A Small Town

by Thomas Perry

  Scott was thirty-one years old and had worked at Weldonville since he was twenty-six. The job of commander’s deputy was not at all what he had thought it would be. He had worked for a while in a state facility, where crimes were ugly—murder and armed robbery, child abuse, assault. He had always assumed that a federal prison would have a lot of men who were easier to be around. He’d expected the people in federal prisons had committed federal crimes, like counterfeiting, stock and bond manipulation, or postal fraud. He couldn’t recall having seen any of those offenders at Weldonville. They were all hard cases now.

  He used the logic of elimination to decide how to attack tonight’s problem. It would do no good to look in Cellblock C for the seven men, because whatever had happened there was over. Order had been restored, or had returned on its own because everybody was locked up. The same was true of the infirmary. The patients on camera were all in their beds. The yard was empty and the towers that oversaw it were manned. The best remaining idea was that maybe the squad had taken the two offenders to the solitary holding cells away from the cellblocks so they could be interviewed separately and the arguments sorted out before they were either disciplined or returned to the general population. When he reached the first stairway, he opened it with his key card and began to climb.

  He took a route along the catwalk above Main Street. He told himself that it was a shortcut, but the prison was a place of straight lines and right angles, so whatever route ran the length of the place was the same distance to the inch. The truth was that the catwalks were above the cellblocks and the prisoners and the routes they could use. If he met anyone up here, it would be one of the roving guards armed with rifles, and that thought was comforting.

  He trotted along the catwalk, trying to make good time. Captain Humphry was a fair boss, but he felt it was his job to evaluate everyone. It was essential for Scott to dispel any suspicion that he was lazy, incompetent, or fearful, a man trying to keep his place in an office so he wouldn’t face the danger the guards had to.

  He didn’t like being out alone this way in the prison, especially when there was an odd breakdown in the surveillance and communication systems. He was determined that after this lonely scouting mission, Humphry would be pleased. At least for the present, Humphry would approve of him.

  He saw one of the roving riflemen coming along a catwalk that was perpendicular to his. He was coming from the west side of the prison. Scott adjusted his speed so they would meet at the intersection. The man had his rifle on its sling over his shoulder, and not in his hands. He obviously wasn’t aware of anything wrong.

  Scott didn’t recognize the man. He hoped he would come up with the man’s name soon. This was one of the bad things about being isolated in Operations. He wasn’t close with the rest of the prison guards. He smiled broadly and waved his hand as he approached. The other man smiled and nodded, and when they were about eight feet apart, his hand came up too. By the time Scott saw and understood that it held a canister of CS and pepper spray, it was already propelling its pressurized stream of liquid into his face, blinding his eyes and making them burn.

  “Stop it!” he shouted. “I’m a guard like you. Can’t you see I’m a guard?” He was bent over, his hands rubbing his eyes. “I’m the deputy commander.”

  The uniformed man used the butt of his rifle to knock Scott senseless and prone on the catwalk. Then he put down his weapons, slipped his hands under Scott’s armpits, dragged and hoisted him up to the railing, draped him there, and then squatted and clasped his thighs and lifted him up and over.

  He watched Scott’s unconscious body fall eighty feet toward the polished concrete pavement of Main Street. His body sprawled out full-length, his arms and legs out, like a gingerbread man. When he hit, his body bounced slightly before it settled. He was facing upward, and his head had a circular splash of blood around it like an aura. He was dead, and there had not been enough noise to be audible on the next cellblock. The uniformed man picked up his rifle and aerosol tear gas–and–pepper spray and walked on along the catwalk.

  4

  Humphry had a moment when his mind ran through the most alarming possibilities. What if the seven men of the trouble team had arrived at the Cellblock C hallway gate, gone in and closed it behind them, and then had the power go off? Judging from the blackouts on the monitors, there had been an outage. During a circuit failure and then the surge afterward, the gates could have shorted out or lost their programming and become inoperable. The seven men could be trapped between the outer gate and the gate to the inmate housing area. With the glitch in the radio system, they couldn’t even call for help.

  There were certainly inmates in a population of 2,500 who had some training as electricians. Some could even have degrees in electrical engineering. One of them could have tinkered with the circuitry and stranded the seven men.

  The seven could be there all night. It was the sort of predicament the inmates all relished. Whenever a guard got injured or got locked in somewhere, they would celebrate it, hurrying to tell all the other inmates and, if possible, bringing them to see the poor guard in there waiting for rescue. That kind of event was a disruption in the ecosystem of the prison. It undermined the guards’ sense of themselves as the superiors of the inmates, and it reminded the inmates that the guards were vulnerable and could be hurt. He hoped that what had delayed the trouble squad wasn’t as dire as that.

  He hoped it was nothing, even though he knew it couldn’t be nothing. Almost any problem would have been reported to his office within a minute and a plan could have been selected within two more. But there had been no report.

  He thought hard for a moment. There was no sight or sound from Paul Scott either. He walked to the wall of monitors at Scott’s workstation and began to study the segments of the screens. Each monitor represented a section of the prison, and each square on a screen was the feed from a single camera in that section. A couple of them were still blacked out on the first section he checked. Three were blacked out on the next one. That meant something. Probably the electrician Humphry had posited was playing another trick.

  Humphry hated to call for help, but he felt he had to. The normal procedure was to pick up the phone at this point and make three calls, in order. The first was to notify the warden, then the local police, and then the state police that something disturbing was happening inside the prison.

  He went to the nearest phone, which was sitting on the desk that Scott had vacated. He lifted the receiver, but there was no dial tone.

  He caught a movement in the corner of his eye. The door handle was moving. Thank God, he thought. It was undoubtedly Scott and the seven men. They were fine. The door opened.

  Six men in guard uniforms burst into the room at a run, saw Humphry, and veered toward him. The first pair collided with him, knocked him to the floor, and overwhelmed him.

  Minutes later the dozen uniformed prisoners who had led the break reunited and were on the move again. Now they had the watch commander’s key card, which would open any and every lock in the prison. There were only two of those keys, and the other one was at home with the warden.

  They made their way toward the guards’ locker room, led by Paul Duquesne, the man with the captain’s key card. He ran ahead of the other men, stopping at each gate to open it and then run on while two of the others jammed the mechanism so the gate could not be closed again.

  It took five minutes to reach the guards’ locker room. As soon as they were inside, they took off their guard uniforms and put on the civilian clothes that were hanging in the lockers. They took the dead guards’ wallets, keys, phones, and other belongings.

  They left the uniforms in the lockers, but took with them the firearms and ammunition they had stolen from the arsenal. Each man had an M4 rifle capable of firing on the settings for semiautomatic and fully automatic, two Glock 17 pistols, and as many loaded magazines as he could carry in his pockets, jacket, and belt.

  They made their way to the out-processin
g area on the ground floor, where prisoners were held while being prepared for release. They shot the two guards on duty there and used the watch commander’s key card to open the building doors and the outer gate. Then they streamed out through the gate and left it open for the inmates they knew would follow.

  They trotted out to the staff parking lot outside the prison walls, and quickly figured out which sets of keys went with which cars and trucks. Most of the car key fobs had brand logos on them, and all of them could unlock a door and light the dome lights with the press of a button.

  Within minutes each of the twelve had a car, and by then most of them had found the addresses of the guards, either from a driver’s license or a car registration. Each of these addresses was a place where a man about to start a new life might find things that would help him on his way.

  The guards’ houses would contain more clothes and maybe a suitcase or two to carry them. The houses would also contain some cash, some food and water, and some valuable items that could be sold or traded later. There could be many additional attractions at any one of those houses, and the seven-to-seven shift was not even close to over. It was only 1:12 a.m.

  None of the escapees had ever been outside the walls of the prison before, and the U.S. marshal’s vehicles that had delivered them at the start of their sentences had carried them directly from the interstate highway to the prison without passing through the residential neighborhoods of Weldonville. Some of the twelve escapees used the guards’ cell phone apps to get directions to the dead guards’ addresses.

  Beth Tiedemann was upstairs asleep when the car crept up the street. The evening of July 19 had been such a hot, still time that she had the bedroom windows open and the ceiling fan running. The doors and windows downstairs were all locked and bolted. Those were the only ones that mattered, because the upstairs windows were too high to reach without an extension ladder, and there were no big trees close enough to the house to use as a way to climb up to a bedroom.

  The bass-range hum of the engine woke her. It sounded exactly like Jack’s Mustang to her. She knew that sound so well because she’d listened for it for three years, and she’d heard it every time he’d come home from work, so it gave her a warm, happy feeling. She opened her eyes, but it was still dark. Maybe it was a different car, because Jack wasn’t supposed to be home until after seven in the morning. She sat up and listened. It sure sounded like Jack’s Mustang. She looked at the red numerals of the clock on the stand beside the bed. It was only 1:28.

  She looked out the window. It was Jack’s Mustang. And what would he be doing arriving at the house just after one? Was Jack coming home sick or hurt?

  She got up, stepped into the slippers by her side of the bed, and ran out into the hallway. Because it was a hot night, she hadn’t worn the sweatpants and football shirt she often wore. She’d put on a pair of shorts and a tank top. She hurried down the staircase.

  When she was almost to the first floor, she heard a key in the front door and the doorknob turned, but the door didn’t open. She had set the deadbolt because she was alone, and that didn’t open with the key. She hurried to the entrance, turned the lever that made the deadbolt retract into the door, and tugged the knob. As the door swung open, she said, “Jack, what’s—”

  The door was pushed inward hard and as it hit the wall, a man was already charging inside, reaching out for her like a creature in a nightmare. The man was wearing Jack’s new blue shirt.

  5

  Leah Hawkins was six feet two inches tall and bony, with unruly, wiry hair the color of clover honey that she had confined in a tight bun. Tonight she wore her navy blue version of the suit that many female cops wore. The jacket was tailored to hang from her shoulders without curving in much at the waist, so the sidearm she wore on her belt wouldn’t cause a bulge.

  She drove her personal car from her house on Calloway Street on the east side of Weldonville to city hall. As she went, she passed empty lots that had once been the homes of people she knew, burned the night of July 19 two years ago but never rebuilt or even sold to new people or builders. Most of the charred wood and the standing remains of chimneys had been removed, and the holes that had been basements were filled in, but the work had not been done by the owners. Many of the owners were dead, and the survivors had abandoned the lots, and the city had assigned the Department of Public Works to use its two bulldozers and four dump trucks to clear the ruins.

  Whole blocks on the east side had been leveled, and the wood, bricks, concrete, and pipes hauled off. Two or three houses on nearly every other block had been removed, from where the federal highway met the town at a tangent all the way to Main Street, where the fire damage had been stopped.

  Near Main Street in the commercial district there had been a slower kind of damage. More than half the small stores and restaurants that had been alive two years ago now had plywood sheets over their windows and doors. Leah could look along Main Street and see the handiwork of the employees of Clay’s Hardware Store. The plywood was all cut accurately to size, placed over each opening, and screwed—not nailed or stapled—in place. The boarding-up job would probably last longer than the other parts of some of those buildings. You couldn’t get hired at Clay’s Hardware if you didn’t know your way around a toolbox, and you wouldn’t stay long unless you took pride in doing things right. The older Clays, the brothers who had run the business, had died that night two years ago, but those standards hadn’t changed.

  Leah had heard that the work of boarding up storefronts and offices and gas stations had actually given Clay’s a year of better-than-normal profits before things had begun to taper off from people leaving. But that was typical gossip. People in the area beyond the periphery of a disaster did a lot of talking, while the ones in the center seemed to lose interest in it. The talk wasn’t even about anything most of the time, just people’s way of claiming a small share of a big event.

  She parked her car in the lot of the Public Safety Building next to the big, black unmarked car she’d had assigned to her when she’d returned to Weldonville from her years with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation in Lakewood. She looked at it for a second and wondered who would be driving it next.

  She walked from the employees’ parking lot by the Public Safety Building to the Main Street sidewalk and then across from the park and up the eight steps to the front entrance of city hall, taking them two at a time. The big set of double doors were clad in a dark metal that was supposed to look like bronze, unlike the glass doors from her childhood they had replaced. The glass had allowed kids like her to stare inside down the long corridor and watch people on their way to and from official affairs. The bronze ones reminded Leah of the doors of a church, but an ugly church.

  She tugged the right door open and headed along the mirror-polished marble floor to the place where Sergeant Tim Munson stood waiting to operate the metal scanning machine. When she was close enough, Munson said, “Evening, Lieutenant.”

  She said, “Evening, Sergeant,” as she took off her utility belt, with her badge, sidearm, and handcuffs on it, and set it in the plastic bin on the metal table. “Everybody in there waiting for me?” She put her phone in the bin and stepped through the metal detector.

  “It’s not eight o’clock yet, but I think they’re ready for you.” He picked up the bin holding her equipment and said, “You know I have to lock these up while you’re in a council meeting, right? No firearms, no phones?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I’ve been to the council.” She knew the gun ban was a tradition that dated to the city’s founding in 1873. As he put the belt and phone into the lock box below the table, she started in the direction of the council chamber. “See you later.”

  She walked to the door of the city council chamber and opened it. The seven council members were not in their semicircular row of seats facing the audience, the way they were at open, official meetings. They were sitting around the big table where the citizens who had business before them sat. As
Leah walked down the aisle between the two halves of the chamber, the mayor said, “We saved a seat for you, Lieutenant.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Mayor.” She sat in the empty seat at the foot of the table.

  The mayor said, “You all know Detective Lieutenant Leah Hawkins.”

  Of course they did, and if they hadn’t before, they would have learned in the past months. Tonight was their third closed meeting with her during that time.

  Linda Harris said, “Yes, of course.” She and most of the others gave Leah a wave or a nod.

  But Mayor Donaldson persisted. “And Lieutenant, you undoubtedly know City Attorney Phil Haymes. He wasn’t here for the other meetings.”

  She said, “We went to high school together. Hi, Phil.”

  “Hi, Leah.”

  “Okay, then,” said Mayor Donaldson. “Since we’ve dispensed with all of the routine issues before the council, and the lieutenant is here, the agenda lets us turn to the police issues. We’ve all read the FBI’s report we received at our May 12 meeting. As far as I can tell, they have made no progress in two years locating, much less arresting, any of the twelve men who caused, planned, and directed the July 19 prison break. I’d like to ask the lieutenant this. Is the destruction of Weldonville now a cold case?”

  “Nobody is saying that,” Leah said. “But in my experience, no law enforcement agency, even the FBI, keeps hundreds of people working on a case after the public’s safety is no longer threatened and there haven’t been new leads for them to follow. There will be a few agents keeping the files current. If there are tips from informants or chance sightings, they’ll act. But barring that, our case is a piece of history. One big indicator is that the expert special agents in charge that we worked with at first have all been reassigned.”