Terry held up a hand to Frank. “I get all that, Clint. I understand your concern. But you know me, all right? I’ve worked with Lila for more than a decade. Since before she was sheriff. You’ve eaten dinner at my house and I’ve eaten dinner at yours. I’m not going to do anything to any of those women, so give me a break.”
“I’m trying—”
“You would not believe some of the garbage I’ve had to shovel up around town over the weekend. Some lady left her stove on and burned down half of Greely Street. A hundred acres of woods south of town are torched. I got a dead high school athlete who tried to rape a sleeper. I got a guy with his head smashed in by a blender. I mean, this is stupid. Let’s put aside the rulebook. I’m acting sheriff. We’re friends. Let me see she’s sleeping like the others, and I’ll get out of your hair.”
The security kiosk on the opposite side of the fence, where an officer ought to have been stationed, was empty. Beyond it, across the parking lot and on the opposite side of the second fence, the prison hunched its gray shoulders. There was no movement to be seen through the bulletproof glass of the front doors, no prisoners taking laps on the track or working in the garden plot. Terry thought of amusement parks in the late fall, the ramshackle appearance they took on when the rides stopped spinning and there were no kids walking around eating ice cream and laughing. Diana, his daughter, was grown now, but he’d taken her on countless amusement park trips when she was younger. Those had been fine times.
Christ, he could use a nip. Good thing Frank kept his cool flask handy.
“Check your phone, Terry,” came Clint’s voice through the intercom speaker.
The train whistle that was Terry’s ringtone went off. He took his cell phone from his pocket and looked at the photograph that Clint had messaged him.
A woman in a red top lay on a cell cot. There was an ID number above her breast pocket. Beside the ID number an ID card had been placed. On the card was a photograph of a woman with long black hair, tan skin, and a wide, white smile. The name of the woman was listed as “Eve Black” and her ID number matched the number on the uniform shirt. A cocoon had blotted out her face.
Terry handed the phone to Frank so he could see the picture. “What do you think? Do we call it good?”
It occurred to Terry, that he—the acting sheriff—was fishing for a direction from his new deputy, when it was supposed to be the other way around.
Frank studied the picture and said, “This doesn’t prove jack shit. Norcross could put one on any sleeping woman and add Black’s ID.” Frank returned the phone to Terry. “It doesn’t make any sense, refusing to let us in. You’re the law, Terry, and he’s a goddam prison psychiatrist. He is smoother than slippery elm, I’ll give him that, but it smells. I think it’s a stall game.”
Frank was right, of course; the picture didn’t prove anything. Why not allow them in to at least see the woman in the flesh, sleeping or not? The world was on the verge of losing half its population. What did some warden’s rulebook matter?
“Why stall, though?”
“I don’t know.” Frank took out the flat flask and offered it. Terry thanked him, took a glorious swig of the whiskey, and offered the flask back. Frank shook his head. “Keep it handy.”
Terry pocketed the flask and thumbed the intercom. “I got to see her, Clint. Let me in, let me see, and we can all get on with our day. People are talking about her. I need to put the talk to rest. If I don’t, we might have a problem I can’t control.”
From his seat in the Booth, Clint observed the two men on the main monitor’s feed. The door to the Booth was open, as it never would have been under normal conditions, and Officer Tig Murphy was leaning in. Officers Quigley and Wettermore were just outside, also listening. Scott Hughes, the only other officer they had left, was taking a nap in an empty cell. A couple of hours after she’d shot Ree Dempster, Van Lampley had clocked out—Clint hadn’t had the heart to ask her to stay. (“Good luck, Doc,” she’d said, sticking her head in the door of his office, out of uniform and in her street clothes, eyes bloodshot from tiredness. Clint had wished her the same. She hadn’t thanked him.) If she wasn’t asleep by now, he doubted she would have been of much use, anyway.
Clint was confident that he could put Terry off at least for awhile. What concerned him was the big guy standing beside Terry, who had given the acting sheriff the flask and was advising him between exchanges. It was like watching a ventriloquist and his talking dummy. Clint noticed the way the big guy was scanning around instead of staring at the intercom speaker, as people instinctively tended to do. It was like he was casing the place.
Clint depressed his intercom button and spoke into the mic. “Honestly, I’m not trying to complicate things, Terry. I feel terrible about this. Not to beat a dead horse, but I swear, I’ve got the warden’s book right here in front of me. It’s in capital letters at the top of the Lockdown Ordinances!” He tapped the electronics board in front of him, on which there rested no book of any kind. “This isn’t what I was trained for, Terry, and the book is all I have.”
“Clint.” He could hear Terry’s disgusted exhalation. “What the heck, man. Am I going to have to bust down the gate? This is ridiculous. Lila would be—really disappointed. Really disappointed. She wouldn’t believe this.”
“I understand you’re frustrated, and I know I can’t even begin to appreciate the stress you’ve been under the last couple of days, but you do realize there’s a camera on you, right? I just watched you take a drink from a flask and we both know that it wasn’t Kool-Aid. With all due respect, I knew Lila—” The mention of his wife in the past tense, realized only as soon as it was out of his mouth, caused Clint’s heart to catch. To get himself a moment, he cleared his throat. “I know Lila a little better than you, and that’s what I think would disappoint her, that her go-to deputy is drinking on the job. Put yourself in my position. Would you let someone into the prison who doesn’t have jurisdiction, or the right paperwork, and who’s been drinking?”
They watched Terry throw up his hands and walk away from the intercom, pacing in a circle. The other man put an arm around his shoulder, and spoke to him.
Tig shook his head and chuckled. “You should never have gone into prison medicine, Doc. You could have been rich selling shit on HSN. You just did major voodoo on that guy. He’s going to need therapy now.”
Clint swiveled to the three officers standing by. “Anybody know the other one? The big dude?”
Billy Wettermore did. “That’s Frank Geary, the local animal control officer. My niece helps out with the strays. She told me he’s okay, but kind of intense.”
“Intense how?”
“He really doesn’t like people who don’t take care of their animals, or abuse them. There was a rumor that he put a beatdown on a redneck who tortured a dog or cat or something, but I wouldn’t bet all my money on that one. High school grapevine has never been too reliable.”
It was on the tip of Clint’s tongue to ask Billy Wettermore to give his niece a ring before he remembered how unlikely it was that she’d still be awake. Their own female population was down to a grand total of three: Angel Fitzroy, Jeanette Sorley, and Eve Black. The woman he’d photographed was an inmate named Wanda Denker who had a body type similar to Evie’s. Denker had been conked out since Friday night. In preparation, they’d dressed her in scrubs with Evie’s ID number and Evie’s ID pinned to her red top. Clint was grateful—and a little stunned—that the crew of four remaining officers had bought into what he was doing.