tag on your breast pocket.”
“Right, but all it says is NORCROSS. She called me Lila. I have to get off the phone. Just tell me that when I get there with her, the welcome mat will be out.”
“It will be.”
“Thank you.” He heard her clear her throat. “Thank you, honey.”
“You’re welcome, but you have to do something for me. Don’t bring her alone. You’re beat.”
“Reed Barrows will be driving. I’m riding shotgun.”
“Good. Love you.”
There was the sound of a car door opening, probably Lila’s cruiser. “Love you, too,” she said, and clicked off.
Was there a slight hesitation there? No time to think about that now, to pick at it until it turned into something it probably wasn’t, which was just as well.
“Jeanette!” And when she turned to him: “I’m going to have to cut our session short. Something has come up.”
4
Bullshit was Coates’s arch-enemy. Not that most people were friends with it, or even liked it, but they put up with bullshit, came to an understanding with it, and they dished up their fair share. Warden Janice Tabitha Coates didn’t bullshit. It wasn’t in her disposition and it would have been counterproductive anyway. Prison was basically a bullshit factory, call it the Dooling Bullshit Manufacturing Facility for Women, and it was her job to keep production from raging out of control. Waves of bullshit memos came down from the state that demanded she simultaneously cut costs and improve services. A steady stream of bullshit flowed from the courts—inmates and defense attorneys and prosecutors bickering over appeals—and Coates always seemed to get drawn in somehow. The health department loved to drop in for bullshit inspections. The engineers who came to repair the prison electrical grid always promised that this would be the last time—but their promises were bullshit. The grid kept right on crashing.
And the bullshit didn’t stop while Coates was at home. Even as she slept, it piled up, like a drift in a snowstorm, a brown drift made of bullshit. Like Kitty McDavid going nuts, and the two physicians’ assistants picking the exact same morning to go AWOL. That stinking pile had been waiting for her the moment she stepped through the door.
Norcross was a solid shrink, but he produced his share of bovine excrement, too, requesting special treatments and dispensations for his patients. His chronic failure to recognize that the vast majority of his patients, the inmates of Dooling, were themselves bullshit geniuses, women who had spent their lives nurturing bullshit excuses, was almost touching, except that it was Coates who had to wield the shovel.
And hey, underneath their bullshit, some of the women did have real reasons. Janice Coates wasn’t stupid and she wasn’t heartless. Lots of the women of Dooling were, above all else, luckless. Coates knew that. Bad childhoods, horrible husbands, impossible situations, mental illnesses medicated with drugs and alcohol. They were victims of bullshit as well as purveyors of it. However, it wasn’t the warden’s job to sort any of that out. Pity could not be allowed to compromise her duty. They were here, and she had to take care of them.
Which meant she had to deal with Don Peters, who appeared before her now, the bullshit artist supreme, just finishing his latest bullshit story: the honest workingman, unfairly accused.
When he had put on the finishing touches, she said, “Don’t give me that union crap, Peters. One more complaint and you’re out. I got one inmate saying you grabbed her breast, I’ve got anoth
er saying you squeezed her butt, and I’ve got a third saying you offered her half a pack of Newports to suck you off. The union wants to go to the mattresses for you, that’s their choice, but I don’t think they will.”
The squat little officer sat on her couch with his legs spread wide (as if his basket was something she wanted to look at) and his arms crossed. He blew at the Buster Brown bangs that hung down over his eyebrows. “I never touched anyone, Warden.”
“No shame in resigning.”
“I’m not quitting, and I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done!” Red suffused his normally pale cheeks.
“Must be nice. I’ve got a list of things I’m ashamed of. Signing off on your application in the first place is near the top of it. You’re like a booger I can’t get off my finger.”
Don’s lips took on a crafty twist. “I know you’re trying to make me angry, Warden. It won’t work.”
He wasn’t stupid, was the thing. That was the reason no one had nailed him so far. Peters was canny enough to make his moves when no one else was around.
“Guess not.” Coates, seated on the edge of her desk, pulled her bag into her lap. “Can’t blame a girl for trying.”
“You know they lie. They’re criminals.”
“Sexual harassment’s a crime, too. You’ve had your last warning.” Coates rummaged in her bag, searching for her ChapStick. “By the way, only half a pack? Come on, Don.” She yanked out tissues, her lighter, her pill bottle, her iPhone, wallet, and finally found what she was looking for. The cap had fallen off and the stick was flecked with bits of lint. Janice used it anyway.
Peters had fallen silent. She looked at him. He was a punk and an abuser and incredibly fortunate that another officer hadn’t stepped forward as a witness to any of the abuses. She’d get him, though. She had time. Time was, in fact, another word for prison.
“What? You want some?” Coates held out her ChapStick. “No? Then get back to work.”
The door rattled in the frame when he slammed it and she heard him thudding flat-footed out of the reception area, like a teen doing a tantrum. Satisfied that the disciplinary session had gone about as she had expected, Coates returned to the matter of her linty ChapStick, and began to stir around in her bag for the cap.