Wilson lowered his arms. ‘Thanks.’ He rolled his shoulders and twisted his hips from side to side. ‘Feels good.’
‘See what I mean?’ said Coley. ‘Different man.’
On the bench he’d laid out a collection of scissors and scalpels. He unwrapped a sterile blade from its sealed foil envelope and slotted it into place on the handle of one of the scalpels.
‘These’re here fo’ when you need ’em. They sharper than any shank but they no good fo’ stabbin’. Just slashin’. It comes to it you gotta stay outa their way, keep cuttin’ and movin’.’
His hand suddenly darted out towards Wilson’s throat. Without apparent haste Wilson took a step forward and out. The blade missed his neck by half an inch. Coley suddenly found Wilson to his blind side, fist cocked ready to smash the side of his head in. He nodded.
‘Maybe you do after all,’ said Coley. He indicated the scalpel to Devlin. ‘You okay ’bout this?’
They looked at her, big tough guys, and Devlin felt the weight of her gender pressing down on her. She shrugged. ‘My anatomy’s pretty good. I mean I guess I know the best place to cut someone’s throat. But I’ve never killed anyone,’ she said.
Wilson grinned. ‘Shit, neither have we.’
‘I’ve butchered hogs,’ said Coley, ‘and killin’ crackers ain’t no different, ’cept maybe they make more squealin’.’ He put the scalpel back on the bench. ‘Let’s go see what’s goin’ down.’
They went through into Crockett ward. As they entered the murmur of the patients changed to a battery of questions shouted at Coley. Coley waved his hand at them to shut up. At the windows two of the more mobile patients were peering outside. The sound of the thudding from the front doors was louder in here. Each crashing blow was accompanied by a shout, drunken voices raised with the jubilation of hate.
‘Fuck!’ A pause.
‘Fuck!’ A pause.
‘Fuck!’ A pause.
Wilson glanced at Devlin to gauge her reaction. Devlin said, ‘Nice to know they haven’t got much imagination.’
Coley went to the window and peered through the bars beyond the reinforced glass. Devlin looked over his shoulder. In the light from the porch she could see a mob of twenty, maybe thirty men gathered around the foot of the steps. Some of them were rummaging in the cardboard box of drugs. Others had sampled them and were already staggering. On the steps themselves six brutes, led by the two bearded giants, held a long iron girder which they battered with a regular beat into the double doors.
‘Fuck!’
‘Fuck!’
Coley said, ‘Least they won’t get that thing round the bend in the hallway. It’s too long.’
‘Coley, whatsa score, man?’ Vinnie Lopez had pulled himself up to a sitting position. Coley sneered at him with brutal humour.
‘You gonna get yo’ little Mex balls cut off.’
‘My balls from Cuba, muthafucka.’
Devlin watched Wilson’s face. He was staring at Lopez’s emaciated frame as if he didn’t recognise him.
‘Vinnie?’ said Wilson.
Lopez read Wilson’s expression. ‘Where the fuck you been, Wilson? Why you don’t come training with me no more?’
Wilson’s eyes flickered away, like he didn’t know whether or not it was okay to look at the bones sticking through Vinnie’s skin.
‘Been busy, Vinnie.’
‘Fuck, man, you look like shit. You nearly fat as Coley. I gotta get you back down the gym.’
‘That’s what I need,’ said Wilson. He smiled uncertainly.
Coley pushed Wilson out of his way. ‘You fuckers gonna get all the trainin’ you can use. Wilson, you stay here.’ He jerked his head at Devlin. She followed him down the ward. Coley stopped at the desk at the nursing station and took a tube from a drawer. They went out through the barred gate of the ward and into the corridor. Standing between them and the porch hallway were three doors. The first was a simple wooden door, no bars, no bolts, just a mortice lock. It was usually left jammed open. They walked through past the empty TV room, two bathrooms, the linen closet, two storerooms. The next door was heavy, of solid steel plate with a peep slot. Coley unlocked it and pushed it open. Ahead of them, beyond Sung’s office and Bahr’s room was the last of the inner barriers: a gate of inch-and-a-half steel bars. The crunch of the battering ram against the outer doors became deafening. Coley gave her the tube.
‘Glue,’ he said. ‘Some kind of epoxy resin shit. Go squirt it into the lock there case one of ’em got th’intelligence to pick it. I’ll be back in a minute.’
Devlin took the tube and walked towards the steel barred gate. As she approached it the brute crash from the porch resolved into smaller details: the splintering of wood, the rattling of the oblong bolt as it mounted a heroic resistance to the assault, the tortured creaking of the old hasps and hinges. She unscrewed the cap of the glue tube and inserted the applicator into the lock and squeezed. When the glue started dribbling out around the nozzle she pulled it out. From the darkness of the hallway came an ear-splitting clatter, a final bursting of rent timber and wrought iron. Suddenly a swell of voices rose, a whoop of triumph, the sound of scuffling, then a single voice raised above the others. She couldn’t make out any words. The whooping died down into a deathly quiet. Devlin stood rooted to the spot, transfixed by the silence. The silence lengthened. The sound of her own breathing became very loud to her ears.
A figure rounded the corner from the porch and stood alone on the other side of the gate. The angelic, shave-headed boy. Hector Grauerholz. He smiled at her beatifically.
‘Doctor Devlin? I b’lieve you wanted to talk to me.’
A massive charge of adrenaline flooded Devlin’s nervous system and drained her muscles of the power to move. She could neither blink nor swallow. She did not feel frightened. She felt filled from head to toe with a neutral shimmering liquid. At a physiological extreme of fight or flight was a painless, anaesthetic acceptance of death. This was how a rabbit felt staring into the headlights of a truck. Or the bright button eyes shining from the other side of the bars. Grauerholz stepped right up to the door.
‘What was it you wanted to say?’ said Grauerholz.
There was no threat in his tone, but rather a bizarre innocence, a child asking his grade school teacher permission to go take a pee. Devlin’s body trembled and the scientist in her head told her that was good because it meant she was at least capable of some movement. Now concentrate on your larynx, the scientist said, and scream.
Silence.
Grauerholz pressed his face between the bars. Devlin didn’t move. His sour breath drifted into her nostrils.
‘We got Ray Klein, you know.’
Devlin swallowed. Her mouth was dry. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. Funny, she could talk on Klein’s behalf but not her own. The neutral liquid began to contract inside her skin.
‘You don’t let us in we gonna hafta bring him down here and peel the skin off his pecker while you watch.’
The liquid had drained towards her torso from her arms and legs and head. She realised she could move again if she wanted to. Something Coley had said earlier on popped into her mind and out of her mouth.
‘Kiss my ass.’
‘I’d love to,’ said Grauerholz.
He shot his hand between the bars and grabbed her left wrist. He yanked her against the door. His other hand slipped through the bars and groped for her cunt.
‘Gonna eat your pussy too,’ he panted. His mouth gaped in a childish giggle, leering through the bars at her face.
Devlin, mastering her revulsion, crammed the nozzle of the tube of glue into his left eye and squeezed.
‘Eat this instead,’ she said.
With a strangled ‘Fuck’ Grauerholz reeled back from the bars and doubled over, clutching his face, scraping at his eye, a skein of semi-transparent goo entangling his eyelid and fingers.
‘Bubba!’ he wailed.
Suddenly there was a rush of feet and a crowd
of bulky figures came charging round the corner from the hallway. Devlin started to walk slowly backwards. The half-blinded figure of Grauerholz disappeared as sweating hulks crowded against bars, their arms straining towards her as they shouted obscene threats, told her to get them panties off, pleaded with her to suck their cocks and show them her tee-tees. Their eyes were bestial, their mouths gaping, wet with drool. The liquid that had filled her was now concentrated in a swollen balloon in her stomach and she realised that it was her fear. She had been so utterly terrified that she had felt nothing. Now, for the first time since Galindez had pushed her towards the infirmary all those hours ago, she felt really scared. One of the beasts on the other side of the cage took out his penis and started to masturbate.
In her growing up, Catholicism had imbued Devlin with the concept of evil – a numenous force, an unknowable thing-in-itself, a must-be, a kind of prime mover that was not itself phenomenal, for it could not be observed or explained, but which had to be posited if certain phenomena were to occur. Like, say, the mindless mass murder of the helpless. Her scientific education, on the other hand, denied evil. If the sequence of causal dominoes, one falling into the next, of a person’s life could be reconstituted in sufficiently intricate detail then mass murder inevitably popped out at the other end. That process of reconstitution was the matrix of her profession. If an event made no sense it was because of insufficient information, not because of evil. Billions of words of psychological discourse denied its existence, scorned the very idea. Now, as Devlin stared into the writhing mass of matted beards and scarred faces and tattooed arms she knew the thing-in-itself of evil. It was not that she felt it, saw it, smelt it. She felt her fear, she saw their twisting faces, she smelt their bodies. Evil did not make itself available for perception. Evil never survived to stand on trial. But it was there, in them, in the foul air, in the steel bars they rattled with their fists, in the granite blocks that enclosed them.
‘Devlin!’
She turned. Earl Coley was dragging a fire hose through the solid steel door. She ran back up the corridor to help him. A torrent of vocal fury swept after her.
‘Niggercocksuckerbitchfuckencuntfuck.’
As she reached Coley he shouted over his shoulder.
‘Hit it!’
The ancient yellow canvas hose buckled and writhed in Coley’s fists. A jet of water erupted past her and Coley braced himself against the force. His eyes widened as Devlin seized hold of the hose and tore it violently from his grip. She felt herself scream something, she didn’t know what, through clenched teeth, then the power of the water pitched itself against her and she fought back, wrestled the squirming tube down against her hip, felt its energy feed into her savagery. The water jet hurtled down the corridor ahead of her and blasted through the bars of the gate into the fat bellies and bristling beards, the grotesque faces bloated with hate. She strode back down the corridor towards them, the hose unravelling behind her, ignoring a shout from Coley. Her lips were working, her voice scraped harshly in her throat, and again she heard not what she said above the cataclysm of battering water and the war music echoing to a rage of drums inside her skull. One by one she scraped them off the bars of the cage and blew them down the hallway. The masturbator and his seed, the furious giants, all the tattooed cocksucker scum and the filth and pain they would inflict upon her people. She was six feet from the cage and the hose would stretch no further and only one person was left gripping the bars. A psychotic angel, his one-eyed face contorted by a violence without measure, his scrawny hands seized upon the steel with the strength of the insane. Devlin dropped the hose to twist and twitch at her feet and hauled the monkey wrench from her belt. She heard Grauerholz screaming at her in breathless blurts of incoherence.
‘Bitch. Die. Bitch. Die. Fuck. Cunt. Niggers. Niggers. Die. Cunt. Bitch.’
She chopped the wrench into his right-hand knuckles and he whimpered and snatched his fingers away. She raised the wrench again and stared into his single, glaring bloodshot eye. Grauerholz wouldn’t let go. Devlin smashed his left hand from the bar. He staggered back, dangling his bloody knuckles before him. He sobbed with frustration. One of the sodden giants loomed behind him and took him by the shoulders. Grauerholz let himself be led slowly backwards, away. As he went his sobs evoluted into giggles, one eye rolling, the other congealed and distorted by the resin.
‘We be back, niggerfucker. We be back. We be back.’
Devlin watched them disappear around the corner.
‘We be back niggerbitch.’
The corridor before her was suddenly very empty and in the emptiness the hiss of the hose expending itself against the wall seemed like silence. In a spasm that came from nowhere Devlin jackknifed forward and vomited a thin stream of bile into the water swirling at her feet. She held onto the barred door with one hand. She trembled from head to foot and then became very still. After a moment she felt Coley’s hand on her back.
‘You okay?’
Devlin spat sour liquid. She leaned forward and scooped a little water into her mouth, spat again. She scooped more water across her face. She straightened up and looked at Coley and nodded. Coley pulled a paper towel from his pocket and handed it to her. She took it and wiped her face and blew her nose.
‘Thanks.’
Her voice surprised her by coming out steady. Down the corridor behind Coley, Reuben Wilson stood in the steel doorway watching her. He nodded. Devlin nodded back then turned to Coley. Coley seemed stuck for anything to say. Then the thing she’d been looking forward to all day popped back into her mind and she momentarily forgot all she’d just seen and done. She smiled at Coley.
‘I just remembered,’ she said. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’
TWENTY-FIVE
‘WHERE THE FUCK you goin’ with the beaner, man? Nev’s real pissed off with him for lettin’ the jigs loose.’
Colt Greely, his arms covered with tattoos from wrist to shoulder, stood by the B gate office, blocking Klein’s passage through the sallyport into the atrium. He pointed at Galindez.
‘What’s he doin’ in them duds?’
‘He’s coming with us,’ said Klein.
‘I like you personal, Doc, so I’m givin’ you a free warnin’. Don’t fuck with us.’ Greely cast a worried glance over Klein’s shoulder at Abbott. ‘An’ if we need to we got guys take care of the boobie there in ten fucken seconds.’
Klein shone the flashlight in his face and Greely screwed his eyes up. ‘Whose idea was the head, Colt?’ said Klein.
‘What fucken head?’
‘The one someone left on a stool in his cell.’
Greely put his hand on the hilt of the shiv in his belt. ‘I think you better come talk to Mr Agry.’
‘Did you do the cutting or just help hold him down?’ said Klein.
‘Nigger was already dead. Doc. But between you an’ me, we enjoyed it jus’ the same.’
Greely took a half step backwards and Klein decided that Greely had to go down. He decided coldly and without anger. From now on that had to be the way if he was to get through to Devlin. He switched off the flashlight and stuck it in the back of his pants. He smiled. ‘Say, Colt, any of the guys tuning in to the Lakers game?’
Greely was taken off guard. ‘Yeah,’ he said warily. ‘Last I heard the Knicks were five points ahead, second quarter. Why?’
‘I got a lot riding on the result,’ said Klein.
Klein skipped forward and stomped a hundred and eighty pounds of lean weight through the inside of Greely’s right knee. He had practised the move for years but this was the first time he’d tried it for real. When it worked as smoothly as it did he was surprised. Greely’s lateral and anterior cruciate ligaments snapped in one with a dull pop and the knee joint came apart. As Greely’s mouth opened to scream Klein chopped his left hand into his throat and swung the full rotational power of his right hip into mowashi empi, a roundhouse elbow strike to Greely’s left temple. Greely dropped like a sack of shit and la
y twitching and wheezing on the walkway. The combination had taken less than two seconds. Klein looked around the dark cellblock, at the scattered, roving light beams. No one seemed to have noticed. He looked down. Coldly, and without pleasure, he stamped his heel on Greely’s head and the twitching stopped. It reminded him of the painful procedures one had to inflict on patients in medicine: you didn’t enjoy causing hurt, but it was for the best. Greely had been excised like an infected boil. Klein took the shiv from Greely’s belt. He stood up. Galindez was looking at him.
‘Hide him in there,’ said Klein.
Galindez paused then nodded and dragged Greely into the end cell with the charred bodies. Klein turned to Abbott.
‘You’re in the catbird seat, Henry. Where to now?’
Abbott bent down and from the walkway at his feet picked up a heavy ball-peen hammer. The neck and head were crusted with clots of blood. Klein felt a momentary chill as he remembered the crime for which Abbott had been sentenced. Henry raised his arm and pointed with the hammer through the sallyport.
‘The mess hall,’ said Abbott.
Galindez emerged from the cell, saw the pointing hammer, glanced at Klein. Klein handed him Greely’s sharpened screwdriver.
‘Let’s go.’
They walked through the atrium where the forty-foot glass dome now offered no light at all. Through the gates of cell block D Klein saw a faint yellow glow, maybe from candles or fires or home-made oil lamps. An occasional flash beam carved through the darkness. He decided to use his own flash as little as possible so as not to draw attention. It made the going slower but it seemed better than attracting a cloud of psychopathic moths carrying knives. They passed the entrance to C block. Inside was a terrified, murmuring quietude. Six hundred mainly black, Latino and Native American inmates were still sealed helplessly in their cells from third lock and count. They knew what had happened on B and had been listening to the sounds of terror for eight hours. Galindez shrank into the shadows from an approaching flash beam as a bunch of men emerged swaggering and laughing from C block. Redneck accents. Klein felt glad to be white. The beam shone in his face and he froze. A voice he couldn’t place growled from the dark.