The Last Act

by Brad Parks

  “Hi, Mrs. Lembo,” I said.

  It immediately sounded wrong. Too high-pitched. No, wait: I had let my accent slip.

  Quickly, I added a twangy, “How’re you today, ma’am?”

  “I’m doing fine, thank you,” she said. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “Great, thanks.”

  “You look hot.”

  “Jogging,” I said. “They serve us all those carbs at lunch. If I don’t get the blood moving a bit soon as I get out, I’ll fall right asleep.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Well, I had a conversation about you with Mr. Munn yesterday.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  I shifted my weight and subtly—God, I hoped it was subtle—crossed my arms over my stomach. It was an entirely unnatural thing for a man in a full lather to do. And it only made me hotter.

  “He says you haven’t signed up for any vocational classes yet. Is that true?”

  “Yes, ma’am, it is.”

  “I know things can feel pretty bleak at first, when you think your sentence will never end,” she said gently. “But this really is the best time to get on the right path, when you’re still new and still forming your habits here. It’s like we said at orientation: You need to start preparing for the day you get out on the day you get in. Remind me, what kind of job did you have before you came here?”

  “I was a teacher.”

  “That’s right. History?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You know you’re not going to be able to teach again when you get out, right? School systems do background checks.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “But that’s no reason to give up on life. You’ll still be a young man when you get out of here. This is a great opportunity to try something new.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to get on that.”

  “We’ve found educated inmates like yourself often really enjoy working with their hands. Carpentry, perhaps. There’s always going to be a need for carpenters, and the industry tends to be forgiving to those with criminal records. We’ve placed a number of inmates directly with jobs as soon as they’re released. Our instructor in the woodshop is excellent. I bet he’d take you under his wing.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “You should go see him right now. I’ll walk you there if you like.”

  I’d like nothing less.

  “That’s real, real kind of you,” I said, desperately trying to deflect her. “But I wouldn’t want to meet him like this. I’m pretty sweaty.”

  She appraised me with suspicion. “Well. Okay. But I’m going to check with the woodshop later. I hope I hear you went there.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Right after I change my shirt.”

  She studied me again, her smile remaining unconvinced. I swear, the moment lasted longer than “City on Fire/Final Sequence” from Sweeney Todd—and that’s a thirteen-minute song.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Lembo, appreciate the talk,” I said, then sidestepped her and continued toward Randolph.

  I didn’t dare turn around to see if she was still watching me. I just walked straight back to my room and—not knowing what else to do with it—stashed the unicorn under the plastic sheet that covered my mattress, closing up the hole I created in the seam with the safety pins that had cinched my pants that first day. I don’t think I breathed the entire time.

  One Ring to rule them all.

  One Ring to send them directly to maximum-security hell.

  * * *

  • • •

  Time moved slowly after that, taking an hour or two to pass each five- or fifteen-minute increment. I went to the library, where I studied some topographical maps of Dorsey’s Knob. Then I established contact with the prison woodshop so I could keep Karen Lembo off my case.

  Before dinner, Masri and I huddled one more time to review plans. He also gave me the maintenance warehouse key—another item I really wasn’t supposed to have.

  Dinner was tasteless. I ate it strictly because I knew I’d need the energy later.

  My conversation with Amanda after dinner was even flatter than usual. “Kelly” told me my cousin Amanda had gone to the obstetrician. She was describing some routine test they had performed, but I was having a hard time concentrating. At one point she even asked me if I was distracted by something. Yeah, honey, it just so happens I’m breaking the law tonight. . . .

  The final thing I did before entering Randolph for the nine o’clock standing count was rustle up a stick so I could use it later as a prop for the front door.

  By ten o’clock, I was settled into bed when the lights cut out. Under my feet was the small rise in the mattress from where I had hidden the unicorn. I was exhausted from the anxiety but couldn’t have slept without the aid of a tranquilizer gun.

  Other than underwear and socks, the only thing I wore was my Timex, whose tiny LED light allowed me to check the time under the covers. I had decided that twenty minutes was sufficient time to get up, get dressed, and climb the hill. A lifetime in the theater had made me proficient at both speedy costume changes and hasty exits.

  In the bunk underneath me, big Frank Thacker’s breathing became slow and steady. Outside our room, the noises of Randolph settling in for the evening—latecomers shuffling in from the television room, guys using the bathroom one last time—slowly dissipated. The heavy snorers, guys who could rattle the walls with their soft-palate vibrations, didn’t usually get going until later. This was the quietest time of day at FCI Morgantown.

  I swore the loudest sound in the whole dorm was the thunderous beating of my own heart as I waited to make my move.

  CHAPTER 22

  Herrera loved the new moon.

  As a boy, he would slip out of the house and roam through neighbors’ farms, enjoying liberties given to him by the cover of darkness, going places forbidden to him during the day.

  Sometimes he’d spy into the windows of the homes. These were not the dusty Mexican farm shacks of gringo imagination. They were large, elegant homes faced in stucco or tile.

  Herrera grew up in Jalisco, in an area renowned for growing the best blue agave in the world. His family and their neighbors had their battles like any farmers—with capricious weather, with rot and weevils and fungus—but as long as the world remained thirsty for tequila, they would remain prosperous.

  In that way, Herrera was unlike so many of the men in the cartel, who were raised in poverty and were either forced to join or signed up because they had few other choices.

  Herrera had options. He had gone to college. He could have stayed and made a fine living with his family. He could have gone to the city and found a job. He joined the cartel because he wanted the action. Because he loved the things that could happen in the dark.

  So even though he was in a very foreign place—the suburbs of Atlanta, an American city whose humidity he found oppressive even in the middle of October—he was comfortable in the small hours of the morning, approaching a house whose owner was unaware of his presence.

  His target was a small saltbox with drab gray siding. Herrera had driven by it in his rental car a few times, then parked down the street and traversed the cracked sidewalk until he was outside. He pulled on a ski mask and walked up the driveway.

  To the left of the three front steps was a blue octagonal sign for a security system. Herrera smirked at it. He knew the company. It favored pressure sensors—easily defeated—for windows and doors.

  He continued around to the back of the house, where there was a deck with a barbecue grill and a small dry bar with an umbrella over it. More important, the deck’s elevation offered easy, waist-height access to two windows.

  One of which had an air-conditioning unit stuck into it. Which meant the pressure sensors on that window weren’t being monitored. The unit hadn’t even been bolted into the window frame. It
had simply been propped under the window, which had then been shut on top of it. The owner might as well have set out a welcome mat.

  Working carefully, Herrera needed only a few minutes to negotiate the quiet removal of the unit. The gloves he wore slowed him a little, but he didn’t dare take them off.

  Never give the Americans evidence they could use to extradite you. One of El Vio’s rules.

  Once the air conditioner was resting on the deck, Herrera climbed through the open window and into the kitchen. Finding it unremarkable, he passed into the living room next. It was stuffed with furniture, like the occupants had once lived in a much larger house and were now cramming the same amount of stuff into a space a third of the size.

  Herrera paused at one of the end tables. Cluttering the top of it were a number of photographs. Most of them featured one or both of a pair of children at awkward ages, with their braces and their fast-growing bodies. But there was one portrait of the whole family.

  The woman was pretty. Blond and nicely dressed. Herrera did like blondes.

  The banker was next to her, his arm around her, smiling like he knew he was punching above his weight class. Herrera picked up the frame and studied the man who created all this trouble. He didn’t look like much.

  Herrera set down the picture and, satisfied by all he had seen on this level, started climbing the stairs. They were old, like the rest of the house. After the second step creaked on him, he took the rest gingerly.

  At the top of the stairs, he was confronted with four doors. One was open. The bathroom. That made the other three bedrooms. He selected the door to what appeared to be the largest of them, grabbed the handle, turned slowly, then poked his face in.

  The air was warm and moist from human exhaust. A king-size bed took up most of the space. On the right side of it, nearest to the door, there was a woman.

  The blond woman from the picture, the banker’s wife. She had kicked off the covers and was sleeping on her back, her legs akimbo. She wore panties and a T-shirt, which had ridden up, exposing her midriff. Her thighs were pale, almost alabaster, and well toned.

  He walked toward her until he was standing above her. In the faint glow of a nearby alarm clock, he could see the rise and fall to her chest. He bent low and, from a sheath strapped to his calf, removed a serrated hunting knife. It was designed to cut through the soft flesh of a mammal, to slash muscles and arteries, causing an animal to bleed out quickly.

  In one quick movement, he sat down on the edge of the bed and clamped his hand down on her mouth. Her eyelids immediately opened. He brought the knife to her face.

  “If you scream, I will kill you,” he said softly, in accented English. “Do we understand each other? Blink twice for yes.”

  She blinked twice.

  “Very good,” he said. “I’m going to remove my hand now.”

  He kept the knife blade inches from her cheek.

  “My husband has documents,” she whispered. “If you hurt us, he’ll turn them over to the FBI and all of you will—”

  “I’m well aware of what your husband has,” Herrera said. “And I don’t care. If I don’t recover those documents myself, I won’t live long enough to be prosecuted. El Vio will kill me and send someone else to do this job. So. I am going to make this very simple: If you don’t tell me where those documents are, I will kill you, then I will butcher your children. I will leave them alive but horribly disfigured, so they can live out the remainder of their lives as grotesque orphans. Is that what you want?”

  “No. But I—”

  “Then tell me where the documents are.”

  “I. Don’t. Know,” she said. “If I did, I would have turned them over to the feds a long time ago and gone into witness protection. You have to believe that.”

  He did. He had heard the tapes.

  “There is a hunting cabin,” he said.

  “They’re not there. I looked already.”

  “Not as carefully as I will. Tell me where the cabin is.”

  “It doesn’t have an address.”

  “But you know how to get there.”

  “Of course I do, I—”

  “Then you’ll tell me.”

  “I . . . I have GPS coordinates. That’s what we give to guests who visit. You can enter the numbers into your phone, and it’ll take you right there.”

  “That will suffice,” he said.

  She retrieved the numbers from her phone. Herrera wrote them on his arm in pen, then brandished the knife in her face again.

  “If you are lying to me,” he said, “I’ll be back.”

  CHAPTER 23

  At a few minutes after midnight, I heard the CO making his rounds, doing the count.

  He was using a handheld counter. The sound of his double clicks grew closer as he did, then faded away, like some kind of snap-clacky Doppler effect.

  Then there was more quiet.

  At exactly 12:40, I eased myself into a sitting position. Putting to use all I had learned about body control from many years of dance training, I gradually slid toward the edge of the bed, going slow enough its calcified bedsprings didn’t creak, then climbed down the ladder.

  My socked feet were silent on the tile floor. Reversing what I had done earlier in the day, I eased up the fitted sheet, then located the seam on the plastic mattress cover. Working by feel, my fingers found the safety pins and unhooked them.

  Then I slid out the package. The plastic bag rustled too loudly for my liking—the sighs of angels were too loud for my liking at the moment—but I slowly shifted it over to our desk, placing it lightly on top.

  I reached inside. My hand hit rough fabric, and I pulled out the canvas pants. Then I eased into them, being careful not to let the fabric rustle. They were too large, of course, but I rolled cuffs and tightened the belt and judged them good enough. The shirt came next.

  After putting on my own footwear—the black steel-toed boots issued to the COs were essentially indistinguishable from ours—the finishing touch was the radio, which I attached to my shirt, just like the COs I saw every day.

  There was no mirror in the room to check that everything was squared away, but looking down, I judged myself to have passed muster. This getup only had to fool someone from a distance of twenty feet or more. If one of the nighttime staff members got closer to me than that, I’d probably be done for anyway.

  I took a tentative step toward the door to my room, then I heard:

  “Sir?”

  It had come from the lower bunk. I froze. The ambient light coming in from our small window was faint. Could Frank see me in it?

  “What’s up?” I whispered.

  “Where you going?”

  “The bathroom,” I said.

  “Why you all dressed up like that?”

  Crap.

  Frank and I still hadn’t really talked. All I could say about him was that he was huge and black and that he had gone to church on Sunday and Bible study on Wednesday, the classic convict trying to get right—or stay right—with Jesus. I still didn’t know why he was in here. I hadn’t explored his feelings toward authority. I was uncertain if he’d snitch on me to curry favor with the administration.

  “I’m just going out for a little errand,” I said.

  “You runnin’ the hill?”

  “That okay with you?”

  I wished I could see his face so I could have some idea what he was thinking. He shifted position, rolling toward me.

  “Could you get me some Slim Jims, sir?”

  Feeling a rush of relief, I said, “You got it.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You be careful, now. Them woods is dangerous. You never know what’s out there.”

  I almost laughed. The incredible bulk was afraid of a few forest creatures?

  “Thanks, Frank. I will be.”

  I
took two steps toward our door and paused, acutely aware that one of the most treacherous moments of the mission would be the first. Fact was, I didn’t know where the CO assigned to the cottages had chosen to spend his evening. There were five possibilities, which meant there was a one-in-five chance this was going to be an exceedingly brief exercise.

  And I had no way of knowing. I had heard the CO leaving the cottage after the midnight count—the bar that opened the door from the inside made this metal-on-metal shriek from not having been oiled in an eternity. The problem was, the thumb button on the handle that let you back in was much quieter. He could have reentered silently.

  With this in mind, I walked softly out of my room and up the corridor, passing the bathroom. The glass-enclosed office where the CO would most likely be hanging out was up front, by the entrance.

  As soon as I turned into the hallway, I flattened myself against the wall, face-in, and edged slowly along. I was primed to bolt back toward my room the moment I saw anyone in the office. That’s if the CO was actually in the office. If he was doing what he was supposed to do—stay moving in and around the cottages—he could show up anywhere, including behind me. I was mostly relying on institutionalized laziness for protection.

  I eased slowly forward. With each incremental bit of progress, more of the office came into my view. It was dark, which was a good sign. As long as he wasn’t hunkered down in there with the lights off.

  Inch by inch, the office revealed itself: fifty percent, then seventy-five, then eighty-five. Still no one. When I got to the point where I could see it in its entirety—and it was entirely empty—I moved decisively toward the exit.

  Speed was now my friend. The less time it took me to travel from Randolph to the safety of the woods, the better. I slowed momentarily at the door, pressing the bar gently so I wouldn’t trigger a squeal as I opened it. I found my stick lying on the ground where I left it and wedged it in the door.

  Then I scampered down the steps and slipped into the night.

  * * *

  • • •

  The nearest light stanchion was several hundred yards away and behind me. Its output was meager enough I barely cast a shadow. The moonless sky above was dark, save for the stars, which twinkled like an array of tiny, distant LEDs.