East of the Sun

by Trey R. Barker

  Von Holton ran to the ad-seg inner door and yanked on it. “Open up.”

  The lab tech, his face as white as a summer cloud, stepped out of the cell. Jakob pushed him back in. “Keep working. Document absolutely everything. If there are less than a hundred pictures, you’re going on report.”

  “Get me outta here,” Von Holton called across the pod.

  From behind their doors, prisoners suddenly woke up and stared with wide and scared faces.

  “No one in or out, Detective,” Dillon said.

  “Sarge,” Jace said. “What do you want me—”

  He cut her off. “Detective, you’re—”

  “If Bobby’s gone, I gotta get on it.” Von Holton jerked on the locked door again.

  “No.” Dillon shook his head. “You’re here to stay.”

  “Goddamnit, open the door.”

  Dillon turned away from Von Holton as the alarm continued to jar its way into Jace. She tried to eat down the fear that rose from deep in her gut. “Sarge, what do you want from me?”

  Dillon waved her off. “Bibb, get everything in record.”

  —done, baby—

  “Phones, too.”

  —got it—

  From behind their desk, the B-shift jailers were a whirl of motion. One went quickly to the lower tier while the other went upstairs. They yanked on every door to ensure it was closed and locked, and they peered through every cell-door window to account for every prisoner.

  “Dillon, open the door. I’ve got to—”

  —A Pod locked—

  —locked in B—

  —discipline locked—

  —we locked? Yeah, E is locked—

  —locked in females—

  —medical pod is locked—

  “We’re good, Sarge,” the jailer on the second tier called.

  “On the radio, everyone needs to know.”

  —ad-seg is locked—

  —two in booking, both locked . . . ERTs enroute to station beta—

  “Control, kill the alarm.”

  The silence was as instant as a bullet to the head and in the burst of quiet, Jace had the sensation of suddenly being at a precipice with one leg over. But in that silence, the facility took a breath, and so she did, too. She put both feet back on the safe side of the cliff.

  Licking his lips, Dillon shifted his body inside his sharps vest. “All right. Okay. Everybody chill out. We’re good. We’re good.” After another deep breath, he keyed his radio. “Every pod that’s locked and secured coughs up a jailer. Jailers search everything . . . you guys are the bloodhounds. ERTs will not search, under any circumstances. ERTs are the shotguns. Everyone under full jail arms. Two people per team. I find anyone in the halls alone, they’ll get thirty days no pay and both my boots in their ass.”

  “Patrol?” Major Jakob asked.

  Dillon nodded. “On it, ma’am. Control, let Lt. Beem and Lt. Silverman know what’s going on. I want five of their patrol deputies working a perimeter around the jail, looking in every hole and shadow they can find. Ask them to send some cars to his known haunts, too. I have no idea how long he’s been gone.”

  —10-4, Sarge. Soon as I get that, I’ll dig up vid, see if I can nail down a time—

  “You’re a good man, Sergeant Bibb.”

  —yes, I am . . . and my birthday’s coming up—

  Von Holton had come back to the group, his face was swollen with anger. “Dillon, listen: if Bobby has taken a powder, I’ve got to get on top of that. I can’t do my job from this pod. Let me outta here.”

  “Step the hell off’a me or we’re going to be back where we almost were a few minutes ago.”

  “Sergeant, I need—”

  “Detective.” Dillon’s voice boomed across the pod. “As far as I know, I have an escapee . . . one who is your murder suspect. We know he’s violent and we know he’s killed and I’ve got no guarantee he won’t do it again. You are unarmed and I will not have anyone unarmed in my halls while I’m looking for someone who stabbed a doctor twenty or thirty times.” Dillon held up a hand to stop Von Holton’s protest. “We are in lockdown until we know what’s what. I know it’s a pain in the balls for you and for that I apologize, but my priorities right now don’t include you. No one moves. I don’t care who it is.”

  Von Holton chuckled but it was a sound riddled with anxiety. “Right, protocol. Bet Bukowski ain’t locked down.”

  “Adam 1 from 405.” Dillon stared at Von Holton.

  —405 go ahead—

  Jace recognized the sheriff’s tired voice. To her ear, the depth of it always put her in mind of Zeus from atop Olympus, though perhaps a Zeus who was ready to turn Olympus over to a new tenant.

  “Sir, where are you?”

  —locked in my office, Sergeant . . . you better send me a goddamned pizza or something—

  Though a chuckle was on his face, Dillon kept his voice straight. “Yes, sir.” He looked at Von Holton but softened his tone a bit. “The better I do my job, the sooner you get outta here.”

  Reluctantly, Von Holton acknowledged Dillon and stepped back.

  “Same for you, Major,” he said to Jakob. Her face became stony, but she said nothing.

  “Sarge, what about me?” Jace waited until Von Holton was out of earshot. “I need something to do.”

  He nodded. “456 . . . what’s your 10-20?”

  —D pod . . . I was headed out to search—

  “Negative. 10-25 ad-seg hallway. You and 479 will search the tunnel. Full jail arms for you.”

  —Yes, sir—

  Once, when she’d been young, maybe eight or nine years old, Jace and Mama had gone to a Halloween spook house down the road in Stanton. It was in an old mansion—money long since made from cattle and wildcat oil wells and gone from God knew what—and was their first visit. Before Mama finished parking the car, Jace knew she was scared. She had giggled to cover her fear, but then lost the laugh when she and Mama got to the entrance. It was a walkway that led from the county road up to the front door and where once it had been covered in honeysuckle and ivy, it was now covered with cobwebs and bats and blood. A man took their money, then grinned—with bloody teeth—and held the curtained doorway open for them. Beyond that black curtain was a tunnel that was about a hundred miles long.

  Jace tried to keep her face neutral. “Tunnel?”

  Dillon eyed her. “It’s one of the nooks and crannies.”

  Jakob shook her head. “It’s about a million of the nooks and crannies. Happy New Year.”

  CHAPTER 30

  It wasn’t a shiny darkness, like that of a deep west-Texas night when the lights from countless oil rigs competed with a deep blue-black blanket of stars. This was muted, the kind of flat pallette reminiscent of the black primer that stared from between smears of hand-applied gray on Grapa’s long ago battered pickup. But it was more than simply black; it was a breathing darkness, its breath overpowering from deep in the tunnel. It shoved its way into her throat and coated her lungs as though it were a powder, ground fine by years of disuse.

  Hearing the muffled sound of the world above, the clank and bang of it, but seeing only dark was unnerving. Jace’s and Rory’s radios crackled in their ears, popping to life every few minutes with a quick blast of chatter before falling silent again.

  —from 405—

  —sweep team—

  —go—

  —got somebody’s dinner at the back door . . . Chinese, I think—

  —send ’em back, Bibb—

  “Signal’s getting bad.” Jace turned up the volume.

  “Be gone soon.” Rory’s flashlight limped out in front of her, a weak beam trying to cut open the darkness. “We’ll be on our own. Let’s don’t get separated.”

  “You’re the boss, sister.”

  “Pro’ly ought to scare you.”

  Jace breathed out hot, scared air. “It does.”

  Pipes ran above their heads, the sound of rushing water clear. There was also a low-vo
lume moan that could have been anything from the harmonic resonance of earth held back by cracked concrete walls to a Hammond B-3 organ playing soulful jazz. Regardless, it and the rushing water came together as an angular and jagged music that played relentlessly and sideways, just as Mama’s friends’ well-intentioned pronouncements had after Mama’s memorial service.

  —456 and 479 status—

  Rory keyed her radio. “10-6, control.”

  Jace imagined this place was what Mama would have seen had there been an actual burial; this darkness that deepened when Jace and Rory played the bluish swath of their flashlights over the tunnel’s walls. Instead of a burial, there had been a service attended by a handful of friends, by her and Grapa and Gramma, by a few old high-school chums, conducted by Preacher.

  —4 . . . 6 and . . . status—

  “Control,” Rory said. “We’re fine.”

  Both women stopped and listened for a response.

  “Control, 10-6.”

  A crackle came back, punctuated by remnants of Bibb’s voice.

  —did . . . say . . . 6?—

  “10-4”

  There the reception died, with an audible, rattling last breath like that of a wounded animal.

  “He’s gone.”

  Jace focused her flashlight into the tunnel. After no more than ten or fifteen feet, the dark ate the light. “I’m starting to freak out a little.”

  “Take it easy.”

  Jace’s boot kicked the leg of a rusted and bent chair, decades old. She stepped around it and they continued on, their lights back and forth, trying to see everything while actually seeing almost nothing, and hoping Inmate Bobby didn’t come out of some hidden shadow.

  “Hey,” Jace said. “What’s ‘full jail arms’?”

  “Everything you’re given to work the jail. Baton, OC spray, Taser, whatever.”

  “Don’t we already have all that?”

  “Not everyone. Some jailers haven’t been certified or recertified on something.”

  “And ‘full arms’ would be firearms.”

  Rory nodded. “That’d be a pretty extreme situation.”

  In the yawning dark, which lent itself to a moaning silence, Jace felt fear bulge in her like a tumor closing her throat. She tried to ignore it, then to swallow it down but it went nowhere, impervious to her attempts. “I keep thinking about the locks.”

  “Me, too.”

  There was a series of doors, each secured, that led down through the basement and the sub-basement to the tunnel. Each lock had been opened as though it were a child’s puzzle that, after having been opened, lost the attention of the child.

  “Who’d’a thought Bobby was paying enough attention to snick some keys and get his ass outta here.”

  Jace kept her feet in as straight a line as she could, though the darkness bent her sense of direction. “True, that. Shouldn’t we just go back to Dillon? Let him know what’s what?”

  “First of all, we don’t know what’s what. We have some opened locks. Maybe it’s Bobby. Maybe it’s custodial services.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “No. It’s Bobby. But he’s already gone.”

  “Tempting fate, aren’t you?”

  “Haven’t had a date in a while . . . at least I’m tempting somebody. Look, he killed Doc and boogied outta here through the tunnel when he realized we knew it. Probably already got out the other end. Operations has cars around the jail and heading to his places. Our job—as I see it—is to go back to Dillon with all the answers he’s gonna want. Which doors and what route and blah blah blah. Don’t matter what happened, we’re going to do our jobs damned well and look good to Dillon and Major Jakob and the sheriff while we do it.”

  Rivers of sweat traced lines along Jace’s face and neck. She wiped it away and tried to ignore walls that, regardless of her flashlight, stepped closer to her. “You like her, don’t you?”

  “Jakob? She’s righteous, Jace. She is who I want to be.”

  “Forensics?”

  Rory kicked a rat out of her way. It thumped against the wall and scurried into the safety of the darkness. “She didn’t start out there. She was a roadie. Years ago. Wanna talk about tough? A woman in this county on the road twenty years ago? Fighting drunks and arresting wife-beaters? And you know she didn’t have much backup. Had to prove herself to the boys every single minute. Doesn’t get any tougher than that.”

  “So you don’t want to test semen samples; you want to be tough.”

  “Hah. I am tough.”

  The basement of the Zachary County jail housed Records, the repository of every sliver of jail-produced records, both paper and digital, that state statutes demanded be kept. On the far side of that brightly lit room was a door Jace had never before noticed. Through that door, which was sometimes locked and sometimes not according to Rory, there was a stairway—lit by a string of yellow incandescent bulbs—that led to the subbasement. Jace hadn’t known that area existed and was shocked to find even more records.

  “Hundred years back maybe,” Rory had said.

  The room was also a messy final resting place for bits and pieces of equipment. Ancient radios and gunbelts with leather so old and dried that much if it had cracked to pieces where it had been left. There were worn boots and, to Jace’s shock, they were actually cowboy boots rather than Gore-Tex or zippered duty boots. There were also scrapbooks put together by long-ago deputies highlighting some retiring man’s career or car chases and shootouts. On the far side of that room was another door, also unlocked. Through that was a last gate, then a short stairway down to the tunnel that connected old jail with old courthouse. Both the door and the gate had been unlocked, the rusty padlocks sitting on the floor like forgotten bullets.

  They stepped carefully and tried to see anything Bobby might have stumbled against in his headlong rush toward the courthouse. The women traced their lights in a pattern: Jace in the nearness and Rory deeper in the tunnel.

  The lighting has gotten dimmer, Jace realized.

  In the hallway upstairs the lighting had been almost too bright, a splay of harsh blue-white fluorescent. In Records only a few of the overhead fixtures had been on because the office was closed. The two fixtures gave just enough light that, in the morning when the clerks arrived, they’d be able to see to get behind the counter. Each next place had fewer lights and they’d gone from the fluorescent to a handful of single bulbs, then to a single bulb. Each step put Jace and Rory deeper in the black, until, at the tunnel entrance, there was no light but what they had.

  “I asked Dillon about Inmate Bobby’s medical.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t know what?”

  “What meds Bobby might have been taking.”

  Rory stopped, cocked her head slightly, and listened. After a drawn-out second, she started walking again. “Which would mean what?”

  “Well, I thought maybe Wrubel was getting Inmate Bobby some drugs for a medical condition.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “No. Wrubel and Bobby were both selling and Bobby killed him.”

  “Yeah. If you think about it, what better place to sell than a jail? Or a damned jail hospital.” Rory held up one finger. “Patients,” and a second finger, “junkies. It’s perfect.”

  They had walked about another fifteen minutes when Jace’s ears twitched.

  “What?” Rory kept her eyes ahead of them.

  “Probably shouldn’t be hearing anything in here, should we?”

  Rory turned into the tunnel. “Uh . . . no.”

  In the distance, someone cried. A weak sound that, to Jace’s ears, was full of mourning. They moved cautiously, their flashlights arcing back and forth. Within a couple of minutes, they saw the blood.

  “Shit.” Rory swept her flashlight along the blood. It had splashed, then sprayed, and then there were drops as big as quarters heading deeper into the tunnel.

  “Cut himself?”


  “Lotta blood for a simple cut. And what would he have cut himself on?”

  “The scalpel. I didn’t find it.”

  Even in the dim light, Jace could see Rory grit her teeth. “Damn it.”

  “Bobby? You okay?” Jace’s voice echoed in the tunnel. She walked faster, trying not to let panic overcome her. “Bobby? Come on, it’s Sheriff Jace. Talk to me. What’s going on?”

  “Jace?” Rory was two steps behind. “Whiskey tango foxtrot?”

  “I think he’s killing himself.”

  “Crap.”

  Rory took off at a jog, faster than Jace was comfortable with, but not anywhere near as fast as Jace wanted to go. “Bobby? It’s Deputy Bogan . . . Rory. Where are you?”

  The dark grew deeper, darker. It tightened on them with every step. The light moved slower, too, shrinking and slipping behind them. The walls came in, concrete and aggregate, chipped paint and cobwebs, and slipped around them like a cold, hard blanket.

  “Bobby?”

  There was no answer. The crying stopped, then started again.

  “Bobby? Where are you? Do you need a doctor?”

  On the floor, the blood spatters got smaller. Moving faster? Or bleeding out?

  —. . . 456? Do . . . py?—

  Rory grabbed her shoulder mic. “Yeah, yeah, we’re here. Send me a doctor. I got injuries.”

  —. . . say again . . . you’re injured?—

  “Inmate injured. Send a doctor. Now.”

  —. . . 56 . . . breaking up . . .—

  “They’re never going to hear us, Rory.”

  “Damn it, we need some help.”

  The crying got louder, almost within reach. If this was suicide, it wasn’t over yet.

  “Damn it, Bobby. Where are you?”

  When they rounded a bend in the tunnel, they found him. Peering through the slashes of light, they saw a face streaked in red, almost an angry grin that reminded Jace of a clown’s huge mouth. A scalpel was in Inmate Bobby’s right hand. Covered in blood, it melded into his hand and then his arm until all three were a single instrument. Blood ran down, then sideways, then back up toward Inmate Bobby’s face.

  “Holy God.” Jace stopped, frozen by the violence.

  He’d been standing up when he slit his own throat. Probably back where they found the first spray. He walked here and lay down and the blood ran down his neck toward the floor. Then he struggled against the pain, or sudden regret, and turned his head until the blood seemed to rise into his face and eyes and stain his forehead.