Hangman: A Novel

by Stephan Talty

  Finally, a short, squat, thinly whiskered guard arrived to take her down. Hangman’s cell was on the second floor of the prison. There was a straight line of eight cells along the corridor, five feet from a railing that looked down on the public area, the same number across the gap on the other side. The sound of the other inmates—gossiping, calling out to each other—echoed down the row. Abbie glanced over the railing at the cement tables below, painted a light green, those prison kinds of tables that are built right into the floor and can’t be taken apart and used as weapons. After the last cell in the group of eight, the wall angled left and there were six cells in a semicircle facing a guard booth that had Plexiglas windows on all sides. One guard kept an eye on the twenty-two cells from an office chair inside the booth. Hangman’s cell was number 16, the first after the turn.

  She went to the cell window, the only opening in the beige metal door except for a slot for food and for handcuffing. The guard stood behind her.

  It was probably 6 × 8 and unremarkable in every way. There was a single cement bunk, with a thin mattress on top. A blanket had been folded at the foot of the bed with a pillow at the head, the way the guards fixed a cell when it was empty. A lid-less toilet was affixed to the wall in the opposite corner, with a stainless steel mirror above it. There were no posters or drawings taped to the walls.

  If the room had held any indication that it had once held a human being inside, they’d been scrubbed away. She had an image of Hangman running across fields near Warsaw, a mindless automaton, a bald berserk thing, its face smoothed out like a mannequin, running and stumbling over the rows of corn stubble.

  Abbie turned and looked from the door of the cell to the guard booth. There was an older guard in a brown uniform with tan epaulettes sitting in the chair, staring glumly at nothing.

  “Listen, how long you going to be?” the guard behind her said.

  Abbie stood there. Something, some misaligned thing, was bothering her. She couldn’t leave until it was gone. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I got prisoners to take down to chow in D wing. When you’re ready, call Ortiz over there, and I’ll come get you.”

  Abbie glanced at the older guard behind the glass, and nodded.

  “Holler if they get too nnnnnaasty,” the man said, and his laughter echoed back to her as he walked off.

  Abbie headed to the last cell before the wall curved into a semicircle, the one just before Hangman’s. She ducked her head down. Inside a thin white man with wrinkly, tattooed arms and greasy hair to his shoulders was laid out on his cot, facing the door, and reading a tattered paperback. Abbie read the title—The Fate of All Mankind—before the inmate dropped it to his lap and stared at her.

  “How you doing?” Abbie said.

  The man’s eyes were watery. He looked like an old biker with emphysema.

  “Ah’m okay.” Southern accent.

  “How long have you been in this cell?”

  “Two days. Got caught shoplifting again.”

  Abbie nodded. “You have a good night,” she said. The man looked almost disappointed when she pulled back from the bars.

  “Hey!” he called out. “What are you looking for? This ain’t my first time through this place.”

  Abbie considered that. “Someone who had a cell next to Hangman’s for the past few weeks, or longer.”

  The eyes looking at her with a look a thousand years old. “Try Hector Lopez. He was in 8, next door to Hangman, for a couple of months. He’s in 14 now, on account of spitting at Sergeant Platz, the animal.”

  10

  Hector Lopez was young and wiry and dressed in a clean wife-beater and white pants rolled up to the calf. When he saw Abbie standing at his window, he lifted up off the toilet seat where he’d been doing curls with a towel tied around something square and heavy. He walked toward the door with a rolling gait, catlike, smiling.

  He whispered something in Spanish.

  “Excuse me?” Abbie said.

  “Oh! I thought you might be …”

  “Do I look Spanish, Hector?”

  He grinned. “Might be, might be.”

  Abbie shook her head. “I’m Detective Kearney with the Buffalo PD and I have a question for you.”

  His teeth were brilliantly white, and he had dimples. He came to the door and rested a muscled arm on the horizontal bar. “The answer is yes, mujer. You don’t even—”

  “Shut up, Hector. I need to know something about Hangman.”

  Hector’s face twisted as if he’d bitten into a lime. His head shot back. “Why you want to talk about that freak?”

  “You were celled next to him for a while, weren’t you?”

  Hector leaned toward Abbie, studying her. The motion caused his biceps to pop. Abbie rolled her eyes.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Did you ever hear anything from his cell? Or outside it?”

  Hector’s face went still, then he turned and strolled back slowly to the toilet. He pivoted, sat on the toilet seat, and picked up the cloth, began wrapping the ends of it around his left hand while he flexed his fingers.

  “Be serious, Hector,” Abbie said.

  “I am serious,” he said, puffing a little as he lifted the weight up, not meeting Abbie’s eyes. “I’m a very serious person, cuz.”

  “Did you hear anything?”

  The eyes were bright, but Hector’s face was stony.

  “You help me, I can help you,” Abbie said.

  “With what?”

  “If your information helps me find Hangman, I’d say a reduction on your sentence for good behavior. Or transfer downstate. Where you from, the Bronx?”

  Hector considered that. He curled the brick a second time, a third and fourth, then lowered it to the floor, picked up the looped cloth with his other hand. “I might have heard a thing or two.”

  “I’m listening.”

  Hector’s face grew red as he finished the fifth curl.

  “You’re starting to annoy me, Hector. Is that little curling weight legal? I might have to have one of the sergeants come down and check it out.”

  Hector’s face tightened. He dropped his head, then came back off the seat, but there was no roll in his walk this time. He got to the window and laid his left forearm against the flat horizontal bar.

  “What you lookin’ for?”

  Abbie held his gaze. “What’d you hear?”

  Hector rubbed his nose with his finger. “Spooky shit.”

  “Like what?”

  His eyes on hers. Not unfriendly.

  “Was it a voice, Hector?” Abbie asked. “Late at night, sometimes?”

  He backed off, his face tight with shock. “How’d you know that?”

  Abbie felt a thrill of excitement go through her. “What did the voice say?”

  “What do you think it was saying?”

  “I need to hear it from you.”

  Hector paused. He dropped his gaze to the floor. “ ‘Where’s … the … girl?’ That’s what I heard. Usually after lights-out, around this time, come to think of it.”

  Abbie felt a surge of adrenaline that seemed to lift her heels off the floor. I knew it I knew it I knew it. “Very good, Hector. And when you heard these things, did you ever try and see who was saying them? Was it Hangman or someone else?”

  Hector shook his head. “Nope. Stayed on my cot.”

  Abbie smiled. “Come on now. You weren’t afraid of some voice talking in the dark, were you?”

  Hector stared at her, and the eyes were deadly serious. For a minute, Abbie wondered what he was in Auburn for.

  “Who else is gonna know about this?” he asked.

  “Nobody.”

  “You swear, Carney?”

  “It’s Kearney. And yes, I swear. Now who was it?”

  Hector dropped his gaze. He leaned toward the window and lowered his voice. “It was Carlson, man. The dude Hangman just killed? He killed him, right? Carlson was whispering in the man’s cell in the dark like s
ome crazy person. Where’s the girl? What’s up with that shit?”

  11

  Hangman sat on the green bench, dressed in khakis and a bulky blue down coat that was too long in the sleeves, watching the cars pass. He had a Buffalo Bills winter hat on now, the kind with the festive red-white-and-blue ball sewn to the top. The cap was pulled low over his eyes, and a black scarf was pulled tight around his mouth. Steam appeared through the holes in the yarn, and he tasted the wet wool when he stuck his tongue out. His eyes watched the cars, relaxed, waiting. He felt no urgency. He could see in the rhythms of the people walking by and stopping to wave or chat that the news hadn’t yet gotten out to the wider public.

  He stared at the house across the street, a stately old Colonial whose owners had faced the lower half of the facade with local river stone. He decided he liked the effect. To keep himself from turning his head, he tried to imagine what color he would paint the top half of the house instead of the pale cream the owners had chosen. How the different colors would look in the light of the early dusk, like now.

  Hangman heard the bus rather than saw it, and judged the distance at three blocks. His hearing was exceptional, despite having his right eardrum blown out during a fight with a red-haired bully in grammar school, and he didn’t need to turn to watch the bus approach. The vehicle had a balky transmission and Hangman heard it shifting up with agonized jerks as it came down the broad avenue toward him.

  The bus shuddered to a stop a block away, the stop previous to the one he sat across from. The kids getting off the bus would come toward him. It was a late bus, full of the kids who did theater and sports and other things after school.

  It was cold. He cinched the scarf tighter, looked at the house. To keep his pulse from racing, he imagined the house painted a dark olive green. That might work, would give the house a more rustic feel. And then change the shrubbery in front to roses and hyacinths.

  The bus started toward him.

  The engine, roaring like a tank’s, coming down the avenue to his left. His eyes didn’t move. It was odd to be hunting again. A feeling of exaltation rose in him, honey filling the marrow of his bones.

  The orange of the bus swam into his field of vision, black smoke pouring from the exhaust as it ratcheted to a stop, the brakes shrieking. The feet of the students appeared under the frame of the bus as they exited. Six sets of feet, three of them definitely female, two male, one undetermined. The engine sounded again, and the tall side of the bus was pulled away like a curtain at a theater, all at once, and there were six students standing and laughing in three groups.

  From across the street, Hangman’s eyes quickly swept over the six figures, their mouths moving in gossip, the thin arms gesturing excitedly. Behind the scarf, he frowned deeply. Then his gaze moved right to the girl moving on the edge of the second group. His heart seized up as he stared at the face behind a scrim of blowing brunette hair that she caught awkwardly with the third finger of her right hand and swept back behind her ear. His eyes were avid now and he watched her step down off the curb and walk toward him with two friends, not even bothering to check both ways before crossing the street, confident of being protected by the world as all teenagers are.

  The girl came toward him and he let the scarf fall away, revealing his open mouth, so intent was he on her brown eyes.

  12

  The entrance to the escape scene was hard to miss. There was a line of cop and sheriff cars tilted down into the ditches on both sides of the road as the van slowed on the country lane. Uniformed men bent over the open trunks of cars, getting equipment out. The sheriffs wore clear plastic caps over their hats and yellow slickers.

  Just like Attica in ’71, Abbie thought. These grim, square-jawed faces, like the ones of soldiers on Russian monuments to World War II, were the same as those cops. From those newsreels, she’d always thought of the men out here as some kind of other species. Killers, really.

  “Here you go,” the van driver said as they pulled up to the entrance to a small lane to the left.

  “Don’t leave me.”

  The driver nodded as Abbie dropped to the street. She let a car pass—behind the wheel, a fat-faced blond woman with eyes wide as she stared at the cops massed by the entrance before speeding off. Abbie hung her badge around her neck and let it rest on her black wool coat, then strode up the lane, her leather boots squelching in the mud. Cops coming the other way glanced briefly at her, some opened their mouths, then spotted the badge and went back to their conversations. She walked five minutes before the trees to her left and right, which had huddled above her, their branches interweaving, began to space out and then fell away. The ruts of the lane petered out and she walked onto a grassy clearing.

  There was a white van with NY STATE CORRECTIONS written in blue on the side. The sliding door was open and men were watching something in the backseat. Abbie walked over.

  A sheriff’s deputy turned, feeling her presence as she walked up. He nodded and touched the tip of his wide-brimmed hat. Country manners.

  “Hi,” she said. “What’s going on in there?”

  “A recreation,” he said quietly. “Seeing if Hangman could really have gotten out of the restraints. They fixed Williamson up just like he left Auburn and put a key in his mouth. He’s our best tech guy.”

  “Our” would refer to the Wyoming County Sheriff’s Department, by the patch on his heavy olive-colored nylon jacket.

  “How’d he do?”

  “Took him three tries but he got it. The seat belt, believe it or not, played a big part. If it was loose enough for him to lean forward, then Hangman could have gotten the key down to his hands and spit it out. Then he got Fatty Joe’s gun. He was a good guy. I knew him.”

  The deputy brought up his iPhone, and stared at it.

  “That a picture?” Abbie said.

  “Yup.” He handed her the phone. “People’ve been sending it around.”

  Fatty Joe Carlson was smiling, standing in front of a late-model Corvette, his arm around a young boy in a football outfit. Abbie peered closely at the image. Carlson was dressed in a richly colored Missoni sweater—the kind with the wavy stripes—and pressed jeans. She spotted the watch on his wrist, which had a distinctive clasp over the crown. A Panerai. She knew the brand, as her ex-husband had bought the classic model for Christmas one year, with Abbie’s money.

  Carlson’s son was wearing a forest green football uniform, pads, and a helmet that seemed impossibly large for him. Across the forest front of the uniform, “School Saints” was written in white.

  “That his son?” she said.

  “Yeah, Joe Jr.”

  “He goes to Cortland Christian?”

  “Yup. Plays football.”

  “That poor boy,” Abbie said. She released the man’s wrist and the phone dropped away.

  She meant it. She thought about the boy that Hangman had made an orphan. He’s probably been told something bad had happened to his daddy, and that he wasn’t going to school tomorrow. Later they’d tell him his father was never coming home and he needed to go to the mall to buy a new suit. Black.

  “He drove a ’Vette?” Abbie asked.

  The cop’s face froze. “What the fuck does it matter what he drove? He’s dead.”

  “I’m just wondering if Hangman could have the keys.” No she wasn’t.

  “Oh,” the deputy said. “Sorry. No, he left the keys in his locker at Auburn.”

  Abbie nodded. She was doing figures in her head. Basic addition. And the figures weren’t adding up.

  She circled around the vehicle, then walked past it toward the top of the hill twenty yards away. It was a steep crest that gave way, lower down, to pine trees and scrub that formed a dark belt around the middle of the hill. A couple of deputies were deep in conversation, looking out over the flat valley, the wide brims of their hats tilting like ringed planets as they moved their heads.

  The grass swished against her boots as she came up to the edge and looked down. Cars sw
ept by on the road that snaked along the base of the hill. An Amoco gas station to the left was busy; she counted all four pumps occupied by cars, two of them official. Cops would be filling up on their way to manning the roadblocks. She followed the road along to the right and there was the black roof of the Warsaw Motel, missing a few shingles.

  There was a group of teenage boys, two of them on ten-speed bicycles, gathered in the early evening light out in front of the motel. They were crouched over the handlebars, whispering together and glancing occasionally at the place. Maybe they thought the killer was coming back to the scene of his last crime. Right now, this must be the most famous place in Wyoming County.

  So why did the Corrections officer bring Hangman to a spot overlooking the motel where he’d been captured?

  Abbie felt the breeze steady on her face, running up the slope and cresting over, a clean fall wind that smelled faintly of pine.

  Abbie looked down. Hangman knew we’d find the van eventually. But what if there was something he didn’t want us to see?

  She sighed and stepped down the steep bluff. A flat rock buckled under her boot heel and went slapping down the hillside, picking up speed.

  “Hey,” one of the deputies called. “What the hell you doing?”

  “Investigating,” she called back, turning quickly to place her hands on the grassy slope. She began to crawl down the hill, like a backward crab, eyes darting left and right. Loose rocks went spilling down, sending up little trails of airborne dust.

  The two men were looking down at her, their hats appearing as dark saucers against the dying sun.

  The hill was covered with scrub and shallow-rooted grass that tore away in her hands. Ten feet down, her left foot slipped back dangerously and Abbie dug the toe of the right one in.

  The ground leveled out a bit and she was able to stand. She looked back up the hill. No garbage or trash—it didn’t appear the hill was a lookout or a lovers’ hideout. The grass waved back and forth, and a small contrail of dust lingered where she’d come sliding down. Abbie turned and surveyed below her. The gradient got even steeper before it flattened out about thirty yards below.