“How long do you reckon ’fore I can get in?”
“You awready on the schedule, Sheriff. Shouldn’ be but a spit.”
Ordinary visitors were required to check in at least an hour ahead of any scheduled contact. A spouse or family member or lawyer would be moved through at least one staging area where a waiting pair of officers would require the purpose of each visit to be recorded and the name of the prisoner to be visited logged in on a manifest as strictly enforced as any harem. No last-minute additions allowed. Visitors could expect to be scanned by one of those full-body rigs common at airports, and wanded, and then a light frisk before bridging the sally port to cross a grassless yard under escort to reach a separately ciphered building within which a windowless room granted entry.
Sheriff Buchanan bypassed wives, husbands, and children huddled with inmates in a cheerless bunker. Cheap, plastic chairs jammed up at odd angles against metal tables bolted to the floor. Ceiling lights buzzed like insects behind wire grids as thick as hockey masks. This was where free citizens and felons communed, a place situated to create a kind of limbo between the gatehouse and units farther inside. You couldn’t spend cash in the “Friendly Room,” but there was a kiosk to exchange dollar bills for copper tokens with which friends and kin coaxed soft drinks and candy from the several vending machines that were the only source of sanctioned junk food in that bleak house.
But Colt Buchanan did not linger in limbo.
He was headed to the library.
Most prisons maintained a library of some sort, even if it was just a cart stuffed with magazines. Better funded institutions offered classes that were often taught in the library. A surprising number of inmates actually got a GED in prison and everyone had heard stories about jailhouse lawyers. Of all the work details to which prisoners were assigned, library duty was the most coveted, a plum for prisoners desperate for any occupation to pass time. The bibliotheque waiting for Sheriff Buchanan, if spartan, was nevertheless a place of books and lamps and tables offering refuge from the brutal sun attending outdoor labor. The library was also a reasonably reliable refuge from sexual predators or other hardened felons. Prisoners generally earned library time with good behavior, the second most popular privilege apart from the yard. You could read at ease in the library. You could even write, though you had to leave your pencil in one of the tin cans scattered like ashtrays on the metal tables arranged below surveillance cameras outside the stacks. There were also computers on hand, not many, a half dozen or so, at which a model prisoner might be allowed heavily filtered access to the Internet.
Tiny Sessions had worked the library detail far longer than any other inmate at Laureate’s prison—more than five years of a thirteen-year sentence for manslaughter. Now, if some state auditor or ordinary citizen asked the warden what Tiny had done to earn his long tenure in the stacks, the warden would supply the usual song and dance—good behavior, exemplary attitude, a volunteer for the Christian chaplain who vouched for Tiny at every meeting of his parole board. That was the official explanation. But Colt knew that the primary reason the warden put Tiny Sessions in the prison’s library because the library was a safe place for Tiny to snitch.
Only the warden knew that Tiny Sessions was Colt Buchanan’s informer and primary source regarding the production, sale, and distribution of crystal meth throughout the Third Judicial District. A pair of guards was required to escort Sheriff Buchanan to his scheduled rendezvous. Most of the guards were local and Colt knew them by name. On rare occasions the warden himself would accompany Colt down featureless halls through cipher-coded doors to reach the lockup’s library. But unlike any other visitor, Colt’s supervision ended at the library door. Once inside the stacks, Sheriff Buchanan stood alone and unarmed in the company of the largest felon in the prison.
“Tiny, how’s life treatin’ you?”
Imagine a slender, compact Cherokee in crisply pleated tans speaking to an African American three-hundred-pounds sloppy in prison blues.
Tiny was occupied with a pencil and pad at a book cart. “Got me a Honey Bun?”
“Right here.”
Colt tosses the contraband to a table littered with magazines and books and Tiny pulls up a chair.
Maybe a pair of chairs.
“Be nice to have a soda with this thang.”
“Don’t push it, Tiny.”
“Just sayin’.”
Colt selects a chair for himself and waits for the inmate to peel his snack from its wrapper, which Tiny accomplishes with the dexterity of King Kong plucking diamonds from a necklace.
He rips off the wrapper.
Takes one long lick down the side.
“Damn, he good.”
Tiny wads the Honey Bun into his mouth and swallows it whole. Just one gulp. Like a vitamin pill.
“Shit hot mama!”
“You’re gonna choke, you keep that up,” the sheriff warns.
“Ain’ nuthin’ chokin’ me,” Tiny disagrees and wipes his hands on his striped pants.
“Can I do for you, Sheriff? ’Nother lab? Pusher? I heard ’bout some boys settin’ up in Madison. Got one o’them RVs usta belong to the blood bank? Goddamn blood-bank van! Drivin’ around in the wide open.”
“Sounds reckless.”
“Gimme some o’them buns, I get you the puhticulahs.”
“I’m not here for those particulars, Tiny. Not this time.”
“You juss here to smack, then? Bullshit with ole’ Tiny?”
“No. This time, I need you to think outside the box.”
“What box? This, here? Ain’ no box, boss. This here a lie-berry. This my house, Sheriff. My church.”
“And you’re doing excellent work, Tiny. Worth a Honey Bun, at least. But I’ve come across something unusual. Several things, actually. Random shit, all over the county. And now it’s turned violent and I’m hoping whoever’s involved with this latest incident is connected to somebody inside. Perpetrators love to brag, don’t they? Anyway, I need you to sniff around. See if you can get me a name.”
“God don’t give His name,” Tiny declares, jowls hanging like a basset’s. “An’ neither do I, ’less I get me another Honey Bun.”
“Would you like to lose this detail, Tiny?”
“Chu mean?”
“I mean you’re my house nigger and if you don’t start acting like it, we can put you back in the general population.”
“Thass cold.”
“That’s facts. You ready to take notes?”
For a moment the prisoner smolders, fury and resentment stirred with a rush of glucose.
“Awright then.”
He plucks a pencil from a coffee can as gently as a rose from a vase.
Pulls the legal pad off the cart.
“Whatchu got?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Animal’s Death Unexplained
The Clarion
I lingered outside for a moment after Colt dropped me at t he Clarion and saw that he was heading out of town. I knew my cousin made regular trips to the prison and I’d suspected for some time that he had a snitch inside, but Colt guards his sources as jealously as any journalist. To this day, I’ve never been trusted with a jailhouse conversation. I can, however, report Dr. David Oliver Trotter’s postmortem of Roscoe Lamb’s hound practically verbatim because I was there to witness the event. Everybody knows D. O. Trotter, by the way. Besides tending generations of patients, Trotter’s Sunday School classes at Laureate’s First Baptist Church are famously unorthodox, and popular. For more than twenty years Doc has guided youngsters and adults through the conflicting narratives of the Old and New Testaments. Seeking grace in the ordinary and in the unexpected. Outside of church, he’s something of a rapscallion. An interesting combination of parts, is Dr. Trotter.
All kinds of stories revolve around the old man, some more believable than others.
In appearance, D. O. favors his grandpa, or maybe Mark Twain, an aging curmudgeon with a flow of silver hair and an unfash
ionably exaggerated mustache. Wears cowboy boots with his long, white coat. Doc’s supposed to be retired, but you go by his cinderblock office ’most any time from daylight to dusk, you’ll see him with a patient or sometimes playing checkers with Judge Simmons. First time I got pains in my chest, I had Trotter check me out. I didn’t like his diagnosis. Doc didn’t much care.
“You’re going to have to do something with this here, Clara Sue. Either that or let it kill you. Which it prob’ly will do anyway, sooner or later.”
He’s a gruff kind of physician, old school. Trotter respects his patients and his community, but he also expects that deference to be reciprocated. When I reconnected with Sheriff Buchanan at D. O.’s utilitarian digs, Doc was in the midst of a necropsy of Roscoe Lamb’s hound.
And he was not happy about it.
“Explain to me how I’m gonna bill this, Sheriff? That be Medicare? Medicaid? Is this an elderly hound?”
“County’s good for it, Doc,” the sheriff assured him. “Either that or I’ll pay you cash myself.”
“Cash? Well, that eases the sting. Ya’ll do know what ‘MD’ means, don’t you?”
“ ‘Me Deity’?” I supplied and got a glare that would wilt bricks.
I should mention that Trotter is one of only two physicians serving the entire county, and the only native born. Before Doc returned to Laureate, the only medical facility in the county was a part-time clinic run out of a trailer by interns on rotation from the medical school in Gainesville. The only thing you could reliably count on from that bunch was your blood pressure or birth control.
Took years to get any doctor to set roots in town. We still only have one full-time physician. Dr. Cory Aquino jokes that she used to be a Filipino president. She’s working off her med-school debt through a federal program that sends medical school graduates to places where there are no theaters, bars, condos, or culture higher than scoring touchdowns or killing hogs. Fortunately, Aquino’s upbringing on a rice farm in Baguio leaves her well-prepped for that spectrum of stimulation.
Trotter, by contrast, separated from military service debt free, a flight surgeon transitioning to internal medicine with an HMO in Atlanta. Doc practiced in that high-end market for ten years before returning home to Laureate, taking breaks to join Doctors Without Borders for a dozen deployments worldwide, those interventions proving to be excellent preparation for practicing medicine in rural Florida.
“I regularly diagnose ailments in Laureate that I haven’t seen since Southeast Asia,” Doc confided to me one morning over grits and coffee.
He was right, of course. Communities in the rural southeast vie with Native American reservations for the most unhealthy populations in the United States.
“Not what I thought I’d see coming home.” D. O. stirred another spoon of sugar into his coffee.
“But look at it this way, Doc—” I scratched for a silver lining.
“You’re right where you’re needed.”
Not words of encouragement for a proud man deep in the entrails of Roscoe Lamb’s hound.
“I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”
“How ’bout what opened him up?” Colt suggested. “Could it have been a hog’s tusk, Doc? Was it a blade?”
“You need that bunch from CSI, Sheriff.”
“You’re all we got, D. O.”
“You’ve got the damn Pound Lab, don’t you?”
The Pound Lab is a hub of forensic diagnosis associated with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida. Anyone enforcing the law from Pensacola to Key West is familiar with that laboratory, including Sheriff Buchanan.
“Problem is this here animal’s not associated with a crime,” Colt explained. “At least, none that we know of. Now, if I could say this animal was materially involved in the murder of a human being, or Medicare fraud, I’d be down to the Pound in a heartbeat.”
“Speaking of heartbeats.” Doc paused briefly. “We get done here, Clara Sue? I wanta listen at your ticker.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Never better.”
Doc raised his eyes to Heaven.
“See my problem?”
“Back to the hound, Doc—tusk, you think? Or blade?”
Doc withdrew from the carcass.
“A crude cleaver or hatchet, maybe even a butcher knife could’ve done this. So could a boar’s tusk. I’m just not the expert in that area.”
“So you can’t really explain what happened.”
“Sure, I can. Damn dog’s gutted and between exsanguination and shock he died.”
“I meant the means.”
“I can’t specify means, no.”
“Or motive,” I added.
“Hell, I can’t locate my own motives half the time,” Doc growled.
“Seems like there’s a lot doesn’t get explained.” I offered what I thought was sympathy and, boy, was that a mistake.
“You know, Clara Sue, you can be one condescending bitch.”
Doc dropped a bloody scalpel into a pan shaped like a kidney.
“Come on, Doc.”
“Come on yourself. Do you have any idea what happened to this animal? Do you have a story ready to print? Some salacious detail for your readers? Because unlike newshounds, Ms. Buchanan, I work from a method that respects science and method which means that, for a variety of good damn reasons, there are any number of things that I cannot explain.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Thought I was letting you off the hook.”
“If I need rescue from a hook of any variety, I’ll let you know.”
“Said I was sorry, Doctor.”
“Yes. Well.”
The three of us let the steam disperse a moment or two. Doc removed his glasses. Colt took that as an opening.
“What’s bothering you, D. O.?”
“A slaughtered dog, for starters.”
Colt inclined his raven head.
“What else?”
Doc settled down. A long moment passing.
“This has to stay confidential. And I mean confidential. Clara Sue, you put this in the paper without my permission or breathe it to a soul—?”
I threw up my hands. “Not a word.”
“Thing is, I saw Jenny O’Steen just a few hours after that episode at the candy store. Principal at the school rushed Jenny to Dr. Aquino right after it happened. Doctor gave her a thorough examination, but the parents didn’t want to believe a foreigner, so they brought her on over to me.”
“Is Jenny okay?” I asked.
“Better than okay,” Trotter answered.
“What d’you mean, Doc?” I stilled the impulse to grab my notepad.
“I mean her beta-cell function and glycemic index were rock solid. And here’s the thing, I’ve followed up with that little girl a half-dozen times over the past few weeks and her blood work hasn’t changed a jot.”
“Well, that’s great news, isn’t it? That means she’s keeping track of her levels. Taking her injections.”
Doc Trotter shook his head.
“No injections.”
It took a moment for the import to register.
“No injections. What’s that mean?”
“It means no shots—I took her off. Jenny O’Steen isn’t getting any insulin other than what’s coming from her own pancreas.”
Colt rocked back on his heels.
“Doc, are you saying—? Are you saying Jenny’s cured?” “I won’t go that far.” The old veteran shook his head wearily. “Child could get sick tomorrow for all I know. What I can say is that if you took Jennie O’Steen to the Mayo Clinic today, they’d swear she’s never had diabetes in her life.”
Trotter let the import of that diagnosis sink in.
“. . . I don’t believe in miracles, D. O.”
“Oh, I know. And I understand the need for proof, Clara Sue. The hunger for certainty. But now and then we need to be humble.”
Trotter bowed away from the bloody table as though it were an altar.
<
br /> “Blessed be they who do not see, and yet believe.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Federal Funds Approved for School Construction
The Clarion
When Hiram Lamb dissembled, he stroked the birthmark along his jaw as though it were a stubble of beard. It was a sure tell. Killed him when he played poker. However, Butch McCray did not see Hiram often enough to be able to read those signs. Hiram’s campaign to strip Butch of his store was normally waged through proxies, at arm’s length. Both of the Lamb brothers abjured actual contact with their foster brother; Butch almost never saw Hiram or Roscoe face-to-face. That changed when the candy store got in the way of Hiram’s bid to refurbish the county’s consolidated school.
The elder Lamb ambushed his foster brother late one afternoon as Butch was restocking his plywood shelves for the next day’s retail. School was long over, the last bus departed. The last soda and lollipop sold for the day. Butch was easing Cokes and Pepsis into an ice-filled locker in happy oblivion when Hiram pulled up in his Suburban.
Hiram Lamb slammed the door of his vehicle. Paced up to Butch’s store.
Ducked his head to enter the tiny shed.
“Butch, we need to talk.”
Butch pausing from his labor to see the unfamiliar shirt and tie. Always pressed sharp and clean.
The foster brother oblivious to the rigid posture, the flush in Hiram’s face, the birthmark bright below that magnificent hair.
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