The Best Revenge

by Stephen White

  Staying low, she sprang forward, dove, and rolled across the loading area, finally coming to rest in a prone position eight feet away from where she’d been hiding in the hall. As she moved she heard more shots—two, three, four. She wasn’t sure exactly how many. She did feel confident that none of them had entered her body.

  Rolling to a stop, Kelda jammed her elbows against the floor, the 9mm poised and ready. Within a fraction of a second she fixed the man’s torso in her sight and in rapid succession fired three times into the black and white target that she imagined was pinned to the center of his chest.

  Each impact caused him to jerk a little, as though he’d hiccupped. He didn’t drop his gun right away. She released a fourth round and kept light pressure on the trigger until he fell. It took every bit of discipline she’d acquired in her training to refrain from emptying her clip into him.

  The room, she thought, smelled like the range at Quantico.

  It was as comforting as the aroma of a lover’s sweat.

  Two or three seconds passed. Through the haze of what she had just done she saw the silhouettes of two of her colleagues as they entered the building through the side door. She held up her left hand to them to tell them to wait where they were. “I’m okay, Gary,” she called. “The UNSUB is down. Let me go in and get the girl.” The reverberation of the gunshots still echoed in her head, so she couldn’t hear her own words as she spoke, and wondered if she’d said them loudly enough for Gary to hear her.

  Kelda stood and stepped over to the man she’d shot, keeping the Sig pointed at his head until she was able to kick his weapon farther away from his hand. The handgun the man had fired at her was a monstrous .45; she shuddered at the thought of being hit by one of the gun’s slugs.

  The UNSUB on the floor was slight. He wore new Adidas, a clean pair of jeans, and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His shirt was untucked and his belt was undone.

  The man had fallen on his side, facing away from her, and she couldn’t detect any sign that he was still breathing. His rimless eyeglasses sat cockeyed on his head. She didn’t see much blood, just three dark circles on the back of his shirt. She wondered if she’d somehow lost the fourth round that she’d fired, though she couldn’t imagine how that could have happened.

  Her Sig at the ready, she crouched beside him and checked his pulse.

  Nothing.

  Standing erect over him, she said, “Damn you. Don’t die, asshole. Don’t you dare die.”

  In order to control an impulse to kick him in the face, she stepped back away from the man. Then she inhaled twice to quiet the echo of the exact same impulse. In her peripheral vision she saw Gary move into the room like a bishop striking from the corner of a chessboard.

  “Get the girl,” he said. His voice competed unsuccessfully with the echoes of the gunshot; he sounded as though he was trying to get her attention across a crowded bar. But she knew what he had said.

  Three quick steps forward took her into the room with the window that faced the alley.

  Rosa was kneeling sideways on a mattress, wearing only a pink T-shirt with a filthy picture of Big Bird on it. The little girl’s face was wound with duct tape. One of her skinny arms was manacled to a chain that was bolted to a D-ring that was anchored to the wall.

  She was weeping.

  “Hi, baby,” Kelda said. “I’m here to take you home.”

  Kelda was weeping, too.

  PART ONE

  Taunting the Hangman

  CHAPTER 1

  I can just walk out that door? That’s what you’re saying?”

  The warden held back a smile and said, “You can stay here if you’d like. But if you do, I’ll have to start charging you room and board. I can pretty much guarantee you won’t like the rates.”

  The two men were standing in the sterile public lobby of the Colorado State Penitentiary. The spacious front room of the modern prison was all concrete and light. Some tile. It only hinted at what was inside—“inside” meaning the other side of the security doors.

  Just hinted.

  A dozen steps away, near the guards who acted as the gatekeepers/ receptionists for the public, one of the warden’s assistants leaned against the wall.

  From where the warden stood near the front doors, the tall, electrified chain-link fences were visible through the glass, and above them coiled rows of concertina sparkled with the earliest indication of a summer dawn. Beyond the fences, miles of high prairie loomed. Beyond that, the Rocky Mountains hovered ominously.

  Tom Clone’s mind wasn’t on the far horizon yet. He found himself examining the details of the room. He was uncomfortable with its unfamiliarity, and with its spaciousness. He said, “How do I get somewhere? I mean somewhere else besides here?”

  “Your lawyer’s sending someone to get you. I would guess they should be here anytime now.”

  “So that’s it?” Clone asked the warden. He fingered the collar of his new knit shirt with his left hand and touched the money in his pants pocket with the fingers of his right. “After thirteen years here, I sign some papers, get a hundred bucks and some clothes from Kmart, and then I’m . . . gone? That’s it?”

  “You want a brass band maybe? Some dancing girls? With a little more notice, maybe . . .”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Most guys don’t get the ride from their lawyer, Tom. All they get is a cold seat in a big bus to Pueblo or Denver.”Usually get themselves a round-trip ticket, too, the warden thought, but he didn’t say it. He was pondering the question of whether—no, when—he’d be welcoming Tom Clone back again.

  “Most guys who leave here aren’t innocent, Warden.”

  The warden shrugged. “You ask them, they’ll tell you they are. Don’t ask them, most of them will tell you they are anyway.”

  “But most guys who walk out that door don’t have DNA tests on the murder weapon to back up their contention.”

  The warden considered his reply before he said, “I suppose they don’t, Tom. I suppose they don’t.”

  The inmate’s sharp eyes read the time on the warden’s Timex. “Why is this happening at five o’clock in the morning? Why not during the day?”

  Completely deadpan, the warden said, “What? You wanted to sleep in? Damn, I hate it when the guests don’t make their requests clear. We try so hard to please.” He made a compassionate face. “Other than this one early wake-up call, you weren’t disappointed with anything else during your stay, were you?”

  “It’s a serious question, Warden. I’ve never been released from prison before, but I’d be surprised to learn that it usually involves a personal visit with the warden and an opportunity to watch the sun rise.”

  “Well, if it’s a serious question, then here’s a serious answer. Once I actually received the order from the judge in Park County last night, I knew you were going elsewhere. Getting you out of here at dawn was my idea. Why? Because I don’t want to give the press a chance to get themselves organized for your release, which they still think is scheduled for sometime this afternoon. As far as I’m concerned you can have your dog-and-pony show with the ACLU and the Innocence Project someplace else besides in my prison.”

  Tom didn’t expect the honesty. He lifted his eyebrows involuntarily.

  “As a general rule,” the warden continued, “I’m not a big fan of commotion. You may have noticed over the years that we don’t hold too many unnecessary group functions around here.”

  Tom Clone’s eyes swept the big room again before they settled back on the warden. There was a time when Clone might have appreciated the sardonic nature of the man. But thirteen years living alone in a concrete room on death row had dulled his sense of irony. Anyway, the warden was a stranger to him, and Tom wasn’t sure what to make of him. He’d noticed that the entire time they’d been talking the big man’s tongue was busy in his mouth, as though maybe he had a poppy seed stuck someplace he’d rather not have one, and he’d really like to have
a toothpick.

  The warden looked away for a second or two before he returned his gaze to Clone. “Tom? You don’t mind that I call you Tom, do you? Good. Listen, if you’re waiting for an apology from me—and I’m beginning to suspect that you are—don’t waste your energy. You won’t get one. The courts told me to lock you up, and I did that. And now the courts have told me to let you go, so I’m doing that. I make it a practice not to apologize for doing my job.”

  Tom said, “How’d you know that’s what I was thinking?”

  “It’s what I’d be thinking if I was standing in your boots.” Both men looked down. “Or your cheap sneakers, as the case may be.”

  Tom Clone laughed. He heard the noise as though it had come from someone else. He thought,That was my first laughter as a free man, and said, “So what else might I be thinking?”

  “Scared thoughts. Unless you’re a fool, if you’re not scared already, you’ll be scared soon. Something tells me you’re not a fool. You’ll be scared soon. You can bet on it.”

  “I’ve been watching my back for thirteen years, Warden. Fear is nothing new for me.”

  “Not that kind of scared. Though that kind won’t go away for a while, either. I’m talking scared that life’s passed you by. Thirteen years is a long time to be institutionalized. Back then, you still had a life ahead of you; you were a hotshot kid who was about to become a doctor. Now you’re an old-timer. You’re used to this place. To us, to our ways. To being a small man in a small world.”

  The warden pointed out the door. “You don’t know shit about what’s outside that door anymore, and people on the outside are going to hear where you’ve been all this time and they’re going to treat you like a con. That’s scary to you already, or it damn well should be.”

  The words made him nervous, but Tom shook his head stubbornly. “I’m leaving here an innocent man. It’s going to be different for me out there than it is for other people who walk out that door.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Some people may believe you’re innocent, but most won’t. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is. Look, that there’s your ride, I bet.” He pointed at a green Buick sedan that was pulling into the otherwise empty visitors’ lot half a football field away. “Good luck, son. You’ll need it more than you know.” He pushed the door open. “Now grab your duffel and get out of here before somebody up in Park County comes to their senses.”

  Tom hesitated as though he didn’t trust what the man had said. Finally, he leaned down, picked up the blue canvas bag that was filled with his few personal belongings, and began to walk away. As Tom Clone cleared the front door and took his first steps outside as a free man, the warden’s assistant sauntered forward and stood beside his boss. “How about twenty bucks?”

  The warden replied, “I said I’ll do up to fifty. But it’s your call, Hank. If I were you, I’d save my money.”

  “Twenty’s fine, Warden.”

  The concrete path that led through the gate in the fence ran about fifty yards to the parking lot. Almost exactly halfway down the path, Tom Clone tossed his duffel far ahead of him and immediately sprang forward. He took a little hop, picked up some speed, and launched himself into a cartwheel. When he completed the cartwheel—which he accomplished with some skill—he leaned backward and then, with an additional little push of his strong legs and a fluid thrust of his arms, he finished with a nicely executed back flip.

  He planted the landing well. Only one little extraneous hop.

  The warden held out his hand; the assistant warden carpeted his boss’s palm with a twenty-dollar bill. “How did you know he’d do that?”

  “For the last month, since the rumors started about him getting out, that’s how he’s been spending his hour a week in the yard. Cartwheels and back flips. Cartwheels and back flips. Over and over again. I figured we were going to have a little recital as he left.”

  The assistant shook his head and said, “Damn. I think these guys can’t surprise me anymore and then . . .” He let the morning breeze carry the thought across the high prairie.

  Eyes still on Tom Clone, the warden said, “I can’t tell you how glad I am that there weren’t any news cameras here to see him do that. I would have had to watch his gymnastics twenty more times on the news. There would have been a thousand e-mails and everybody including the governor would have been calling wondering how we could have allowed him to do that.”

  “That’s why we were up at four o’clock in the morning? So the press wouldn’t see him play Olga Korbut?”

  “Nadia Comaneci. But yeah, that’s the only damn reason.”

  Tom Clone finished his back flip and pumped both fists into the air. Before he could shriek in exaltation, he heard a woman’s voice behind him.

  “Tom Clone? Mr. Clone?”

  Even before he turned toward the sound, he was drinking in the novelty of the melody of a female voice that didn’t belong to a guard. He reflexively inhaled, hoping the woman was wearing perfume. The morning breeze carried her scent. He wasn’t disappointed.

  The woman he faced was lovely. She was silhouetted against the mountains but he could tell that her dark hair was tied back behind her head and that her face was adorned with little makeup. She wore white jeans and had on a claret-colored leather jacket that was zipped up to her throat.

  He inhaled her perfume again.

  “Mr. Clone?” she said once more.

  He nodded and thrust out his hand. She didn’t touch it. She kept her free hand by her side, while the other stayed atop the leather bag that hung from her shoulder.

  Finally, he spoke. He said, “Yes, I’m Tom Clone.”

  “Hello,” the woman said. “I’m Special Agent Kelda James of the FBI. Your attorney asked me to come to get you this morning. I’m your ride out of here. Welcome back to freedom.”

  Upon hearing her name, his impulse was to rush in and hug her, but he sensed her reticence and held himself back. He’d had a lot of recent practice with restraint. “Kelda James. My God, you’re the one who . . . who—”

  “Yes,” she said. “I am that one.”

  He stepped forward and hugged her. Despite her stiffness at the embrace, the contour of a female body against his was almost overwhelming to him.

  “Thank you,” he said into her hair. “Thank you, thank you.”

  “Please let go of me, Mr. Clone. Please.”

  He did, and took a step back from her as well. Her voice carried that kind of authority.

  “Those are all your things?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I donated everything else to Goodwill.”

  The lines of her mouth softened into the slightest grin. “Let’s go, then,” she said.

  CHAPTER 2

  1989

  Martha Reese was red-eyed and her lime green apron was stained with cherry juice and almost perfectly parallel drools of her own vomit. She was shaking so badly that water was sloshing out of the cup she tried to hold in her hands. The cup was decorated with pictures of the Car Guys from NPR. The guys were laughing.

  “I came over here for a cup of sugar, I swear. I know it sounds like a cliché but it’s true. I bought a bucket of sour cherries this morning from a roadside stand out on the highway—you know the one by the turnoff to town?—and I was busy making pies and I totally misjudged how much sugar I’d need, and I just flat ran out. It happens, it does, even to experienced bakers.

  “I knew the Greens were visiting their kids in California, but the lights were on at their place and the house sitter’s car was out front, so I walked down the road to try to borrow some sugar. Nancy doesn’t bake, but I’m sure she has sugar. I mean everybody has sugar. Maybe not diabetics, I suppose, but that’s not the Greens. They’re not diabetics. I’m telling the truth. I promise.”

  A young sheriff’s deputy sat across from her on a hard teak chair on the front porch of the Greens’ house. It didn’t even cross the young cop’s mind that Mrs. Reese wasn’t telling the truth about the cup of sugar and th
e Greens not being diabetics.

  Only a couple of hundred yards or so separated the cabin that Martha Reese shared with her husband—“It’s really a house. I don’t know why everybody calls them cabins”—and the Greens’ home. The evergreen forest was sparse on the county road between the homes, and a dry spring had left the lane especially dusty. Summer hadn’t even officially arrived, yet Park County was already a tinderbox. The neighbors were talking about what they could do to make sure that illegal campers or kids with fireworks didn’t set the whole mountainside ablaze by the Fourth of July.

  Martha was a few pounds overweight—“Okay, maybe twenty”—and regretted not driving up the hill for the sugar. As she climbed up to the Greens’ place she was struggling to keep her breathing even and was more than a little embarrassed about the sweat that was dotting her upper lip and dripping in a rivulet down her spine. The sun had sunk behind the Divide but the early evening temperature was still in the seventies. “Some people might not consider that warm, but I do. For us up here, that’s a little warm for the evening.”

  She and Nancy Green weren’t close—“They’re more modern people than us. But we get along, you know?” The Greens and the Reeses were good mountain neighbors. They shared plowing expenses in the winter and pooled their resources to get deadwood cleared from the land around their homes in the summer. Nancy Green was comfortable stopping by to borrow Italian parsley—“I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I didn’t even know what it was. Why can’t the Italians just use regular parsley?”—and Martha was comfortable going up the hill for sugar when she ran out while baking sour cherry pies.

  Martha dreaded the final steep climb from the road up the driveway to the Greens’ house. At the base of the driveway she actually considered going all the way back to her house and getting her car. But she didn’t.

  The Greens didn’t have a regular doorbell; they had one of those speakerphone systems attached to their telephone. The apparatus made Martha uncomfortable. She was never quite sure what to do—“Am I supposed to lean over and speak into the little box or can they hear me if I speak regular?” She just didn’t know. Nor did she understand why someone would want something like that living up in the mountains. It wasn’t as though anybody but neighbors ever knocked on anybody’s doors up in Park County. “You know as well as I do that we don’t get too many Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses walking around up here trying to get you to read their funny books. It just doesn’t happen. I suppose we aren’t worth the effort, or something.”