All I heard was the heavy breathing of a maniac about to kill. He was excited, pleased with himself. The sound of footsteps on the pavement grew louder. I opened my eyes and saw Bishop standing with Luther and a couple of other cons.
"Bishop," I called out. "You're a witness. You're all witnesses here. Don't let him do this."
All silent.
My eyes locked onto Bishop's. Would he just stand idly by while Butch put a bullet in my head?
Butch pulled back slightly and addressed Bishop. "You and Silk got something going on?" Bishop scoffed. "'Cause if you and Silky-boy here are together, you know I'm going to—"
"He's nobody," Bishop said, raising his voice. "Now, you keep your word."
"Don't I always?" Bishop folded his arms over his chest and glowered. "Okay, don't matter how often I do or don't," Butch said. He stepped back but kept his foot on the small of my back. "You gotta prove to me that you'll keep up your end."
"Whatever."
"No, you listen to me, Bish! This here boy disrespected me."
"Like you're so respectable."
"I wanted him dead, but y'all had to go on and show up here." Butch let up and stepped away. I rolled over, kept my eye on Bishop. Behind his tough façade I sensed a man who actually feared Butch. Or something Butch could do to him, anyway. Bishop just glowered at him without a word. On his way out the door, Butch said, "Fine. Then at least make sure he never forgets his place."
Looking desperately to Bishop, I asked, "Are you actually bending to him?"
"Shut up!" He grabbed my shirt and pulled his fist back. "Always getting in the way!" Words failed. I couldn't believe he would do this. He was about to throw a punch but stopped short. Instead, he dropped me on the ground and stepped away. Then he turned to Luther and the other cons.
"Do it."
Chapter Sixty-Seven
I regained consciousness in the infirmary, aching all over, barely able to speak. My last memory was Bishop standing by, arms folded over his chest, while Luther and company proceeded to puree me.
A sharp pain skewered my shoulder when I reached for the bedrail. I let out a terse groan and propped myself on my side. That hurt too. There wasn't a side of my body that wasn't bruised or bandaged. Just be grateful you're alive.
Victor, the doctor that checked in on me, was a firm believer in the thought that laughter was the best medicine. Interesting in theory, but he just wasn't funny. He'd laugh at his own jokes, snort when he laughed, then keep on laughing and snorting. Finally, after a while, I asked him if I could just go to sleep. He agreed reluctantly.
The next morning, Victor discharged me with two broken ribs, a sprained wrist, seven stitches, and one very bruised spirit. On my way back to my cell, I ran into C.O. Sonja Grace.
"Oh Sam," she said. "What happened?"
"Long time," a pained grunt cut me off.
"I got transferred to C-Block. You okay?"
"They seem to think I'll live."
"Better do more than that," she said, with a sympathetic smile.
Just as I began to answer, a guard from B-block interrupted us. "Yo, Hudson. Someone to see you!" Great. The last thing I needed was to show any one my beaten face. I said good-bye to Sonja and dragged my chained feet, scraping against the concrete and made my way to the guard.
Because my guest hadn't yet entered the visitation room, I couldn't see who it was. Maybe Dave or Alan. My head swam in an ocean of painkillers as I took a seat at a vacant table, put my head down, and tried to block out the sounds of thugs and sweethearts babbling and flirting. Two minutes. That's all I'd wait.
Images of Aaron's face kept flashing through my mind. His chestnut hair, fine features, freckles, all inherited from his mother. As my thoughts turned to Jenn, something frightening happened. For the first time since her death, the thought of her didn't tear my heart to bits. Was I forgetting her? Bethie? It had been over two years now, but I never wanted to stop feeling the pain. It reminded me of how much I loved them.
I just wanted to curl up and die. Two years in prison had numbed me. Now I was having trouble even conjuring up memories of my beloved wife and daughter. I was losing them. Before I could get up and leave, a warm hand touched the back of my neck. I lifted my eyes.
"Hey, Sam." Rachel's arm dangled in a sling, a couple of stitches crossed her left eyebrow, and her forehead was bruised. She was the most beautiful sight I'd seen in a long time.
Without thinking, I stood up and wrapped my arms around her like she was the last human being alive on the planet. "Rachel. Oh God. I'm so sorry." Our last argument was still fresh in my mind.
She reached her good arm up and around my neck. We embraced for just a bit longer than ordinary friends. She pressed her face into my chest, the warmth of her breath seeped through my shirt. "No," she said. "I'm sorry"
I gently pressed my lips into her ebony hair. Jasmine and silk. All the tension in her body dissolved as she leaned against me. Though her last visit wasn't that long ago, it felt like years. "You have no idea how glad I am to see you," I said, slowly releasing her and taking a step back to have a good look.
Her eyes glistened, naturally brown. "Pardon my appearance," she said, holding up her slinged arm. "My doctor would kill me if he knew."
"First do no harm?"
She smiled and gazed at her shoes.
"Don't we need a private room?" I asked. She gave me a tentative smile. "I mean, you know, attorney-client?"
"I'm here as your friend," Rachel said. As we spoke, the awkwardness from our little spat melted away like December frost in the corner of a window. She had come in an unofficial capacity, but there were some urgent matters.
Oscar and Maggie had been speaking to their attorney about the possibility of keeping legal guardianship over Aaron, in the event I was exonerated. They knew how I felt about keeping Aaron on life support and were concerned that I was not thinking in his best interest.
"We're definitely going to fight it," Rachel said. "But the first order of business is reopening your case." Brent Stringer was being held in San Diego Central and the D.A.'s office would offer no deals. As Rachel reported what she'd learned about Brent, the light in her countenance faded. "They've combed through all his computer records, his notebooks. The guy was as meticulous as he was arrogant."
"How'd he do it?"
"You know why he calls himself Kitsune, right?"
"Among other things."
"He likens himself to a messenger of Oinari, a Japanese deity. I think he takes the metaphor of being a shapeshifting fox beyond the metaphoric. In addition to his extraordinary ability to manipulate people, he studies his victims, their lives, their entire family. Then he devises a fool-proof method of leaving behind just the right evidence. Evidence which incriminates the husband. For all intents and purposes, he becomes the husband, the father, forensically speaking."
"Did this have something to do with that Instant Message session?" My stomach cramped at the thought.
"Well, he's also a brilliant computer programmer, or he knows someone who is. Stringer used the internet to upload spyware onto his victim's computers. He did that to mine. We found some on your laptop too." She brushed a lock of hair behind her ear, squeezed my hand with concern. "You said he contacted Bethie with the Huli-boy screen name, right?"
I was pressing my forehead into my palm now, cursing myself. "I should have known. I should have known!"
"Known what?"
"He impersonated one of Bethie's classmates over Instant Messenger, I uploaded a game. A kid's game! That must have contained the malicious software. He used it for identity theft, didn't he?"
Biting her lip, Rachel nodded.
"So everything, the credit cards, the porn?" Back into the fiery pits of Hell, all over again. "Oh God."
"Can you think of any other way he might have gained access?" Rachel reached into her briefcase and took out a memo pad and started taking notes.
"The day we first met to set up that Superdad interview. He was waitin
g in my cubicle at work when I got there."
"That explains it. We found some hidden executables in the system restore volumes dated that day. They were programmed to scan the hard drive and send information such as cookies and URLs of websites you visited, shopped at. Eventually copied those kiddy porn images to a shared network drive under a directory with your name."
"A lot of personal information on my work computer too." I thought back to the day Stringer and I first met, shook hands. "He was also looking at the manual for my new alarm system, which I'd left on my desk. Jenn was complaining of a problem with the access code and I was going to research it. Stringer said he had the same model, didn't know how to program it." A stab of recognition tweaked my mind. "Oh no. I can't believe it."
"What?" Rachel pulled her chair closer, flipped to a fresh page, and continued writing down everything I said.
"He must have taken down the model number."
"And found a way to disarm it."
"I can't believe how careless—" I looked to Rachel as if she held the answer. The answer to one of the most pressing questions which festered like an open sore. "Why me? Why Matt Kingsely, why any of us?"
"I wish I knew." She put the pen down and held my hand. "One thing, though. Each of you had appeared in the media before Stringer targeted you: Kingsley for rescuing that stray dog from the freeway, and you for the superdad photo. Maybe it's part of his obsession." For a few minutes, we sat and allowed the tension to ebb.
"Is he going to make a full confession?"
"I'm not sure," she said, taking the papers back as I hadn't even glanced at them. "Stringer's killed a lot of people. And he's being really weird about what he tells and what he withholds."
"I've got to get out of here. Right away. Aaron needs me."
"I promise I'm working two hundred percent on it. We're back in discovery now, going over all the evidence, old and new. The hearing could be set sooner than you think."
"Hope so."
"In the meantime," she said, grasping my hand and brushing the bruise on my cheek with velvet fingertips, "stay out of trouble."
"You mean stay alive."
"Yeah." She consulted her watch. "Gotta go. Call me tomorrow. Same time." For the past two and a half years, whenever she left the visitation room, she never looked back. We'd said our good-byes already so there was no point. But this time, she stopped at the doorframe, looked over her shoulder and with a poignant smile, whispered, "Bye Sam." I stood by the table, watched her go down the corridor. Rachel's admonition resounded in my mind.
Stay alive.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
For the next couple of days, I continued with the anti-inflammatories. Possum seemed relieved to see me when I returned from the infirmary. He graciously offered his lower bunk, since the very thought of climbing caused my stomach to clench. And that in itself hurt enough to make me sit down right away.
One morning, Possum sat staring out the open cell door with his elbows on his knees, his jowls resting in his palms.
"Why aren't you out in the yard?" I said, straining as I lay down.
He didn't answer.
"Poss?" Still, no answer. "Okay, well. If you don't mind, I'm going rest up." Not so much as a look or hint of acknowledgment. Finally, without averting his vacuous gaze, he said, "You been praying for me, like I asked?"
A grin tugged the corners of my mouth. "I just don't know if God honors prayers for a convict to break out of prison."
"And make it out alive."
"Honestly, no. That's not exactly how I've been praying for you."
"I'm just saying." He missed his wife, his son, so much it was making him crazy. When his wife started writing him about taking their son and moving back to Minneapolis with her parents, he became distraught and even less rational than usual.
"Hang in there, Poss."
"Easy for you to say. You'll be getting out soon. Me? I got ten more years, five if I'm a good boy and confess at the parole hearings."
"There you go."
"You dope! By then, Pam's gonna be screwing the postman in Minneapolis and Jack'll be a teenager."
"Oh. Right. I hear you, man." Must've been all the Naproxin, there had to be a better reason for my density. For the next few minutes Possum didn't speak. Fine with me, my head was pounding anyway. But silence with Possum in the cell seemed about as natural as pirouetting pachyderms in pink tutus. He was sullen, withdrawn. "Hey," I said. "You all right?"
Nothing.
"Come on, Poss. What's the matter?"
"Sometimes, I just don't feel like talking, okay"
"Since when?" I said.
A smirk. "Well fine," he said. "But only 'cause you're twisting my arm."
"Whatever you say."
He shook his head, lowered his eyes and sighed. "I'm going to die."
"I've got news for you, buddy. We all are."
"Wiseguy. I mean if I don't get out of here soon, I am going to die."
Despite the pain, I sat up and craned my neck to see past his feet. "Poss, listen. I know how you must feel, believe me. Your wife, your kid? At least they're still alive."
He jumped down from his bunk and threw his pillow at me. "That's not it, you idiot."
"Hey!" I threw it back.
"I'm getting this really bad feeling. Did you know that dogs can sense disaster before it strikes? I heard about this dog in Thailand, see? It suddenly ran for the hills just before a huge tsunami hit them. Me? I'm that dog."
"I thought you were a possum."
"Come on, Silk."
"Do possums do that too?"
"I'm serious! Something really bad's gonna happen to me in here. I can feel it." If not for the unequivocal fear in his eyes, I would have continued to rag on him.
"Look, Artie," I said, "Lots of people think that—"
A noise like the sound of an approaching truck interrupted me. Possum grabbed the edge of open cell door and peeked outside. "What the hell?" He looked to the right, then to the left. The rumbling crescendoed like a tympani in a Shostakovich symphony. Soon the entire building began to shake.
"Oh my god!" he squealed.
"Take it easy, Poss! It's just an earthquake." I shouted, although it was the biggest one I'd ever experienced. The lockdown klaxon blared. Inmates began shouting. Plaster and concrete rained down. Possum dropped and curled up on the floor, hands covering his head, trying in vain to crawl under the bed.
On all fours, I crept to the bars, took hold and shouted for the guards, who were nowhere in sight. The tremors came in waves, each punctuated with an earth-shattering boom before starting up again.
"I'm gonna die!" Possum cried, as another wave started up. "I'm gonna frikkin' die!" The steel shelf fastened to the wall began to rattle, books and picture frames fell to the ground. Shattered glass spread across the concrete floor.
Then it stopped.
Possum let out a startled gasp. The klaxons continued to squawk as a C.O. barked orders over the PA system for us to stay in our cells. But none of the cell doors could shut or lock. Malfunction.
Scrambling about like a swarm of waterbugs, inmates shouted and swore, some in Spanish, some in English. Again, the tremors started up. Again, the guards attempted to shut the cell doors from the control room. And again, they jammed halfway.
Possum's feral eyes flashed. He grabbed the bunk frame and pulled himself to his feet. "I'm coming, Pam!" He stumbled out of our cell, looked all over the place. God only knew what he was thinking. Whatever the case, he was in no state to be out there in the middle of an earthquake.
Each time I tried to stand, my legs became jello, the prison shook side to side, sifting me like dirt in a prospector's pan, only there was no gold. Possum called back to me. He popped his head back into the cell. His expression had changed from that of panic to wild excitement. "Come on, Silk! Something's going down at the control room!"
I froze.
"I ain't passing this up," he said. "You coming or not?"
&
nbsp; "You want to get yourself shot?"
"Suit yourself. I'm outta here." Away he went. On his own, however, he wouldn't last five minutes. If he didn't get crushed by falling concrete, he'd surely be killed by an inmate or an overzealous C.O. I had to stop him.
Just as I started for the door, something flashed so clearly in my mind that I had to stop. It was there, clear as glass. I sucked in a choking breath of dust.
That image.
It hadn't been mine, this was Possum's nightmare.
A raven, squawking in pain.
Its wing caught in a closed door.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Ironically, the first thing that came to Frank "Bishop" Morgan's mind, as the ground shook, was Saint Paul and Silas in the Phillipian prison. Bishop, however, was no saint. Not by any stretch. And he wasn't going to sit around praying or singing hymns.
If God had any sense of justice, this had to be a sign. Bishop peered across the yard and saw a pack of inmates closing in on three guards. Luther had gotten hold of one of their weapons and shot one of them.
Animals.
Because the quake was so violent, guards in the sentry towers fled their positions. Bishop held onto the chain link fence and waited for the waves under his feet to stop. Each set of tremors seemed worse than the last. He hadn't experienced anything this bad since the '79 El Centro quake. This was far worse.
But he saw an opportunity. A chance to finally get out of this hole, make a run for it, and get a new identity in Mexico. From his waistband, he pulled out his latest insurance policy. Something he'd worked on every moment when the guards weren't looking or listening. It had been honed to perfection, from the crudest materials he could extract from his bed frame—created for a moment such as this. The shank was short, but sharp enough to slit a throat or slice an artery.
It's about time, God, he thought. You owe me. No one had better interfere with this divine restitution. If anyone did, his insurance would cover it. Sure, the premium would be sky high, but the deductible was negligible.
A troop of La Fraternidads brandishing the guns they'd snatched rushed into B-block. The Blacks followed behind. The Reichers as well. Mortal enemies united by the idea of shooting their way out of prison.
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