by Noah Bly
“Whenever you’re the teensiest bit sleepy, you just go right on and say so,” Dottie said quietly to Julianna as The Dupont Show was interrupted by a commercial. “I’ve got the guest bed all made up and ready to go in Stevie’s old room, and Ronnie and I will only be ten feet away and can be there in a jiffy if you need anything at all. You don’t have to worry a bit about those hooligans down in the jail. They’ll never hurt you again. Bonnor’s down there with them, and he’ll watch those filthy jackals like a hawk and shoot them dead if they so much as make a peep, I promise you that.”
She leaned in closer and dropped her voice even lower. “Between you and me, I don’t really like Bonnor. I tell Ronnie all the time that Bonnor Tucker is as mean as a snake and as dumb as a toadstool, but Ronnie won’t fire him because he thinks Bonnor is a lot better than his last deputy. I’m not so sure of that at all, though, because like I was just saying to Ronnie the other night, Jared Jones may have been lazy and dishonest but at least he was nice and didn’t ignore people like Bonnor does every time somebody tries to talk to him. Ronnie didn’t like Jared mostly because he never shaved the back of his neck or changed his socks, but I keep saying that good hygiene isn’t half as important as good manners, though I suppose intelligent people can disagree about things like that. Ronnie can be awfully pigheaded sometimes, but most of the time he’s the sweetest man who ever lived. Anyway, I swear Bonnor Tucker sometimes sees me coming and turns around and walks the other way just to avoid saying hello. Can you imagine? Last week I went right up to him and . . .”
Julianna had no idea who the woman was who had been sitting on the couch next to her for the past three hours, but she certainly knew a chatterbox when she met one, and she’d quickly adopted Sheriff Buckley’s obvious strategy of dealing with his wife’s never-ending soliloquies: Namely, nodding and smiling kindly at Dottie every few minutes without paying the slightest bit of attention to her. It was all the acknowledgment the short, hungry-looking woman seemed to require, and it left Julianna’s thoughts free to roam. Dottie’s voice was like the hum of the two fans in the room, and Julianna didn’t really mind it one way or the other, except for the fact that it made it difficult to listen for sounds from the basement, where her friends were being held.
Every so often that evening, she thought she’d heard suspicious noises drifting up from the jail, but the concrete floors of the building were too thick and solid to allow sound to carry very well, and she hadn’t been able to determine if she was imagining things or not. She was almost sure she’d heard Jon yell something once, for instance, but between the television, the fans, and Dottie’s patter, she’d eventually decided that her overstimulated ears were deceiving her.
She gazed at the wall clock above Ronnie’s chair and bit her lip when she saw that it was 9:32 p.m. She was terribly frustrated to have gotten so close to home, only to be stopped by such a silly misunderstanding; she knew her mother and father would be worried sick about her, and Ben’s parents would be beside themselves.
I could just strangle Jon, she thought, nodding placidly at Dottie but seething inside. If he hadn’t broken Günter’s lock, we’d all be back in Pawnee right this very minute!
“What kind of a stupid name is ‘Bonnor’?” Jon Tate whispered to Elijah. The hallway separating their cells was only a few feet wide, but Elijah didn’t move on his bed and Jon wasn’t sure the younger boy had heard him. He pressed his face against the bars of his own cell door and whispered again as loudly as he dared. “I guess I’d be a huge asshole, too, if I had such a dumb name.”
Elijah remained still.
Jon was worried about his friend. They hadn’t spoken all evening because Bonnor Tucker had forbidden it, but while Jon had spent much of the time pacing, Elijah had only risen once from the metal cot in his cell, to pee in the toilet. During the evening, he’d lifted his head from the mattress now and then to glance over at Jon (as if reassuring himself that the older boy hadn’t somehow been spirited away), but other than this, he hadn’t moved at all. Jon could see he was awake and staring at the ceiling, and something about this wide-eyed, cadaver-like stillness was making Jon fear for him. It would no doubt anger Bonnor if he caught them talking, but for some reason it seemed crucial to know what Elijah was thinking right then and there.
Both boys were still handcuffed, but ever since their supper several hours earlier the cuffs were now in front of their bodies instead of behind them. Deputy Tucker had intended to cuff them behind their backs again when they were done eating, but Sheriff Buckley, before retiring for the night, had said, “Are you gonna wipe their asses when they need to take a crap, Bonnor?” and the deputy had been obliged to reevaluate his plan.
This minor aggravation aside, however, Bonnor Tucker had been enjoying himself immensely that Sunday evening. The instant the sheriff had gone upstairs, Bonnor had begun doing everything he could think of to make this experience a memorable one for his prisoners, and he was 100 percent certain he had already achieved this goal. Granted, the first few minutes had been by far the best part, but even so he wouldn’t have missed a single second he’d spent with Elijah and Jon that night for, in his words, “all the pussy in China.”
“What are you saying in there, you piece of shit?” Bonnor now barked at Jon from the open door of the tiny office at the front of the building. The jailhouse office—with barely enough room for a desk, a phone, a cot, and a trash can—was at the opposite end of the hall from the steel door that led to the Buckleys’ residence. “Don’t make me come in there and teach you little buttwipes another lesson!”
Bonnor had given each of the boys what he drolly referred to as “a lesson in manners” soon after Buckley had collected their dishes and disappeared upstairs for the final time. Elijah had been the first to receive Bonnor’s instruction; he now had a swollen jaw and an ugly, livid bruise on his right cheek to go along with the puffy lower lip he had gotten during the arrest itself. He was also in considerable pain from having a knee driven into his groin, and there was a walnut-sized welt on his left bicep from Bonnor’s nightstick. Jon’s private tutorial had been somewhat less harsh—three vicious, surgical jabs to the stomach, followed by an uppercut to the chin—but only because the deputy was out of breath by then and decided he needed to pace himself.
All these punitive measures, or so the boys were informed at the time, were merely “a down payment” on what they had coming, yet after this initial assault Bonnor was content to sit in the office and verbally abuse Jon and Elijah from there every few minutes. These harangues served as a palate cleanser of sorts between the dozens of phone calls he was making to everybody he could think of; the calls themselves were to ensure that all the people he considered important in the “whole goddamn dipshit county” (he was currently speaking to Ardell Watley, his retired third-grade teacher) knew just who Deputy Bonnor Tucker had in his charge. Every hour or so he wandered down the hall to taunt his prisoners at close range, but a belated realization that he might have a little explaining to do the next day to “some candy-ass, stuck-up, hairless, nut-suckin’ mama’s boy FBI agent” concerning the physical condition of Hunter and Tate had thus far restrained him from entering their cells again.
“The fuckin’ feds always ruin everything,” he kept saying mournfully to the boys.
Meanwhile, down the hall in the jail cells, Jon’s whispered remarks about the deputy’s name had taken several seconds to penetrate Elijah’s consciousness. The brutal beating earlier that had left him gasping for air and cradling his crotch on the floor of his cell had also stopped his mind; he had no memory of crawling on his bed afterward, nor could he recall what he’d been thinking or feeling as he stared up at the ceiling for the better part of four hours. As Jon’s hushed voice now brought him back to their grim surroundings, despair beyond anything he’d ever known threatened to overwhelm him, and he immediately tried to sink back into the oblivious, restful state he’d been in before Jon disturbed him.
“Go away, Jon,�
�� he murmured, turning on his side. Every muscle in his body burned with pain, and he almost hated his friend for trying to rouse him. “Just let me be, okay?”
He continued staring into space for a little bit, but he could feel Jon watching him, and he began to feel bad for making the other boy fret. He stirred at last on his bed, sighing, then rose gingerly from his mattress and shuffled over to the cell door, wincing with every step. Jon was directly across from him as he came to a halt, and the two gazed at each other for a long time, both leaning against the bars of their cells.
Elijah was shocked by Jon’s appearance. The harsh glare of the single fluorescent bulb on the hallway ceiling didn’t extend all the way into the cells, but now that they were closer to each other Elijah could see the other boy’s injuries in lurid detail. Jon’s left eye—swollen shut and circled by a hideous raccoon-like black ring—was especially gruesome, but his entire face was a patchwork of cuts and bruises that were nearly as bad, and his chest and shoulders were scraped raw in places from being thrown on the gravel during the arrest. Elijah’s wounds, however, looked equally bad to Jon: A sickly yellowish bruise on the younger boy’s jaw was the worst of it, but there was also matted, dried blood under his nose and on his chin, and the welt on his left arm looked like some kind of ghastly, plague-related boil.
Neither boy knew what to say; the bleakness of their situation had stricken them both dumb. Elijah finally cleared his throat—after making sure the deputy had resumed speaking on the phone in the office—and gave voice to the only thing that seemed worth talking about.
“Yeah, Bonnor is a dumb name,” he whispered. His jaw was throbbing and he was having difficulty standing upright because of the pain in his groin, but he could see Jon was hurting, too, so he tried to grin for the other boy’s sake. “Wanna bet everybody called him ‘Boner’ when he was a kid?”
Jon attempted to smile, too, even though the hopelessness in Elijah’s face made his own heart ache. “Yeah, I bet you’re right,” he answered.
“I mean it!” howled Bonnor Tucker, slamming the receiver down on a semi-senile Ardell Watley in midsentence. Bonnor couldn’t hear what his captives were saying, but he didn’t care for their whispered conversation one little bit. “I swear to God I’ll break your goddamn heads open if you don’t shut the fuck up right now and sit your asses back down on your beds!”
Jon and Elijah grimaced at each other, wanting to keep talking but knowing it would be foolish to do so. The unfairness of their plight became unbearable for Elijah, and his dark eyes filled with tears. Jon’s throat tightened, and without thinking he reached through the bars of his cell door, awkwardly twisting his upper body and stretching his handcuffed wrists toward the younger boy as far as he could, wanting to offer comfort but not knowing how. Elijah understood what Jon was trying to do, and began to cry harder. He put his own arms out in the hall a second later, trying to grasp Jon’s hands in his own. Both boys strained as hard as they could, but the metal bars of their cages made it impossible to extend their arms into the hallway much past their elbows. Jon cursed under his breath in frustration and Elijah bit back a sob when their fingertips remained several inches apart in spite of all their effort.
“Ahhh, if that ain’t the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen, I’ll eat my own fuckin’ jockstrap,” Bonnor Tucker mocked. “But what part of ‘sitting your asses down on your beds’ did you two little fudge-packers not understand?”
The two boys talking was bad enough, to Bonnor’s way of thinking, but actually reaching across the hall and trying to hold hands like a couple of lovesick fairies was an unforgivable breach of jailhouse etiquette. He picked up his nightstick and lumbered down the hall, relishing the effect each heavy footfall he took had on the boys’ faces as he approached them. Even from fifteen feet away he could smell their fear; the reek of their sweat permeated the whole first floor of the building.
I can only give them a couple of love taps this time, he reminded himself. The fuckin’ feds always ruin EVERYTHING.
Jon and Elijah quickly backed away from their cell doors, looking at each other in dismay as Bonnor drew even with them, reaching for the key ring on his belt. He inserted a large skeleton key in Elijah’s door, and the teenager stumbled backward, his eyes huge.
“Jesus Christ, man, he’s sitting down, okay?” Jon pleaded from behind Bonnor.
“Shut your goddamn mouth,” Bonnor snapped over his shoulder. On impulse he withdrew the key from Elijah’s cell door and turned around. “On second thought, maybe I’ll start with you this time, pecker-breath.”
He unlocked Jon’s cell door and it swung open on its hinges, creaking. Jon backed away from the hallway until he could go no farther, holding his hands up.
“But we haven’t done anything wrong!” he cried out. His desperation turned to rage as Bonnor kept moving forward. “Why are you being such a fucking ASSHOLE?”
Bonnor’s blood rose immediately; he didn’t appreciate being called names. “It looks like you need another lesson in manners, fucknuts,” he said, reattaching the keys to his belt. “Calling me a bad name like that is gonna cost you a few teeth.”
Bonnor figured he could always tell the feds that Jon had tried to grab him as he was walking by the cell.
With an almost casual motion, he knocked Jon’s arms out of the way and half turned the younger man, exposing his bare back. The nightstick came down instantly, striking Jon just above the left kidney. As Jon screamed and fell against the wall, Bonnor struck him twice more on the left flank, and then spun him around again and popped him in the mouth with a glancing blow of his fist. The poorly aimed jab didn’t have as much force as Bonnor had intended, but Jon’s head still snapped back and hit the concrete wall; he sprawled on the floor, dizzy with pain. He tried to crawl away from the deputy, but Bonnor bent down and flipped him on his back as easily as if he were a turtle.
“Just think of me as your friendly neighborhood dentist,” Bonnor said amiably, taking careful aim at Jon’s mouth with the tip of his nightstick.
“HEY, YOU FAT FUCKING PILE OF SHIT!”
The shout that came from behind Bonnor was stupefyingly loud, as if someone had put a megaphone over his entire head and bellowed into it. Bonnor jerked upright and spun around, forgetting all about his desire to deprive Jon of his teeth.
“THAT’S RIGHT, BONER, YOU PISS-DRINKING COCKSUCKER, I’M TALKING TO YOU!” Elijah continued wailing at the top of his lungs. “WHY DON’T YOU GET YOUR FAT ASS OVER HERE RIGHT NOW? I’VE GOT A NICE HOT STEAMING PILE OF NIGGER SHIT FOR YOU TO EAT, YOU BUTT-UGLY, RETARDED SON OF A BITCH!”
Elijah Hunter had never been more afraid in his entire life.
What am I DOING? he thought in astonishment. There wasn’t a flicker of doubt in his mind that he was signing his own death warrant, yet he couldn’t seem to make himself stop.
What the FUCK am I DOING?
Courage, Elijah had always believed, was a character trait he had been born without. And as much as he might despise himself for what he saw as a lack of spine, he had long since accepted that being a hero was simply not part of his makeup. Yet as he had watched Bonnor Tucker beat Jon without mercy, something unprecedented had occurred: He had found himself willing to do anything, anything at all, to protect somebody he cared about.
Even if it meant getting himself killed.
“WHAT’S IT LIKE TO HAVE THE STUPIDEST FUCKING NAME IN THE WHOLE GALAXY, BONER?” he bellowed, giddy with recklessness. “DID YOUR MOM CALL YOU THAT ON PURPOSE, OR WAS SHE EVEN MORE RETARDED THAN YOU ARE?”
Bonnor Tucker was no longer enjoying himself in the slightest. The sense of having Jon and Elijah in his power was completely gone, lost in the mind-numbing effrontery of Elijah’s taunts.
“YOU’RE DEAD, NIGGER!” he screamed, belatedly lurching into motion. He charged out of Jon’s cell and flung himself at Elijah’s door, grappling for his keys with one hand and banging the nightstick on the iron bars with the other.
Elijah knew he couldn�
�t last two seconds against Bonnor, but the wrathful elixir coursing through his veins had stolen every ounce of his reason. Now that he’d gotten Bonnor away from Jon, the only thing he cared about was having the opportunity to try to dig Bonnor’s eyes out of their sockets with his thumbs before the deputy killed him.
“SPEAKING OF YOUR MOM, I HEAR SHE KNOWS MORE ABOUT BONERS THAN ANY WOMAN ALIVE!” he raged, ramming his handcuffed fists through the bars straight at the deputy’s large head. Bonnor dodged aside and attempted to grab Elijah’s arms, but Elijah leapt away. “JESUS CHRIST, BONER, I’M FROM MAINE, AND EVEN I’VE HEARD ALL ABOUT YOUR OLD LADY! SHE’S A GODDAMN LEGEND!”
“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Bonnor howled. He couldn’t get the key in the lock; his hand was shaking too badly from the overmastering need to kill Elijah right now. He ducked another two-fisted attack from Elijah and aimed a kick through the bars at the teenager’s shins; the kick missed and the toe of his boot clanged into a bar instead.
“GODDAMMIT!” he yelped, dancing in agony. “YOU’RE GONNA PAY FOR THAT!”
Jon Tate stirred on the floor of his cell, shaking his head woozily. He felt as if he were hallucinating: Elijah was standing behind his own cell door, laughing like a madman at the enraged Bonnor Tucker, who was hopping around the hallway on one foot. The younger boy seemed oblivious to the danger he was in, but one glimpse at the side of the deputy’s murderous face was all it took for Jon to grasp just how far the man was willing to go to exact vengeance.
Jon forced himself to sit up, looking around wildly for a weapon. Bonnor had left Jon’s own cell door wide open in the rush to get to Elijah, but Jon was in no shape to take him on unarmed; the simple act of sitting up had almost made him pass out. Yet Bonnor was already back at Elijah’s cell, and this time when Elijah tried to strike him, Bonnor was finally able to land a blow, jabbing the boy in the sternum with his nightstick and sending him reeling. Bonnor got the key in the lock and began to turn it, and Jon, frantic and weaponless, did the only thing he could think of.
