I'm sure you'll take that into account in the future, Ish suggested reassuringly. For the moment, though, instead of blaming each other, our time might be better spent figuring out how to limit the damage.
Eat shit and die, replied Max. He'd already figured out how to limit the damage.
A moment later the reanimated body drew a deep, calming breath, the long-lashed eyes fluttered open. Max took off the icebag and sat up slowly. He could hear a guard circling the pod; he waited until the footsteps had passed his cell before rolling up his sleeve and reaching into the urine-filled toilet beside the bunk. The toilet and sink were one stainless steel unit, sink above, toilet below. Max fished around in the bottom of the bowl, removed the inch-long handcuff key, washed it off in the sink, dried it on his jail-issue, postage-stamp washcloth, and slipped it into his mouth.
Max had been to court before—as Dr. Cogan would have said, he knew the drill. There was no metal detector for prisoners leaving the new jail on Natividad, no cavity search for prisoners being transported to and from the courthouse, and no metal detector at all at the old jail on West Alisal.
Prisoners returning to the new jail did have to pass through a sensitive, state-of-the-art metal detector on their way in, Max knew. He had no intention, however, of returning to Natividad Road, with or without Terry Jervis's handcuff key, which he planned to return to Deputy Jervis personally, at the earliest opportunity.
17
JUST AFTER TWO O'CLOCK on Wednesday afternoon, Lieutenant Rigoberto Gonzalez of the Monterey County Sheriff's Department— early forties, perfectly pressed uniform, carefully trimmed black mustache—met Pender in the alley next to the old jail, abandoned now except for the ground-floor cellblock in the east wing, and led him from the brightness of a sunny Salinas afternoon into the gloomy half-light of the jail. Directly ahead of them were sliding barred doors. Gonzalez turned right instead, and Pender followed him into a messy, crowded, claustrophobic little room that looked more like the office of an old-time two-pump country gas station than the command post for a metropolitan jail.
“You carrying?” asked Gonzalez, unholstering his own weapon, the sheriff's department standard-issue Glock .40. Pender handed his SIG Sauer to Gonzalez, butt first; the deputy checked it out. “I thought you guys carry Glocks now.”
“I'm more comfortable with the SIG.”
“Not as much stopping power with a nine as with a forty.”
“The dual action is faster, though. I figure I can always shoot 'em twice.” Pender hadn't actually fired a shot in anger since his days as a Cortland County sheriff's deputy, but he remained range-qualified with both pistol and shotgun.
After locking up the guns and introducing Pender to Frank Twombley and Deena Knapp, the two deputies on duty, Gonzalez led Pender through the office—they were now on the other side of the sliding barred doors—then to the left, down a narrow corridor to the jail's old visiting room, bare save for a single metal bench suspended like a shelf from the back wall. The windows that had once separated the inmates from their loved ones were boarded up, the telephones gone, their torn wires sticking out from the wall at three-foot intervals.
“You can change in here.” Gonzalez handed Pender a paper bag containing an orange jumpsuit, a gray T-shirt, white socks, and rubber sandals.
Pender asked Gonzalez if there was any significance to the variety of jumpsuit colors he'd seen the inmates wearing.
“Orange is for your violent felons, red for nonviolent felons, green for misdemeanors.”
“So I'm a violent felon?”
“You'd have to be, for us to put you in with the Ripper. We keep the prisoners strictly segregated in the holding cells.”
“You call him the Ripper?” asked Pender, unfolding the jumpsuit and checking it for size. XXL—close enough.
“Did you see what he did to that girl?”
“Unfortunately, yes—I saw the autopsy photos.”
Gonzalez left Pender in the visiting room, returning a few minutes later with a full set of handcuffs, leg irons, chains, and a padlocking belt to pull the ensemble together. When he finished securing Pender, he stepped back and nodded approvingly. Bald, scowling, immense, the FBI man might have been the enforcer for a gang of over-the-hill outlaw bikers.
“Agent Pender, you could give mean a bad name. What do you want to be in for?”
“What do I look like I'd be in for?”
Gonzalez narrowed his eyes, gave Pender an exaggerated onceover. “How about rape? No offense.”
“None taken. But with a face like mine, who'd ever believe Ihad trouble getting any?”
The deputy grinned. “With a face like yours,” he said, “we should probably make it serial rape.”
The holding cells were at the opposite end of the corridor. Gonzalez opened the metal cabinet containing the door control panel beside the entrance to the cell block. Inside the cabinet were four vertically sliding knobs above a solid steel wheel eighteen inches in diameter. All four knobs were down in the red, or closed, position; Gonzalez raised the fourth until it showed yellow, then cranked the big wheel clockwise.
Ready? mouthed Gonzalez.
Pender nodded.
“THEN LET'S GO, PENDEJO!”
Gonzalez stepped behind Pender and shoved him through the portal into the darkness. Pender stumbled forward down the dim corridor. A high windowless wall loomed to his left. To the right, his peripheral vision picked up dozens of shadowy figures stirring restlessly behind floor-to-ceiling bars, visible only in silhouette and motion, like nocturnal animals in the zoo when the infrareds are turned off. Then, before Pender's eyes had a chance to become accustomed to the tenebrous light, Gonzalez slid the last door open, shoved Pender inside, and he was one of them.
18
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES AFTER the cell door clanged shut behind Pender, it slid open again. Max shuffled in and took a seat on the iron bunk suspended from the wall, as far from his temporary cellmate as possible. When his pupils had adjusted to the dim light— weak fluorescents flickering behind a dense mesh grille in the ceiling—he saw that the other man in the cell was another goddamn gorilla, every bit as large as the almost-late Refugio Cortes, and just as mean looking.
Max could feel Alicea pushing him to make a switch. No fucking way, Max told her. We're not going through that again.
Ish would have concurred, had he been consulted. It was Ish who'd analyzed the vicious cycle after the first time around. Feeling sexually threatened by the brutal Cortes, Max had dispatched Alicea to deal with him. But Alicea's feminine charms only inflamed the passions of Cortes, who had been doing a threemonth stretch of county time for possession of methamphetamine. Whereupon Cortes had told Alicea, in his charmingly accented Pachuco, to “save up your spit, puto, or maybe you like a dry verga up your culo?”
But when Cortes showed up after lights-out (actually, they only dimmed), it wasn't Alicea waiting for him, but Lee. Lee was the alter who'd studied both karate and kung-fu, wrestled in high school at a hundred and twenty-eight pounds, and boxed in Juvie. When Lee looked into a mirror, however, he saw, not a slender junior lightweight but a light-heavyweight with a twenty-inch neck and pectorals like Batman's breastplate. And since everybody on the outside saw him as a little guy, this actually provided him a formidable advantage when he was picking on somebody his “own” size.
When he was up against a gorilla like Cortes, Lee's speed and agility were even more valuable than his strength. What gave him a real edge, however, was a trick his best friend Buckley had taught him to help him survive the no-holds-barred call-outs that were a primary source of evening entertainment at the Umpqua County Juvenile Ranch.
It was simple enough, the Buckley maneuver, but it took a fearful-amount of will and practice. Decide on your first offensive move, then start counting down from ten in the mind. The trick is to make the move any time before reaching one.
Three, five, even nine—the count doesn't matter, so long as it hasn't been predetermined.
That way the opponent never sees any of the usual warning flickers, the tensing of muscles, the shifting of eyes, that normally precede an attack. This makes the maneuver especially effective against experienced fighters, men who have trained themselves to watch for precisely those clues.
So here comes Cortes with his rank smell, and his dick waving in the dark. And although such behavior was personally repugnant to Lee, he impersonated Alicea long enough to put the brute at ease . . . ten . . . kneeling before the big man . . . nine . . . fondling him until he was hard . . . eight . . . then giving him a twisting, twofisted hand job . . . seven . . . as if in preparation for oral sex to follow. Six . . . five . . .
At four he struck, bending Cortes's penile shaft in the middle like he was breaking a celery stalk in half. Cortes was momentarily paralyzed by what must have been excruciating pain, giving Lee enough time to straighten up, deliver a blow to Cortes's Adam's apple with the side of his left hand and another, with the heel of his right hand, to his nose.
Cortes was unconscious before he hit the ground, which did not deter Lee from jumping up and down on his rib cage, then stripping down his jumpsuit, turning him over, spreading his legs apart until his privates were on the floor, and grinding them under his heel as if he were putting out a cigarette butt.
The deputies in charge of the pod responded quickly, but it was too late to save anything but Cortes's life—the whole episode (from soup to nuts, in Max's humorous phrase) had taken no more than three minutes. And this time it was Lee who took the beating from the guards. Lee didn't mind pain—it only made him stronger.
In the end, the encounter with Cortes worked out satisfactorily for Maxwell. It ensured that he would be housed alone for the rest of his stay, and gave him a certain cachet among both the guards and the other inmates. But there was nothing to be gained by another such episode. For one thing, Max had learned over the years that you had to space the major thrills out, or you'd get jaded. For another, you might get away with destroying one cellmate, but do it twice and your jailers would start taking extraordinary precautions, which was the last thing he wanted.
So this time he kept Alicea rigidly suppressed. You so much as try to come out, Max informed her, and I will slice up this face until it's so hideous not even Miss Miller will be able to look at us.
Then he called Mose, his memory trace personality, into co-consciousness with him, narrowed his eyes until they were nearly, but not entirely shut, lest the new gorilla try to jump him despite his restraints, and had Mose reread him the last chapter of Ulysses,Molly Bloom's soliloquy, while waiting to be brought from the cell to the courthouse, where he figured to have his best chance at escaping.
Ulysses was their favorite book. Max remembered the first time they'd seen it. “Look!” the nine-year-old had cried, spying it in the bookshelf in Miss Miller's living room. “Look, a book about me!”
A few hours later Miss Miller, her breasts perfumed like Molly's, had read him—or rather, Christopher—that last chapter out loud in bed. And though he was too young to understand much of it, like Leopold Bloom's, Christopher's own heart was going like mad, and yes he said along with her, yes I will, Yes.
19
THE ART OF AFFECTIVE INTERVIEWING, as practiced by Ed Pender, sometimes involved mirroring the interviewee's body language. In this case, with both of them cuffed and chained, sitting on a hard steel bench, that was already accomplished.
The difficult part for Pender was controlling his own excitement at being less than six feet away from Casey after all these years. Unbelievable. But he knew he'd have to proceed slowly, feel his way along. The ideal would be to wait for the other man to initiate the conversation, but the way Casey seemed to have withdrawn into himself, Pender knew he couldn't count on that.
“Hey,” he said, after a good five minutes had passed.
No response.
“Hey—I'm talking to you.”
“You talkin'a me?” Casey looked up slowly, his eyelids lowered sleepily and his eyebrows drawing together. And again: “You talkin'a me?”
A perfect Travis Bickle. Pender's laugh came easily. “Not bad.”
“Not bad?” said Casey. “When did you ever see better?”
Celebrity impressionists—you never knew what was going to kindle a connection. Pender took the ball and carried it in the direction he wanted to go—place names. “I saw Rich Little do De Niro in Vegas . . . well, tell you the truth, you're about as good as him. But I saw Fred Travelena do him in Dallas—now that guy's a genius.”
“I do a better Nicholson,” said Casey.
“Lemme see.”
The eyebrows peaked, the lips widened to a leer. “Heeere's Johnny!”
“The Shining, right?”
“Right. I can also do Christopher Walken: I hid this uncomfortable hunk of metal up my aass two years. . . .”
“Man, you are good.” Pender slid a little closer toward Casey. “My name's Parker.”
“Yeah, whatever,” said Casey.
Pender told himself he hadn't really expected the man to give his true name, but he was disappointed anyway—even an alias might have helped. He shook it off. Back to work. “You ever done that kinda thing professionally? You should give it a try.”
“Ah, bullshit.”
But Pender could see that Casey was pleased. A little less guarded, too—the manacled hands, balled into fists at first, had relaxed. “No, really. You should go to one of them, what do they call 'em, open mike things. They had one in that club in Dallas. Actually, I think it was Plano. You ever been to Plano?”
Casey shrugged; Pender, with a Ph.D. in shrugs, read it as a positive response: not a Fuck, no, but a Yeah, what of it?
Oh-ho, thought Pender. Oh-ho was his version of Bingo! or Eureka! or Gotcha! On to topic number two. “In my opinion, it's basically a suck-ass town. Wall-to-wall stuck-up bitches. Man, I couldn't get laid in Plano to save my life.”
“You couldn't get laid in Plano? Jeez, I got more pussy in Plano than the ASPCA. 'Course, I'm better looking than you are. I can get a woman anyplace. Shit, I can get a woman in jail. There's this shrink they sent to check me out—the bitch has already got the hots for me. We fooled around a little in the interview room—we're talking about getting together soon as I get out.”
Oh-ho. Drilling randomly, Pender had struck a gusher. Casey was speaking freely now, not at all guarded. Pender modeled a receptive posture, hands as wide as the manacles permitted, shoulders relaxed, chest open but not thrust forward, as Casey slid a little closer, until they were only three feet apart.
“Of course, a guy with your looks, what you might want to do if you ever get back that way and you're horny, there's a motel called the Sleep-Tite in Dallas. Vietnamese hookers. Ask for Anh Tranh. Tightest little piece I ever had. All you gotta do is call the desk, tell the guy you want number one girl, make boom-boom.”
Pender decided to narrow the focus a little. “They got any white girls there?”
“Just 'Mese.”
And a little narrower. “Naah, I like white girls. Blonds or redheads—nothing like a pale-haired pussy.”
“You're crazy—pussy's pussy,” Casey said quickly. Then he shut down, thud, like an asbestos fire curtain coming down in the middle of a scene.
Pussy's pussy. Max knew immediately that he'd gone too far. That locker-room bullshit about Irene Cogan. And why on earth had he felt compelled to tell Parker about the Sleep-Tite? He knew what Ish would say: that it had something to do with a need for approval from older men—apparently any older man would do. Or not so much approval as acceptance—he wanted to be accepted as a man, by men. He also suspected that this compulsion toward sexual boasting had as much to do with Mr. Kronk as it did with Ulysses Maxwell Sr. It would be nice to ask Dr. Cogan about it when he got her back to Scorned Ridge and they started therapy again for real.
The abduction of Dr. Irene Cogan: now that would be a challenge worthy of Max. He'd known he'd have to attempt it when he awoke from his
hypnotic trance that afternoon—he'd been so damn smug, so sure she could never put him under. But she'd not only put him under, she'd made contact with little Lyssy.
Lyssy the Sissy, his—their—original personality, was the only identity with whom Max did not share memory, so there was no way for him to know whether or not the little tattletale had let slip some clue as to their identity, or the location of Scorned Ridge. In any event, it was not a chance he cared to take.
But self-preservation was only one of two reasons Max had determined to bring Irene along with him. The other had to do with his admittedly unique psychological makeup. Although he understood that to the rest of the world, DID was a disorder, personally Max liked to think of it as a new and superior order. Still and all, it was a great strain on Max, the de facto host alter after Useless had been supplanted, the personality who dealt with the world most of the time, whose job it was to hold together the complex and contradictory bundle of personalities known collectively as Ulysses Maxwell.
It was for that reason that Max had turned to the study of psychiatry seven years earlier. With all the resources of the system, of course, there'd been no need for formal education. He'd simply bought a small library of psychology books down in Medford, plus every textbook on MPD or DID he could get his hands on, and subscribed to every journal and magazine that came to his attention. Max read them, Mose memorized them, and Ish, who'd come into being during this period, integrated the insights into the system.
But lately Max was beginning to think they'd taken their therapy about as far as they could on their own. And since Dr. Cogan was a specialist—an attractive specialist—in dissociative disorders, and since he needed to remove her from the general population for his own protection ASAP, why not bring her back to Scorned Ridge with him to continue his therapy?
The Girls He Adored Page 8
