The Chase

by Candice Fox

  While movies and novels about prisons had prepared Celine for the smell of disinfectant, the cheap paint slapped over everything, the institutional coldness of the hallways and the general grimness of the men she passed, nothing prepared her for seeing her grandfather the way that he was. He lowered himself onto the steel stool on the other side of the glass. He was exactly as he had been the last time Celine saw him, maybe a couple of pounds heavier. She had expected him to be as physically ravaged as she was by what had happened. For his cheeks and eyes to be sunken, his frame withered by neglect or abuse, perhaps months of sleepless nights thinking about what he had taken from the world. But he was as tanned as he had been by the farmyard sun, and his hair was thick and silver, and when he looked at her his gaze was bright and attentive but expressionless, like someone waiting for their name to be called at the DMV.

  ‘Well?’ he said after a while.

  Celine opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t find the words. She lowered her eyes and stared, her face burning, at the counter between them. The seconds ticked by. In the distant halls, men shouted and doors banged, an alarm started bleeping and was soon shut off. Celine tasted a sourness on her breath that made her think of rotting meat, and when she swallowed it was as if a rock was lodged in her throat.

  ‘Why me?’ she said finally.

  Her grandfather laughed, a single bark, and shook his head.

  ‘Of course.’ He nodded. ‘Not “why”. But “why me”.’

  Celine was shaking in her chair, her fingers sliding in her own sweat as she gripped the edge of the table between them.

  ‘Because of the damned fence,’ her grandfather said. ‘That’s why.’

  Celine sucked air, tried to ease it out slowly.

  ‘I had to look at that fence every day for three years, you know that?’ he said. He leaned on an elbow, the phone clutched in his chained hands. When she glanced up now and then she saw that he was skewering her with his cold, blue eyes. ‘I had to remember what a shitshow you made of it. Not just the job itself. But me offering you any kind of basic advice about it and you losing your stupid little mind. What a performance you put on. Wow. Yeah. Because that’s you. You’ve never been able to accept even so much as a shred of constructive criticism. You’re perfect. You’re fucking perfect, Celine, and Lord help anyone who tries to suggest differently. I mean, my god, child. If you’re so perfect, how come you made such a hash of painting a goddamn fence?’

  Celine found some words. Not many, but some.

  ‘The . . . fence?’

  ‘I mean, there was even dirt in the paint.’ Her grandfather snorted, shook his head. ‘You painted all the way down to the ground and flicked up the dirt, and just kept on painting over it. It looked like that expensive goddamn cookies-and-cream ice cream you insisted Nanna buy for the pancakes on Christmas morning.’

  He was carrying himself away now into the rageful memories. Celine saw a vein bulging from the skin of his temple, near where the receiver rested.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said after a while, ‘I came up from the barn after I sent the boys on their way and I told you to get inside and you refused, standing there by that fence with your cigarette. With your fucking hip dropped and that bratty little pout. So I just thought, You know what? Fine.’ He sat back and folded his arms. ‘Fine,’ he said again. ‘Suit yourself.’

  Celine snapped. She felt it as a physical break, a crunching of shards so hard and splintered with grief and fury that they sprayed out inside her, cut the underside of her skin to shreds. Her words sliced out of her, painful to form with her lips, her eyes burning as she banged the phone receiver on the glass with both fists.

  ‘The fucking fence?’ she roared. ‘You left me here to live with all this because of the fucking fence?’

  ‘You and me, baby girl.’ Her grandfather shrugged. ‘We’re in this together. Don’t try to tell me you didn’t ask for it.’

  Celine hardly heard his words. She was banging on the glass with her open palms, smashing it with her forearms and elbows, trying to get at him, trying to claw her way into the room with him. But then there were arms encircling her and pulling her away, voices cautioning her and commanding her, and for all her thrashing and twisting and screaming, nothing seemed to get through the glass protecting the old man as he sat, looking slightly amused, in his seat. Celine let the big female guard who held her carry her all the way back down the hall to the room with the steel table, and she sat there crying and clawing at her hair and face, trying to pull the words out of her brain even as she knew she would never be able to.

  People came to the door, but the guard just waved them away. She sat near to Celine but did not touch her, twisting a strand of hair at the bottom of her afro hairstyle and staring at the corner of the ceiling. And, for the first time in a long time, Celine was glad for the silence of the other woman. For the fact that she wasn’t smiling. That she wasn’t talking about bravery or closure or justice. Her just being there, rather than talking loudly about how she was there, was a tiny comfort.

  As her sobs subsided into helpless little hiccups, Celine distracted herself from the memories burning and staining their way into her brain by looking at the guard’s uniform. The name badge that said WEBBER, and the shiny buckles, the equipment on her belt. She tried to memorise it all. To try to drive out the sound of the old man.

  ‘You want to go home?’ Webber asked eventually.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’ll walk you out the back way.’ Webber nodded towards the door. Celine got up and walked shakily, a few steps behind the broad-shouldered woman, her bones aching, feeling small and cold in the huge prison. They followed a convoluted path along shaded gravel walkways and empty, caged yards, buzzing through gates and doors, until the guard stopped by the entrance to a building and seemed to consider something.

  She decided, and said, ‘Come with me.’ Celine followed. They entered a cell block. Celine was hit with the smell of men. The barred doors revealed small spaces crowded with personal belongings – posters, books, medicine bottles, clothes. In the tiny, boxy rooms, men sat quietly, one reading a book, one lying on his bunk, apparently asleep, one watching a small television set. The cells were like messy closets, with thin bunks rammed into one corner and a toilet squeezed into another.

  ‘See this?’ the guard named Webber said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘This is death row,’ she said. ‘Small row, ours. We’ve only got seven guys. Your grandfather isn’t here yet. He’s still in processing. But he’ll end up here, next week maybe.’

  Celine looked. In the cell nearest to her she could see a towel with brown stains on it hanging over the corner of a bed. The man who sat there was hunched over a little desk, staring at nothing, wringing his fingers and rocking gently. In another cell, a kid’s drawing hung over a bed where an inmate lay with his arms behind his head, staring at the ceiling. The silence was icy.

  Webber stepped back, and Celine followed, until they stood against the furthest wall from the cells, out of earshot of the men. Celine looked at the windows high above them and saw blocks of white sky cut with steel mesh.

  ‘Let me tell you what I’m gonna do,’ Webber said. She pointed to a cell at the end of the row. ‘I’m gonna keep your grandfather in that cell there for the rest of his life.’

  Celine looked at the grey, striped mattress. The low ceiling. Nicks and scratches in the paintwork of the walls, some names and clumsy pictures.

  ‘I’m going to make sure he doesn’t get out.’ Webber was watching her eyes carefully. ‘Not soon. Not ever. This here? This is the box he’s going to get stuffed into. And he’s going to scramble around in that box hour after hour, day after day, year after year, maybe until they take him out of there and kill him.’

  ‘You have to be his guard?’ Celine asked.

  ‘Me, and a couple of other guys,’ Webber nodded. ‘We keep them here until their time runs out. We make sure they live the life they’re supposed to live. They d
on’t get hugs or kisses. They don’t get special food. They’ve got a menu they can order off from commissary, but there’s nothing on there that would brighten up your day. Your grandfather has drunk his last glass of wine, girl. He’s had his last good night’s sleep. He’s seen his last sunrise and his last sunset and his last tree. I don’t know if he ever saw the ocean, but if he didn’t, well, he’s lost his chance. It’s over for him.’

  Celine nodded.

  ‘But none of that matters,’ Webber said. ‘What really matters is that now he can’t hurt you anymore. He’s going in the box, and he’ll stay there, and he won’t hurt anybody ever again.’

  Celine threw her arms around the woman. Webber stumbled a bit, said ‘Whoa’ and laughed, but Celine held on. Some of the inmates on the row were watching them. The guard’s words had filled Celine with such happy, vicious, hateful emotion that she couldn’t speak, could only hold the woman and watch the inmates and curse her grandfather with all her soul. She stared at the empty cell because she wanted to remember every inch of it, the smell of it and the shape of it, the hellish box into which he would be thrown and buried alive.

  She walked out of the gates that day and unlocked her car, climbed in and drove away without looking back at the prison reflecting the sunlight on the hill.

  CHAPTER 24

  When Celine woke up, Keeps was gone. One side of her face was aching from resting on her hands on the tabletop, her lower back yowling with pain as she straightened, stretched, tried to determine what had happened. The laptop and sheet of paper still lay beside her, and as she came to her senses she felt a wave of relief rush over her that the Not Guilty column still held only the name Dr Martin Stinway. She recalled some half-hearted argument between her and Keeps about calling the specialist then and there to question him about Kradle’s case, and Keeps fishing around on the internet, trying to hunt down contact details for the man. She must have drifted off.

  The doorbell rang, and Celine realised the sound must have been what woke her. She walked numbly into the foyer and unlatched it, and it swung, hard, in her hand as Trinity Parker pushed it open, walking in as if she owned the place.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘You’re awake. Make me some coffee, will you? Please tell me you’ve got something better than instant. I’ll get set up. You want me to call animal control while I’m at it?’

  ‘Wha—’ Celine shook her head. ‘Animal control?’

  ‘There’s an inmate swimming in your pool,’ Trinity quipped.

  Celine returned to the dining room and looked through the glass doors. Keeps was hanging over the side of the pool, his elbows splayed on the tiles, looking at the desert plants in the manicured garden. Celine could see his bare feet gently paddling just under the surface of the water.

  ‘Oh, Keeps,’ Celine said. ‘He’s helping me with some—’

  ‘I’m too busy for bullshit.’ Trinity held a hand up. ‘You want to bang an ex-con, go ahead. It’s not my role to judge you. Not everybody’s standards are as high as mine.’

  Celine sighed.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong. I understand the appeal,’ Trinity said. ‘The tattoos. The muscles. The danger. The deep-seated psychological need to rebel against your parents’ dreams of you having missionary sex with a stockbroker once a month until he’s too old to get it up anymore. What’s he wearing? I assume he didn’t bring his swimming trunks. Should we shift this meeting to the dining room so we can work with a view? Will that get you filled with vigour and verve?’

  ‘Please stop talking.’

  ‘In all seriousness, you might want to look more carefully at that guy. He has rather a sketchy—’

  ‘I know,’ Celine said. ‘I know.’

  ‘So, make the coffee then, Osbourne.’

  She did. Trinity sat at the kitchen island and opened her laptop. When Celine came to sit beside her there was a video set to play. She was watching CCTV camera footage from what looked like a large department store. The shadowy figure of a man limped onto the screen, powering up the aisle as fast as his wounded body could take him, snatching items off the shelves.

  ‘Guess who?’ Trinity said.

  ‘John Kradle,’ Celine said.

  ‘Clever boy, your other criminal beau,’ Trinity said, tapping the screen, following Kradle around the department store from video file to video file. ‘Most fugitives, if they get injured and need medical care, hit a pharmacy. Some will break into a veterinary clinic. Some go so far as to hold up a doctor. Not your guy. He broke into a Joanne’s.’

  ‘Joanne’s?’

  ‘Craft supplies,’ Trinity said. ‘He took needles, wire, scissors, gauze, cotton balls. He went into the paint section and took some methylated spirits. Then he hit the manager’s office and stole a cash box with four hundred dollars in it. Nobody responded to the alarm going off because it was a goddamn hobby craft store, and we’ve briefed all the sheriff’s departments to be on alert for break-ins at doctors and vets.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t interested in chasing John Kradle,’ Celine said. She watched Kradle limp down the hardware aisle and grab a hammer off the wall, probably for the cash box. ‘Especially since he and Homer Carrington have split.’

  ‘That’s just the thing,’ Trinity said. ‘They haven’t split.’

  Celine watched as Trinity pulled up a video of Kradle exiting the store through the rear fire doors. He disappeared off screen, carrying a plastic shopping bag of items. After a second or two, a dark shape materialised, seemingly from the shadows themselves. A big man stepped out from where he had been standing against the wall and turned, passing under the camera in pursuit of Kradle.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Celine said. A strange impulse pushed its way to the front of her mind, a tangle of emotions, the desire both to tell John Kradle he was being pursued and not to tell him – to both watch and intervene in his death. Trinity seemed to sense her conflict.

  ‘I was in my kitchen once, and I looked out onto my lawn and saw the neighbour’s parakeet had got loose from its cage.’ Trinity sat back, reflecting, smiling. ‘It was sitting there eating grass seeds. Then I noticed another neighbour’s cat stalking it from my hedge. I felt the same thing you’re feeling now, I suppose. The delicious, godly power of being able to stop death. Change fate. That wonderful curiosity that pulls you back before you can do so, that wants to witness things playing out in all their beautiful savagery.’

  ‘You really are incredibly full of yourself, aren’t you?’ Celine said.

  ‘Should I tell you what I did?’ Trinity asked.

  ‘No.’ Celine sipped her coffee. ‘You should tell me why you’re here, why you’re giving me this lead on Kradle.’

  ‘Because I want something in return,’ Trinity said. ‘It’s the only reason I do anything in life.’

  ‘Sounds about right.’

  ‘I want you and your delinquent squeeze to come and lean on Joe Brassen for me. I’ve managed to get a little traction with him by threatening to cut off his balls. But I’ve hit a wall. He’ll sing for me but he won’t dance, and I think you two could help.’

  ‘Joe Brassen!’ Celine felt her mouth fall open. ‘He’s not—’

  ‘Oh, yes he is.’

  Celine rubbed her eyes. ‘Urgh, Jesus,’ she moaned. ‘It makes sense. He manages the prison baseball game. Not the team itself – he’s not the coach – but he runs the event.’

  ‘Yeah, we already put the coach’s head in a vice,’ Trinity said. ‘First guy we went to. He’s clean.’

  ‘Brassen advertises the game in the staff rooms,’ Celine said. ‘He organises catering. He would have been able to recruit personnel from all over the prison to be on the team, or at least invite their families to come watch.’

  ‘Is he a known white supremacist?’

  ‘What? No!’ Celine said. ‘You think I’d have a white supremacist on my staff?’

  Trinity shrugged. ‘I think you’d have capable, punctual and dedicated guys who can handle the most dangerous inma
tes in the prison on your staff. You’d look at their work performance and ignore their personal beliefs, because that’s what you’re like – all work and no personal life.’

  ‘I have a personal life,’ Celine said.

  ‘Really?’ Trinity glanced around. Celine refused to take her eyes from the woman’s face.

  ‘Let’s just get going,’ Celine said.

  ‘Before we do’—Trinity turned back to the laptop—‘there’s something else I want to show you.’

  She pulled up another CCTV file, this one attached to a news story. Celine watched people milling around the card tables in a casino. A woman in a frilly shirt and vest was shuffling cards for a guy in a ball cap. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. Befuddled tourists sidestepped young men on a big night out.

  Celine watched the card dealer leave the table, cross the floor and walk up to a man in a white collared shirt, her fist already balled.

  ‘Whoa!’ Celine blurted as the punch played out. ‘Ho-ly cow!’

  ‘Hell of a right arm.’ Trinity smiled.

  ‘Is that—’

  ‘Abdul Ansar Hamsi.’

  ‘Jesus. She’s KO’ed him.’ Celine found herself smiling alongside her adversary.

  ‘I want her,’ Trinity said. ‘I want to give her a counterterrorism job. First, I want to take her somewhere and feed her martinis and have her tell me all about her life. Then I want to give her a counterterrorism job.’

  ‘You’ll have to fight talk show hosts for access to her for the next year and a half.’

  ‘Enough fun,’ Trinity said, slamming the computer closed. ‘We’ve got to roll.’

  Celine heard the glass doors slide open in the dining room, and wet footsteps on the hardwood floors.

  ‘Yo, can I smell coffee?’ Keeps yelled. ‘Where’s mine?’

  Keeps slid into the passenger seat and Celine climbed behind the wheel. They sat watching as Trinity Parker pulled away from the kerb in her silver Mercedes and disappeared into the morning. Celine felt a strange, unspoken tension between her and Keeps, as though a line had been crossed, not when she recruited him as her fellow fugitive hunter but when she fell asleep in his presence. She imagined herself drifting off there beside him, and him wondering whether to disturb her, rouse her or try to move her, the self-professed conman and criminal who had talked his way into her life now completely and truly alone with all of her world laid out in front of him. How vulnerable that made her.