by Mike Lawson
“Bullshit,” Nelson said again.
“What’s bullshit?” DeMarco asked.
“There’s no way Kelly came to see you and told you all that.”
“Well, he did, Nelson, and the reason he did was to get you out of this place. He said Mulray is going to have you killed while you’re here at Wallens Ridge and the only way he could stop that from happening was to testify. So he wanted a deal. He said he’d give up Mulray if the government would let you walk.”
Maybe he shouldn’t have said walk.
It took a moment for Nelson to absorb all that, and although he was still skeptical, he said, “So is that why you’re here, to tell me they’re going to let me go?”
“No. I’m here because Kelly’s dead. A guy named Earl Lee killed him. Lee’s dead too—Kelly shot him. So you’ve got one chance, Nelson. Assuming you don’t get shanked by some nut here at Wallens Ridge, you’re going to—”
Nelson let out a roar—the roar of an animal in pain—and before DeMarco could react, Nelson, using only his massive arms, launched himself at him. He knocked DeMarco out of his chair and onto the floor, placed his hands around his throat, and began to choke him.
DeMarco wasn’t a small man—he was five foot eleven, weighed a hundred and eighty pounds—and he had good upper body strength. Nelson, however, was six foot four, weighed two twenty, and had incredible upper body strength. He didn’t need his legs to choke a man.
DeMarco tried to pull Nelson’s hands apart, and when he couldn’t, he began to strike Nelson’s head with his fists, which was like hitting a cinder block—but Nelson seemed oblivious to whatever pain he might be feeling. In less than a minute, DeMarco’s vision began to blur. He was going to die; he was going to be strangled to death by a man who used a wheelchair.
DeMarco didn’t hear the guard throw open the door to the room, because he was unconscious by then. Fortunately for DeMarco, the guard had heard Nelson’s wheelchair slam against the wall. The guard jumped on Nelson’s back and tried to pull him off DeMarco, but he couldn’t break Nelson’s grip, either. He stood up and kicked Nelson in the ribs with his boot, tried to break his grip again, then kicked him again, screaming for help as he did. Another guard rushed into the room. He kicked Nelson in the face, then both guards tugged at Nelson’s arms until they finally pulled him off DeMarco.
DeMarco came to in the prison infirmary. A woman—he didn’t know if she was a doctor or a nurse—told him he was going to be all right and to just lie there for a few minutes and not stand up right away. DeMarco’s throat felt like it had been kicked by a mule wearing jackboots, but he sat up and said he needed to talk to the warden immediately. His voice sounded like Louie Armstrong’s.
The warden was short and broad, dressed in an ill-fitting gray suit. The suit coat came down too far on his legs, as if it was made for a taller man; most likely the warden couldn’t find an off-the-rack coat that would simultaneously accommodate his stubby legs and his wide shoulders. He also looked like a worrier. He had four or five lines running across his forehead like deep furrows in a freshly plowed field. At the moment, he was probably worried that DeMarco might sue the prison for having almost been killed by Nelson. He began by apologizing for what had happened, but DeMarco interrupted him.
“I’m fine, Warden,” DeMarco said, “and it was my fault Nelson attacked me. The reason I’m talking to you is I’m concerned Nelson’s going to get killed. He’s a key witness against a powerful pharmaceutical company, and they’re going to find some way to get to him while he’s in this prison.”
“I never wanted him here in the first place,” the warden grumped. “Some judge in Arlington rammed him down my throat.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry about that,” DeMarco said, “but you need to find some way to protect him until I can get him out of here.” DeMarco saw no reason to tell the warden that it was his idea to put Nelson in Wallens Ridge in the first place.
The warden said he’d do his best but couldn’t make any guarantees, and DeMarco left Wallens Ridge rubbing his throat and wondering how long Nelson had to live.
48
“We have to get Nelson out of Wallens Ridge,” DeMarco told Charles Erhart, the Arlington County prosecutor.
“What’s wrong with your voice?” Erhart asked.
DeMarco ignored the question. “I made a mistake having you put him down there. Maybe he’ll change his mind about testifying later, but right now you have to get him out of there and put him someplace where he can be protected.”
“I can’t move him,” Erhart said. “It was the judge who sent him there.”
“So talk to the judge.”
“He’s out of town. He’s fishing someplace in Canada, one of those places you fly into by floatplane.”
“So talk to another judge.”
“Another judge won’t move him. Another judge will just say wait a week until Judge Harris gets back from his fishing trip.”
DeMarco then did the only thing he could do: he invoked his boss’s name. “Mr. Mahoney’s not going to be happy to hear this,” he said.
“Look, I’ll try,” Erhart said, “but I’m just telling you the way it is.”
“We have to get Nelson out of Wallens Ridge,” DeMarco said.
“What’s wrong with your voice?” Mahoney asked. “If you’re sick, don’t go breathin’ on me.”
“I’m not sick,” DeMarco said, and explained how Nelson almost choked him to death when he told Nelson that Kelly was dead. To this, Mahoney responded by laughing. “You almost got killed by a guy in a wheelchair?”
DeMarco didn’t bother to explain that Nelson wasn’t your average disabled person. Instead, he said, “I need you to call somebody and get him out of there.”
“But it was your bright idea to put him there.”
“Yeah, I know. But if we leave him there—”
“We? What’s this we shit?”
“Boss, he’s gonna get killed. Right now the guy’s upset about Kelly’s death, but maybe after a little time has passed, maybe then I can get him to testify. His big concern with testifying before was giving up Kelly, but with Kelly gone, maybe he’ll come to his senses. Plus now he knows Mulray killed Kelly, and if he wants to avenge Kelly’s death, he has to testify. So I need your help. I need you to get him moved to someplace where Mulray can’t get to him.”
The State of Virginia is politically schizophrenic, unable to make up its mind if it wants to be red or blue. The majority of Virginians voted for a Democrat in the last presidential election, elected two Democrats to the Senate, then immediately turned around and elected a Republican governor—which for Mahoney wasn’t good, because he needed the governor’s help.
Had the governor been a Democrat, Mahoney would have just leaned on the man to get his way—and Mahoney’s weight was still considerable within his own party. But with a Republican, he needed either leverage or something to trade. He mulled this problem over, and when he couldn’t think of any way to coerce the governor or of any political favor to trade, he finally did the simple thing and just called the guy and asked for his help.
For once, Mahoney’s instincts about the nature of politicians—that they only did something when they got something in return—turned out to be wrong. He told the governor the story—that he suspected that Mulray Pharma had killed a bunch of old people to develop their latest drug and that the next person they were going to kill was Nelson.
“If Nelson’s killed,” Mahoney said, “there won’t be anybody to testify against Orson Mulray.”
“But what do you want from me?” the governor asked.
“I want you to get him out of that prison and stash him somewhere with guys that can’t be bribed. The problem is, Mulray’s got so fuckin’ much money he could probably bribe the Pope.”
The governor didn’t say anything, and Mah
oney wondered if he’d offended the man with his language or his reference to the Pope. More likely, though, he was just trying to come up with a diplomatic way to tell Mahoney to shove his request up his ass. But he didn’t.
“Okay, Congressman, I’ll take care of it. And don’t worry, I know men who can’t be bought.”
“Well, uh, thanks,” Mahoney said, flabbergasted the guy was being so cooperative. “One of these days we’ll have to get together and have a drink.”
“I don’t drink, sir,” the governor said.
So the guy wasn’t perfect—but he was all right.
49
Albert Morehouse couldn’t believe what he was about to do.
He was being crushed by the weight of his debts, and if he lost his house … Well, he could just see himself living out of his car, his wife lying in the backseat moaning, her wheelchair in the trunk, and his meth-head daughter becoming a hooker before she killed herself with drugs. There were days he felt like getting in his car and just driving away. Most days, however, he felt like taking a gun and shooting everyone who worked at the HMO that wouldn’t pay for his wife’s treatments.
“Clancy,” he yelled, “get your dumb ass over here. I want to talk to you.”
Ike Clancy raised the three hundred pounds he was bench-pressing like it was a ten-pound sack of sugar, set the bar down on the rack above him, and slowly got to his feet.
Ike Clancy was six foot six, and because he couldn’t think of anything better to do, he spent about six hours a day lifting weights or doing push-ups and sit-ups in his cell. He looked like the Incredible Hulk on steroids—or the way the Hulk might have looked if he had a shaved head, a thrice-broken nose, and swastika tattoos on his chest, his back, and both arms. He also had an IQ that Morehouse suspected was about the same as the ambient temperature on a warm day—not a hot day.
Clancy had been sentenced to twenty years in Wallens Ridge, although he might be paroled after serving half that amount. Clancy had committed murder—but not cold-blooded, premeditated, first-degree murder. Clancy’s crime was a crime of passion. He had beat his common-law wife to death when he found her in bed with their landlord. Clancy claimed at his trial that he wouldn’t have killed the woman if she’d been screwing the guy to pay the rent, but as he’d paid the rent just that week, he knew that wasn’t the case.
“What did I do?” Clancy asked.
“You didn’t do anything,” Morehouse said. “But I want you to do something for me.”
“What?”
Morehouse didn’t answer immediately. He looked over at a group of prisoners who were laughing their asses off about something and he thought, as he always did, that prison administration in the United States needed to be drastically changed. Half these people were living better than they’d ever lived on the outside. They were given three squares a day, clothes, a warm place to sleep, exercise facilities, television and library privileges. Wallens Ridge was like a fucking low-class resort. He figured prisons would be more of a deterrent if these thugs were forced to do hard labor the way they did in Russia, or the way he heard they did in Russia. They should feed them table scraps once a day, make them dig canals through snake-infested swamps, and use horsewhips on them when they misbehaved. Then he thought that maybe it was a good thing prisons weren’t so hard, because with what he was about to do, he might end up in one.
Answering Clancy’s question, he said, “I want a prisoner named Nelson to stop breathing.”
“Who’s Nelson?”
“The new guy in the wheelchair.”
Morehouse knew—but couldn’t prove—that Clancy had shanked two inmates since he’d been at Wallens Ridge. One of the men died; the one who lived was afraid to testify that Clancy was the one who put out his eye with a jagged piece of sheet metal.
“What’s in it for me?” Clancy asked.
“I’ll put Carly Mendez in your cell for a week.”
Carlos Mendez, who called himself Carly, was twenty-seven but looked eighteen. He shaved his legs and his armpits and let his hair grow down to his shoulders, and when he wore lipstick and eye shadow he looked like a young Jennifer Lopez—or so most of the other prisoners thought. He was arguably the most sought-after he-she in the prison, but Carly liked handsome black men, not redneck grotesques like Ike Clancy.
“For a week?” Clancy said.
God forgive me, Morehouse thought. “Yeah, for a whole week,” he said.
50
He found a Coke can that one of the guards had carelessly left sitting on a window ledge—a guard could lose his job for a mistake like that—and was delighted to see that the pull tab that opened the can was still attached. He shoved the can into his underpants, and when he returned to his cell he pulled the pull tab off the can and spent three hours grinding the end of the tab against the cement floor in his cell until it was pointed at one end. When he was finished, he had a crude but effective can opener. He punched the pointed pull tab/can opener into the top of the Coke can and begin to gouge and tug and rip to remove the top. It took him an hour, and he cut his hand a couple of times, but he was eventually able to remove the top of the can. He spent another two hours grinding the pull tab to reestablish a point on it and then repeated the procedure with the bottom of the can.
Six hours after he began, his hands and fingers ached and were cut in a dozen places, but he now had a Coke can with no top or bottom. He flattened the can with his foot, then doubled it over, flattened it again by hitting it with a rock he’d found in the exercise yard, doubled it over a second time, and beat on it with the rock to flatten it more. When he was finished he had a piece of metal approximately one inch wide, five inches long, and less than a quarter-inch thick.
Then came the hard part. He took one corner of the rectangle, wedged it into a crack in the cinder-block wall in his cell, and began flexing it back and forth—which wasn’t easy, but fortunately his hands were strong. It took him two hours, bending the corner back and forth, until finally the metal weakened and the corner broke off, leaving him with a shaft about four inches long and a triangular point on the end of the shaft about an inch long. Then he spent four more hours grinding the point against the floor.
Twelve hours after finding the Coke can, he had a weapon that was pointed if not exactly razor-sharp. But it was sharp enough. He would wrap a rag around the shaft to protect his hands and drive the pointed part of the flattened can into soft flesh, then rip downward. Then he’d repeat the procedure—stab, rip, stab, rip, stab, rip—until the asshole was dead.
He waited until the guy went to the library.
He was at a table, his back to the door, but he wasn’t reading or writing like he usually did. He was just sitting there. Maybe he liked that the library was quiet. Or maybe he figured he was safe because he was in plain sight of the trustee who checked out the books.
He turned to his buddy and said, “Get the old guy away from the desk. Tell him to show you where they keep the law books.”
His buddy did as he was told, and as soon as the librarian was out of sight, he walked up behind the bastard and plunged the Coke can shiv into his neck a dozen times. He must have hit an artery, because blood started spraying out like the guy’s neck was some kind of fountain.
He dropped the shiv on the floor—he hated to leave it after all the work he’d put into it—and walked out of the library.
As he walked away he could hear Brian Kincaid choking on his own blood.
That’ll teach you, you cocksucker, to make fun of how people talk.
“Is he going to die?” Mahoney asked.
“No,” DeMarco said, “but he lost a lot of blood. And his neck’s a mess; he may not be able to move his head right because of all the muscle and nerve damage.”
“Aw, geez,” Mahoney said. “Mary Pat’s gonna be pissed.”
This was typical of Mahone
y: instead of being concerned for Brian Kincaid, he was worried about his wife being mad at him.
“And I suppose you still haven’t figured out a way to get him out of prison.”
“No,” DeMarco said. “He’s going to serve the time unless you can get him a presidential pardon.”
“Well, that ain’t gonna happen,” Mahoney said.
“If I could just convince that damn Nelson to testify.”
“So go talk to him again.”
“He almost killed me the last time I tried,” DeMarco said.
“Yeah, well, be more careful next time.”
51
Ike Clancy walked over to the table where he normally sat for chow, but ignored the guys around him as he thought about Nelson. Killing the guy wasn’t really a problem. He was a cripple in a wheelchair and all Clancy had to do was walk up behind him and shank him or put a choke hold on him. The problem he had was that he didn’t want to get caught for killing the guy. He’d be out in ten years if he didn’t get in any more trouble, but if they pinned Nelson’s murder on him, he’d never get out.
He’d been thinking that maybe he should tell Morehouse that he’d changed his mind and that Morehouse should get someone else to do the job—but then he’d start thinking about spending a week with Carly Mendez, the little bitch suckin’ his dick four, five times a day, him jamming it to her until she screamed, and then smacking her around because that was almost as much fun as screwing her. (It never occurred to him to think of Carly as anything but her; to do otherwise would make him queer, and anyway, Carly thought of himself, herself, whatever, as a her.) Oh, yeah, it was gonna be a great week, the most fun he’d had since being stuck in Wallens Ridge. He just couldn’t pass that up.