by Susanne Beck
Table of Contents
REDEMPTION
PART 1
PART 2
PART 3
PART 4
PART 5
PART 6
PART 7
PART 8
PART 9
PART 10
PART 11
PART 12
PART 13
PART 14
PART 15
PART 16
PART 17
PART 18
EPILOGUE
RETRIBUTION
PART 1
PART 2
PART 3
PART 4
PART 5
PART 6
PART 7
PART 8
PART 9
RESTITUTION
PART 1
PART 2
PART 3
PART 4
PART 5
PART 6
PART 7
PART 8
PART 9
PART 10
PART 11
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR'S AFTERWORD
THE ANGEL AND ICE TRILOGY
REDEMPTION
RESTITUTION
RETRIBUTION
BY
SWORD ‘N QUIL
(SUSANNE BECK)
Ebook by
PDAFiction.com
REDEMPTION
Disclaimers
The characters in this novel are of my own creation. That’s right, this is an ‘uber’ story. Some may bear a resemblance to characters we know and love who are owned by PacRen and Universal Studios.
Violence and Naughty Language Disclaimer: Yup, both. And quite a lot of each, to be truthful. This takes place in a prison, and where there are criminals, there’s gonna be violence and naughty words.
Subtext Disclaimer: Yup, there’s that too. This piece deals, after a fashion, with the love and physical expression of that love, between two adult females. There are some graphic scenes located within this piece, but I have tried to make them as tasteful as possible so as to not avoid anyone’s sensibilities. Let me know if I’ve succeeded.
Dedication: As always, I’d like to thank the man who gives up some of his free time every day to read the stuff I send over to him. The best beta-reader on the planet, Mike. I’d also like to thank my other betas: Candace (who read the entire novel in IM and showed her support every night), Rachel, and Alex. A special thank-you goes to Sulli, who made a very bad day a wonderful one with her gift of generosity. I would also like to thank Mary D for reading and housing this at her site. But mostly, I’d like to thank the readers for reading my stuff and giving me such great feedback. It’s what makes sitting in front of this balky computer and tickling the tans so much fun.
Feedback, if anyone is so inclined, is always gratefully received and appreciated. I can be reached at
[email protected]
Susanne Beck
[email protected]
REDEMPTION
PART 1
MY NAME IS Angel, and around here, I’m known as the woman who can get whatever you need. ‘Here’, actually, is the Rainwater Women’s Correctional Facility, more commonly known as ‘The Bog’ because we’re safely tucked away in a nice cedar forest hard by a cranberry bog. That’s probably more than you wanted to know, but I promised myself when I started writing this that I’d try my best not to leave anything out and so now you know the name of our little community.
As you may have guessed by now, my name isn’t really Angel either, but I’m gonna save us both a bunch of heartache and just stick to the name I’m known by here. Names are really important in the Bog. To get one means you’ve succeeded in mastering some metaphysical rite-of-passage where the rules and players aren’t really known until after you’ve succeeded. One day, they’re calling you by your real name and beating you up at every opportunity; the next, you’re given some sort of status and the abuse seems to lessen. Oh, it never stops altogether, unless you’re really lucky or really strong, but at least you can close your eyes at night reasonably sure that your body will be in pretty much the same working condition as it was before you went to sleep. And believe me, in a place like this, that’s really important.
They say that I was given the name ‘Angel’ because of my innocent looks. And, looking in the mirror, I guess that’s true enough, though I can tell you that the face looking back at me isn’t the same one that came into the place five long years ago. Back then, my hair was really long and more red than blonde. My face was unlined and my figure could best be described, I suppose, as awkward young adult. Now my hair is short and blonde, my face has lines added by the sun and worry as much as by simple aging, and my body has muscles that would make even an aerobics instructor jealous.
My time here has certainly changed me, and not all of it for the better. But I’d like to think that I’ve been able to retain at least some of that youthful innocence that came into this place with me. And believe me when I tell you that that is very hard to hold onto here. I’ve seen good women become heartless killers in the Bog. I’ve seen strong women end their own lives at the end of a belt. There but for the grace of God, I guess.
I suppose that if I’m to keep to total honesty here, I might as well tell you why I got locked up in the first place. Back in 1978, I was convicted of murder. Of my husband, to be precise. Now, most women in the Bog will tell you they’re here on a bum rap. I’m not one of them. I killed my husband. Oh, I didn’t mean to, but, as someone or other has been known to say, dead is dead.
My story is pretty much the same as any other’s. Just your basic small town girl desperate to get away, grabbing on the first coat-tail heading out of town. My ticket happened to be my high-school sweetheart; a sweet, if rather dull, boy who happened to land a job at some steel mill or other in Pittsburgh. He wanted company and I wanted out, so we eloped, found the first Justice of the Peace who would marry us without our parents’ permission, and set up house in a run-down studio in Pittsburgh. If you could ignore the squadrons of cockroaches who shared our apartment with us, noisy neighbors and middle-of-the-night shootings, our first six months together playing house like a couple of bona fide adults was pretty smooth. I managed to land a job as a secretary and general Gal Friday at a local warehouse while my husband worked nights at the mill. We didn’t get to see each other all that much, but at the time, I was just so relieved at getting out from beneath the oppressive shadow of small town life that I didn’t have time to be lonely.
Then Peter, my husband, started coming in later and later from his shift. He told me he was putting in a lot of overtime so he could buy us some nicer things, and I believed him. Then whole days went by without hearing from him and I began to suspect things weren’t going the way they should. Then he’d come home from these binges smelling of sex and cheap booze and I realized that I’d made a very big mistake. But like many young women, and maybe you are one of them, I was too ashamed to reach out to my folks for help. Besides, I’ve always been an optimist and strong in my convictions. I thought I could change him. Of course, I was wrong.
What I called trying to change my wayward husband’s habits for the better, Peter called nagging. He’d come home drunk, I’d start in on him, and the fights would begin. They weren’t bad at first. Mostly yelling. Then he started becoming a really big man with his fists and I started getting to try out my budding storytelling abilities in explaining just how a cupboard door can manage to hit your face in the exact same spot three weeks in a row.
Now I know that there are plenty of you out there who are just shaking your heads and asking why I didn’t just up and leave the bastard. I’ve asked myself that same question more t
imes than I can count since coming to this place. All I can tell you, and myself, is that I don’t have any good answers. I was young, and naïve, and scared. But most of all, I was trying to hang onto any thread that would tell me that I hadn’t just flushed my life down the proverbial toilet.
One evening, Peter came home smelling like a really bad whorehouse and demanding ‘husband’s rights’ to my body. When I refused, he threw me down on the bed and started shredding my clothes. I snapped. I’d taken to sleeping with a baseball bat at the side of my bed for a sense of protection from intruders. I never thought I’d need to use it against my own husband. But use it I did. God knows, I didn’t mean to kill him, just to stun him long enough to get away. But when that wood came into my hand, well . . . .I can’t really explain it. It was like I knew exactly how to wield it as a weapon, and did. I can still remember the sound it made when it crashed down on his skull. It makes me physically sick to think of it to this day. He went limp and I pushed him off of me. He was dead before he hit the ground. At least that’s what the coroner said at the trial, and I’ve got no reason to disbelieve him.
To say that I was completely devastated over what happened would be putting it mildly. At the time, though, it all seemed sort of surreal, like a really bad underground film. I had reached another crossroads in my life; a place where the most important decisions I’ve ever been faced with would have to be made. Should I run? We lived in a very bad neighborhood. Chances are, the police might have believed it was a simple burglary gone awry. Or should I stay and face up to the fact that I’d just taken a human life?
Maturity is a funny thing. You never know how it’s going to come into your life. Most people just go along gaining maturity drop by drop as they grow older. They don’t know they’ve fully matured until they find themselves making the same remark to another that their parents made to them. It’s a scary moment. For me, maturity just walked up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. One moment, I was a sobbing young girl who had just killed her husband in self defense. The next moment, I was a full-blown adult, with a telephone in my hand, ready to take full responsibility for my actions.
Maturity isn’t always everything it’s cracked up to be, however. It doesn’t come with an instruction manual, and believe me, it should. When the police came to my home, I did the worst thing I could ever have done. I confessed.
Now remember, I grew up in a small town where the worst crime we ever heard came from old Mrs. Simpson getting another ticket for driving on the wrong side of the road. I was raised to believe that the policeman was your friend and you should always be honest with him. So, that’s what I went with.
I was handcuffed and in the back of a squad car before the idiocy of my actions bloomed fully in my brain.
Still, I hung onto that naïve optimism for which I’m well known, even here, in a place as near to Hell as I ever hope to get. I mean, the evidence was clear, at least from my viewpoint. My clothes were ripped to shreds and I had bruises, old and new, littering my body bearing what I thought to be mute testimony to Peter’s drunken actions.
I couldn’t afford a lawyer, and was too mortified to call my parents, so they assigned me one. He was an older fellow who always sported a heavy growth of beard no matter how early in the day he came to see me. His suits were shiny, his shirts always stained, and he smelled of those red-striped mints people suck on to cover the scent of whiskey and cigarettes. He had a big mole on his right earlobe and whenever he would listen to me talk, he would rub at it constantly, as if trying, by sheer friction, to wear it away.
But still, I had faith in him and his big shiny briefcase and told him everything I could about the living Hell my life had become in the last six months. He always appeared distracted, as if listening to a sound that only he could hear. As I talked, he would scribble things down on his big yellow legal pad, using a mechanical pencil whose point invariably broke during the most important parts of my recitation. We would then spend the remaining time searching for another one. It got to be so bad that even the guards in the county jail where I was housed pending trial could barely cover their looks of sympathy when they’d bring him yet another pencil.
The days between my arrest and the trial dragged on interminably. Aside from talking to my lawyer, all I could do was sit in my tiny cell on my tiny cot and try to decipher the scribblings of the people who had been housed here before me. Jailhouse writings range from the profound to the sublime and if the day ever comes when I’m able to walk out of here as a free woman, I hope to write a thesis on them.
I won’t go into the details of the trial. Suffice it to say that since I’m writing from within the hallowed halls of the Bog, the verdict didn’t go quite as I’d hoped. My bruised body and torn clothes, which I had assumed would prove my case, were instead shown to be the marks of a valiant man’s struggle against the rage of a jealous and deadly wife. My plea of self defense crumbled before my eyes and before I knew it, I was a felon, convicted of one count of second degree murder.
The part of me that was raised Catholic welcomed the verdict and subsequent sentence, seven years to life, as a justified penance for my sins. The rest of me grew red with rage. And believe me when I tell you, the color of rage is red. All bright and shining, like newly spilled blood, and impossible to think past once it has you trapped within its hungry grasp.
If red is the color of the enraged, the color of the despairing is green. Industrial green, as in the peeling, chipped paint adorning the interior of my newest home, Rainwater Women’s Correctional Facility. It is the color of lost hopes and shattered dreams. It is the flat monochrome hue of the loss of innocence.
In the eight years since I first entered the battered steel doors here, that color has become more of a blessing than a curse, but when I first set eyes upon it, I experienced this strange feeling of a huge ocean wave, green and silty and violent, drawing up and over me and bearing me down with it to rest, broken, at the bottom of its oceanic home. In a weird sort of way, that sensation was almost familiar, as if it had happened to me before in some unknown past life.
Now, normally I’m not the type of person who believes in karma and past lives and astral projection, but if, from somewhere down deep in my subconscious I can dredge up a comfort in drowning, I’m more than happy to go with it. That feeling kept me sane those first few months of my new incarceration.
As I look back on the four pages I’ve managed to write amidst the clanks and yells of a humid jailhouse night, I realize that I’ve gone off on an incredible tangent. This story’s not meant to be about me, not really. But, since I’m a large part of this narrative, being your person in the know, so to speak, I’ll just continue on this way in the hopes that you won’t find it terribly inane and boring in the extreme.
As I said before I drove down this long side road, I’m known here as the person who can get it for you. Now I know that makes me sound like I’m some big woman on campus, and, in point of fact, it does give me some sort of pull with the guards and prisoners alike, but mostly it means that a lot of my fellow inmates, big ones who would otherwise like to see what interesting shapes they could twist my nose into, instead come to me with the tiniest shard of respect shining in their eyes. Now, despite the depravity of my crime, at heart I’m still Ms. Small-Town-America. What this means, in plain English, is that I only get what could be gotten by your average citizen, and that in a totally legal way.
So, if they don’t carry your brand of cigarettes in the commissary, or if you’re wanting to wrangle a conjugal visit with your old man, or any one of a hundred other small things, I’m the person you come to see. Because I don’t really have much need for money in the pen, I only mark the price slightly above cost. A girl’s gotta make a living somehow, and for me, this is as good as any. I’ve been able to develop a good rapport with the guards, and the prisoners who’d normally have fun preying on a woman like me give me a wide berth. So it works out quite well for me, as you can guess.
I supp
ose, to keep this narrative complete, I should backtrack a little, once again, and tell you a little about the hierarchical structure of this particular state prison. In the eight years I’ve been here, I’ve seen two wardens grace the big office. The first, a woman by the name of Antonia Davis, was every writer’s dream, if he or she were trying to think up a stereotypical warden for a revival of one of those horrid nineteen fifties Women in Prison movies. Her blonde hair was always kept in the most severe of buns and her lips were always heavily glossed with a color red more common to fire engines and ladies of the evening than blushing passion. She wore her uniforms at least two sizes too small, as if to show us by the very size of her ‘assets’ how qualified she was to be the top sow in the pen. She was also known to have a voracious appetite, tending toward nubile young blondes fresh off the streets. As a member of that particular genus, I always found it a bit miraculous that I never came under her scrutiny. In this one thing, I consider myself well blessed, since her conquests never did fare well once she tired of them.
Antonia was the darling of the prison gangs, a subject which I shall delve into with a great deal more detail latter in this missive. She curried their favor with a passion, and they, hers. Suffice it to say, for now, that when Antonia got over her latest convict du jour, she’d toss the leavings to her prison pets. What was left after they were through wasn’t pretty.
The warden’s downfall came when she let her hormones rule her mind and picked the wrong prisoner to love and leave.
You may remember, if you’ve been around town long enough, the story of one Missy Gaelen, a State Senator’s daughter who was caught buying the wrong drug from the wrong dealer in a huge police sting. Not all of the mighty Senator Gaelen’s money or prestige could get his daughter out of the trap of her own making, though he did manage to get her sentence reduced from five to ten down to two with one served. Nothing, however, could prevent her from being incarcerated in the Bog, and therefore coming under the appreciative and predatory stare of one Antonia Davis.