Fallon had been doing his walking exercise and was heading straight toward the wall when the iron door opened suddenly, sending light—not even direct sunlight, but light from the inside of the basement—and Fallon squeezed his eyelids shut and turned. He dropped to his knees and shielded his eyes with both arms. Somewhere, he heard The Mole’s screaming. Footsteps sounded.
“Noooooooo!” The Mole screamed.
Hands gripped Fallon’s shoulders.
The Mole yelled: “What are you doing? I cannot see!”
“Shut up, you crazy ol’ coot!”
Fallon recognized the voice. It belonged to the older, bigger guard who had delivered most of the beating to Fallon just before he was tossed into the basement cell with The Mole.
“Just stay put, old-timer!” That was the voice of the leader of the guards. Fallon remembered his voice, too. “You’ll be back in the dark before you know it.”
A moment later, Harry Fallon felt a club—one of the guard’s line sticks—slam atop his skull, sending him back into the blackness he had known for about one long, dark, terrible week.
* * *
Water splashed into Fallon’s face, and he blinked, coughed, and felt the pounding in his skull. His eyes opened, but immediately closed for the light, that terrible, blinding light. Slowly, Fallon lifted his left hand to test the knot one of the guards had placed upon his head with the line stick, a metal rod that had been wrapped with leather. Fallon kept his right forearm tight against his eyes, and his eyes remained closed.
“The light is unpleasant, isn’t it?” Fallon knew that voice, too. Harold Underwood. Director, warden, the biggest son of a bitch in the Missouri State Penitentiary. “Mr. Fowlson, why don’t you close the curtains? I’ll turn down my lamp.”
So Fowlson, the leader, the deputy warden in the state pen, was here, too. Fallon wondered if the two guards, O’Malley and what’s-his-name, were here, too.
He could hear footsteps on a rug, and other steps on hard flooring. There came the sound of a string being pulled and fabric rustling. Fallon felt the light fade and realized the curtains had been closed.
Someone was beside him, on the left. Fallon could sense that, but he did not lower his arm from his eyes.
“The light will take some getting used to, but you’ll be fine.” That was Warden Underwood, standing beside Fallon. “How was your time with The Mole?”
Fallon just twisted his head and squeezed his eyelids tighter.
“You are one tough bastard,” Underwood said. “I’ll say that for you.”
“Maybe we could use him,” Fowlson said.
“No. We could use him, perhaps. But trusting him?” The warden chuckled. “Once The Mole was trusted.”
Fallon smelled something under his nose and understood that the warden was holding a snifter of brandy.
“It’s very good brandy,” Underwood said. “It’ll help cure what ails you.”
“No, thanks,” Fallon said, and the snifter was withdrawn, and the warden walked around the chair to face him. Fallon could feel the man’s shadow. He also understood that only the warden and deputy warden were in this office. Outside the door—for the door here was wooden, not iron—feet rustled and a match was lighted. That would be the two other guards, O’Malley and the other hard rock. From outside the window came the sounds of a prison. Inmates walking, but not talking. The only voices came from the guards. Fallon knew all about that. Guards talked. Prisoners kept quiet.
He knew something else, too. All that time, that week in nothing but a place as black as midnight, had heightened Fallon’s other senses. He detected the slightest sounds, the briefest movements. His nose caught odors most people would fail to notice. The warden had shaved this morning. Mr. Fowlson smoked cigars and was tapping his line stick against his thigh. The warden was sipping the brandy.
“A telegraph came from your pal MacGregor,” the warden said. “Just checking in. Making sure you were all right. He said there was no need to reply. Unless you were dead. You aren’t dead. Are you?”
The warden chuckled.
Mr. Fowlson said: “He oughta be.”
“I think you can lower your arm now,” Underwood said.
Slowly, Fallon did as he was told. Reluctantly, his eyelids opened, closed again, tightly, and he turned his head slightly. He forced the eyes open again, squinted, and kept them open for a moment. After a number of rapid blinks, Fallon twisted in the chair, and made himself look at Harold Underwood.
The warden sniffed his brandy, then killed the liquor and set the fancy crystal on his desktop. They were in the warden’s office at the prison. It seemed to be on the second floor from the sound of the voices outside. Fallon wet his lips, blinked again, and glanced at Mr. Fowlson, who had fished a cigar from his coat pocket, ran it underneath his nose, then clipped the end by biting it off and spitting it into a brass cuspidor at the corner of the desk.
“Here are the rules of the prison,” Underwood said. “You keep your head down, always. You do not talk. You’ll be assigned to one of our factories. You do not talk at work, either, unless you are asked a question by a supervisor or a guard. There is no talking at the Missouri State Penitentiary. Silence is golden. Do you understand?”
Fallon recalled a similar speech when he first stepped inside the gates at Joliet.
“When anyone who is not a prisoner speaks to you, or if you speak to them, your cap is to be removed. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Chewing the unlighted cigar, Mr. Fowlson moved away from the desk and tossed Fallon his battered old cap.
“I like that sir, Fallon. Keep that up. You call guards and officers mister and sir. But you do not sir any inmate, nor do you call any convict here mister. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Typically, a fresh fish spends his first night alone in a cell.” Underwood grinned. “But I think you don’t need that treatment. You’ll be given a blanket.” Underwood frowned. “Mr. Fowlson, before you deliver Fallon to his new home, please outfit him with clothing that fits him better. He looks like a tramp who just jumped off a westbound after a weeklong drunken bender.”
“Yes, sir.”
Underwood frowned, shook his head, and slowly walked back to the chair. This time, he knelt and put a hand on Fallon’s left arm.
“Hank,” he said, and Fallon hated the man and his long whiskers right then and there. “I know you think you got a raw deal. Getting a pounding like that, tossed into solitary in that dungeon for a week. Trust me, we did that for your own good.”
Fallon stared, waiting.
“This is the worst bunch of scum in America. More than two thousand convicts—men guilty of murder, rapine, robbery, hardened criminals with no hope for redemption and no one to welcome them until Lucifer shows them Hell. It was you and your associate, Mr. MacGregor, who wanted this to look good to the filth and cold-blooded killers who are incarcerated here. So we gave you rough treatment. But trust me, we had to.”
He squeezed Fallon’s arm, and grunted as he rose.
“Mr. Fowlson did what he had to do, and he did what I ordered him to do. Because this was the only way the prisoners would accept you. Trust you. You need their trust to do your job. Isn’t that right?”
Fallon just stared.
“If you came waltzing in here, just given special treatment and shown a nice cell that you could have all to yourself, well, that would not work. You’d find yourself lying in your bunk with a homemade knife between your ribs after two or three days—and maybe not even that long. This way, your fellow convicts will see you as someone that we, the guards and the other officers here, do not like at all. And well we shouldn’t. For you were once one of us, a man of law enforcement. And that’s another reason we did what we had to do. Beat you all to hell. Toss you into solitary.”
He was back at his desk now, refilling his crystal snifter with more brandy. Mr. Fowlson had found a match and now lighted his cigar. The warden drank
a bit, wet his lips, and leaned against the desk, holding the snifter in his left hand and pointing at Fallon with his right.
“You ought to know from your stay in Joliet how convicts treat lawmen who wind up in prison. Most lawmen don’t last long behind the iron. You did, though. You got through ten years in Joliet. That’s something. And by now the prisoners here know that. They also know that—for appearances, and only for appearances—the guards and I hate your miserable guts.”
He finished his second brandy.
“So our beating and your inhumane treatment was a blessing. The men have heard of this, too. So now they trust you. Do you understand?”
Fallon made himself nod.
“Then Mr. Fowlson, O’Malley, and Johnson have been forgiven?”
Johnson. That was the other guard’s name. Again, Fallon nodded slightly. His stomach roiled. His mouth tasted like the most bitter piece of gall.
“Good. Good. Good.” Turning, the warden found a piece of paper. “The bad news, Hank, is that we could only find room for you in A-Hall.” He turned to Fowlson and said the number of the cell, which meant nothing to Fallon. All he knew was that A-Hall had been built in 1868 by the inmates. A-Hall had the basement where The Mole had been kept in solitary—except when he had visitors like Harry Fallon or the late Mr. Sherman—for sixteen years.
“To put you in another cell would have required us to transfer prisoners out of those places,” Underwood explained. “And that would have put you back into a state of distrust. The cons here would have decided that you were nothing but a yellow lawdog, and you’d be dead in less than a week.”
Fallon wet his lips.
“I understand,” he said.
Oh, he understood. He understood everything perfect. He knew that Fowlson and Underwood were lying through their teeth.
“Very well. You want to get in good with Doctor Gripewater, you’ll have to figure out a way to see him. He’s drunk this morning, so we’ll have to forgo the usual examination. But that’s for the best, too, Fallon. Because we say we give newcomers complete evaluations from our medical staff, but that’s just for show. Our doctor is too busy treating inmates for vicious beatings, knifings, or accidents at the factories where our convicts work. Again . . .” Underwood began refilling his snifter yet again.
“We don’t want to have the prisoners thinking you’re just some stinking, low-down, miserable spy. We want them to trust you. Like we trust you. Like you trust us.”
Mr. Fowlson came over and helped Fallon out of his chair. He pointed his line stick at the door.
“Let’s go, fresh fish,” Fowlson said.
Harry Fallon turned, muttered a soft, “Yes, sir,” and walked to the door.
Why is it, he thought, that every warden he ever met, and probably eighty percent of the prison guards, seemed like they belonged locked up behind bars more than the inmates serving time?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Out of Warden Underwood’s office, Mr. Fowlson ordered two guards to take Fallon to his cell, then the deputy warden disappeared down the corridor heading for his office. The two guards, wearing black coats, pants, and hats, escorted the new prisoner down the stairs and out of the building into the main prison yard.
Underwood and Fowlson had both mentioned A-Hall, and Fallon knew that building—especially the damned cells in the cellar—all too well. But the first guard told Fallon to wait, and both guards left him standing on the path. He watched the black cat again as it meandered, sure of itself, down the path that led to A-Hall. Fallon kept his chin against his chest but managed to raise his eyes and study the compound.
The women’s cellblock was easy enough to spot, but a twenty-foot-high wall separated it from the rest of the prison’s interior. The women had their own cells. That made sense. But would they have their own doctor? He seemed to doubt that. Surely, Thaddeus Gripewater would have to tend to women as well as men.
The exercise yard was against the walls beyond which, if Fallon’s memory hadn’t been wiped out during those long, dark eternal days and nights with The Mole, lay Capitol Avenue. Beyond that was another recreation yard, and against the rear walls were plants. More prisoners were being escorted out of one, while others waited to go back inside. The guards spoke. No one else did. Even the cat, which had now disappeared either behind A-Hall or inside it, seemed to know not to make a sound.
Hearing the footsteps of the guards, Fallon lowered his gaze to stare at the path.
“All right, fish,” one of the guards said. “Left face, and march.”
Once they stepped inside A-Hall, a convict was standing by the storage cell on the ground floor. The man was pale, bearded, with a bulge in his cheek and wild eyes. His face was crevassed with deep lines and wrinkles. For all Fallon knew, this man could’ve been behind the walls of the Missouri state pen when The Mole entered here, too.
“Get him clothes,” said one of the guards. “That fit. And everything else he’ll need.”
“He’ll need a woman,” the toothless old coot said. His laugh sounded more like a braying donkey than anything human. “But I’s fresh out of wimmin-folks.” The donkey hee-hawed one more time before shifting the massive chaw of tobacco in his mouth from one cheek to the other. He started to say something else, but the bigger of the two guards raised his line stick and waved it threateningly over his head.
The old-timer certainly got the message. “All right, all right, all right,” he said, and lowered his head. “C’mon, fish.” His voice had dropped to a whisper. “Let’s get ya suited up.” He waved his bony arm and entered the cramped room. Fallon followed.
Inside, Fallon stripped off his duds and took what the old con gave him. The man stopped laughing, however, when he saw the wound on Fallon’s calf.
“You ought to get that ouchie looked at,” the crazed man whispered. He did not sound quite as crazy now, and he glanced through the doorway. The two guards busied themselves rolling cigarettes. The ancient convict knelt on the cold, hard floor and studied the wound and its stitches before Fallon pulled up his britches.
“Socks?” Fallon asked softly but making sure he got his point across to the crazy old man. Fallon wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible.
The old man blinked, nodded, spit tobacco juice onto the floor, and moved back to the piles and piles and piles of storage.
Soon, Fallon was dressed. This time, his uniform fit. The old man told Fallon to hold out his arms and began giving Fallon the other items he would need. A thick blanket. A bar of soap. A couple of towels. Extra socks. Extra undergarments. And a coat. He lifted the coat, and Fallon saw the makeshift knife lying atop the socks before the coat’s tail was dropped back, covering the weapon.
“Tobacco,” the man whispered. He smiled, revealing briefly the well-worn quid in his gums, then shifted the chaw to his left cheek. “Even Change plug be my brand.”
“I’ll have to owe you,” Fallon whispered back.
“Yer good fer it,” the inmate said. “Now that I give ya somethin’ ya mos’ shorely will need.”
Fallon nodded, turned, and lowered his head to step out of the small doorway.
One of the guards pointed his line stick toward the stairwell in the corner, and Fallon, keeping his head down and remembering not to look at a guard in the eye, moved in that direction. The two guards followed him, one of them tapping the heavy stick against his meaty palm.
“This one,” a guard told him when they had reached the third tier. Fallon stepped onto the grating and obeyed when the other guard ordered him to stop.
The two guards came out and waited beside Fallon.
Four guards were escorting a line of prisoners across one of the catwalks that spanned the distance between the two walls of cells. There were three catwalks: one at the far end of the building, one on the side where Fallon stood, and another across the center. The prisoners kept their heads down, and the narrow path swayed as they moved. Fallon looked over the iron railing. That would be a long, hard
, fatal fall to the ground floor.
“Just wait here,” said one guard.
Fallon understood why. There wasn’t much room for traffic going both ways. The floor path looked solid, but the little railing on the edge would do little to keep a man from falling to his death below.
“Or jump,” the other guard said and laughed.
Once the inmates had reached this side, they turned and walked down the hard floor, one convict and sometimes two stopping in front of a closed cell door.
When the last man had stopped, the chief guard barked an order. The convicts opened a door, stepped inside, pulled the door shut, and waited for one of the guards to lock the doors to the individual cells. When the last door was locked, the guards who had escorted the prisoners walked down the path, stopping when they came to Fallon and his two escorts.
Fallon kept his head down. He looked at the jacket that covered the knife.
“Who’s this?” one of the newcomers asked.
“Name’s Fallon,” said the toughest guard.
“What’s he in for?”
“The jackasses upstairs didn’t bother to tell us,” said the guard. “But it’s four years or something, so he didn’t kill nobody.”
There was a lengthy silence, and Fallon felt the new guards considering him, studying him, and even memorizing him.
“I don’t know,” said one of the escorts. “He has the look of a man who has killed before.”
“Hey!” the leader of the escort patrol called. His shout echoed across the third floor.
“Hey,” the man said again. “Look up, Fallon. I’m talkin’ to you.”
Fallon raised his head, briefly made eye contact, and dropped his gaze so that he just looked at the brass buttons on the man’s buttoned black coat.
“He’s done time before,” said another guard with the escorts.
“Most people who visit us have,” said another. That caused a few slight chuckles.
“Fallon,” said the leader of the escorts. “Look up. There you go. It’s not so hard. I don’t bite. No, no, no, you just look me in the eye. You won’t get rapped hard with this . . .” The man tossed his heavily wrapped line stick up and caught it as it came toward the floor. “ . . . Not yet. I mean, not for looking at me. I just want to ask you a question, and I don’t want you to think, figure out what I want to hear, or nothin’ like that. And you don’t blink. You don’t breathe. You just look at me the way you’re looking at me now. You just look at me and you open your mouth and you tell me the answer. The truth. Not a lie. If you lie to me, Fallon.” He tossed the stick up again, snatched it hard, and slammed it against his leg without the slightest flinch. He grinned then and wet his lips.
Behind the Iron Page 17