Guilty Jen’s smile vanished from her face. “They teach you that in cop school? Hostage Negotiation 101, offer ’em all kinds of shit, get ’em on your side, then when it all turns out to be a lie you shoot ’em in the back while they’re running away, thinking they’re home free? Yeah, I bet they teach you that trick. What they should teach you is that I am not fucking stupid.”
Guilty Jen’s hand lashed out and Clara’s head snapped back, fast enough and hard enough that she worried she would get whiplash. It took a second for the pain in her cheek to arrive, a hot blossom of agony that grew and grew.
“Okay,” Guilty Jen said. “Lesson learned. Let’s move. Featherwood, what’s it look like out there?”
The burned woman was over near the door. She cracked it open for a quick peek, then said, “Looks clear. Those ugly sons of bitches were running around like welfare moms on a first Monday two seconds ago, but now they’ve cleared out.”
Guilty Jen nodded. She scooped up the pistol off the floor and put it inside her jumpsuit, deep enough that no one could just reach in and grab it away from her. “We need to get someplace we won’t be interrupted. Lucky for us, my crew here’ve been in and out of Marcy so many times they got the place memorized. There’s an interrogation room up on the second floor of the admin wing. There won’t be anybody there, and it’s nice and quiet.” She gave Clara a knowing glance. “Soundproofed.”
The women under Jen’s charge moved quickly and silently through the dark corridor that led back toward central command. They acted like a trained military unit, effortlessly responding to their leader’s hand signals. There was one exception, though, and it wasn’t a woman. Jen had a CO under her care as well, a living human prison guard still dressed in his navy blue uniform. He had some bad cuts on his face and his hands were bound behind him in plastic handcuffs. He moved like it hurt him to do so. Jen made him keep pace with the others by repeatedly jabbing him in the kidneys with his own collapsible baton. Occasionally he would shoot a glance Clara’s way, as if imploring her for help, but every time she returned his gaze he just looked away as if he were embarrassed to have anyone see him in this condition.
Clara could sympathize.
Jen led them down a side corridor and through a pair of swinging doors. For a minute they were outside, walking under a covered walkway. Barely a hundred yards away was the wall, separated from them by first fenced-in exercise yards, then three layers of razor wire. Clara looked up at a watchtower, hoping there would be someone there, someone she could signal to, but even if there was someone up there it would probably be a half-dead, and she didn’t want them to know where she was.
Back into the prison, then, back into darkness. They climbed a flight of stairs without any light at all, Clara banging her shins again and again but not daring to even gasp in pain. At the top of the stairs they passed through a short corridor and into the promised interrogation room. It wasn’t much to look at. There was a simple wooden table and two chairs. One chair had nylon restraints dangling from its arms and coiled around its legs. The walls were covered in a flocked wallpaper that would eat up any sound. Light came from a pair of very narrow windows in one wall. The glass inside the windows was reinforced with chicken wire, even though the windows were too thin for even a child’s hand to pass through.
There was a stain on the table that could have been a very old coffee spill or dried blood. Guilty Jen hopped up on the table and pulled her legs into an easy lotus position.
“Who are you?” Clara asked, when the door had been closed. “I mean—how does someone like you end up doing all this?”
Guilty Jen just smiled. “Featherwood, Queenie, you get lunch going. I’m starved. Maricón, you’re on guard duty.”
The woman called Maricón was a Latina wearing pronounced lipstick and mascara—at least on her good eye. The other one was covered in a thick bandage.