Go-Between

by Lisa Brackmann

  She took in a deep breath. Stay calm, she told herself.

  “I have something of Danny’s,” she said. “I think you should see it.”

  “All right. I’ll give you an address.”

  He already sounded wary. Good.

  “I can email it. I think you’ll want to see it right away.”

  A long moment of silence. Michelle waited.

  “You’ll need a pen,” he finally said. “I’m going to give you an IP address.”

  She ordered a coffee of the day and bought a bottle of Eos water, which was supposed to be ethically sourced. Found a table in the corner and wiped off the crumbs and coffee ring and dribbles of milk with a napkin. Sat down and got out the iPad she’d bought at SFO. She’d never set up the internet on it; she’d wanted to keep it secure.

  Now was the time.

  After that was done, she went to Yahoo and created an email account. Hit the “Compose” link.

  She wondered briefly what she should use for a subject line and settled on “Requested information.” Then she slipped the flash drive into the USB port and attached one of the files she’d made from multiple pages of Danny’s logbook, plus the note he’d written. She typed: “There’s a lot more, but this will give you an idea. Call me when you’ve had a chance to review.”

  Her finger hovered above the send button on the touch screen.

  You might as well do it, she told herself. You already hit the self-destruct button, and the clock’s ticking.

  She pushed send and waited.

  She’d drunk her cup of coffee and was halfway through a refill when her burner cell rang.

  “I don’t know what the fuck you were thinking.”

  Her heart started pounding, and she felt a sudden damp chill on her skin. You can’t panic, she told herself. Act like you’re in control.

  “Me? I’m not the one who wrote it,” she said.

  “What do you expect me to do with this?” He sounded angry.

  Good. That meant she’d hit him where it hurt.

  “I really don’t care what you do with it. Danny wanted people to see this. What I want is for you to get him out of jail and to get Gary off of me. I want a life, like you promised me we were going to have. And just so we’re clear about this, I’ve made sure that if you fuck with me, this information is going to get released, and I’m not bullshitting you about that, Sam. I mean it.”

  Michelle noticed, belatedly, a girl in her late teens or early twenties briefly look up from her tablet and glance in her direction. I probably shouldn’t have said that in the Starbucks, Michelle thought, but the girl was wearing earbuds and nobody seemed to care.

  Meanwhile, Sam was employing one of his strategic silences, but this time, Michelle wondered if it was because he really didn’t know how to respond.

  “I can’t control Gary,” he finally said.

  “Maybe you can’t control him, but you can negotiate with him, better than I can. You’ve got people behind you. You have influence.”

  Another silence.

  “I assume if I do this, you won’t release the information.”

  “Correct. I won’t.” She wanted to laugh. “That’s how these things work, right?”

  “What about Danny? You said he wanted people to see this.”

  “Danny’s loyal. You know that. If we make this deal, he’ll keep his end of it.”

  “All right. I’ll see what I can do. Don’t expect immediate results.”

  “How soon?”

  “A few days. And it may not work.”

  “Then you can all live with the consequences,” she said, and hung up.

  She had one last thing to do before meeting Caitlin for lunch. She had to call Gary.

  “Bout time you called,” he said. “I hope you don’t think you can just put me off like that, Michelle. You should’ve called me back last night.”

  “Sorry,” she said, not even trying to sound apologetic. “We didn’t get in till really late. And I told you the important part.”

  “Oh, really? So, just when were you gonna tell me about Troy Stone?”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “I …” Goddammit, she thought. No point in asking how he knew. She just had to somehow bullshit her way out of this.

  “Well, today,” she said. “Honestly, I didn’t think it was that important until last night.”

  “You didn’t think it was important.” Michelle recognized that tone, the one that implied a threat. “They’ve been emailing each other since y’all met in Los Angeles.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Michelle said. “Because, funny, I don’t read Caitlin’s emails. Why didn’t you tell me, if you thought it was important?”

  Gary puffed out a sigh. “Well, to be honest with you, Caitlin did kind of an end-run. After the first couple of emails, she switched to texting and a non-Safer America email address, and not one of her usual ones either. I had some other stuff going on, and I just kind of dropped the ball. So, okay, that’s on me, Michelle. But you know what, it’s partly because I trusted you to keep me in the loop. I have a lot of respect for your abilities, I’ve told you that before.”

  “Look, Gary … you told me this was a babysitting job. You told me I was supposed to keep Caitlin healthy and focused. I’ve done that. Then you told me to let you know if she suddenly diverged from Safer America’s agenda, and I did that too. Now I’m calling you back, like I said I would. What else do you want me to do?”

  Gary laughed. “You really crack me up, you know that, Michelle?” He sounded genuinely amused. Jovial, in fact.

  This was probably not a good thing.

  “You’re a smart woman. It’s been so much fun, seeing your learning curve for this kind of work. But I gotta tell you, you almost outsmarted yourself here. Lucky for you, Troy Stone is going to save you a considerable amount of grief.”

  She felt that sick feeling in her stomach again.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Now it’s my turn to be a little coy. You’re just gonna have to wait till I set a few things up. I’ll tell you what you need to know, when you need to know it.”

  Definitely not good.

  Just how was Troy Stone going to save her “a considerable amount of grief”?

  “Hell, I wish I could just skip this CIAC convention,” Caitlin said with a sigh. “It’s such a bore. And so is Anaheim. What am I gonna say to them, anyway?”

  Was it possible he was some kind of asset of the Boys?

  No, that didn’t make sense.

  Focus, Michelle told herself.

  “But you’re not doing a speech or presentation, right?” she said. “It’s a meet and greet?”

  CIAC was the Correctional Industries Association … something. Michelle couldn’t remember what the final “C” was for.

  “Right,” Caitlin said. “I guess I can just eat their food and drink their booze and call it a day.”

  They were having lunch at the hotel sushi restaurant. Caitlin seemed to be addicted to the stuff. It was nice to see her eating, anyway.

  Think like Gary, Michelle told herself. How would he see Troy Stone?

  “You want some toro to finish?” Caitlin asked.

  “Sure. That sounds great.”

  As someone he could set up, maybe. Like what he’d done to her in Mexico. Get Troy in trouble and use that as leverage against him.

  “It’s just … this convention, Michelle. It’s huge and it’s loud and it’s full of people trying to sell you security cameras, cheap food service and handcuffs. The whole thing’s kind of a bummer. And that’s how I felt before I started really digging into the prison-industry numbers.” Caitlin leaned forward, for a moment resting her face on her curled fingers. “I gotta tell you, last year when I was there, I was so stoned I can barely remember it. These meds I take, plus a few drinks, sometimes it’s just all a blur. Thank god.” She lifted her sake cup in a mock toast and drained it. “Maybe I should just ditch the meds and start smoking pot.�
�� She released that cackle of a laugh, the one that signaled she wasn’t faking her amusement. “Wouldn’t that make people’s heads explode?”

  You barely know Troy Stone, Michelle told herself. He’s not your responsibility.

  Neither was Caitlin.

  “You know, the more research I do on this stuff, the more appalling I’m finding it all.” Caitlin refilled Michelle’s sake, and then her own. “And I swear, that’s not just Troy talking through me.”

  I could tell you a few things, Michelle thought. About Harris County Jail. About Weaver Detention Faciility, and Prostasis.

  “You know what might be fun?” Caitlin said suddenly. “Filming it. Hire somebody with a video camera to follow me around.”

  Please, god, no. “You smoking pot?”

  “Oh, no, I wasn’t serious about that. I mean, me at the CAIC convention. I can talk a little bit about the prison industry. Shake some hands. See what happens.”

  “I … okay. And … I guess I’m not sure. Why do we want to do that?”

  Caitlin shrugged. “Maybe we could use it somehow. Depending on where we go with this whole thing.”

  “You and Troy.”

  “And Shane, potentially. We’ll see.”

  “Okay,” Michelle said.

  “I guess I need to decide pretty quick about what to do in California. It’ll be bad enough when I tell the board I want to pull our resources out of Protect Our Communities. If I tell them I want to go in and campaign on the other side …” Caitlin chuckled, in a way that suggested she was faintly embarrassed. “Well, that’s gonna be some fun times.”

  Michelle took a quick glance around the restaurant. A few Japanese businessmen, local hipster types with handcrafted leather messenger bags, well-heeled tourists, techies in hundred-dollar hoodies. No one who seemed to be watching them, though someone certainly could be.

  She thought about her purse. Both of her iPhones were in it, and they were both switched on, Michelle’s phone for work, and because she knew she could only be out of touch with Gary for so long before he’d retaliate, Emily’s phone in case someone called about Danny. She didn’t know if Gary could put spyware that switched on the mikes on her phones if he’d never physically gotten his hands on them. But she couldn’t trust that they weren’t being heard. There were plenty of other ways Gary could listen.

  “Caitlin … are you sure you want to take this that far right now? Some of the donors … well, they’re powerful people. And … I know the type. They can be pretty ruthless.”

  “Now, what are they gonna do?” Caitlin said with a snort. “Try and smear me? You know what, they can call me unstable, they can go ahead and try, but I’m not going to be doing this alone. I have people on my side too.” She paused to refill Michelle’s sake cup. “Besides, I don’t give a shit what they think. They’re free to take their money someplace else if they don’t like it.”

  There had to be some way she could warn her, some story she could tell that Caitlin would believe.

  Michelle drew in a deep breath. The air came with just the slightest hint of fish. It occurred to her that if Danny did get out, maybe he could back her up on this. The story would still sound crazy, but if there were two of them saying it …

  And there was his logbook. Should she show it to Caitlin?

  I have to time this right, she thought. I need to wait until Danny’s out before I risk it. There were negotiations going on, she knew, and blowing up Gary’s operation would only complicate them.

  But what if Danny didn’t get out? When was Gary going to pull the trigger on whatever he had planned for Troy Stone?

  Where could she and Caitlin talk and not be overheard?

  “Where did you go?”

  “Sorry,” Michelle said. “It’s just … I was thinking of some things that happened a couple of years ago, when my husband died.”

  Caitlin leaned in closer. “Do you want to talk about it, hon? I get the feeling you had kind of a rough time.”

  Michelle manufactured a chuckle. “It’s a long, complicated story. I’ll tell you about it sometime. Just not right now.”

  It wasn’t until the next morning, when they sat in their Business Class seats, plane waiting on the tarmac at SFO, and the flight attendant requested that all portable electronic devices be switched off for takeoff, that Michelle realized when and where might be the best opportunity for them to talk with some privacy.

  No cell phone reception. No bugs. No van parked on a street outside with a high-powered mike aimed in their direction. Other passengers were a concern. But if she were careful …

  She’d wait a day for Danny. But on the flight back to Houston on Sunday, she’d tell Caitlin the truth. Or some version of it.

  In the meantime, she’d keep a close eye on Caitlin.

  “You know,” she said, “about filming you at the convention … I do a lot of still photography. I don’t have that much experience with video, but in a pinch, if we can’t find someone else on such short notice …”

  “Oh, that sounds good,” Caitlin said, between sips of her mimosa. “I mean, this is just an idea I had, it may or may not come to anything. No need to make a big production out of it.”

  Just the excuse Michelle needed to keep Caitlin in her sights.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Well, here we are.” Caitlin grinned at the camera. “Prepare yourself.”

  Michelle followed her onto the convention hall floor.

  “Caitlin, can you hold up a minute? I want to get a few long-shots of all this.”

  The convention floor was huge, lit by fluorescent lights and ambient glow from displays in the booths that formed a maze across it. There was no natural light here, it was sealed off from the outside world like an indoor shopping mall or sports arena, its own disconnected environment, the constant chatter of the crowd forming an oceanic, discordant roar.

  Michelle got her shot and half-jogged to catch up to Caitlin, who stood next to a booth for a company advertising itself as “The Next Generation in Correctional Healthcare.”

  “Ready?” Caitlin asked.

  Michelle nodded. They’d stopped at a Best Buy a couple of miles from the convention center on their way from the airport and bought a Rode mike, some memory cards and an extra battery pack for her dSLR. A camcorder would have been better, but the camera would do, and at least Michelle already knew how to use it.

  “So, the prison industry in the United States is big,” Caitlin said. “State and federal governments spend around seventy-five billion dollars a year on corrections. We’ve got a total inmate population of two point three million people, which in terms of both the number of prisoners and as a percentage of the population, is the biggest in the world. We’re five percent of the world’s population, and we have twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population. That’s right—we’re number one.”

  She paused. “You got all that?”

  Michelle nodded.

  “Let’s walk a little, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Michelle followed alongside Caitlin as they moved down the row of booths. There were booths for food service. For secure payment systems. For vests that promised “ultimate stabbing protection.” For tactical weapons, security cameras, prison architects, prison plumbing fixtures, drugtesting kits. Phone systems, correctional software, correctional pharmacies, prison ministries, sheriff’s associations, insurance companies.

  Caitlin halted again. “So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this. Wondering, is it really true that we just commit more crimes in America? And if so, why is that? Is this”—she made an open-palmed wave at the convention floor around her—“helping us fix that?”

  They walked a little farther. Caitlin stopped in front of a booth for substance-abuse software. “Well, one thing I learned is that about half of the folks behind bars in state prisons are there for non-violent crimes. Ninety percent of federal prisoners are there for non-violent crimes. You know how many of those are
there for drug offenses? About one quarter of the people held in US prisons and jails. You can add another seventeen percent who say they committed their crimes to get money for drugs. Around sixty-five percent of prisoners have some kind of drug problem. Only eleven percent of them get treatment for it.”

  She really was good at this, Michelle thought. The way she pulled up all those facts and figures without sounding rehearsed or rushed, how she faced the camera with an easy charm.

  “Here’s something else,” Caitlin continued. “I was talking to a representative from a correctional officer’s union the other night, and you know what he told me? More than half of all male inmates have at least one significant mental health problem. With women? Seventy-five percent.”

  She held the camera’s gaze and said: “There are more seriously mentally ill people in the Los Angeles County Jail than in any psychiatric hospital in the United States. Three times more people with serious mental illness incarcerated than in hospitals.” She shook her head. “Now, that’s a lot of numbers and percentages I’m throwing out here. But to me, they all started adding up to the same thing.”

  She paused. “Maybe we aren’t doing this right.”

  By now they’d reached a huge display for Prostatis: Responsibility. Efficiency. Dignity. was written across the back of the booth, lit by dramatic spotlights.

  Michelle’s heart beat faster. Standing in front of display was Randall Gates, shaking hands with another man in a business suit.

  “Keep filming,” Caitlin said in a low voice. She pasted on a smile and headed over to Gates.

  “Caitlin!” Gates gave the other man’s hand one last pump and a goodbye pat on the shoulder. “So nice to see you here.”

  “Hi, Randy,” she said brightly.

  By now, Gates had caught sight of Michelle and her camera. “What’s this about?” he said, still smiling.

  “I haven’t exactly decided yet.”

  “Should we go have a little sit-down?” he said in a low voice.

  “A sit-down? Is there something you’d like to discuss?”

  “Maybe not with …” He turned to Michelle. “Could you … ?”