The Girls He Adored elp-1

by Jonathan Nasaw

  “C'mon, just a drink to unwind after our shift,” he begged her for the last time, on Wednesday afternoon. “No harm in two”-he searched for the word-“ colleagues having a little drink after work.”

  “Gimme a break, Frank.” Knapp was sitting at her desk with her back to the room, cramming for her criminology final. “I don't drink, and I don't date… colleagues.”

  “Oh well, you can't blame a guy for trying.”

  “One time, no. One hundred times, you're skating on thin ice, harrassment-wise.”

  “Well, excuuuse me.”

  “I don't need this shit, Frank. I'm trying to better myself here, and-”

  “Deputy! Excuse me,deputy!” Someone calling from inside the cell block.

  “Sounds like our G-man,” Knapp remarked.

  “I'm not feeling so great. Could you let me out now? I have everything I need.”

  “Jesus Christ, how unprofessional,” said Twombley. “I better get him out of there.” He flipped up the fourth knob on the door control panel, and cranked the wheel, then entered the dark cellblock. Twombley hurried past the first two cells, one packed with redjumpsuited prisoners, the other with orange, past the third, left empty to provide a buffer for Pender's interview, and peered into the fourth cell-Pender was lying on his side on the floor, with his back to the bars.

  “I dunno, first he said he had a headache,” shrugged the man whom the deputies referred to as the Ripper. He was sitting on the bench with his knees drawn up as far as his shackles permitted. “Then he just fell over, hit his head on the cee — ment.”

  Twombley slid the door open and entered the cell. “You stay right there,” he warned the Ripper.

  “I ain't going anywhere,” the man replied, rattling his chains for emphasis.

  Twombley knelt by Pender, saw the blood pooling around Pender's head, black as crankcase oil in the dim light. Pender's eyelids fluttered-his mouth opened and closed but no sound emerged.

  “Just take 'er easy now,” said Twombley. “Everything's gonna be-”

  The last word would have been okay, but Twombley never got it out. The chain came around his neck from behind; the links cut deep into his throat, shutting off his air. He heard a roaring in his ears; then, as he tried to reach for his pepper spray, he heard a popping sound, like knuckles cracking, only a hundred times louder.

  It was, he understood as his body crumpled beneath him like a marionette whose strings had been cut, the sound of his own neck being broken; he noticed as he lay dying that there were little rainbows floating in the black pool of Pender's blood.

  Deputy Deena Knapp, too, was thinking about blood, or more precisely, blood splatters.

  “If a blood spot on level ground is 4 mm wide and 11 mm long, what is the angle of impact?” read the question on her sample test.

  She punched in four divided by eleven on her calculator, came up with. 363636, and was in the process of converting that into a sine function when she sensed Frank Twombley's presence just behind her. She thought it was odd that she hadn't heard him returning from the cell block-normally the jingle-jangling of Twombley's keys drove her crazy over the course of a shift.

  “Back off, Frank,” she said without turning around. “You're invading my personal space.”

  Instead, he grabbed her by the hair, jerked her head back, and fired a burst of pepper spray into her face from point-blank range. Her chair tipped over, the back of her skull hit the linoleum with sickening force. She saw a flash of red against a field of black, then another as he grabbed her by the hair and slammed her head against the floor again.

  Blinded, suffocating, in pain, she fought him as long and hard as she could. She clawed for his face with her nails, hoping at least to mark him. His weight shifted on top of her. He was straddling her upper chest now, pinning her arms with his knees. She forced her eyes open, saw a blur of orange through the tears, realized it wasn't Frank after all, but one of the inmates. She tried to scream; he fired another burst of pepper spray directly into her open mouth.

  This second burst sent her into convulsions. Her eyes rolled back in her head until only the whites were showing; pink froth bubbled from her mouth. And although Max had climbed off her immediately after she lost consciousness, and hurried back into the cell block, Deputy Knapp's body continued to flop and jerk for a good five minutes afterward, as if she were still trying to buck him off.

  21

  The commotion was building in the other holding cells as Max raced back into the cell block, unbuttoning his jumpsuit as he ran. Lee had done his job and slipped back into the darkness of their mind-now it was up to Max to get them to safety.

  “Shut the fuck up,” he shouted breathlessly to the red- and orange-clad prisoners as he jumped over Twombley's body, which lay athwart Pender's, blocking the entrance to the holding cell. “I'll open the doors, but you gotta keep it down.” The last time he'd been here he had estimated, counting off the seconds in his mind, that no more than fifteen minutes ever elapsed between the arrival or departure of prisoner convoys with armed escorts. This meant he had only five minutes left, ten tops, to make good his escape.

  Stripped down to his jail-issue underwear, he hauled Twombley's body off Pender and began undressing the deputy, while his mind worked frantically. An ordinary man, he knew, would simply walk out of the jail through the office door. In which case, when the alarms began to sound and the sirens to blare, that hypothetical ordinary man would find himself stranded within hailing distance of the jail, the courthouse, city hall, and the Salinas Municipal Police headquarters.

  And what then would be the ordinary man's options? Run for it? Try to bluff his way through the cordon of security that would surely be thrown up, relying on a deputy sheriff's uniform for camouflage, when they already knew his face, and would realize soon enough that Twombley's uniform had been taken? Hotwire or hijack a car in that overpoliced neighborhood?

  No doubt about it, thought Max, unbuckling Twombley's heavy belt and tightening it around his own slender midsection: an ordinary man, even if he'd managed to get out of the jail in the first place, would almost certainly be captured within minutes.

  But Max was no ordinary man. He was extra ordinary, and possessed both the foresight to come up with an extraordinary solution and the courage to carry it out. Time, however, was in short supply. Max hurried out of the cell, giving Pender's body a wide berth so as not to step in the blood still pooling out around the head and risk leaving bloody footprints behind.

  The other prisoners were crowding up against the bars, calling to him in both English and Spanish. Max tossed Deputy Twombley's handcuff key into the first holding cell on his way back into the office, then fumbled through the rest of the keys until he found one that opened the gun cabinet. He grabbed a Glock with a clip already inserted, slipped it into Twombley's holster, closed the locker again, then looked around for a telephone book. There was one on the desk; as he thumbed through it looking for the two addresses he needed, something began nagging at Max, something he'd left undone.

  Unfortunately, there was no time to call on Mose. But it would come to one of them eventually-it always did, Max told himself as he located the panel that controlled the cell doors, flipped the three remaining knobs up into the yellow position, then cranked the wheel, opening the doors to the rest of the holding cells. Immediately a dozen or more prisoners, mostly orange-jumpsuited felons, elected to take early parole and began spreading out through the streets of the West Alisal neighborhood, exactly as Max had planned.

  But Max was not among them. Instead, he turned back into the jail and used another of Twombley's keys to open the iron door leading from the holding cell corridor to the long-abandoned interior of the jail.

  Inside, it was dark as a moonless night. Max locked the door behind him, then used Twombley's big cop flashlight to navigate his way past an obstacle course of loose wires and cables, jagged-edged water and sewage pipes, boulder-sized chunks of collapsed masonry, overturned furniture, s
hattered glass, rusting cell doors hanging crookedly from one hinge or fallen entirely and blocking the narrow aisles.

  As he picked his way toward the interior staircase leading up to the second and third floors, Max could hear sirens going off all around him. He was in the process of congratulating himself on making the right decision when he realized what it was he'd left undone earlier: Pender, the FBI man-in all the hurry and commotion, he hadn't stopped to finish off Pender.

  It wouldn't have taken but a moment or two, Max realized ruefully, knuckling himself on the forehead the way Miss Miller used to when he'd screwed up: Hello? Anybody home in there? He could have stomped Pender, strangled him silently, suffocated him-shit, he could have stood on Pender's throat while he was changing clothes with Twombley, and not lost a single goddamn second. Maxwell's adrenaline began flowing again-he broke out into a sweat.

  Steady-steady now. This is not the time to panic. Max slowed his breathing, calmed himself, and began reasoning through the problem. In the first place, he didn't know for sure that Pender was still alive. Max didn't remember seeing him breathe-and he sure as shit wasn't moving.

  In the second place, even if Pender had survived, after three whacks on the skull-three Lee whacks-his brains were probably so scrambled he'd be lucky if he could remember his own name.

  And in the third place, even if Pender were both alive and compos mentis, there were no Lone Rangers in the FBI. Anything Pender knew, other agents almost certainly knew-and if they'd had any reason to connect him to Scorned Ridge, they'd have been up there digging a long time ago.

  No harm, no foul, Max reassured himself-he hadn't put the system into any further jeopardy by failing to finish Pender off. Which meant all he had to do now was find a secure place inside the jail to hole up until the fuss around him died down.

  So moving as quietly as he could in Twombley's leather-soled cop shoes, which were two sizes too large for him, Max made his way up to the second floor, where the cells were stacked wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with court records in cardboard boxes. Alarmingly, the corners of the floor-level boxes had been chewed through by rats.

  Max shuddered and backed away-he didn't care for rodents. Eventually he found a windowless isolation cell deep in the interior of the building. The door had been removed and was leaning against the wall; just inside the entrance the flashlight beam picked out the skeleton of a pigeon lying in the dust, undisturbed by rodents, skull and ribcage intact, the long bones of the wings, feathers still attached, fanned out in perfect deltas.

  It was ideal for his purposes-if the rats hadn't come in here to eat a dead pigeon, they certainly wouldn't be bothering a live human. He could hear sirens in the street below, pounding footsteps, urgent voices. A Chinese fire drill, he chuckled. They seek him here, they seek him there.

  Enormously pleased with himself, he switched off the flashlight and settled down with his back to the wall to wait them out. It was pitch-black; he literally couldn't see his hand in front of his face. Which didn't bother Max any-he wasn't afraid of the dark. He knew who was, though, and it occurred to Max that perhaps the time had come to teach Lyssy the Sissy a lesson, once and for all.

  22

  Three times the handcuff bracelet clenched in Maxwell's fist had come crashing down on the crown of Pender's skull. He felt only the first blow, as a jarring sensation, followed by the sort of breathless, welling nausea that usually follows a swift kick in the nuts.

  Stunned, all but paralyzed, he saw the prisoner's hand rise and fall, rise and fall again, but couldn't make sense of what he saw. Couldn't hear anything, either, until he closed his eyes and began to tumble through darkness. As he fell, and fell, and fell, all the hollow, distant sounds of the jail, fragments of Spanish from the other cells, a toilet flushing, the sleighbell jingle of chains and fetters, washed over him with a roar like breaking waves.

  He opened his eyes. The surf sounds abruptly ceased-the world was devoid of sound. He saw the cell bars, inexplicably horizontal-it wasn't until the deputy appeared in front of him that Pender understood that he was lying on the cell floor, on his side. It dizzied him to try to focus on the face filling his field of visionit was distorted longitudinally, as if through a fish-eye lens. Then it disappeared. Pender felt an urge, not framed in words, to apologize to somebody about something, and as he closed his eyes and gave in to the darkness, he was overwhelmed by regret.

  Time had passed-how much, Pender couldn't say. Now that the pain was in his head, his mind was paradoxically clear. He saw Twombley's underwear-clad body lying a few feet away and realized from the angle of his head that there was nothing that could be done for him.

  McDougal will be so pissed, thought Pender. Got to help. Help me do this.

  That last was a prayer-and Pender was not a praying man. But the results surprised him. Time slowed. Despite the pain he managed to raise himself up on his hands and knees, head hanging; he could see the blood from his scalp falling to the cement floor, drop by drop. Sometimes there were three or four drops in the air at the same time, like black rubies strung on an invisible chain.

  Along with the clarity of vision came an increasing clarity of mind. His thoughts raced along swiftly, transparent and weightless. What have I learned that can help them? The motel in Dallas? The hooker? Old news. What's current? The shrink-he said something about hooking up with the shrink. What was her name? Hogan? No, Cogan.

  Swaying, his left hand pressed against the dripping scalp wounds to slow the bleeding, he dipped his right forefinger into the warm pool where his head had rested on the cement floor, and wrote the following in his own blood:

  Kogin akomplis?

  Pender's strength failed him at the end. He drew the question mark lying on his belly. His use of phonic spelling was inadvertent. Whatever circuits in the brain governed that particular function must have been scrambled-he didn't even notice the misspellings until he found himself looking down from somewhere around ceiling height. From that lofty vantage he saw the two bodies below him, his own and the deputy's, the pool of blood, the clumsy scrawl. Then the walls and bars disappeared-he was in the dark; a tiny figure was walking toward him, the light streaming from behind it.

  I don't believe in this crap, he thought, hurrying forward to meet whoever it was. It's a dream-it's only one last dream.

  But what a dream. The figure grew larger. It was Pender's father, not as he'd been at the end, shrunken by cancer, but strong and tall and broad-shouldered in the bemedaled dress blues that he wore in the Veteran's Day parade every year in Cortland when Edgar was growing up. As a kid, Ed knew what every medal and ribbon represented, which was the Purple Heart and which the Silver Star. They'd buried the old man with them.

  “Daddy?”

  “It ain't Elvis, son,” said First Sergeant Robert Lee Pender, USMC, Ret. “You ready to go?”

  “I don't know.”

  “What do you mean, you don't know? Got any unfinished business?”

  “The guy that killed me-he got away.”

  “The one that killed all them women?”

  “That's the one.”

  His father laughed. “Well, shit, boy, he ain't killed you yet. Call me if he does, I'll come back for you. And don't forget, quitters never win, and Penders never quit.”

  And with that, Sergeant R. L. Pender executed a smart about-face and marched back up the slope, leaving Ed alone. He looked down, saw his body lying on its face, right arm extended, as if pointing to the words he had scrawled in blood on the cell floor. It was still bleeding, still breathing-and a moment later he was back inside it.

  I still don't believe in this crap, thought Pender. Then the pain hit him, and he lost consciousness again.

  23

  Lyssy the Sissy was frightened. He didn't like the dark. And this dark was worse than the closet his father used to lock him in. Because at least in the closet, even if you couldn't get out, you knew nothing else was going to come in.

  But this dark was more like the basem
ent. Bad things happened in the basement-it was the worst place he knew.

  Although he had a watch, a big man's watch, Lyssy couldn't tell time, so he had no idea how long he'd been in this place. All he knew was that he was forbidden to cry, and he was forbidden to use the flashlight. Even so, soon his terror got the better of him. He struggled with the heavy switch-it was hard for his little fingers to operate it. Finally, using both thumbs, he managed to turn on the light, and immediately wished he hadn't.

  Because there, lying only a few feet away from him on the dusty gray floor, was the skeleton of a dead bird. Seeing those empty eye sockets, that hungry beak, was worse than the dark. Lyssy tried to turn off the flashlight, but the switch wouldn't budge. He tried to cover the light with his hand. His fingers glowed red-he could see through them-he could see his own bones.

  Please, he said, his lips moving silently. Please help me. Then he heard the voice again.

  Lyssy?

  Yes?

  You want my help?

  Yes.

  You know you've been a bad boy. It was not a question.

  Yes.

  If I help you, will you do what I say from now on?

  Yes.

  No more talking to the nice doctor unless I give you permission?

  Okay.

  No more talking to anybody unless I say it's allowed?

  Okay.

  You promise?

  I promise.

  Cross your heart and hope to die.

  Cross my heart and hope to die.

  You also have to promise to share what you know with me.

  Sharing's good.

  Sometimes. Tell me what you told the doctor this afternoon.

  I told her about the dream-the dream about the masks. And what Daddy did.

  Did you tell her about the other people, or where we live now?