The tools were checked off and collected and put into a steel floor chest that was then locked. The furniture crew shuffled to the table, grabbed sandwiches and Dixie cups of drink, and waited for Murphy to do the count. “Ladies, the great outdoors awaits you. Someone grab me a ham and cheese.”
“You got it, cutie,” Angel Fitzroy murmured under her breath. Murphy gave her a sharp glance, which Angel returned with an innocent gaze. Jeanette felt a little sorry for him. But sorry don’t buy no groceries, as her mother used to say. She gave Murphy three months. At most.
The women filed out of the shed, sat down on the grass, and leaned against the wall of the building.
“What’d you get?” Ree asked.
Jeanette peered into the depths of her sandwich. “Chicken.”
“I got tuna. Want to trade?”
Jeanette didn’t care what she had, she wasn’t a bit hungry, so she swapped. She made herself eat, hoping it might make her head feel a little better. She drank the lemonade, which tasted bitter, but when Ree brought her a pudding cup, Jeanette shook her head. Chocolate was a migraine trigger, and if her current headache turned into one of those, she would have to go to the infirmary for a Zomig, which she would only get if Dr. N. was still here. Word had gone around that the regular PAs hadn’t come in.
A cement path ran toward the main prison building, and someone had decorated it with a fading hopscotch grid. A few women got up, found stones, and started to play, chanting rhymes they must have learned as kids. Jeanette thought it was funny, what stuck in a person’s head.
She pounded down the last bite of sandwich with the last swallow of bitter lemonade, leaned back and closed her eyes. Was her head getting a little better? Maybe. In any case, they had another fifteen minutes, at least. She could nap a little . . .
That was when Officer Peters popped out of the carpentry shed like a bouncy little Jack-in-the-box. Or a troll who had been hiding under a rock. He looked at the women playing hopscotch, then at the women sitting against the side of the building. His eyes settled on Jeanette. “Sorley. Get in here. I got a job for you.”
Fucking Peters. He was a tit-squeezer and an ass-patter, always managing to do it in one of the multiple blind spots the cameras couldn’t quite reach. He knew them all. And if you said anything, you were apt to get your tit wrung instead of just squeezed.
“I’m on my lunch break, Officer,” she said, as pleasantly as she could.
“Looks like you’re finished to me. Now get off your duff and come along.”
Murphy looked uncertain, but one rule about working in a women’s prison had been drummed into his head: male officers were not allowed to be one-on-one with any inmate. “Buddy system, Don.”
Color suffused Peters’s cheeks. He was in no mood for ticky-tack from Teach, not after the one-two combination of Coates’s harassment, and the call he’d just received from Blanche McIntyre that he “had” to pull a double because of “the national situation.” Don had checked his phone: “the national situation” was that a bunch of old ladies in a nursing home had a fungus. Coates was out of her mind.
“I don’t want any of her buddies,” Don said. “I just want her.”
He’s going to let it go, Jeanette thought. In this place he’s just a baby. But Murphy surprised her:
“Buddy system,” he repeated. Perhaps Officer Murphy would be able to hack it after all.
Peters considered. The women sitting against the shed were looking at him, and the hopscotch game had stopped. They were inmates, but they were also witnesses.
“Yoo-hoo.” Angel gave a queenly wave. “Oh, yoo-hoo. You know me, Officer Peters, I’m always happy to help.”
It occurred to Don, alarmingly—absurdly—that Fitzroy somehow knew what he had in mind. Of course, she didn’t, she was just trying to be irritating, like every other minute of the day. While he would have liked five minutes alone with that lunatic sometime, he did not care at all for the idea of having his back turned to her for so much as one second.
No, not Fitzroy, not for this.
He pointed at Ree. “You. Dumpster.” Some of the women giggled.
“Dempster,” Ree said, and with actual dignity.
“Dempster, Dumpster, Dimplebutt, I don’t give a fuck. Both of you, come on. Don’t make me ask again, not with the day I’m having.” He glanced at Murphy, the smartass. “See you later, Teacher-gator.”
This provoked more giggles, these of the ass-licking variety. Murphy was new and out of his depth and none of them wanted to be on Officer Peters’s shit list. They weren’t totally stupid, Don thought, the women in this place.
3
Officer Peters marched Jeanette and Ree a quarter of the way down Broadway and halted them outside the common room/visitors’ room, which was deserted with everyone at lunch. Jeanette was starting to get a very bad feeling about this. When Peters opened the door, she didn’t move.
“What do you want us to do?”
“Are you blind, inmate?”
No, she wasn’t blind. She saw the mop bucket with the mop leaning against it, and, on one of the tables, another plastic bucket. This one was full of rags and cleaning products instead of pudding cups.
“This is supposed to be our lunchtime.” Ree was trying for indignant, but the tremor in her voice spoiled it. “Besides, we’ve already got work.”
Peters bent toward her, lips pulled back to show the pegs of his teeth, and Ree shrank back against Jeanette. “You can put it on your TS list and give it to the chaplain later, okay? Right now just get in there, and if you don’t want to go on Bad Report, don’t argue the point. I’m having a shitty day, I’m in an extremely shitty mood, and unless you want me to share the wealth, you better step to it.”
Then, moving to his right to block the sightline of the nearest camera, he grabbed Ree by the back of her smock, hooking his fingers into the elastic strap of her sports bra. He shoved her into the common room. Ree stumbled and grabbed the side of the snack machine to keep from falling.
“Okay, okay!”
“Okay, what?”
“Okay, Officer Peters.”
“You shouldn’t push us,” Jeanette said. “That’s not right.”
Don Peters rolled his eyes. “Save your lip for someone who cares. Visitation Day tomorrow, and this place looks like a pigsty.”
Not to Jeanette, it didn’t. To her it looked fine. Not that it mattered. If the man in the uniform said it looked like a pigsty, it looked like a pigsty. That was the nature of corrections as it existed in little Dooling County, and probably all over the world.
“You two are going to clean it from top to bottom and stem to stern, and I’m going to make sure you do the job right.”
He pointed to the bucket of cleaning supplies.
“That’s yours, Dumpster. Miss That’s Not Right gets to mop, and I want that floor so clean I could eat my dinner off it.”