The Last Act: A Novel

by Brad Parks

  All for six months of my time.

  It was a good deal. And now it was time to seal it.

  I took a deep breath, stuck out my chest, and said, “Guilty.”

  ACT TWO

  It’s time to trust my instincts, close my eyes, and leap.

  —Elphaba, from Wicked

  CHAPTER 12

  Three hundred minutes. That’s how much monthly phone time the Bureau of Prisons permitted Mitch Dupree and every other inmate at FCI Morgantown who had managed not to lose his privileges.

  In Dupree’s case, that meant three hundred minutes to stay current with everything in his wife’s and kids’ lives—all in the desperate hope that when he got out eight-plus years from now, he might still have some shred of a relationship with them.

  It worked out to ten minutes a day, and Dupree tried to keep each call at that length, rationing himself so it would last. The Bureau of Prisons called the accounts TRULINCS, an acronym for Trust Fund Limited Inmate Communication System. With a stress on the “limited.” Mitch set the timer on his watch to keep track of call length. The kids knew they had but so much time each day, and they prepared for it, like they were readying to make a report.

  The fourteen-year-old, Charlie, typically had no problem staying within the limit. Everything that wasn’t good was fine. Everything else was “I dunno.” Mitch used to worry his son was holding out on him or that the boy resented his father for getting locked up. Then Mitch remembered that most modern fourteen-year-old boys actually don’t have that much to say about anything that didn’t pertain to video games.

  The eleven-year-old, Claire, was more talkative—when she was in the mood and wasn’t being a sullen preteen. She talked about her friends, and her ex-friends, and which ex-friends were about to become current friends, and so on. Mitch actually took notes so he could remember who was in, who was out, and who was somewhere in between. When it came to girl politics, Congress had nothing on middle school.

  If Claire and Charlie used all ten minutes, Dupree and his wife, Natalie, would postpone whatever they had to talk about until the next day. The children came first. The grown-ups got the table scraps.

  The previous three days, the kids had taken up all the time. But on this day, Charlie had mumbled a few unmemorable things about band practice and Claire had been betrayed only once, leaving a full two minutes for the parents.

  Mitch knew how lucky he was to still have Natalie. Despite the burdens his incarceration imposed on her, she had stood by her man. Many of the other inmates weren’t as fortunate. The ones who weren’t in the midst of divorce when they arrived soon found themselves there.

  “I miss you, baby,” Mitch gushed as soon as the kids were clear of the line. He didn’t like them to know how much he was suffering, being away from them.

  “We don’t have time for that,” Natalie said softly. “They’re watching me again.”

  Mitch felt this like a punch. “Who?”

  “I don’t know. They didn’t look Mexican, but . . . They were just sitting across the street in a car, trying to blend in. A man and a woman. I saw them with one of those satellite dish thingies. They started aiming it at us as soon as we got on the phone last night.”

  This was one of the many downsides of their financial situation. No longer did they live in the gracious home set well back from the road in the tony Garden Hills section of Buckhead. They had cashed it out—after the lawyers had eaten through all their savings—and downsized to a three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath, sixteen-hundred-square-foot saltbox with gray siding. The place was being marketed as a teardown. It didn’t even have central air.

  The only real selling point for the Duprees was that it allowed the kids to keep going to the same schools. So they bought it, even though it meant living in a small house that was practically on top of the street, offering no privacy—auditory or otherwise.

  “Then it’s probably not the cartel,” Mitch said. “If it’s a listening device like that, it’s the FBI or the DEA. They can’t get a warrant to tap the phones anymore so . . .”

  And the Bureau of Prisons was possibly listening to him speculating about it. He didn’t care. If he was right, he wasn’t telling the government anything it didn’t already know.

  “Are they out there right now?” he asked.

  “I don’t see them, but . . .”

  But that didn’t mean anything. They could be hiding anywhere. A crowded neighborhood gave them endless cover.

  “I wish they would go away,” Natalie said softly. “It’s so creepy just to have them . . . out there. Listening. And watching. Are you sure we can’t . . . I was watching this YouTube video about witness protection. I bet they’d send us someplace warm, someplace—”

  “We’ve talked about this. There’s the kids and their school.”

  “The kids care about their father more than they care about what school they go to.”

  “All the more reason we can’t do WITSEC. The moment I hand over those documents, I’ll be as good as dead.”

  “Yes, but maybe—”

  “They’d find us. Guaranteed. This is the only way we stay alive.”

  She sighed. “I just don’t know how much longer I can take it with these people out there. What if it is the cartel and they decide to come after me?”

  “They wouldn’t dare. They know what I have.”

  “I need more protection than that.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do.”

  Like that wasn’t already obvious.

  “I have to go,” Mitch said. “Ten minutes. I love you.”

  He didn’t keep the line open long enough to hear whether she replied.

  CHAPTER 13

  Perhaps I had watched too many old movies, but I was expecting to be transported to prison in some aging rattrap school bus with caged windows, surrounded by scarred men who would look at me like I was the fresh fish they were about to eat for dinner.

  The reality was more comfortable and less interesting. It was just a white SUV with a yellow US Marshals star on the side. I was the only prisoner. And if I could ignore the fact that I was shackled in three places, the ride through the early-fall hills of West Virginia was really quite pleasant.

  It was October 9. The thirty-five days between my pleading and my sentencing had been uneventful. I was free on that personal recognizance bond. Agents Ruiz and Gilmartin had gone back to the field office in New York, showing up roughly once a week to collect receipts, pay our tab at the Holiday Inn, and make sure I wasn’t getting cold feet.

  They had guided me through setting up my commissary account and my TRULINCS account, which would help me survive and communicate. They had also been preparing me mentally for life on the inside. Their main point—and they found various ways to make it—was that I couldn’t trust anyone.

  “Remember,” Gilmartin had told me several times, “everything your fellow inmates tell you will likely be a lie.”

  Otherwise, Amanda and I had been on our own. I worked out and began a score for a musical, tinkering with an I-want song about an out-of-work actor who aspires to the role of a lifetime. The melody was a struggle. The words came more easily. I have lots of experience at longing.

  I had also spent a lot of time browsing the Internet, learning all I could about prison generally and FCI Morgantown specifically.

  Amanda painted with more urgency than ever. After months of e-mailing, Hudson van Buren had proposed a face-to-face meeting. Amanda downplayed it, merely deeming it a sign her unofficial apprenticeship was progressing well. But she was a master of never letting her hopes get too high. Why would van Buren propose a meeting if not to offer her a showing?

  We eased into a pattern of working during the morning and into the afternoon, then knocking off around four. We had a lot of sex—not having to worry about getting pregnant was sort of awes
ome that way. But sometimes we just went for a walk, then watched movies.

  It was perfectly lovely except for Amanda’s morning sickness, which often extended into the afternoon and evening. I wouldn’t have been surprised if our baby came out craving Saltines and Gatorade. That was all Amanda could get to stay down some days.

  Once or twice—well, okay, more like twice-and-a-half—I broached the issue of marriage, proposing that we run down to the local courthouse and make ourselves official before I went off to the big house. Each time, Amanda hastily swatted the notion aside. She wanted us to be “settled” first.

  Like I needed more pressure to get this done.

  During our separation, Amanda decided to live with my mother in Hackensack, because it was closer to the New York art scene. I didn’t know how that dynamic was going to play—they got along now, right?—but I acted like it was a champion idea. Mostly, I was hoping my mother would quietly sever the Achilles tendon of any guy who made a run at my fiancée.

  The trickiest part of those otherwise happy thirty-five days was when my probation officer came around to complete the presentencing report. He wanted to know everything—and I mean everything—about Pete Goodrich, forcing me to invent all kinds of details about myself. Who knew I had been in the Peace Corps after college? Or that I coached JV soccer?

  Amanda impersonated “Kelly,” Pete’s wife, for a brief phone interview. We told the probation officer that we had lost our house to foreclosure and that she and our three kids were already in California with Kelly’s parents.

  Also over the phone, Gilmartin ended up posing as the high school principal who had hired me; Danny Ruiz pretended to be the history department chair and my former next-door neighbor, Dave Cola. My mother got to be my mother. At least she didn’t have to fake being distraught about her little boy going off to prison.

  In what felt like a very West Virginia thing to do, I put Amanda’s name down as my “cousin” in the relatives section of my presentencing report questionnaire. I had learned from the FCI Morgantown handbook that if she wasn’t in my presentencing report, I couldn’t put her on my visitors list. Not that we were planning to have her visit. But it was nice knowing she could. Just in case.

  Once completed, the presentencing report said I was a nice guy who made a terrible mistake, and it recommended I get ten years. The number staggered me, even if I wouldn’t actually have to serve it. Ten years. It sounded like a life sentence.

  In his generosity, David Drayer knocked that down to eight years, which was still astonishing. I kept reminding myself I would be out in six months. Otherwise I got a little light-headed. Drayer packaged the sentence reduction with a request that I serve my time at FCI Morgantown, near my alleged “home” in Shepherdstown. The judge generously went along with both recommendations, which is how I ended up in that white van, headed west.

  About two hours into our journey, around noontime, we stopped at FCI Hazelton to pick up another inmate. Again, I was braced for the worst: a skinhead with facial tattoos, a gangbanger whose arms were thicker than my neck, a lunatic in a straitjacket drooling from all the drugs the medical unit had force-fed him to keep him sedated.

  Instead the first real prisoner I interacted with was a solidly built middle-aged white man with salt-and-pepper hair. He slid into the seat next to me with a smile and a friendly nod.

  “Hi,” he said. “Rob Masri.”

  “Pete Goodrich,” I replied in my Pete Goodrich voice, which came easily after a month of rehearsing it.

  “First day?” he asked.

  I was still wearing my civilian clothes, marking me as a rookie, so I said, “Yep.”

  Pete Goodrich was the kind of guy who said “yep” instead of “yes.”

  “And what brings you to the Bureau of Prisons?” he asked.

  “Thought we weren’t supposed to tell each other that sort of thing. The websites say, ‘Do your own time, keep your head down,’ all that stuff.”

  “Oh yeah, that,” he said. “There’s a place for that. But you’ll find that gets pretty lonely after a while. My theory is this whole thing sucks, but it’ll suck a little less if I have friends. I’m guessing you could use one right now.”

  “Yep,” I allowed.

  “So, in that case, I’m Rob Masri, and I’m a lawyer from Charlottesville, Virginia, or at least I was until I decided to buy stocks based on privileged information a client gave me. Now, thanks to a prosecutor who decided to make his career on my back, I’m in the midst of an eleven-year sentence. Not that I’m bitter about that.”

  He flashed a smile. Everything my fellow inmates would tell me would likely be a lie, according to Gilmartin, but his story seemed plausible enough.

  “What’s your deal?” he asked.

  Here goes nothing. “I was a teacher in Shepherdstown, West Virginia,” I said. “Got desperate one day and robbed a bank. It’ll cost me eight years.”

  “Nice,” he said. “And you’re heading to Morgantown?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Why good?”

  “Because Morgantown is a vacation compared to most places. Certainly compared to that place,” he said, then jerked a thumb toward Hazelton, now growing smaller as our van descended the hill it was set on. “That’s medium security. Maybe that doesn’t sound so different from minimum security, but it’s like going backwards about ten thousand years in human evolution. You got all the worst elements in there: the gangs, the sexual predators, the guys who will just as soon fight you as look at you. Whitey Bulger got pummeled to death right inside those walls. I’ll spare you the rest of the horror stories. Just, trust me, whatever you do for the next eight years, do not get yourself sent to a place like that.”

  “But why’d you end up there?” I asked. “Insider trading, that’s not violent. And I’m assuming you didn’t have a record. Shouldn’t you have been in minimum all along?”

  “Yeah, except you need to have ten years or less on your sentence before you’re eligible for a place like Morgantown. They actually made me serve close to two years at Hazelton. They told me the whole time it was because there were no beds in Morgantown. Turns out Morgantown has a capacity of thirteen hundred and they only have about nine hundred guys there right now. Go figure.”

  He shook his head. “But you’ll learn that’s the Bureau of Prisons. They’ll act like they have all these rules and are doing everything by the book, but there have been so many past edicts and promulgations from on high, there are at least three policies contradicting the policy they’re enforcing. The only consistency is inconsistency.”

  Masri offered this and other pointed observations about the world I was about to enter as we got back on the highway and continued our journey toward Morgantown. He quieted only when we exited the highway. After a few turns, we slowed as we passed a short wire fence that wouldn’t have stopped a mildly determined dachshund.

  Beyond it lay FCI Morgantown, which I recognized from photos I had seen on the Internet. It was set in a small bowl, surrounded by hills on all sides. A softball field and some low-slung buildings were spread out along paved paths, with plenty of green space in between. A few trees dotted the rolling landscape. A small stream bisected the valley.

  Once we made the turn into the facility, the wire fence turned split log, like they had put Abraham Lincoln in charge of security. On the south side of the facility, which backed up against the largest of the hills, there appeared to be no barrier at all other than trees.

  There were also no guard towers, no sniper turrets, no defensive structures or prisony looking things of any kind. Dotting the grounds were a few tall light stanchions, but even they weren’t the massive floodlights I might have expected.

  All in all, it was about as intimidating as your local community college. I recalled from my reading that FCI Morgantown had originally been the Robert F. Ke
nnedy Youth Center, constructed while he was attorney general, then named for him after his assassination. It retained that kid-friendly feel.

  “Here we are,” Masri said as we passed a small, manned security booth. “Welcome to Camp Cupcake.”

  * * *

  • • •

  During my last briefing from Rick Gilmartin, he told me FCI Morgantown was organized in what they called a unit management system. That meant each prisoner was assigned to a housing unit. Your work detail and any classes you might take were not segregated by unit, but pretty much everything else was. You ate with your unit, slept with your unit, recreated with your unit.

  All in all, he made it sound a bit like Hogwarts.

  My first job, then, was to make sure the intake officer in the Admission and Orientation Program—the Sorting Hat, as it were—placed me in the same unit as Mitchell Dupree. And the FBI couldn’t help. Danny and Rick had reminded me of this a number of times: Their influence stopped at the main gates.

  The one thing Rick had been able to tell me was that, according the FBI’s Bureau of Prisons liaison, Dupree was housed in Randolph. It was the only one of the five residential cottages with a wheelchair ramp. And that, I had decided, would be my ticket in.

  So it was that when Pete Goodrich disembarked from the van, he had developed a slight but persistent limp.

  I limped from the photograph station to fingerprinting, then to being strip-searched. I limped as I accepted my new clothing: khaki shirt, khaki pants, a black belt, and black steel-toed boots, an ensemble that was actually quite sharp-looking. If you were color-blind.

  My pants were, naturally, too big for me. They gave me safety pins to cinch them and a promise to locate pants that actually fit sometime later.

  I didn’t complain. I just kept limping as they gave me my operations handbook, which was a few dos and a whole lot of don’ts.