by David R. Dow
That day over Colby, this is what I realized: I am not one of them.
Years before, on that day early in our relationship when I first told Tieresse about my family and she told me about hers, I recounted the night my father caused the man who had leered at my mother in the marketplace to disappear. She seemed impressed by his primal act of retribution, not embarrassed on my behalf. I was surprised, and I told her so. Since reading Aeschylus in college I’d believed the urge to get even was a base impulse educated people could overcome. I said to Tieresse, Not to be too cliché-ish, but don’t you think there’s some truth in the pacifist mantra that an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind? Tieresse answered, Yes, of course I do, Rafa, but not all acts of retribution trigger cycles of violence. Sometimes you can close the loop and get rid of the bad guy without injuring a good guy in the process. Maybe those instances are few and far between, but they do exist. I think your father found one of them.
In three sentences, she undermined my entire understanding of why vengeance is bad. I didn’t have to feel shame. It was okay for me to be proud of what Papá had done. Yet until that day flying home, the concept of just deserts remained mostly an abstraction. In prison I’d been too busy surviving to think about who was responsible for hurting me, or what punishment they deserved. Now, with nothing to do but fill the hours of my day, and the question the French reporter had asked lingering in my mind, the urge to get even took root, and it began in utter stealth. My subconscious was formulating details of the plan before my conscious mind realized a plan was there.
Powerful people had violated a moral code. They compounded my sorrow with pain. They deserved to pay. I believe Tieresse would have said that, too, was one of those times demanding retribution. I believe she would have approved.
So a few days later, I flew to Enid, Oklahoma, and drove a rental car to a convenience store at the edge of town. The intuition I had in New York had begun to take on a clearer shape. I bought a Motorola phone with five hundred minutes of talk and one hundred prepaid texts. I paid for it with cash. The same week, at a garage sale in Emporia, I found a brand-new Dell laptop computer still in the box. At a big-box store in Topeka I paid cash for an Apple iPad mini. In the men’s room of a truck stop on Highway 75 I bought a three-pack of tickler condoms for a dollar.
I put the phones in special foil packets the police use to prevent data from being remotely erased, and I placed the packets, along with the computer, the tablet, and a portable GPS, in a faux leather backpack. For the next seven months I stored the backpack in the luggage compartment of Tieresse’s plane.
* * *
• • •
The first thing I needed to do was establish a routine. You could count on one hand, without a need for the thumb, the dividends from my time on death row. But there was undeniably one: Routine came easy to me.
The Main Street Diner, ten miles down the road, had been in business for seventy-five years, serving breakfast and lunch, from five in the morning until two thirty in the afternoon, every day of the year but Christmas, Easter, and New Year’s Day. I started to go in three mornings a week, arriving between eight and nine. Unless it was raining the farmers were usually gone, but a few men in business suits would still be finishing up their eggs and bacon or asking for one more cup of coffee to go. It’s a platitude, but it’s true that news travels fast in a small town, and by my fourth visit, everyone I saw knew who I was. All three early shift waitresses, both busboys, and two of the cooks knew my name. I sat at the same counter stool every day and had coffee and cereal, and every now and again a homemade cinnamon roll or a cup of fruit.
I’d read the local paper someone had always left behind and use the free Wi-Fi to visit national news sites to learn what was happening in the rest of the world. A few former employees, including my sous and pastry chefs, had reached out to me, and I’d also connected with the families of some of the men I had met inside, so I would check my e-mail and social media too. After an hour or sometimes more, I would say thank you, leave money for the check and a tip at my place, and walk across the street to buy groceries and whatever else I needed for the day. Two or three times a month I would stop into the local hardware store. The owner and manager knew I almost always had a do-it-yourself home improvement project in progress. I was a fixture around town. People would have said I kept to myself, that I was friendly but quiet, that I seemed sad or diminished but not angry or bitter. The people who said those things would have been mostly right.
Thursday mornings I would leave. I would get in Tieresse’s plane and fly somewhere for the weekend, always returning Sunday afternoon, unless the weather kept me away for a day or two longer. On Mondays the diner staff would ask me where I had gone, and if they didn’t, I would tell them anyway. I showed them photos of small towns and national parks taken from five thousand feet. Sometimes I stayed in two-star motels in one-light towns and ate at local restaurants. Other times I flew to small cities and stayed and ate at chains. My favorite trips were to the wilderness, where I would camp and cook on an open flame. I was leaving a trail the weakest tracker alive could follow. I flew to places in Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, and Texas—lots of places in Texas. Renata, a new waitress at the diner, once asked me what I was running from, and I told her that wasn’t it at all. I was making up for lost time, seeing the whole country from the air and on the ground. She said, Making up lost time for what? and I saw Ramos, the busboy, whisper in her ear.
In the late afternoons, when the angle of the light made me melancholy, I would take a long walk around our property. In my jacket pocket I kept the box of Tieresse’s ashes and a bag of unshelled pecans to feed to critters. In the early spring I scattered wildflower seeds in the grass. Most days I would linger in the tree swing by the creek and listen to the birds sing. At dusk I would have a drink or two on the porch and eat my dinner watching TV. I never invited anyone over, and in this town, no one ever stopped by unannounced. I would get in bed before eleven and read. I would rise with the sun, eager to start the long day ahead.
Years before, after Tieresse had seen this place for the first time, made a few phone calls, and bought the property with hardly a pause, the two of us returned to Houston. She came by La Ventana one night as we were closing, carrying blueprints and a 3-D model of the house. She said, I just picked these up at the architect’s office. She unrolled the plans, spread them on a table, and said, It’s perfect, but are we sure the design will work on the land? I had answered, There’s only one way to find out. So the next morning, drawings in hand, we went back.
That was when we found it.
On the opposite side of the driveway from where we planned to put our house, hidden by a thicket of weeds, was a large manhole cover, nearly as large as a queen-size bed. It peeked out from the northern end of the mile-long concrete strip we planned to repurpose as a runway. After struggling without success to pry it open, I spied a small gearwheel covered by brush and brittle dandelions. Tieresse turned it, and the heavy steel door opened to the inside, revealing four hinges each a foot long. She said, What in the world is this?
We called the realtor, who had no idea what it was or even that it was there. I grabbed a flashlight from my flight bag and we lowered ourselves in. Tieresse had said, I’ll be darned. I bought a piece of history for a pittance. We built the hangar for her plane right on top of her historical memento.
* * *
• • •
What we had found was a silo that formerly housed an Atlas F missile. Three decades earlier, a small structure on top had hidden the entrance, but the squat cinder-block building was long since gone. In the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, the US government had secretly built dozens of these silos, mostly in the Midwest. They held Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman missiles and were constructed to withstand a direct nuclear hit. Now that they were decommissioned and abandoned, the governmen
t declined to even acknowledge their existence. Ours did not appear on plans of the land, and nobody we asked could tell us when the weapon had been removed, but the silo’s plumbing, electrical wiring, and ventilation remained in perfect repair.
The silo had eight levels, with a narrow tight spiral staircase descending the upper six, and steel-rung ladders welded to the walls providing access to the bottom two. The seventh and eighth levels held storage tanks, hot and cold connection systems, pressurization units, and overflow collection. The sixth level was the least crowded. It held a redundant heat exchange, a doubly redundant exhaust fan, and a diesel fume detector. All the equipment was against the northern and western walls. Tieresse had said, If we didn’t want to keep this place private, we could turn this silo into a bed-and-breakfast. It would be the hardest reservation to get in all the Midwest. I had asked her whether she really wanted to do that. She smiled and kissed me and said, Not in a million years. This spot of earth is yours and mine.
Seven years and a few months later, it was exactly the same as we had left it. Wearing a headlamp, I walked up and down the eight stories, sketching each floor on a separate page of my drafting pad. My do-it-yourself home improvement project took shape. With sheet metal, cinder blocks, and stainless steel, I could turn the sixth level into exactly what I needed, something both secret and secure. It would become two adjacent cells. Together they’d be bounded by three solid concrete walls, with steel bars across the front. They would be divided into two separate spaces by a set of bars as well. They’d lack the built-ins I had on the row, and they wouldn’t have a window, either. But I’d make them larger, because my prisoners would be there all the time. I couldn’t risk taking them back and forth to a separate room for exercise or to bathe. I’d hang a shower curtain on each side of the interior wall so my prisoners could give each other privacy, or gain some for themselves, if they were so inclined.
Some of what I needed I bought from the hardware store in town. For the items that would have made the local owner wonder, I went to Kansas City or Overland Park. I bought the vertical bars from a company near Salina that sold fencing materials to construction crews. I bought sheet metal from a national chain in Topeka. I bought cinder blocks from a small home remodeling business in Tulsa. I paid for everything in cash. When a vendor acted suspicious of my stack of one-hundred-dollar bills, I told him I didn’t like the idea of the federal government being able to keep track of me by getting records from the credit card companies. He shook my hand warmly and said that made perfect sense.
After six weeks, I had stockpiled my supplies, but I needed a disguise. I hired a company to put in a lap pool and hot tub. I can barely swim, but by heating the pool, or pretending to, I could explain heavy power consumption. Next, an outfit from Kansas City custom built for me a one-thousand-square-foot greenhouse where I planned to grow heirloom tomatoes, butter lettuce, and six kinds of chili peppers. Most important, though, it too would draw electricity and water.
With the subterfuges in place, it was time for me to build. Using a walk-behind, wet-cutting saw, I cut four three-inch-by-three-inch holes in the concrete floor of the sixth level down, beginning the construction of what would become the two impregnable cells. The holes would drain water and waste through pipes of PVC to the storage tanks two stories below. I ran a horizontal rod dropped eighteen inches below the ceiling across both cells. The inmates would be able to hang their portable shower bags from that rod. Set on top of two of the drain holes were camping toilets purchased in Oklahoma City that I had modified to fit the space.
In the ceiling I installed recessed LED lights. They were linked to a timer that turned them on at seven each morning and off at eleven each night, the same time the television would run. The electrical circuits were also relayed to my computer network through a router mounted on level 3. All the bulbs were outside the cells, so I could change them without having to go inside. I did not know how physically capable my adversaries might be, and I did not have any interest in finding out. Below the TV, bolted to the wall next to the door, was a digital clock that would count down the hours and minutes remaining until their release. Next to it was a battery-powered calendar showing the day, date, and time.
Vertical steel bars, spaced three inches apart, spanned the front. Each partitioned space had a gate with the highest-grade dead bolts money can buy. I bought them at a hardware store in Houston. The door built into their shared wall of bars had no lock at all. If they wanted to have conjugal visits, they wouldn’t have to ask my permission. I bought cheap end tables for their cells at a flea market, and on top of each I placed a stack of books. In the drawers I left writing notebooks and a dozen pencils and pens. I bought two battery-powered camping lanterns, in case they wanted illumination after the lights shut off. Each cell had a straight-back chair, a rocker, and a stationary bike. One had a single cot, the other a sturdy bunk bed. The mattresses on both were warranted for twenty years.
A second row of bars, sixteen inches in front of the first, had a single door with two padlocks and a twelve-inch towing chain. It created a buffer zone between them and me and, more important, between them and freedom. I doubted they could escape from their cells, but there was something else important I learned on the row: the value of redundancy. The outer door leading to the staircase was from a bank vault. I rented a truck in Junction City to transport it to my property, and I paid three day laborers I hired in Kansas City to help me put it in place. When the work was done I bought them beer and tacos before driving them home, and I hoped they would not remember a single thing about me or what they had done that day. The vault door had a modified lock I could open myself by punching in an eight-digit code. Considering there are a hundred million combinations, I was fairly confident my code was secure. I used a drill with an industrial diamond bit to bore a peephole into the door so I could look in on my prisoners before entering their space.
One story up, on the fifth floor, I cut two four-inch-square holes through which food and water would be dropped into each of their cells once a day by an automated arm I scavenged from an electric dog food dispenser. The inmates would dispose of their waste and small bits of trash by dropping it through the drain holes in the floor of their living spaces, where it would fall into the storage vessel two stories below and be consumed by bacteria ordinarily found in backyard septic tanks. On the floors of levels 3 and 2 I laid a foot of sound insulation, and glued a foot more to the walls. Throughout the silo, I spread tiny remote-controlled cameras the size of a nickel attached to fiber-optic cable dropped down from level 1. The clock contained a camera I could remotely control to send me both video and sound. Smoke and fire alarms as well as carbon monoxide detectors were programmed to send me a text alert in case of danger. I was aiming to be a jail keeper, not a murderer.
Working four days a week, from late morning until early evening, construction took me nearly nine months. When my labor was done, I carried a radio down to level 6, tuned in the loudest music I could find, closed the vault, and climbed the levels until I was outside. I couldn’t hear a thing. I pressed my ear against the manhole cover leading down and listened hard. I still heard nothing, except for a helicopter’s rotors beating in the distance. I walked outside the hangar and looked up to see if I could spot it. I remotely activated the audio feed and heard the Rolling Stones singing “Satisfaction.”
After coffee the next morning, I told the diner workers I was excited about my next trip. I was going to head out to northern Arizona. The pictures I’d show them the following Monday I had actually taken a week before. So instead of flying west, I spent the next five days underground, three days in one cell, two in the other, testing everything out. The lights came on as programmed. My eye mask and earplugs shut out the light and sound of the TV. The food and water dropped on schedule. My shower bag filled every other day. The water and waste drained smoothly. The air was clean and fresh. I tried with both a baseball bat and a tire iron to hammer my w
ay out, and I didn’t make a dent. I couldn’t imagine what kind of implement they would need to escape other than a key or a phone, and I didn’t plan to let them get their hands on either one. The place was a fortress. I’d built a prison more secure than Alcatraz. If they could escape from this dungeon, they deserved to be free.
* * *
• • •
It was time to become familiar with the enemy. One I immediately had second thoughts about, but the other two I did not.
According to her official biography on the State of Texas Judiciary website, Sarah Moss had been on the Supreme Criminal Court for ten years. She attended St. Mary’s School of Law, served as an assistant district attorney in San Antonio for six years, and ran for the position on the court after an unsuccessful bid to oust the Bexar County district attorney. She was a cheerleader at TCU, where she met her future husband, Harvey, who is the pastor of a megachurch in South Austin. The two have no children.
I did a web search to learn more. I did not find much news of interest. The one exception was a story that broke when I was in my second year on death row. Moss’s husband was sued by a former church employee who claimed she had carried on an affair with the pastor for six years and was fired when she decided to break it off. She accused him of fathering her six-month-old girl. The case was settled out of court for undisclosed terms. I tried to track down the mistress. As best I could determine, she and her daughter were living with her parents in Honduras.
