by Stephen King
“You’re taking this rather well,” observed Janice Coates.
Peters brushed a finger along his mustache. “I’m just enjoying thinking about how my lawyer is going to make me a millionaire off this wrongful firing, Warden. I think I’ll buy a boat. Also, I was raised to be a gentleman no matter how I was mistreated. So, fire me. Fine, but you got no proof. I’m going to roll you up in court.” He glanced at Clint, who was standing by the door. “You okay? I see you standing there and making fists, you need to pinch a loaf or something, Doc?”
“Fuck you,” Clint said.
“See? That’s not nice,” said Peters. Smiling, showing teeth the color of shoepeg corn.
Coates sipped from the coffee cup she’d just refilled. It was bitter. She took another sip anyway. She was feeling optimistic. The day was an apocalypse, but her daughter was driving home and she was finally ridding herself of Don Peters. Amid the fecal mounds there occasionally glimmered a pearl or two of satisfaction.
“You’re a scumbag, and you’re lucky we can’t deal with you to the extent you deserve right now.” From the pocket of her suit jacket she produced a Baggie. She held it up and gave it a shake. Inside the Baggie were two Q-tips. “Because, you see, we do have proof.”
Peters’s grin faltered, tried to come on strong, didn’t quite make it.
“It’s your squirt, Donnie Boy. From the Coke machine.” Coates took a big swig of the lousy coffee and smacked her lips. “Once everything settles down and we can deal with you as you deserve, you’re going to jail. Good news is, they keep the sex offenders in a special wing, so you might survive, but the bad news is, even with a good lawyer you’ll be in there for quite awhile. Don’t worry, though, you’ll still get to see me at your parole hearings. I’m on the board, you know.” The warden twisted to her intercom and pressed the call button. “Blanche, can you rustle up a fresh bag of coffee? This stuff is dreadful.” She waited a moment for a response and then pressed the button again. “Blanche?” Coates released the button. “She must have stepped out.”
Coates returned her attention to Peters on the couch. His grin had given up entirely. The officer was breathing hard, running his tongue around under his lips, clearly working through the implications of the DNA evidence that had just been waved in his face.
“For now,” the warden said, “just turn in your uniform and bug out. Telling you we have the goods on you was probably a mistake on my part, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to gloat. It gives you a few extra days until the hammer falls. You could hop in your car, head for Canada. Who knows, maybe you can keep your head down, become an ice fisherman.”
“Set-up!” Peters leaped to his feet. “This is a set-up!”
Clint could no longer hold back. He stepped forward, grabbed the shorter man by the throat, and pushed him against the wall. Don batted at Clint’s shoulders and face, scraping Clint’s cheeks with his nails. Clint squeezed. Under his fingers Clint could feel Peters’s pulse squirming, could feel his Adam’s apple shrinking, could feel the impossibility and frustration and fright of the entire day pooling out around his hands like juice from a grapefruit. A moth was fluttering around his head. It planted a ghost-kiss on one temple and was gone.
“Dr. Norcross!”
Clint drove a fist into the soft sack of Peters’s belly and then let go. The officer fell onto the couch and slid off, onto the floor on his hands and knees. He made a choked animal noise: “Hee-hee-hee.”
The warden’s door banged open. Tig Murphy stepped in, holding a Taser. Damp glistened on Tig’s cheeks and his color was poor; he’d told Clint he was fine, but he wasn’t fine, nothing was fine and nobody was fine.
“Hee-hee-hee.” Peters began to crawl away from Clint. The moth had lost interest in Clint and now it was circling the crawling man, seemingly ushering him out.
“We were just going to call for you, Officer Murphy.” Coates, still at her desk, proceeded as if nothing had happened at all. “Mr. Peters was about to exit the premises and he tripped over a fold in the rug. Help him up, would you? He can leave his things in the locker room.” The warden toasted Tig Murphy with her coffee cup and drank it down.
CHAPTER 12
1
“Now, Officer, you know I’m prone to fits of temper, right?”
Angel, standing at a respectful distance from the Booth, presented this rhetorical question to Vanessa Lampley. Jeanette, beside her, had no illusions: they were facing an uphill battle.
Behind the plastic shield of the Booth, seated at the board, Lampley’s broad shoulders were curled dangerously forward. She looked prepared to leap straight through the shield. Jeanette figured that in a fight Angel could dish out plenty despite her narrow frame—but not enough to handle Lampley.
“Fitzroy, is that some kind of half-assed threat? With the shit that’s going on today? Now I got three inmates covered in cobwebs, I’m way past when I should have clocked out, I’m weary as hell, and you want to test me? That is a bad idea, I promise you.”
Angel held up her palms. “No, no, no, Officer. I’m just sayin, I wouldn’t trust me in a situation like this either, okay? My felony record speaks for itself and there’s lots else I got away with, though you understand I can’t share specifics.”
Jeanette touched her forehead and studied the ground. If there had ever been a plan for Angel, post-parole, to move into the area of international diplomacy, someone needed to revamp it.
“Get out of here, you fucking nitwit,” Lampley said.
“Which is why I brought Jeanette.” With this, Angel threw out an arm: ta-da!
“Well, that changes everything.”
“Don’t mock.” The arm that Angel had raised dropped to her side. What had been collegial in her expression flattened. “Don’t you mock me, Officer.”
“Don’t you don’t me, inmate.”
Jeanette decided it was now or never. “Officer Lampley, I’m sorry. We’re not trying to make any trouble.”
Van, who had started to rise, imposingly, from her chair, settled back. Unlike Fitzroy, who basically lived on Bad Report, owning it like a damn property in Monopoly, Sorley was known for her friendly attitude. And according to Ree Dempster, Sorley had been molested by that poisonous toad Peters. Van supposed she could hear her out.
“What is it?”
“We want to cook up some coffee. Some special coffee. To help everyone stay awake.”
Van held her finger on the intercom for a second or two before she spoke, then asked the obvious: “What do you mean by special?”
“Stronger than regular coffee,” Jeanette said.
“You can have some, too,” Angel said, and tried for a magnanimous smile. “It’ll sharp you right up.”
“Oh, that’s just what I need! A whole prison full of hopped-up inmates! That would be wonderful! Let me guess, Fitzroy: the secret ingredient is crack cocaine.”
“Well . . . not exactly. Since we don’t have any. And let me ask you this: What’s the alternative?”
Lampley admitted she didn’t know.
Jeanette spoke up. “Officer, unless this Aurora gets solved pronto, people in here are going to get restless.” This fully dawned on her even as she articulated it. Except for Maura Dunbarton and a couple of other lifers, there was at least a distant beacon of hope: the end of their sentence. Freedom. For all intents and purposes, the Aurora Flu was a sudden dousing of that hope. No one knew what came after sleep, or if anything did. It was like heaven that way. “They’re going to get worried and they’re going to get upset and scared, and you could have a serious . . . problem.” Jeanette was careful not to employ the word riot, but that was the problem she was envisioning. “They’re already worried and upset and scared. You said it yourself, there’s already been three of us that have come down with this thing.
“And we got the ingredients right in the kitchen. You just have to let us in and we’ll do the rest. Look, I’m not trying to be pushy here or cause a ruckus. You know me, right? I try t
o get along. My time has been clean. I’m just telling you what my concern is and proposing an idea.”
“And your special coffee is going to fix that? Some accelerant is going to make everyone copacetic with the situation?”
“No, Officer,” said Jeanette. “That is not what I think.”
Lampley’s hand found her bicep tattoo of the gravestone, YOUR PRIDE. She let her fingers wander over the lines. The focus of her gaze drifted up, to something above the screen of the Booth.
A clock, Jeanette thought, most likely there’s a clock hanging there. Lampley was morning shift. She probably went to bed around nine to get up at five or five thirty AM and drive to work. From the clock in her cell Jeanette knew it was around five PM now—getting late.
The officer rolled her head around on her thick neck. There were circles under her eyes, Jeanette noticed. That was what a double shift did to you. “Fuck,” said Lampley.
Jeanette couldn’t hear it through the soundproofed barrier, but she saw the officer mouth it.
Lampley leaned back into the intercom. “Tell me more, inmate. Sell me.”
“I think it’ll give everyone a little hope. Make them feel like they’re doing something. And buy a little extra time for this thing to blow over.”
Van’s gaze darted upward again. The discussion went on for awhile longer, eventually turning into a negotiation, and finally into a plan, but that was the moment when Jeanette knew she’d won Officer Lampley over—there was no denying the clock.
2
Clint and Coates had the warden’s office to themselves again, but at first neither of them spoke. Clint had gotten his breath back, but his heart was still going bang-bang-bang, and he guessed his blood pressure, borderline at his last physical (a fact he had neglected to share with Lila; no need to worry her, she had enough on her plate) was redlining.
“Thanks,” he said.
“For what?”
“Covering for me.”
She knuckled her eyes. To Clint she looked like a tired child back from a play date that had gone on too long. “I just got rid of the bad apple in our basket, Doc. That had to be done, but I’m not getting rid of anyone else, not when I’m already shorthanded. At least everyone else has stayed on so far.”
Clint opened his mouth to say I wanted to kill him, closed it again.
“I will say . . .” Janice opened her mouth in a jaw-cracking yawn. “. . . that I was a little surprised. You went after him like Hulk Hogan back in his steroid-assisted heyday.”
Clint lowered his head.
“But I need you for at least the time being. My assistant warden is AWOL again, so you get the job until Hicks turns up.”
“I imagine he went home to check on his wife.”
“I imagine he did, too, and while I understand, I don’t approve. We’ve got over a hundred women locked up in here, and those women have to be our priority. I don’t need you losing your grip.”
“I’m not.”
“I hope that’s true. I know you come from a difficult background—I’ve read your file—but there’s nothing in there about a talent for choking people to death. Of course, juvenile records get sealed.”
Clint forced himself to meet the warden’s eyes. “That’s right. They do.”
“Tell me what I just saw with Peters was an aberration.”
“It was an aberration.”
“Tell me you’d never lose it that way with one of the women. Fitzroy, for instance. Or one of the others. The new one, maybe. Evie the Weirdo.”
Clint’s shocked expression must have been answer enough for her, because she smiled. As it turned into another yawn, her phone rang.
“Warden.” She listened. “Vanessa? Why are you calling me when you have a perfectly good intercom at your dispo—”
She listened some more, and as she did, Clint observed a queer thing. The phone kept sliding up from her ear and toward her hairline. She’d bring it down, and then it would start that upward journey again. It could be simple tiredness, but it didn’t exactly look like tiredness. He wondered briefly if Janice had a bottle in her desk, and dismissed the idea. He and Lila had been out to dinner with Coates a few times, and he’d never seen her order anything stronger than a glass of wine, which she usually left unfinished.
He told himself to stop jumping at shadows, but that was hard to do. If Warden Coates went down, who would that leave until Hicksie got back? If Hicksie got back. Lampley? Him? Clint thought about what it would be like to become acting warden, and had to suppress a shudder.
“Okay,” Coates said into the phone. Listened. “Okay, I said. Yes. Let them do it. Go ahead and put it on the intercom. Tell gen-pop that the coffee wagon will be rolling.”
She ended the call, tried to put the phone back in the cradle, missed, and had to do it again. “Shoot,” she said, and laughed.
“Janice, are you all right?”
“Oh, couldn’t be better,” she said, but couldn’t came out in a slur: coont. “I just gave Van the go-ahead to let Fitzroy, Sorley, and a couple of others make super-coffee in the kitchen. Essentially a form of crank.”
“Say what?”
Coates spoke with deliberate care, reminding Clint of how drunks spoke when they were trying to appear sober. “According to Van—who got it from Angel, our own Walter White—our coffee is light roast instead of dark, which is good because it has more caffeine. Then, instead of one bag per pot, they’re going to use three. Gonna make gallonsh.” She looked surprised, and licked her lips. “Gallons, I mean. My lips feel all numb.”
“Are you kidding?” He didn’t know if he was talking about the coffee or her lips.
“Oh, you haven heard the bes part, Doc. They’re gonna dump all the Sudafed from the infirmary into the coffee, and we’ve got quite a stock. But before they drink the coffee . . . the inmaitches . . . inmates . . . have to chug a mixshure of grapefruit juice and butter. Speeds up the abshorpshun. That’s what Angel claims, and I don’t shee the harm . . .”
Coates tried to get up and fell back into her chair with a little laugh. Clint hurried to her side. “Jan, have you been drinking?”
She stared at him, eyes glassy. “No, of coursh not. Thish isn’t like being drunk. Thish is like . . .” She blinked and reached out to touch a small leather bag beside the IN/OUT basket on her desk. Coates patted it with the tips of her fingers, feeling for something. “. . . my pillsh? They were here on the desk, in my clutch.”
“What pills? What are you taking?” Clint looked for a bottle, but saw nothing on the desk. He bent and looked beneath. Nothing but a few dust bunnies left behind by the last trustee who had cleaned the place.
“Zhan . . . Zhan . . . ah, fuck.” She lolled back in her chair. “Goin bye-bye, Doc. Goin shleep.”
Clint looked in the wastebasket, and there, among some tissues and a few crumpled Mars bar wrappers, he found a brown prescription bottle. The label said JANICE COATES and XANAX and 10 MG. It was empty.
He held it up so Janice could see it, and they spoke the same word at the same time, Coates slurring her half of the duet: “Peters.”
Making an effort—surely a supreme effort—Janice Coates sat up and fixed Clint’s gaze with her own. Though her eyes were glassy, when she spoke, she was hardly slurring at all. “Get him, Doc. Before he leaves the building. Slam that molesting son of a bitch into a C Wing cell and throw away the key.”
“You need to vomit,” Clint said. “Raw eggs. I’ll get some from the kitch—”
“Too late. I’m going down. Tell Mickey . . .” Her eyes closed. She forced them open again. “Tell Mickey I love her.”
“You’ll tell her that yourself.”
Coates smiled. Her eyelids were rolling down again. “You’re in charge now, Doc. At least until Hicks comesh back. You . . .” She uttered a huge sigh. “Keep them shafe until they all go to sheep . . . and then . . . ah, keep them shafe, keep us shafe until . . .”
Warden Coates crossed her arms on her desk blotter and p
illowed her head on them. Clint watched in fascination and horror as the first strands of white began to spin out of her hair, her ears, and the skin of her flushed cheeks.
So fast, he thought. So goddam fast.
He hurried from the office, meaning to tell Coates’s secretary to get on the horn and make sure Peters was kept on-site, but Blanche McIntyre was gone. Lying on her blotter was a single piece of prison stationery with a note written on it in black Sharpie. Clint read the big block letters twice before he could believe what his eyes told him he was seeing.
I HAVE GONE TO MY BOOK CLUB.
Book club?
Book club?
Really?
Blanche went to her fucking book club?
Clint ran down Broadway toward the entrance lobby, dodging a few wandering inmates in their baggy Brown Tops, aware that some were regarding him with surprise. He got to the locked main doors and hammered on the intercom button until Millie Olson, still on the board at the lobby security station, answered. “Jesus, Doc, don’t wear it out. What’s wrong?”
Through the double glass panes, he could see Don Peters’s battered Chevrolet beyond the inner gate, inside the dead zone, but now passing through the outer gate. He could even see Don’s stubby fingers, holding out his ID card for the reader.
Clint pushed the intercom button again and said, “Never mind, Millie. Never mind.”
CHAPTER 13
1
On her way back to town, an impudent little nonsense jingle began to run through Lila Norcross’s mind, one she and her friends had chanted when they were downstreet and their parents couldn’t hear. She began to chant it now, in the dying daylight.
“In Derby Town, in Derby Town, the streets are made of glass; in Derby Town, in Derby Town, the girls will kick your bumpty-bump, bumpty-bump, bumpty-bumpa-tee-bump-bump-bump . . .”
What came next? Oh yes.