“Super Coffee? What’s that? And what’s Fitzroy doing out? She’s not trustworthy, not at all! She has anger issues! I read your report!”
“She’s not angry tonight, at least not yet. She’s pitching in. Like you need to. And if nothing changes, all these women are going to fall asleep, Lore. Every single one. Super Coffee or no Super Coffee. They deserve some hope. Talk to Van, and follow her lead if a situation comes up.”
Hicks grabbed Clint’s jacket. His magnified eyes were panicky. “You can’t go! You can’t desert your post!”
“Why not? You did.” Clint saw Hicks wince and wished he could have called those words back. He took Hicks’s hand and removed it from his jacket gently. “You checked on your wife, I need to check on Jared and Lila. And I will be back.”
“When?”
“As soon as I can.”
“I wish they’d all go to sleep!” Hicks burst out. He sounded like a petulant child. “Every last thieving, whoring, drug-taking one of them! We ought to give them sleeping pills instead of coffee! That would solve the problem, wouldn’t it?”
Clint merely looked at him.
“All right.” Hicks did his best to square his shoulders. “I understand. You have loved ones. It’s just… all this… all these women… we have a jail full of them!”
Are you just figuring that out? Clint thought, then asked Hicks how his wife was doing. He supposed he should have asked earlier. Except, hell, it wasn’t as if Hicksie had asked after Lila.
“Awake, at least so far. She had…” Hicks cleared his throat, and his eyes shifted away from Clint’s. “She had some pep pills.”
“Good. That’s good. I’ll be ba—”
“Doc.” It was Vanessa Lampley, and not on the intercom. She was at his elbow in the hall by the main door. She had left the Booth unmanned, a thing almost unheard of. “You need to come and see this.”
“Van, I can’t. I need to check on Jared, and I need to see Lila—”
So I can say goodbye, Clint thought. It occurred to him suddenly. The potential finality. How much longer could she stay awake? Not much. On the phone she had sounded—far off, like she was part of the way to another world already. Once she nodded off, there was no reason to believe she could be brought back.
“I understand,” Vanessa said, “but it won’t take more than a minute. You too, Mr. Hicks, sir. This… I don’t know, but this might change everything.”
“Watch monitor two,” Van said when they reached the Booth.
Two was currently showing the A Wing corridor. Two women—Jeanette Sorley and Angel Fitzroy—were pushing a coffee trolley toward the soft cell, A-10, at the end. They stopped before they got there to talk to an extremely large inmate who for some reason had taken up residence in the delousing station.
“So far we’ve got at least ten women asleep inside that webbing crap,” Van said. “Might be fifteen by now. Most in their cells, but three in the common room and one in the furniture shop. That shit spins out of them as soon as they fall asleep. Except…”
She punched a button on her console, and monitor two showed the interior of A-10. Their new intake lay on her bunk with her eyes shut. Her chest rose and fell in slow respirations.
“Except for her,” Van said. There was something like awe in her voice. “New fish is sleeping like a baby, and the only thing on her face is her Camay-fresh skin.”
Camay-fresh skin. Something struck Clint about that, but it slipped away in his surprise at what he was seeing and his concern about Lila. “She’s not necessarily asleep just because her eyes are shut.”
“Listen, Doc, I’ve been doing this job longer than you’ve been doing yours. I know when they’re awake and I know when they’re asleep. That one is asleep, and has been for at least forty-five minutes. Somebody drops something, makes a clatter, she kind of twitches and then turns over.”
“Keep an eye on her. You can give me a full report when I get back,” Clint said. “I need to go.” Despite Van’s insistence that she could tell the difference between sleep and closed eyes, he wasn’t sold. And he had to see Lila while he still had the chance. He didn’t want to lose her with this—this, whatever it was, why she was lying—between them.
He was out the door and heading for his car before the thing that had been bothering him finally coalesced in his mind. Evie Black had struck her face repeatedly against the wire mesh of Lila’s cruiser, and yet only a few hours later, the swelling and bruises were entirely gone. Nothing where they’d been but Camay-fresh skin.
Jeanette drove the coffee wagon while Angel walked beside it, banging on one of the urns with the lid and yelling, “Coffee! Special coffee! I got a peppy brew for all of you! Keep you leapin instead of sleepin!”
They had few takers in A Wing, where most of the cells were open and empty.
Earlier, in B Wing, Ree’s reaction had been a preview of what was to come. The special coffee might be a good idea, but hard to swallow. Ree had winced and handed her cup back after giving it a taste. “Jeez, Jeanette, I’ll take a juice, but this is too strong for me.”
“Strong to last long!” Angel proclaimed. Tonight she had traded her normal southern accent for a maniacally perky ghetto patois. Jeanette wondered just how many cups of their special coffee Angel had ingested herself. She seemed to have no problem drinking it down. “It’s a power batch, so down the hatch, unless you’re a dummy, want to end up a mummy!”
One of the A Wing women stared at her. “If that’s rapping, honey, I say bring back disco.”
“Don’t be dissing my rhymes. We’re doin you a favor. If you ain’t drinkin, you ain’t thinkin.”
But was postponing the inevitable really a good idea? Jeanette had thought so at first, roused by the thought of her son, but she was getting tired again, and she could sense hopelessness waiting right around the corner. And they weren’t postponing the inevitable by much; when they’d brought their Super Coffee proposal to Officer Lampley there had been three sleepers in the prison, but several more had gone since then. Jeanette didn’t raise the issue, though. Not because she was afraid of Angel’s famous temper, but because the idea of discussing anything was wearisome. She’d had three cups of the special coffee herself—well, two and a half, her stomach refused to take all of the third cup—and she was still exhausted. It seemed like years since Ree had awakened her, asking if Jeanette had ever watched the square of light from the window as it traveled across the floor.
I just can’t be bothered with a square of light, Jeanette had said.
I say you can’t not be bothered with a square of light, Ree had replied, and now this played over and over in Jeanette’s mind, like some crazy Zen koan. Can’t not be bothered didn’t make sense, did it? Or maybe it did. Wasn’t there some rule about a double negative making a positive? If so, maybe it did make sense. Maybe—
“Whoa! Hold up, girlfriend!” Angel bellowed, and gave the coffee wagon a hard butt-shove. It rammed into Jeanette’s crotch, temporarily bringing her wide awake. The special coffee sloshed in the urns and the juice sloshed in the pitchers.
“What?” she asked. “What the hell is it, Angel?”
“It’s my homegirl Claudia!” Angel shouted. “Hey, baby!”