49
The next morning, Lizzy sat in the back of the van behind a bowling alley a few blocks from the prison, since shooting up in the prison’s parking lot didn’t seem like the best idea. She knew she could only bring herself to go into the prison one more time, and when she did, she had to be sure she could squeeze Tobe Hanrick. If she didn’t, she would be leaving the job for Philip to do, and she couldn’t imagine he’d be able to kill Tobe without ending up back in jail himself—or worse.
She held the vial she had taken from Mitchell Pieda when they were in Pocopson and that she had been carrying with her ever since. He had said that Louise Mortensen had developed the drug to increase his squeeze—or, as Mitchell called it, the crush. Since her attempt to squeeze Tobe Hanrick on her first visit to the prison had apparently been a complete failure, she figured she needed all the help she could get to make sure she could fulfill her promise to Philip today.
She propped her phone up to rewatch the video of how to inject yourself—you could learn anything on YouTube. She’d inject it into her muscle, since she certainly wasn’t going to try injecting the drug directly into a vein. She gingerly inserted the needle, purchased with surprising ease from a drug store, into the vial and drew out about half the contents. She also wasn’t going to risk giving herself a full dose—plus, it might be good to have some left for Uncle Owen or Andy to analyze when she got back to Pennsylvania.
She winced as she inserted the needle into her arm and depressed the plunger, then quickly bundled the syringe and the vial back into the case and returned them to their hiding place in the seat wells. Then she climbed out of the back of the van and began walking quickly toward the prison. She didn’t want to be behind the wheel of a large vehicle when the drug kicked in.
She had timed it so that she would arrive at the bus stop in the visitor lot just a minute or two before the bus was scheduled to pull in. Since she didn’t know how long the effect of the drug would last, she hoped the bus was running on time. Her heart was beating harder than normal, but no more than could be explained by her hurried walk and the fact that she was on her way to kill a man.
She had expected something dramatic, but she felt pretty normal, although her surroundings did seem unusually noisy. A jarring screech from next to the sidewalk made her jump, but when she searched for the source, she could see only a wren-like bird. It opened its beak and screeched again.
She reached the shelter just as the bus was loading its one other passenger. The two-minute ride seemed to take ten times as long, and she was aware of every squeak of the van’s suspension, every ping of a rock off the undercarriage, the slight groan from the wheel as the driver made the last turn to the visitor entrance.
As before, she had brought only the van key and her license. She placed the key in the plastic basket at the guard’s desk and handed over her license.
The guard looked down at the monitor on his desk. “Don’t know why a young girl like that wants anything to do with that bastard Hanrick,” he said.
Lizzy started. She glanced around, trying to see who the man was talking to, but there was no one nearby. Was he talking into an intercom?
“No telling what’s going to turn them on, I guess,” continued the guard.
Lizzy reddened. “I’m not turned on,” she said.
The guard looked up, startled. “What?”
“I said I’m not turned on,” Lizzy repeated. “And I don’t think you should talk about me like that when I’m standing right here.”
The guard glanced around, then looked back at Lizzy, his eyes narrowing. “I’m not talking about you. And you’d best be careful what you say to me if you’re so intent on visiting your friend Hanrick.” He imbued friend with special venom.
“He’s not my—” began Lizzy.
“Little miss smart ass,” said the guard.
But his lips hadn’t moved.
Lizzy gawked at the guard. “What?”
He put his fists on his hips. “Are you giving me lip?” he said, in the normal manner. But at the same time Lizzy heard, Do I need to put up with this crap?
She realized she was staring at him with her mouth hanging open. “No,” she stammered. “No, sorry, it’s just, well, stressful, you know, to come here like this. And I’m really no friend of Mr. Hanrick, I know the terrible things he’s done. I just …” She trailed off.
The guard dropped his fists from his hips. “You come visiting him an awful lot if he’s not your friend,” he grumbled, and simultaneously she heard, Poor screwed up kid. He handed her her license.
She followed another guard down the hallway and even though she couldn’t see his mouth, she knew he hadn’t said out loud what she heard: Hope Maybelle packed ham and cheese today.
A thought drifted over to her from the other visitor walking beside her, a woman not much older than Lizzy. Thank God I’m only going to have to be making this stupid drive for another month.
Her head whirling, Lizzy stepped into the visiting room. The guard inside the door checked his clipboard. She heard Four and started toward the chair facing the Plexiglas window.
“Four,” she heard the guard call after her.
She lowered herself into the chair, her heart pounding and her fingers twisted together in her lap. What was happening? She heard the buzz of a conversation behind her and resisted the urge to turn and see if anyone in the room was actually talking.
A minute ticked by and she had almost decided she would leave when Tobe stepped into the room on the other side of the Plexiglas, followed by a guard. He sat, grinning, and picked up the handset. She stared at him through the glass.
Good thing Spacy Tracy didn’t wait any longer to start her fangirl visits.
She jumped, then grabbed the handset on her side.
“Hello there, gorgeous,” he said out loud. She might be dumb but she sure is cute.
“Hello,” she replied.
Her thoughts were whirling. She shouldn’t have taken so much of the drug—if that was less than one dose, what must Mitchell Pieda have gone through when Louise Mortensen administered it? Thoughts careened through her mind like the silver ball in a pinball machine. She struggled to focus, and to concentrate this energy toward Tobe.
Can’t wait until I get out of here.
He had only thought it, but she couldn’t help responding. “You’re never going to get out of prison, right?”
He looked momentarily surprised, then smiled a smile that held no joy, only cruelty. “Never say never,” he said, but over that she heard, Any minute now, sweetheart. And then I’m going to find you and—
She wished she could clamp mental hands over her ears to block out his thoughts, but they were only too clear. She hoped she was keeping her horror from showing on her face … but maybe this hatefulness was what she needed to make the squeeze work.
But any minute now—what could he mean by that? According to everything she had read about him, there was no way the justice system would ever let him go.
“Maybe,” she said, trying for an encouraging tone, “there’s some sort of appeal you can make.”
He leaned back as far as the metal cord of the phone allowed and scratched his stomach. “There’s something appealing right here in front of me.” She could hear in her head a more vivid version of what he found appealing.
This time she couldn’t keep her expression neutral, and he laughed. “Hey, sweetheart, you’re the one who came visiting.”
“Maybe …” She swallowed down her disgust. “Maybe if you ever get out, we could meet up.”
Clemson best get his ass in gear, thought Hanrick, because I want to be sure that this piece of ass is still around when I get out.
“You bet, sweetheart,” he said with a grin. “I can’t wait.”
Won’t have to wait too long, if Clemson didn’t screw up the plan.
He had a plan for getting out. And it was a plan that was going to go into effect soon.
So Tobe Hanrick was not j
ust a threat to the men in prison with him—if this plan worked out, he would be out there among the Sarah Pearsons and the Daisy Flowers of the world again. And what would he do to the next young woman that caught his eye? Actually, based on his mental monologue that was still boring into her brain, she had a pretty good idea.
If ever she needed to squeeze someone, now was the time.
She tried to summon the power she had used on Lucia Hazlitt, on Anton Rossi, on Gerard Bonnay, on George Millard, on Wilson at Walmart. She tried to focus on the emotions she had felt during those times and direct them toward Tobe.
But her thoughts kept dissolving into some horrible fun house distortion, with maniacal clowns shrieking with laughter from one side and ghoulish demons screaming from another. She clamped her hand over her mouth, trying to hold back a sob. Tobe grinned at her, enjoying her obvious distress.
Then his eyes shifted to over her shoulder, and the grin changed to a scowl. Lizzy yelped and dropped the phone as a hand touched her shoulder. She turned to see the guard standing at her side.
“You okay, miss?” he asked, his eyes concerned. You okay, miss? she heard.
Lizzy stared at him, trying to clear her head.
“I think it’s time to go,” he said, and took her elbow, gently. Poor little thing.
“She’s an adult,” said Tobe, raising his voice to be heard through the Plexiglas. “She can decide for herself when it’s time to go.”
The man at Lizzy’s side gestured to the guard in the room with Hanrick. “Hanrick’s going back to his cell,” he called. Hope the bastard rots there.
Tobe stood, looking mildly annoyed, but mainly amused. “See you around, darling. Soon, I hope.” Real soon.
“Can I just walk back to the parking lot?” she pleaded with the guard when they reached the visitor entrance.
“No, sorry, can’t let you do that.” Who knows what this nut case would do.
“I can’t wait here for an hour,” Lizzy said, barely holding back another sob.
The guard sighed. “Sit there,” he said, motioning to a molded plastic chair. “I’ll see what I can do.” Frank’s probably just sitting on his ass in the break room— The mental voice faded as he went to a desk behind the metal detector and picked up a phone.
She huddled in the chair, her arms crossed, trying to ignore the voices around her. She had failed. Even with the help of the drug—or maybe because of it—she not only couldn’t help Philip avenge his friend’s death, she couldn’t even find a way to make sure this despicable excuse of a human stayed behind bars. She couldn’t tell the guards. How would she explain how she knew?
In a few minutes, the guard was back. “Okay, your ride’s outside.”
She followed him to the door where the van idled, the driver looking at her curiously. Wonder what happened—they never tell me anything.
“There you go, miss, he’ll take you back to the gate.”
“Thank you,” she said gratefully.
She stepped out the door, then turned at the guard’s voice.
“Miss, don’t come back. We’re putting you on the no-visit list.” Can’t imagine she’d want to anyway.
“No, I won’t.”
She rushed onto the bus and endured two minutes of listening to the driver sing an odd two-part accompaniment—the one inside his head in perfect harmony, the other hummed out loud and off-key.
When the bus pulled up at the stop in the visitor lot, she scrambled off with a gasped “Thank you,” and ran for the bowling alley parking lot where she had left the van. The wren screeched as she passed its nest.
She didn’t even bother with the balky driver’s door lock, but scrambled in on the passenger side and clambered across the passenger seat into the driver’s seat. She turned the key in the ignition, wanting to put as much distance between her and Tobe Hanrick as possible. Then she thought better of trying to operate the vehicle in her current condition and switched the engine off. She gripped the steering wheel and took deep breaths until her heartbeat had slowed to a near normal rate.
What should she do? She had to make sure Hanrick didn’t get out of Williams—or, if he did, that he didn’t get far.
There was nothing she could tell the guards that they would believe. She couldn’t claim that Tobe had told her about his plans during her visit—there had been a guard standing right behind him the whole time. She thought back to their conversation. They had talked about him getting out of prison. Maybe she could claim that one of his answers had been some sort of coded message that his escape was imminent.
But she realized that was a bad idea in at least two ways. One was that it would put her right in the middle of an investigation into some conspiracy to break Tobe Hanrick out of prison, and that wouldn’t turn out to be good for anyone. The second was that they already thought she was crazy and probably wouldn’t believe anything she told them.
She cast about for other options. She couldn’t call Uncle Owen and risk upsetting him while he recovered from his heart attack. She didn’t want to get Andy and Ruby involved. If only she could get in touch with Philip.
Then she thought of the unidentified calls she had received—the calls that she had assumed were telemarketers. Maybe Philip was trying to get in touch with her. Maybe he didn’t have his phone and was using someone else’s. It couldn’t hurt to try—if it really was a telemarketer, she would just hang up.
She got out her phone and hit Call Back.
50
Philip walked down the dirt road that led from the trailer to the highway, hoping to clear his lungs of the acrid cigarette smoke that seemed to hang in the air of Wayne’s trailer even when he wasn’t actually smoking. Above him, the stores and houses of Jerome proper clung like mountain goats to the side of Cleopatra Hill.
He was about to turn around and head back to the trailer when his phone buzzed with an incoming call. He glanced at the caller ID: it was the number he had used to try to contact Lizzy. He stabbed Accept. “Hello?”
He heard a deep, gulping breath. “Philip, it’s Lizzy.” And she burst into tears.
He pressed the phone to his ear, as if its proximity would bring her closer. His heart thudded. “Lizzy, are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m okay.” He heard another breath, smoother this time, and a sniff. “I’m okay,” she repeated, as if trying to convince herself.
“What’s wrong?”
She laughed tremulously. “Where should I start?”
Then she fell silent, and after a few seconds, Philip asked, “Where are you?”
“Can I tell you?”
“Yeah. If you’re referring to my advice to Andy not to let me know where you are, that’s not a concern anymore—or at least not at the moment.”
“You’re not with whoever got you away from the hospital?”
“No—I can tell you about that later, but I’m footloose and fancy free at the moment. Where are you?”
“I’m in Williams, not far from the prison. I was going to—take care of Tobe Hanrick, like you asked me to.”
“Jesus, I thought you were in Pennsylvania! I told Andy to tell you that you didn’t have to do that—” he began, his voice angry.
“Andy told me. But I had told you I’d take care of him—”
“You promised that you’d think about it—”
“I know. But then I read about what he’d done, and I thought that if anyone ever deserved to be squeezed, he did.”
Philip stepped off the road and sat down on a rock. “Lizzy, I can’t believe I asked you to do that—it was so wrong of me. I was so angry and I didn’t see any way I could take care of him myself. I’m taking it back. I’m not sure how, but I’m going to take care of him. It’s important to me that I do it myself.”
“You might have to.”
“What do you mean?”
“I went to the prison like a visitor, just like you suggested—”
“Lizzy—” Philip dropped his face into his hand.
“�
��but I couldn’t do it. The first time I think it was because I couldn’t be scared of him because there was nothing he could do to me.”
“The first time?”
“Yeah. I went there twice.”
“What happened the second time?”
She hesitated. “Are you sure no one’s listening in?”
“As sure as I can be,” said Philip.
“I wanted to be sure I could squeeze him, so I took some of that drug that Louise had given Mitchell.”
Philip shot upright. “Lizzy—”
“Don’t worry, it didn’t hurt me,” she interrupted him. “But … I can read minds.”
“You can … what?”
“I can read minds, like Mitchell. He needed the drug to make his squeeze stronger, for me it made me be able to read minds. I could hear what the guards were thinking—just like they were talking, but their lips weren’t moving. And that made it even less possible for me to squeeze Tobe Hanrick. Not only did I still have a wall of Plexiglas between us, and guards everywhere, so I couldn’t feel scared of him, but the experience of being able to hear what people were thinking was so disorienting—I couldn’t concentrate. I could hear what he was thinking, too. He’s going to try to escape.”
“Escape?”
“Yes, and he seemed pretty sure that it’s going to work out.”
Philip tried to process what he was hearing. “Could you tell when?”
“Not exactly, but soon, I think. Very soon.”
Philip stood up and paced back and forth across the deserted dirt road. “This might actually work in our favor. If Hanrick’s going to get out of Williams, I really can take care of him myself. Or,” he added with a sardonic laugh, “the guards will take care of him for us when he tries.”
“How will you know when he’s out?”
“Oh, I think it will be clear to everyone when Tobe Hanrick is a free man,” said Philip grimly. “He’s someone who likes to leave his mark.” He thought for a moment. “You go somewhere else—anywhere else—and check into a hotel. I’ll wait for news, and then when I’ve taken care of Hanrick, we’ll meet up.”
The Iron Ring Page 21