East of the Sun

by Trey R. Barker

  “I dig it. Maybe we’ll scrape us up some sometime.”

  A bit of heat washed into her face. “Bed?”

  “Well, I’m not sure we know each other well enough, but I’m up for it.”

  “The inmates, you ass.”

  He frowned. “Hmmm . . . all those inmates be a lotta people in the bed, but I’ll try anything once. We can film it and put it on the internet and make millions.”

  Jace laughed and headed for the cells. Within a few minutes, nearly all the lower tier inmates were in for the night. A few doors had already closed, pulled by the inmates, while a few others were still open. As they did every night, a few inmates joked with her. A few gave her polite good nights, a few others mumbled. Initially, those mumbles had scared her, but now she ignored them. Inmates who wanted to hurt a guard wouldn’t mumble about it, they’d just get to the hurting.

  Jace closed and yanked on every door because sometimes the inmates stuck a playing card between the door and frame and the door only appeared locked. The computer that controlled the door locks always caught an open door but even if it didn’t, there was nowhere for the inmate to go. There were two secured doors just to get out of the pod, countless more secured doors between the hallways and the World. Besides, the jailers didn’t leave the pod after lockdown. Any inmate who was outside his cell after lockdown found, rather than freedom, the discipline pod.

  Well, the master of his ship, even he stuck in the middle of the ocean and cain’t do not but sail . . . he still the master of his ship.

  Preacher used to say that, about Jace’s mother. Maybe, in the jail, it was exactly that simple.

  About halfway down the tier, the inmate who’d been on the toilet stepped from his cell into the pod, shirtless, his arms flexed like a body builder. Jace thought she smelled a bit of burned cannabis coming out of his cell.

  “Wanna go to a gun show?” He flexed his biceps again.

  “They have shows for BB guns, Tate?”

  The man’s face, his eyes red and almost sleepy-looking, broke apart in surprise. “What?”

  As soon as she said it, she was angry with herself. She wasn’t a jailer who casually tossed insults at inmates or who routinely verbally abused them. Treating them that way, she believed, would boomerang back someday.

  She shook her head in an unspoken apology. “Come on, Tate, get in the cell.”

  His arms came down. “The fuck is your problem?”

  Can’t just recognize hot spots, Jace, have to not cause them.

  This particular hot spot, growing hotter by the moment, she had absolutely caused.

  Her voice cool and calm, Jace put a step or two of distance between them. She kept her eyes on Tate, rather than showing weakness by looking for Urrea. “It’s too late at night for whatever this is going to be. Let’s just call it good and everyone walks away.”

  “Walk this away, bitch.”

  It happened quickly, but later Jace would revel in knowing that she’d seen it coming. She didn’t see it soon enough, but she did see it. Tate rocked back on his right foot and jerked something from behind his back. In a single, quick motion, he drew back and threw it.

  She was unafraid, which surprised her.

  That’s his T-shirt.

  This was the inmate who hadn’t flushed and now that shirt, soaked in urine and feces, flew right at Jace, but hit Urrea when he stepped in. A thick, wet plop.

  “Son of a bitch.” His voice was a bellow. He fell backward away from them, the shirt and the feces plastered to his face and chest.

  Jace moved instantly into Tate’s laugh. She grabbed the guy’s right arm, still extended from the throw, pivoted to her left, and used his momentum to spin him all the way around until he was facing his cell. As Tate stumbled, she planted a foot squarely against his butt and shoved him into the cell. He crashed to the floor while she calmly closed his door and pulled it twice to make sure it was locked.

  Urrea stood there, the shirt on the floor, the stain and stink of it all over him. “Oh, man, this is bullshit.”

  “Well, some kind of . . . anyway.” She didn’t want to laugh, but once it got started, it was impossible to stop.

  “Wha’choo laughing at?”

  “Pretty funny, boss.”

  Urrea glared into the inmate’s cell window, then walked away. “Yeah, funnier for you than me.”

  “Well, like Shelby said, ‘True, that.’ ”

  A half hour later, Urrea had showered and changed. Both of them sat staring absently at the pod TV. On it, a man pleaded with them to send money. For $19.95, plus shipping and handling, they would get not one, but four buckets of cleaning solution, guaranteed to clean anything anywhere anytime.

  “Hah. A little late.” Urrea grinned.

  Jose Urrea had stepped in and taken that hit. For her. Early on, just after the officer arrests, he had shunned her. Lately, the color of his clouds had changed. They’d been tinged with purple and edged in the scarlet of anger, but now were shades of a soft blue.

  “I guess I’m buying the Corona, Jack, and barbeque for a while, huh?”

  After a long moment, during which he sniffed himself intensely, he chuckled. “True, that. But when I can afford to, I’m buying at least one round.”

  “Why’s that?”

  His laugh slipped into a darker, edgier place. “You faced off that freakin’ cow.”

  “ ‘Freakin’ cow’? Is that an idiomatic Spanish expression? Castilian, perhaps?”

  “Idio—? What? No, hell, no, I’m from Texas.” He frowned. “Wha’choo talking about? I mean Laimo. You didn’t even care who she is.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Major Jakob’s daughter.”

  The woman in charge of the crime lab; third or fourth in command of the entire sheriff’s office. “Crime lab is under operations . . . the road deputies.”

  “Si.”

  “Well, that was stupid on my part, huh? For career advancement.” Not that Jace had any inclinations toward working the road.

  “Might have—”

  —control lockdown . . . lockdown—

  Conroy’s voice tripped over its own fear and half a second later, as though Conroy had actually been paying attention, the general alarm exploded to life. That same shrill, piercing sound that Jace hated. Her heart jumped into her throat as she jumped out of the chair, and her skin heated to a white-hot laser. Her eyes snapped almost automatically to the second tier and then down to Urrea.

  “They’re all locked up.” He spoke gently. “It’s not this pod. We’re good; you saw to that.”

  “And if I got it wrong?”

  “You didn’t. I trust you completely.”

  —zebra 4. Control, it’s a zebra 4. Get a bus rolling. Now—

  Jace’s teeth came down hard on her tongue. Zebra 4 was a facility security breach. A bus was an ambulance. Something was terribly wrong.

  —all call from control: lockdown. Facility lockdown—

  —A Pod locked—

  Urrea nodded and she keyed her mic as she took a sweeping look at all one hundred cell doors in the pod, then double-checked on the computer. Green lights, locked doors, across the board. “B Pod locked.”

  —locked in D—

  —E Pod locked—

  —Females locked—

  The voices over the radio were concerned but efficient, each one quick on the heels of the previous one but waiting until it was their turn. Except now there was a break in rotation. Medical didn’t report and Jace’s breath froze.

  —medical?—

  Still nothing and Jace’s breath burst raggedly from her nose. She took a few steps toward the pod’s inner door. “Something’s wrong. Something’s—”

  “Take it easy.”

  —medical locked—

  But there was something unsaid, something left out, a lie by omission by the officer in medical. Jace heard it in the hesitation.

  —Ad-seg locked—

  —booking only one prisoner, she�
�s in holding—

  —kitchen empty—

  Conroy’s voice bellowed from the control room.

  —medical?—

  There was a short pause.

  —Dr. Wrubel is not in medical. Repeat . . . Dr. Wrubel is on premises—

  —zebra 4 at B Pod. 248 on scene. One from B Pod, one from A Pod—

  Her head and Urrea’s swiveled toward B Pod’s main doors. Whatever the situation, it was right outside those doors.

  “Go.”

  “But—”

  “You’ve got it. You know what to do.”

  “I don’t.”

  Urrea smiled, gently and genuinely. “Trust yourself, Salome. Trust me that I know what I’m doing to send you. Go help Doc Wrubel. He’s a good man. He’s one of us.”

  Jace ran toward the inner door. Before she got there, the electric lock snapped. She bolted through and the outer door opened before the inner had closed completely.

  “Sheriff Jace?” The trusty stood near the wall, just outside the B Pod outer door, holding a mop and pale as lace. “What’s going on?”

  “Inmate Bobby. What the hell are you doing out?”

  He raised his mop. “Every night, you know that.”

  “Did you see it?” Her mind raced, faster than what she could understand. What should she do? What would Rory do? What the hell had happened? “Who else was here? Out here in the hallway?”

  “Nobody, Sheriff Jace.”

  “Nobody passed you? No one at all?”

  “No, Sheriff Jace. I came from around that corner.” He pointed toward the distant main hallway.

  “Damn it, stop calling me that. It’s Deputy Salome. Who did this?” Her head seized on the empty hallway, filled with only one person. “Did you do this?”

  “Me?” Inmate Bobby swallowed. “No, I didn’t even know him.”

  Jace shook her head. “Damn it. Get in the go-between and don’t move.” Jace radioed for the go-between. When it popped, the trusty went inside and the door closed hard behind him.

  Forty feet away lay Doc Wrubel. Blood pooled around him and Jace wondered how it could seem so tender, as though it were nothing more than a sanguine halo radiating from his chest and shoulders to above his head. Both eyes were open but, thankfully, neither of them saw Jace.

  And the alarm clanged on and on.

  CHAPTER 4

  There was so much blood.

  As endless as the screaming alarm.

  When Jace was young, a radio man had lived at the Sea Spray Inn. Bruce Haden had wanted to be a world famous jock, but eventually had settled into the skin of a newsman. By the time he was 35, he’d been hired by a local AM station, a 50,000-watt behemoth whose news department had never been out of contention for best in the region and top ten across the state. He’d been offered the city-council meetings, meetings of the school boards, the hospital or parks-district board meetings, all of which were safe, easy-to-cover beats that had semi-regular hours.

  But those weren’t the beats he wanted.

  He’d grown up poor on Zach City’s south side and had seen more than his share of cops slamming into neighborhoods with sirens wailing, red and blue lights beating the darkness into submission. They came for domestic batteries, knifings at the nearby bars, raids on bathtub gin distillers, murders, suicides, robberies and burglaries, raids on shooting galleries, all manner of depravity. As a young girl, Jace had loved listening to Haden’s stories of crimes and criminals. She loved the sheer number of people he’d met and interviewed and—when a freakish blast of summer rainstorms caused massive flash flooding—his stories of helping get people into boats and out of flooded homes.

  Long after Mama had been killed by a drunk driver in Lubbock, Haden had played babysitter for Jace. On that Saturday night, Haden had been called out for a train that had slammed into an old station wagon and killed all four teenaged passengers. With no one to watch over Jace, Haden had taken her. His voice shaky with what she now understood as fear, he’d told her to stay in the car and at first she had. But curiosity, stoked by the storm of blue and red flashing lights and uniformed officers and paramedics and official-looking men and women with sleep heavy on their faces, had forced her out of the car. She had wanted to see the accident and smell the carnage and feel the tragedy.

  The car had been a mangled, two-piece disaster. Part of it had lain near the point of impact. Another part was impaled on the front of the train. Other bits and pieces were scattered throughout the empty field, and fluids—oil, gas, transmission fluid, radiator fluid, the beer that had been in the cooler—covered everything.

  All kinds of fluids but no blood. Nor any bodies.

  Was that how it was when Mama was killed? Had the drunk been going fast like the train and smashed Mama so hard her body was flung into nothingness?

  Later, Haden said the scene had been covered with blood and body parts. He’d told her she’d willfully not seen it. Jace had thought about that over the years. Maybe Haden was right. Maybe, in those dead teenagers turned into jigsaw puzzles, Jace had seen Mama and so blocked out everything. Maybe, if memory made the train crash as bloodless and antiseptic as possible, it would somehow lessen the pain of Mama getting hit by a drunk who, when caught miles down the road, casually told officers he’d hit a deer somewhere back up the road.

  How far did you crawl, Mama? Did you a find a creek and, in an attempt to cool the blast furnace of pain, slip in? Or maybe you found a pile of fallen trees and, in a moment of mindless desperation, burrowed beneath it.

  Either way, Mama was gone and a few years later, Bruce Haden was, too. He had moved on to local television news and died in a helicopter crash while heading back to the station after filing a story about cattle rustling from deep in the Zachary County hinterlands.

  Now Doc Wrubel was dead and for a split second, Jace thought there was no blood, just as there hadn’t been with the teenagers and the train.

  Jace was third on the scene, just behind Laimo and the road deputy who’d stumbled across Wrubel’s body. That deputy, name of Craig something, bellowed into his radio to get the bus here and get it here now.

  But it was over and all of them knew it. Jace had no idea about the injuries, but she saw his empty eyes. Glassy and shocked as though he wanted to ask, “How did this happen? Haven’t I been a good man? How did I die here, on this stained concrete floor?”

  Jace keyed her radio. “Control, can we get the alarm off?” The sound slashed at her brain.

  Laimo said, “And a detective.”

  The road deputy nodded. “And whatever command staff is here.”

  The alarm died with a thundering reverberation.

  —Adam 1 is on his way. So is Major Jakob . . . she was in the building—

  The deputy moved Laimo and Jace both backward a bit. “Mark it off from A Pod to D Pod, then get on the other side of those lines. You—” he pointed at Laimo, “at D Pod, and you at A Pod. No one gets past those lines unless they’re paramedics, administration, detective, or lab rat. Keep a list of who does go in, what time they went in, and what time they came out.”

  Laimo stared at the road deputy. “The hell you think you are?”

  The roadie nodded. “Sure, whatever you want. Your jail, your problem.” He waved and stepped over Wrubel’s body. “Enjoy.”

  Panic exploded on Laimo’s face but was gone quickly, buried beneath a shrug. “Your name’s already on it. First on scene, your scene to handle. I’m just assisting. I better not get bogged down in whatever shitstorm this is going to be.”

  “Whoa,” the deputy said. “Don’t knock me over with that ambition.”

  Jace stared at Laimo, completely unsurprised. This was a new version of her being last one in and first one out when the ERTs hit medical the previous night.

  “Assist your ass to D Pod. And you get to A Pod.”

  Jace nodded, her throat as dry as a concrete sidewalk during high summer, while the rest of her body swam in sweat. This isn’t happening, not again. The
re can’t be another dead man in this jail. Not while I’m on duty.

  “Asshole.” But Laimo’s tone was small and hinted at some inner fear.

  Good. I don’t want to be the only one scared to death.

  “Do we—” Jace wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “Do we stay when the detectives get there?”

  The road deputy shrugged. “Who knows what they’ll want. They’ll tell you. Get to it.”

  Walking away, Laimo hollered at Jace. “Nobody ever died here until you showed up.”

  The deputy’s eyes snapped toward Laimo. “Shut the hell up before I put you back in the middle of all this.” His eyes, as deep as silver alloy, pummeled her.

  Jace opened her mouth but he held up a silencing finger. When Laimo was near D Pod, he shook his head but offered that same evil grin. “She’s an idiot and tramping through the blood will put her deep in this scene, regardless of where she’s posted.”

  On the floor, weaving in and out of the colored stripes that led to various pods, there was the heel half of a left-shoe print, then a gap, then another left-shoe print, all leading toward D Pod. “Don’t let her get under your skin, Salome. Some people need to crap on everyone around them so they lose the smell of their own stink.” He pointed toward A Pod. “Now get down there and remember, write down everyone’s name and their times by the clocks on the wall.”

  Jace swallowed. “Cataloging scene access?”

  “Yeah. Some dumbass who believes his or her badge gives access to everything is going to drop by for a look-see. Your job is to keep the scene as clean as possible.”

  He was right. In her short time in the jail, she’d handled a few scenes that had attracted jailers and more than a few road guys and even a lab wonk or two. There had been a couple of beatings, a horribly bloody female on female rape, and a home-brew booze experiment that went devastatingly awry when the hooch exploded and burned the inmate over three-quarters of his body. At every one of those scenes, small crowds had appeared as though summoned by some quiet god of chaos who pointed the way to carnage.

  “I don’t even smoke and I could use one of Laimo’s cigarettes,” Jace said.

  He chuckled. “Control access, save the scene, let the detectives notice. They won’t say anything but they know who is who in the department. Or when they come to you breathing fire about a scene so messed up they can’t pull any evidence, you’ll hand them the names and be done.” He winked. “Plus? Cops don’t usually want their names written down anywhere so they’ll move along.” He thought for a moment, then offered his hand. “By the way, I’m Ezell, Craig Ezell.”