She might not have been able to bail him out because of the seventy two hour hold.
But she’d darn sure have come to the jail to visit him.
And she didn’t.
None of it. She didn’t return to the motel. She didn’t call the cops. She didn’t come to visit him.
By Tony’s logic, there was only one conclusion left to make.
She was in the hands of the government.
He was now certain of that.
He was certain of one other thing too.
He was certain he would find her. And that he would get her back, and that she would be unharmed.
For he had something the government didn’t know about.
Heck, even Hannah didn’t know about it.
He had Hannah’s golden ticket to freedom.
Chapter 37
Tony had spilled his guts to Mike during his first twenty four hours in the cell. He’d felt a need to vent. He’d had a lot to get off his chest.
And, truth be told, he was incredibly lonely. He needed a friend.
He’d told Mike all about how he and Hannah had met. How they’d fallen in love, way back then in grade school. How’d they’d always felt they were destined to be.
How she was the only girl he ever really loved.
It felt good to have someone to talk to. The walls which surrounded him didn’t seem quite so cramped.
Tony had no idea he was claustrophobic until the night he was arrested. It was the first time in his life he was locked in a room and had no freedom to get up and walk out.
He didn’t understand the signs until Mike explained them to him. The sweating, the pacing, the anger. The way his eyes constantly flitted about, as though searching every nick and cranny of the cell for a way out. It was the shaking, the jitters, the nervous laughter.
They were all signs, Mike said, of mild claustrophobia.
And Mike would probably know, having been in and out of the jail a dozen times before. Having to get to know a lot of other cellmates.
Perhaps having to analyze them as well.
It helped to talk to Mike in a lot of ways. It helped pass the time. It helped take his mind off the cell walls which seemed to be closing in on him, making it hard for him to breathe.
It helped him also to keep his mind off Hannah’s desperate situation, or his own.
So he opened up to Mike about almost everything. His relationship with Hannah, his childhood, his hopes and his dreams.
But he held one thing back.
Because as nice a guy as Mike was, Tony knew he couldn’t trust him.
It was nothing personal. Mike seemed a pretty decent guy in every respect.
But a government shady enough to kidnap his wife just because she did her job well and stumbled across information they wanted to keep secret was capable of doing anything.
Perhaps even plant a spy in the jail, waiting to greet him and to get to know him.
And to find out if Tony posed as big a threat as Hannah did.
So Tony didn’t share everything with Mike.
He didn’t share the fact he’d gone to the local Walmart several days before and purchased a 64 gigabyte thumb drive.
And that he was careful to use cash to pay for it, so the transaction couldn’t be traced back to him.
He didn’t tell Mike that he’d hidden the thumb drive inside a small tear in the driver’s side seat of his Honda.
Or that every time Hannah took her daily bubble bath, Tony had gone out to the car and retrieved the thumb drive. And that he’d used it to back up the files on the two computers they were using for their project.
He never told Hannah about the thumb drive because she’d have told him he was being paranoid.
And a couple of times he seriously wondered if he was.
He’d almost laughed at himself, confessed to Hannah he was an idiot, and tossed the thumb drive in the garbage can.
Almost.
But he never did.
The last backup he did was the day before the night Hannah disappeared. So it wasn’t current. But it was close. They’d done most of their updates by then, and the data was the same, even if it wasn’t quite in the same order.
When he’d gotten in the car that night to go look for Hannah he took the time to reach down and stick his finger into the torn seat.
The thumb drive was still there.
Of course, it might be gone when he got out.
For all he knew, his car might be gone by the time he got out as well.
The last thought came from nowhere, but was not without merit. He should have asked the cops who arrested him if it was okay to leave the car on the shoulder of the road until he was released from jail.
Maybe he should have asked them if he could make arrangements for someone to pick it up and park it back at the motel.
But then again, perhaps it was safer by the side of the road. Anyone who would break into a motel to kidnap a woman and steal computer components surely wouldn’t be above going back and rifling through a car whose owner was in jail twenty miles away.
He suddenly panicked.
He’d told no one of the thumb drive, not even Hannah. So there was no reason to think anyone would go looking for it.
But then again, he didn’t think there was any chance someone would take his wife, either.
Maybe someone had seen him go out to the car every day when Hannah took her bath. Maybe they saw him reach between the seats to retrieve something.
Maybe they saw him return to the car a few minutes later to replace whatever it was he’d retrieved.
Maybe he was the reason they took Hannah in the first place. Maybe it was his suspicious movements which got their attention and convinced them it was a good idea to take Hannah and their computers.
Tony suddenly felt nauseous.
He was probably just being paranoid.
But he hated himself for just the possibility he might be somehow responsible for Hannah’s fate.
And if the thumb drive was gone, then what? It was the only leverage he had to try to wrestle Hannah back from the grip of an apparently evil government. In a sense, it was his insurance policy.
It gave him another thing to worry about.
As though he was troubled enough already.
Chapter 38
There were no clocks in the cell block where Tony was housed. None whatsoever.
The inmates weren’t allowed to wear watches either. Their watches were all checked with their personal belongings during booking. They’d be there waiting for them when they were released. But while they were in they were kept guessing about the time.
To the inmates, it was just another way to abuse them. To make life in hell even worse than it had to be. Why on earth would knowing how many hours were left until chow or visiting hours hurt anyone or anything?
The jailers, of course, claimed there was sound logic behind the policy.
“Inmates could break apart the watches and make weapons out of them,” according to the jail’s written policy, posted on the bulletin board in the common area of the cell block.
It went on, “Inmates who wished to harm themselves could crush the glass lens and eat it, causing internal bleeding and requiring emergency medical treatment.”
Someone, likely one of the inmates, had scrawled the letters “B.S.” across the policy. That led Tony to wonder how the inmate got a pen, since they were considered contraband.
He also wondered why the staff allowed the graffiti to remain unchallenged, when common sense would dictate it be removed and replaced with an unmarked copy.
Perhaps the staff disagreed with the policy too.
In fact, that would make sense, for surely they tired of inmates asking them a thousand times a day how much longer it was before chow time.
As for the part of the policy which referred to desperate inmates eating broken glass, Tony could actually envision that happening.
The jail was a dismal and horrific place.
He could very easily see a desperate man eating glass, if for no other reason than to get out of his cell block for awhile.
For while a stay in the jail’s infirmary would certainly be no piece of cake, it would break the monotony and provide a change of scenery for a man who was going mad looking at the same four walls day in and day out.
The result of having no clocks or watches resulted in a maddening occurrence not thought possible in a place where men counted the days and hours until their time was up.
It was incredibly easy to lose track of time. To forget how many counts one had to go through. How many times they looked through the disgusting garbage on their food trays. How many times they lay upon their bunks for three precious hours of sleep.
Tony wouldn’t have thought the loss of time possible until he himself experienced it.
When his seventy two hour hold was up and he was finally told he could call a bail bondsman, he thought he was at the end of his second day.
He thought they were messing with him.
“You wanna wait 'til tomorrow, that’s fine with me,” the jailer told him. “No skin off my nose either way.”
“Wait,” Tony told him before the man shut the cell door in his face. “I’ll go.”
The bail process was another new experience for Tony. He hadn’t a clue how it worked. For all he knew, the bondsmen came to the jail en masse, cash in hand, and went down a row of prisoners deciding, on looks and gut instinct alone, which ones they were going to pay to have released that day.
Instead, Tony was led to a bank of telephones on the wall. No stools to sit on, no booths or partitions to ensure one’s privacy. Just nine phones mounted at even intervals on a long wall.
A laminated piece of white paper was taped to the wall above each phone.
Centered at the top of the page were the words:
LOCAL BAIL BONDSMEN
It was a list of about twenty bonding companies in alphabetic order, along with their phone numbers.
Tony picked up the receiver and almost dialed the company at the top of the list: AAA Bail Bonds.
Then it occurred to him that ninety percent of the inmates probably called the first number on the list.
He didn’t want to get lost in the stampede.
He chose a number in the middle of the list: Avery’s Bonding Service.
He was surprised to see his hand shaking as he pushed the buttons.
Chapter 40
“Avery Bail Bonds, this is Bud.”
“Um… hello. I’m at the Wright County Detention Facility. I need to make bail.”
The man on the other end spoke in a soft and steady voice. He sounded a bit like Tony’s grandfather.
Tony’s grandfather was named Bud as well.
But it wasn’t the same man. Grandpa Bud died when Tony was thirteen.
“Okay, sir. I think we can help you with that. First and last name?”
“Anthony Carson. But I go by Tony. Nobody calls me Anthony.”
The man laughed.
“Hey, at least you have the option of shortening it. I was born Bud and don’t much like it either. But I can’t shorten it much. It’s about as short as it gets. What’s your charge and amount of bail?”
“The charge is drunk and disorderly. And I don’t know how much my bail is. They haven’t told me.”
“You must have just got there. I can’t help you until you get arraigned.”
“Actually, I’ve been here since Tuesday night. What does getting arraigned mean?”
“You’ve been there four days and haven’t been arraigned yet? What’s wrong with those idiots?”
Tony got the sense the man’s blood was starting to boil, but not at Tony.
He walked it back a bit and explained.
“Your arraignment is where you meet the judge and render a plea. And where he sets a bail amount.”
“Oh. Well, I haven’t done any of that.”
“I’ll tell you what, Tony. I’m going to hang up and call the booking sergeant. I’ll remind him that the county doesn’t need any more lawsuits and strongly suggest he find the judge and have him arraign you. Call me back after you see the judge, okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
Tony was at the mercy of a system he knew nothing about.
He’d assumed, once he was allowed to call a bonding agency, that they’d work their magic and he’d be back on the streets, looking for Hannah, within a couple of hours.
Now he was forced to return to his cell once again. Once again having to wait for somebody else to do something. Once again having to fight to hold back the tears. Or to resist the urge to lash out.
He walked back into the cell and said, almost without emotion, “I hate this place. I really don’t want to be here.”
Mike managed to grin.
“No duh, Mister Einstein. Welcome to the club. That’s the one thing you’ve got in common with the other nine hundred guys in the place.”
Tony didn’t feel much like talking. He closed his eyes and was jarred awake by the sound of the “jailhouse God” coming over the ceiling speaker.
“Carson,” was all he said.
Then the cell door’s electronic lock popped.
Tony was on his feet and out the door though still a bit dazed. He hadn’t expected to fall asleep, and would have betted against it. He thought he was way too stressed to sleep.
And he was plenty stressed indeed.
But he was exhausted, and exhaustion trumps stress every time.
By this time Tony was a familiar face on the cell block. He’d gone through enough head counts to be recognized, and the guard at the hack shack didn’t have to ask his name when he reported.
“I have a message for you from booking. They said the judge will be here to arraign you within the hour. I’m going to send you back to booking to wait for him.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
As Tony walked down that long corridor, his right shoulder hugging the wall, he told himself not to get his hopes up.
Every single time he’d gotten his hopes up they’d been dashed.
He reported into booking and was told to take a seat.
“Judge Martin will be here shortly. Sit. Wait. Get comfortable.”
Two hours later he was still sitting, still waiting. As for getting comfortable, he was still waiting for that too.
Still, he’d make no waves. One thing he’d learned while being a jailbird was that the hacks didn’t like people who made waves.
Finally, just after three hours, his name was called.
He reported to the duty sergeant and a sheriff’s deputy walked up on him.
“Put your hands behind your back.”
He wanted to say, “You’re arresting me again? Isn’t that kind of redundant?”
But he held his tongue.
The deputy explained, “We’ve had problems in the past with people getting irate at their bond hearing. One guy went onto the bench a few months ago and tried to get at the judge. So now we do this as a precaution.”
He clasped the handcuffs onto his wrists. But at least they weren’t unbearably tight like the night he came in.
“Do they try to attack all the judges, or just this one?”
“Just Judge Martin. He tends to set bails really high, and some people get upset about it.”
“Great.”
He was paraded into a room with three other inmates.
“Those of you who were in the military, stand at parade rest. For the rest of you, stand straight, your feet shoulder width apart. Stare straight ahead. Don’t eyeball the judge when he walks in. And don’t argue with him or sass him. He doesn’t like that. Understand?”
No one said anything.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
An old man in a black robe walked through the door and sat on the bench. There was no bailiff to announce him or to tell everyone to stand.
Of course, they were all standing anyway.
&
nbsp; The judge had four manila folders in his hand. Tony’s was on the bottom of the stack. By the time his turn came around, he knew the drill.
“Anthony Carson, you are charged with a violation of City Code 405.1, drunk and disorderly conduct in a public place. How do you plead?”
“Not guilty, your honor.”
“Are you sure, son? You don’t just want to plead guilty, pay a four hundred dollar fine and go home?”
“No sir, your honor. I’m innocent.”
The judge shook his head as though dealing with a bratty child.
“Very well, son. Your bail is set at four thousand dollars.”
The judge got up and walked out of the room without another word.
The other inmates, as well as the deputy, looked at Tony as though he had three heads.
One of them summed up the disdain they all felt when he asked Tony, “Man. You’re a special case of stupid, aren’t you?”
Mike said more or less the same thing after Tony returned to the cell.
“Man, what in hell did you do that for?”
“I don’t know. I just got indignant, I guess. I don’t want those guys to get away with just railroading somebody.”
“Did you think this thing through, man? You could be walking out that door now. You could be looking for your wife in an hour. Instead you have to wait for them to get around to letting you make another phone call. That could be hours. Then you gotta wait for your bondsman to do all the paperwork and come down here to spring you. That could be several more hours.
“Man, what a sap you are. Sometimes you can’t stand on principles. Sometimes you just gotta accept what is.”
Chapter 41
When the chance to make another call finally came, Tony was almost afraid to tell Bud what he’d done. He thought he’d get the same lecture a second time.
But Bud just chuckled.
The Yellowstone Event: Book 1: Fire in the Sky Page 12