But Bobby surprised me after I’d told him the bad news. He looked at me coldly and calmly and said he already knew the chances that he’d ever get out of here. How that kid found out, I couldn’t guess. And he never told me. No doubt it bothered him. I mean, I don’t know a teenager anywhere who wouldn’t have gone to pieces knowing he’d never get back to the real world. But then I have to remind myself that maybe Long Wait was the real world, and that all those poor suckers walking up and down Second Avenue North in Downtown Nashville were the ones living the dream.
In a way, life at Long Wait wasn’t too terribly awful, not if you’d ever read those nightmare histories about San Quentin and some of the other prisons. About cons raping other cons and such. Here, you got your own room, the food wasn’t bad – not by my standards at least – and you had a social life. They even had intramural sports here – ping pong, electronic gaming, running, boxing. Stuff like that. There was a library, a gym, a pool, plenty of DVDs and CDs, art and music lessons, all kinds of things to distract you when you weren’t on the government’s dime. If you got a bad case of claustrophobia, you could head up to the terrarium on the tenth floor and get yourself lost in the forest, swim, or just stare up at the sky on a rainy summer day. Me? I’d sometimes get so sick of being inside this walled heaven that I’d walk up to the roof just to puke my brains out.
And everybody here had a job to do, like I said. Bobby was in programming. People like April and me, political prisoners, did most of the heavy lifting in Long Wait, the day-to-day jobs. We were what the Boneys called Support Personnel. And being in the kitchen, like I said, put April and me at the top of the food chain.
April. One heck of a nice girl. She got into Long Wait because she’d screwed up just like I had. But her mistake? Geez – it had the bang to it. Like I said, April wasn’t quite the head turner if you were into fast, fabulous, and fashionable. She was about five-six, petite, had a waist you just wanted to put your hands around because you knew your fingers would touch, and dark brown hair with matching, red-flecked brown eyes to go with it. And maybe April was the key to Bobby’s opening up at the time he did, but more of that in a second. Like I was saying, April had done the unthinkable. And, like me, she disappeared, probably making her last public debut by having her name and face go out to smartphones and message boards all over America on the Amber Alert Network. She’d probably gotten a good thirty-second commercial, and then the next kid went up, then the next – you get the picture.
April Olson had posted something on Facebook. I can’t remember the exact words, but it was something like, The only reason the Republicans are sending popular bills to the White House is that they really don’t want them, and they know the President is going to veto them. Doing so makes them look good to their prostituency and guarantees their reelection.
Holy crap.
I laughed when she told me that. That crazy girl had called every last congressman in Washington a prostitute and labeled their constituents as being nothing more than sailors on shore leave who’d been screwed in exchange for their votes. I guess she’d spoken the honest truth, but it cost her dearly. She’d said it, and that was all water under the bridge now. But I got the feeling awful quick that day that Bobby was of the mind to throw her – and himself – a life preserver of sorts.
I could only hope there’d be one for me.
Bobby wanted out of Long Wait. And he wanted April out, too. He’d never said as much to me – not in those words – but you just gotta know when two of your friends are in love with each other and want a future. You can see it and feel it. The looks, the smiles, the body language – and the way April started twirling her hair around her finger whenever she saw Bobby, and how she danced her feet around under the table when they sat together. Makes you sick. But maybe my mind’s playing tricks on me. Maybe I’m just filling in the gaps with stuff that makes everything seem more coherent.
Call me crazy. But I believe that, when Bobby finally found April, when he and she fell in love, things began to change, things began to start moving. He got scared, and he couldn’t do scared alone. Am I a hundred percent? Isn’t any such thing as that number. But I do know one thing for sure. And that was what Bobby asked April and me one evening after dinner, in the kitchen, hovering over a candle, watching us devour smores. I’ll tell you what he said, and you can tell me if I was wrong about Bobby being scared.
Bobby said, “There isn’t a basement here. And there isn’t anything in a basement here, is there, Shorty? You know, like an old sewer pipe that runs to the river?” He offered me a slight smile that faded quickly, and he crossed his arms and tucked both hands behind his elbows. “You know people. You know things around here. Do you know about any pipe that exits to the river?”
Now, all of us in Long Wait had read Stephen King’s Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. An old book, but a good book that inspired hope in every one of us here at Long Wait. And I’d also read the old Pinkerton Files – real stories about how the Pinkerton agents busted a guy named Red and a bunch of tunnelers who’d been digging into bank vaults. Those guys dug through roofs, subway walls, sewers – anything – to get the loot. Red, the leader of the gang, later tunneled his way to freedom through the wall of a prison. I guess Mr. King got his story from the Pinkerton Files; and it sounded to me like Bobby wanted to start work on the next book in the series, and I told him so.
“You misunderstand me,” he said to me all grim-like, staring straight at me but not seeing me. And I thought right then and there that that boy, his face ashen and pallid, had just seen a ghost. And he had.
But the ghost he’d seen was his own, I suspected.
And April’s.
And that meant he’d probably seen mine, too.
One of the Boney guards – who he was Bobby wouldn’t say and, to this day, I never found out the man’s name – had gotten Bobby on the elevator to carry him up to the eighth floor for his monthly visit with Karson ‘Nice Guy’ Burlison. The word visit was a synonym for beating here at Long Wait. Seemed like Burlison had gotten liquored up again and needed to visit with the punching bag who’d seen him sent up here.
But that Boney guard? He was awfully nice to Bobby on the ride up, told him he was sorry about every single thing he’d ever done to anybody in Long Wait. And he was honestly repentant, or so it seemed. But the guard also whispered to Bobby a little piece of advice. He told Bobby to win over Karson ‘Nice Guy’ Burlison with a rare bottle of George Dickel Barrel Select whiskey. Funny he’d say that, because it was the booze that put the fire and fury into Burlison’s fists to start with. But that Boney also told Bobby something else. He looked at his watch, counted off five seconds, and said in a trembling voice: “Nobody leaves . . . Nobody leaves Long Wait alive. The day you turn thirty, they . . . they take you down to the basement, they grind you up, and they shoot you out into the river through an eight-inch pipe.” He let out a deep breath, put his hand on his chest like someone had stuck him with a blade, and said, “Okay. I said it.” He looked at his watch again, nodded, and got awful quiet awful quick.
And when Bobby told me that, I believed him. Not because I knew that the fishing was always good on the Cumberland River at the Old Spaghetti Factory. Or that you always had to stand in line to get your fishing license and bait at Hinkle’s Tackle two blocks down. I believed Bobby because his eyes and body posture believed it. The boy was scared out of his mind.
Yep. My biggest fears about Long Wait came true that day. I knew then that the age of thirty was indeed the magic number. And I also knew why the Tennessee Wildlife Resources People made a killing on fishing licenses in Nashville back when I was on the outside.
And that Boney? The guy in the elevator? Bobby did say that he never saw hide nor hair of him after that. Seems like he just up and vanished, disappeared, just as fine and pretty as if he’d been scooped up by the State Police in the principal’s office and dragged away to what might have been a kinder, gentler hell.
But nobody came for Bobby Griffin after the guard disappeared.
And none of us could figure out why.
Chapter Four
So, them’s the breaks, as we like to say around here. At the age of thirty, you looked back on a fruitful career as a slave for the Federal Government, said goodbye, and stepped into some bait-processing machine in the basement. You got out of Long Wait – that’s for sure. But a trip through that small pipe and out through an even smaller alimentary canal of a hundred pound catfish just didn’t have quite the appeal and romanticism of a well-orchestrated jailbreak.
Which could never happen at Long Wait.
Unless you had one bounces-your-train-on-the-ceiling kind of imagination.
And that sure as heck wasn’t me.
But I wasn’t ready to cash in my pile of chips yet, no sir. Not even close to it. Didn’t matter that there were no windows in this place. No doors except for the heavily-guarded front door and gate. Nothing thinner than a twelve-foot-thick, steel-reinforced, alarmed wall. No real privacy except in your room. And even if you could punch a hole through a wall or sneak out through that front door, you’d have no way to contact anybody on the outside and tell them you were coming.
Which leads me to tell you this. Though everyone at Long Wait had a tablet and a computer, there was no link whatsoever with the outside world. No cables, no Wifi, no telephone, no nothing. About the only feasible thing you could do would be to punch a hole through the glass dome on the roof, start a fire, and send smoke signals. But last time I looked, the only Indians in Nashville were wooden, standing out in front of their tobacco shops, or they were motorcycles. And I don’t think anybody here could have done Morse Code in smoke.
No doubt the Boneys on eighth had internet links with the outside world, as did Headmistress Zoe Miller and perhaps a few of the staff and teachers. I’d seen flat screen TVs up there in Boneyville on numerous occasions. Mainly when I’d done something stupid and got sent up for a beating. So, they must have had cable or satellite dishes. What I would have given to get a message out to my Mom and Dad – just a simple email – to tell them I was alive and that I loved them. But, by now, they’d probably moved on with their lives.
April and me? We knew to keep our mouths shut about the basement, even though I’m convinced not a single kid here would’ve ever believed us if we’d told them. The Boneys? Well, you and I both know they were all cut from a whole different piece of leather altogether. If they suspected that we’d caught on to what happened one floor below street level, it wouldn’t have gone well with us.
I never gave up any hope. I just kept telling myself nothing was impossible, even though every fiber in my body told me I was delusional. And so I blocked out all the rationality and whispered to myself every chance I got: A man built this place, and a man could unbuild it. And I repeated that mantra over and over again until it became the peg upon which I could hang my hopes every night before I went to bed.
If anybody had the magic wand, if anybody could conjure up the magic to get us out of here before – well, before you know what – I knew it would be Bobby Griffin. Nobody else. Call it intuition, call it a sixth sense, call it desperation. But after learning what awaited me in that basement, I started putting all my money on Bobby.
Bobby had gone to work on his Enhanced Criminal Proclivity Assessment Program the week after he got to Long Wait. Six months after that, he was moved to the first floor, down near the teachers’ administrative offices. He got himself a nicer dorm – single occupancy – and he also got to work with a few old souls with links to the world outside. I would’ve paid a million dollars in gold to have been in Bobby’s shoes, to rub shoulders with people who had news from the outside. Of course, they’d know to keep their mouths shut or risk getting time themselves. But I would’ve gotten things out of them. Subtle-like. Things like the name of the president, the baseball teams who’d won the last few World Series, all of the recent news, including maybe some new recipes – stuff like that. But Bobby was another thing altogether. If he learned anything, heard any news about things on the other side of these walls, he seldom shared it with me. Not even with April. I once asked him about something, something political. He just looked right past me like he always did when his mind seemed to be all tied into knots. And I knew then and there to let it go. To not push my ticket too hard. I’d just wait for another day, knowing that the boy loved Ben and Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream. Dang, right? Chocolate, caramel swirls, fudge swirls, marshmallows. I don’t expect you to believe me, but I’m telling you: all I had to do was wave that tiny container in front of him, and I’d reel him in. If April were with me, he’d come running a little faster. And we’d all dive into that expensive tiny container together and eat it as fast as brain-freeze.
By the way, sometimes that sixteen-ounce cup of dairy cost me four steaks – two for my Boney informant, one for the guy in procurement, and one for the food service delivery guy. Bobby knew it cost me, and that it cost every single person here at Long Wait. April and I had to play slick and fast to make that ice cream happen, usually by telling a couple of kids they couldn’t have steak because the Calorimeter had said they were a bit overweight and needed greens instead. Sometimes those kids wanted to see the Calorimeter, and then we’d have to tell them we’d made a mistake.
But after a few bites of Ben and Jerry’s, Bobby would open up about things he’d heard on the first floor, and he’d make me promise to make it up to the kids who’d been denied their proper meals.
Bobby didn’t know it at first, but I started running defense for him long before he picked up the ball, so to speak. I had a guy on the first floor, guy by the name of Jack Stranahan. Kid up from Florida doing time for what, he never said. But he liked cornbread and pinto beans and, for him, they might as well have been t-bones and lobster tails. That’s a small price to pay to get eyes and ears on someone in Long Wait. Jack, like Bobby, had exceptional computer skills. Nothing like Bobby, though. He just understood computer language better than he did English, that’s all. Seems like the boy could do the work in his sleep while he was gaming and watching movies. All I had to do was keep him fat and happy with the bread and beans, and three out of every seven days I managed it. He did better than I ever expected he would. He got himself a room on the first floor next to Bobby and ended up going to work on some fringe issues associated with ECPAP. What those things were, Jack never said. And that was unlike him, because he shot his mouth off about anything whether you wanted to hear it or not. In time, I would learn why Jack never mentioned ECPAP, and when I finally did learn something, it was because I finally saw a strange and complex puzzle starting to come together. But I will tell you this: because of Jack Stranahan, not a day went by that I didn’t get a report on Bobby. I knew he was safe, and I knew he was working.
A year after Bobby set up shop at Long Wait, Headmistress Miller announced during dinner the addition of two new departments to be located on the prison’s seventh floor. Heady news at the time, and I’ll tell you why. First, more kids were coming. Second, it became apparent to Bobby, at least, that the Federal Government was on the move in a very frightening way. I blew him off when he’d told me so. As far as I was concerned, the addition of thirty more kids meant more food to cook, more dishes to wash, and more people to watch out for. I’d told Headmistress Miller my concerns, but she couldn’t see her way clear to get me more help in the kitchen. There wasn’t any reason for me to not trust her: she was honest, according to my Boney contact. So I decided not to mess with her dessert.
“They call one of the new departments DEAD,” Bobby whispered to me one day over a late breakfast of Spam and exceptionally fine powdered eggs. “Drone Engineering and Development. They’re not even shy about saying it.”
“Why should they be?” April said, and I agreed with her. We all knew the government around here. We knew all the secrets. Well, at least some of the ones that mattered to us, like Long Wait Prison, the bait-processing plant in th
e basement, and ECPAP. Which pretty well guaranteed none of us was getting out Long Wait alive. April smiled, got up, and headed for the fridge. She opened the door, grabbed a can of Coke, and threw it. Bobby looked up just in time to see it coming, and he caught it just as beautiful as any New York Yankee playing the outfield would’ve picked off a potential home run. April came hurrying back.
“Have you heard about the other department?” Bobby said, as he popped open the can. He knew we had. Headmistress Miller had mentioned it during her announcement. “SNUPE? C’mon. SNUPE? Surveillance Network Performance Engineering is what that stands for.”
“Surveillance drones,” April whispered. “DEAD SNUPE. Catchy.”
Bobby nodded. “Think of the scope of that,” he whispered.
And there we sat that morning, after everyone had left the cafeteria, talking about things we had no business talking about. There’d been a few kids over the years who’d left Long Wait – just up and vanished. We’d always thought they’d been paroled, or maybe they’d done their time and gone home. But —
“They all became fish bait, Shorty,” Bobby said. “They died because they talked.” And he reached out and gently took April’s hand. That was the first time I’d ever seen them touch each other like that. And I knew then that those two kids were for real. I suddenly couldn’t quite handle the thought that people just like them – Jo Mary Poteet for example, a great kid with a great smile – had gone down the tube. Or that Willie Preston, the kid who was always telling jokes and walking around on his hands, and Scott Adams, and a few others whose faces I couldn’t see, had gone down that same tube with her.
Dead Snupe Page 3
