by Ted Dekker
I crossed to the door and cautiously peered through the eyehole. On the landing stood a rather large woman, warped by the lens so that she looked like a bowling pin wearing a blue dress. I released both dead bolts, cracked the door a foot, and peered out.
“Renee Gilmore?” the woman asked.
“I’m sorry, who are you?”
In her hands she held what appeared to be a shoebox. She glanced around nervously. Her brown hair hung to her shoulders, crinkled by a bad do-it-at-home perm—surely she hadn’t actually paid someone to do that to her. She towered over me, all 250 pounds of her.
“You’re Renee Gilmore?”
“Yes.”
“Can I come in?”
“Come in? Why?”
“I’d rather not say, not out here.”
“Why not?”
She hesitated, fiddling with her thick fingers. Her pink polish was a good two weeks old, judging by the growth at the base of her nails. Chipped and scratched.
“Do you know a priest at Basal?” she asked in a husky voice.
Every alarm in my mind clanged to life. First a phone call, and now this? The woman went from being messy tramp to lifeline in less time than I could think it. I scanned the parking lot and sidewalks. “You’re alone?”
“Yes.”
“Who are you? How did you get here?”
“Constance. I got here on the bus. That’s all I can say.” She looked around again, like someone frightened she might be seen talking to me. If she was scared, I had even more reason to be.
I pulled the door open. “Hurry.”
“Thank you.”
As soon as she stepped in, I closed and locked the door. “Don’t touch anything.” That sounded rude. “I mean, I just cleaned. So what do you know about Danny? Have you seen him?”
“No. No, it’s not like that. I—”
“But you’ve heard from him? Or about him?”
“I was told to deliver this.” She held out the shoebox.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will it explode?”
“Hasn’t yet. Please, just take it.”
I took the box from her and examined the lid, which was sealed shut with masking tape. No name, no address, just an old Nike shoebox that held something other than a pair of shoes, judging by how light it was.
“I should open it?” I asked.
“Not now. I have no idea what it is. I was just told to give it to you, that’s all.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“You have to believe me, I have no idea what it’s about.” She hesitated. “But there’s something else.”
“What?”
She glanced around as if putting off saying what she really wanted to say.
“Do you mind if I have a drink of water?”
Not sure what else to do, I set the box on the counter, crossed to the cupboard, pulled out a glass, and filled it from the filtered-water spout at the sink. I handed her the glass. “Here.”
“Can I sit down?”
My first thought was No, we don’t have time for sitting, just say it! And why’d you bring me a box? But I immediately realized how absurd that would sound.
So I rounded the counter and waved her into the living room. “Sure, sit.”
“I have to get back. If Bruce finds out I told you this he’d flip his lid.”
“Bruce who? Tell me what?” She’d crossed to the couch but hadn’t taken a seat. “Sit down.”
Constance settled to the couch. Her glass was still full. She was trying to work up the nerve to tell me something. Already, my mind was seeing Danny lying in the center of the prison yard, bleeding on the ground with a shank sticking out of his back.
“Please, just say it. What’s happened to him?”
“Nothing that I know of. But he might be in some trouble.”
“What trouble?”
“I talked to Bruce two days ago. Bruce Randell. He’s in Basal.”
“Your husband?”
“No.”
“Girlfriend? Sister?”
“Let’s just say we know each other. He went down on a distribution conviction eight years ago and was transferred to Basal after it opened.”
I sat down on the edge of the stuffed chair facing her. “And? What about the priest?”
“If this gets back to Bruce…He’s got connections on the outside.”
“Whatever you tell me, I swear, not a soul will know.”
She nodded once. “Bruce once told me he was sexually molested by a priest when he was a boy. No one can know that or he’d hit the ceiling. For two years, when he was thirteen. He went back when he was eighteen and killed the priest who did it. I’ll deny that if it ever comes back on me.”
“It won’t. I promise.”
“I’m only telling you so that you know why I’m here.”
“Which is what? He hates priests and Danny’s a priest?”
“He talked about the priest transferring to Basal and said I’d be getting a box he wanted me to deliver to someone. He said I’d know who when I got the box.”
“Me?”
She stared at me and nodded once.
My heart was pounding. The phone call suddenly made more sense to me. But why me? How could Bruce know about me? Or get my number? Two thoughts crammed into my mind. The first was that he knew more than a few things about me.
The second was that both Danny and I were dead.
I stood up and looked at the shoe box. “What’s in the box?”
“I swear, I don’t know what’s in the box. Money, for all I know. I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
In that moment, confronted by what seemed like certainty, I felt my mind rewinding, becoming the mind of the woman I’d been three years earlier, before Danny had fixed me.
“Why didn’t you go to the warden with this?” I asked.
“I can’t. You don’t understand, I should have just dropped the box off and left.”
“Who gave it to you?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? They gave it to you, right? They were wearing a mask?”
“It was left for me with a note with your name and address on it. I’m not going to sit here and tell you how or why I have to do this. Let’s just say I have a conscience. But Bruce can hurt anyone he wants to, including me.”
So then. There it was. We were dead. But I wasn’t feeling fear; I was feeling rage. The kind I hadn’t felt for three years. And that box was calling to me, daring me to open that lid.
I sat down and drilled her with a stare. “That’s it?”
“I had to tell you.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
She shrugged. “Warn the priest.”
“Warn him? I can’t even get a phone call through to him! They’ve cut me off!”
The woman pushed herself up using the armrest. “Can he handle himself?”
I couldn’t believe she was just going to dump this on me and leave. “He’s in for murder, isn’t he?” I said. “But he doesn’t like to hurt people. You don’t know anyone else on the inside I can get to? Someone in food services? A cop? A guard?”
“Not at Basal, no way. I’m sorry, honey, I don’t know what to tell you. I did what I had to, you understand. With any luck he sees it coming and gets himself put in segregation.”
She headed for the door, stepped outside without a backward glance, and left me alone in silence.
I locked the door behind her and stared at the old shoe box. I knew whatever it contained couldn’t be good. Images of white anthrax powder and homemade bombs filled my head. But there was that breathy phone call, and there was Bruce, and there was Danny, and there was that box. I had to know what was in that box.
So I withdrew a knife from the drawer, sliced the masking tape, and lifted the lid.
Inside the box lay some tissue paper. On that tissue paper sat a small plastic bag. There was a bloody
finger in the bag.
4
BEYOND THE ADMINISTRATIVE wing, Basal looked fairly typical for any newly constructed prison, Danny thought. But as Bostich ran down a short summary of the layout and basic expectations, it was clear that there was far more to the facility’s inner workings than first met the eye.
The large cross-shaped structure was divided into four operational wings referred to by their compass location with a large, domed common area at its hub. The two-story north wing, where Danny was admitted, held all administrative functions, which centered on the warden. The south wing was used for services including the infirmary, food preparation and dining, laundry, maintenance, commissary, and programs. Members were housed in one of three wings. The longer west or “commons” wing consisted of ninety cells with a maximum capacity of 180 members. The shorter east or “privileged” wing consisted of fifty units called rooms rather than cells, many of which were single occupancy. And the basement or “meditation” floor was reserved for up to fifty less-responsive members.
There were two yards—one small patch off the hub, and a much larger park that surrounded the entire facility, a privileged area reserved only for the east wing members accessed through the back of their quarters.
Bostich led Danny through a secured door into the hub, where perhaps forty members loitered around fixed tables or on brown couches that faced a small television playing HGTV. The rest were either on the yard, in the rec room, or in their cells, Bostich said. Commoners weren’t permitted to work.
Most prisons had work programs ranging from common maintenance to skilled labor—employment that kept inmates occupied for six to eight hours a day, earning a maximum of ninety-five cents an hour, half of which went to pay fines. A man dressed in jeans and a blue button-front shirt paused his mopping of the gray floor and leaned on his mop to watch Danny. Jeans. An employee, yes, but an inmate? The privileged class.
Odd. Work, however menial the task, tended to keep prisoners occupied and out of trouble. Here, that privilege was reserved for those who’d graduated to the east wing. The employed would control the prison’s entire underground commerce, which in most prisons consisted of extorting, hustling, and trading of both legal goods, such as potato chips or coffee, or contraband, such as tobacco, prison brew, or drugs. Goods smuggled in or purchased by the wealthy at the commissary were the currency in most prisons, and those prisoners who had the most to trade typically had the most power, just like in all societies.
Giving those in the privileged wing that balance of power by offering them an easy way to make extra money would create class envy. Violence or threats of violence would be used to extort or rob the upper class in many prison systems.
Evidently, Basal wasn’t home to typical prisoners.
The walls and floor were concrete, painted a shiny gray. Guarded steel doors controlled passage into each of the four wings. Black-and-yellow-striped tape ran along the floor, marking walkways and restricted areas. No pictures or images on the walls, no plants or decorations of any kind.
The silence struck Danny as he followed Bostich across the hub toward a guarded door with a sign that said Commons above it. The hub was massive, hollowed like an echo chamber beneath a large glass dome, and yet an eerie quiet hovered about the several dozen members who quietly watched him. No one seemed to be speaking.
They were all dressed in the same blue slacks and tan short-sleeved shirts, staring with interest. A cross-section of ages was represented, but fewer younger prisoners than at Ironwood.
Respect was critical in prison, not of correctional officers as much as of other inmates. Cross into the personal space of a CO and you were likely to be ignored unless you were belligerent. But disrespecting another inmate with anything from a harsh look to an angry word could earn you unending trouble.
Take a man’s freedom and he will cling to those few needs that make him human: his need for respect and his need for dignity. Take those and he will become an animal.
Treat a man like you treat an animal, and to the extent he is able, he will treat you like one. Respect and dignity—these were the lifeblood of the convict code, a convention that had as much if not more bearing on how a prison ran than the official prison protocol.
What few on the outside seemed to realize was that humans were human, regardless of which society they lived in. Government, hierarchy of power, and expectation of social conformity were as real in the prison society as in any other. Rob the members of their dignity and they would only learn to rob others of theirs. Hence, the monster factory.
Bostich nodded at a brown-headed, lanky CO standing by the entrance to the commons wing. “Danny Hansen, 297, new arrival.”
The guard checked a box on his clipboard. “Seventy-one.”
“Let’s go.”
Bostich led him down a wide hall with two floors of barred cells on the left. Metal stairs rose to a second tiered row with a four-foot walkway for access to cells set back from the railing. Same gray floor, same painted cinderblock walls as in the hub. All of it scrubbed clean and shiny new. A guard station manned by a young officer who leaned back in his chair behind several monitors was centered on the opposite wall. Beyond him was a passage to what Danny guessed to be the showers. He’d seen no public phones yet.
The cell Bostich took him to was located on the second tier, three quarters of the way down the hall. The front wall of each cell consisted of vertical bars and a barred door, allowing unrestricted view of the interior.
“Here you go.” Bostich opened the unlocked door to a cell with the number 71 stenciled above it. “Everything you’ve been issued is on the top bunk, including a handbook with the rules. I suggest you familiarize yourself with it.”
“Thank you.” Danny stepped inside and scanned the cell.
Eight feet wide if you wore large shoes, maybe twelve deep. Two long strides by four shorter strides. A bunk bed on the right, opposite two standing lockers. Beyond the bunk, a single metal sink attached to a single metal toilet, no seat.
On the top bunk, his kit. Two additional pair of blue slacks, two more tan shirts, two white T-shirts, two pair of white boxer shorts, two pair of black socks, one yellow towel, one yellow washcloth, one set of white sheets, one gray blanket with blue stripes at the top, one bar of soap half the size of his fist, a tube of Crest toothpaste, one yellow toothbrush, one red disposable razor with a worthless blade, and two roles of single-ply toilet paper. These and the clothes he wore were now his only earthly possessions. They’d taken the rest when he’d entered the facility.
His cellie was an organized, educated man, judging by the clean sink, the folded clothes on the end of his bed, and the philosophy books stacked neatly on the top of the first locker. No TV, no music player, no electronics of any kind in sight.
The cell door clanked shut but remained unlocked. Lockdown would come at night with lights out.
When Danny turned around, Bostich was gone. There was no further explanation of the prison protocol, no introduction to the facilities, no assembly-line pickup of issued items.
But clearly, that was part of the program. He was being watched carefully. What he did now would determine what happened to him.
And he would do what he always did. Time.
He would go through the motions, naturally. He would eat what they gave him to eat, try to sleep when they told him to sleep, walk around the yard when they allowed him to do so, avoid the hustlers, read anything and everything he could get his hands on, make polite conversation with whoever was predisposed to join him, and he would think.
But mostly he would simply do his time, decades of it, trying to figure out who he really was and then attempting to live a life behind bars that allowed him to be that self. Because truthfully, behind bars a man has only himself and time.
His memory of his past life hung in his mind like a distant fog, surreal now after three years. It was hard to believe he’d been that fifteen-year-old boy in Bosnia whose mother and sisters were raped
and killed…that child who became a man when he took a pistol and shot the men who destroyed them…that young soldier who became feared for his efficiency.
And that priest, who took the lives of far too many people when he became their judge, jury, and executioner. Through it all he’d learned two things about himself, the part of him that had been buried under years of suffering and rage in a brutal war: he would far rather be a lover than a fighter, and he made for a terrible priest. And yet he would always be known for that, wouldn’t he?
The priest who killed.
Danny had finished making his bed and putting his few items in the second locker when the rap of knuckles on steel interrupted his thoughts. At the door stood an older, skinny man with gray hair and a matching goatee, grinning. One tooth missing. Eyes as bright as the blue sky.
“Hello, cellie.” The man opened the door, stepped in, and extended his hand. “Simon Godfrey’s my name. Welcome to your basal cell in-carcinoma, home of the diseased, deviants unfortunate enough to be caught. Basal, institute for the wayward.”
Danny took the cool, thin hand. “Danny Hansen.”
“Good name,” the man said, still grinning. His eyes sparkled with life. “The word is you’re a priest. Now, what on earth is a priest doing in this sanctuary for the wicked?”
The man was either daft or exceptionally witty, and Danny thought the latter. Translation: What are you in for? It was typically a guarded question on the inside, not the first question asked. Godfrey was either too new or too long in the system to care.
“How did you know I was a priest?”
“Everyone knows, that’s why. The captain announced it two days ago. A priest is coming, he said.”
“The captain?”
“Bostich.”
“He said that?”
“He did. And you know what that means.”
