Once there had been hundreds of rats in the prison and dozens of colonies; now just forty remained. As Evie lay with her eyes closed, she spoke with the alpha—an old female, a long-clawed fighter with thoughts like rusty grinding wheels. Evie imagined the alpha’s face as a lattice of scar tissues, very lean and beautiful.
“Why so few of you, my friend?”
“Poison,” this warrior queen told her. “They lay poison. It smells like milk, but it kills us.” The rat was in a crease between the cinderblocks that divided Unit 10 from Unit 9. “The poison is supposed to make us seek water, but often we become confused and die without reaching any. It’s a miserable death. These walls are filled with our bodies.”
“No more of you need to suffer that way,” said Evie. “I can promise that. But I may need you to do certain things for me, and some of them may be dangerous. Is that acceptable to you?”
As Evie expected, danger meant nothing to the queen rat. To gain her position the queen had fought her king. She had torn off his forelegs, and instead of finishing him she had sat on her haunches and watched him bleed out. The queen expected, eventually, to die in a similar manner.
“It is acceptable,” said the mother rat. “Fear is death.”
Evie didn’t agree—in her view, death was death, and it was well worth fearing—but she gave it a pass. Though rats were limited, they were sincere. You could work with a rat. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” said the queen rat. “There is only one question I need to ask you, Mother. Do you keep your word?”
“Always,” said Evie.
“Then what do you want us to do?”
“Nothing now,” said Evie, “but soon. I will call you. For now, you only need to know this: your family will no longer want to eat the poison.”
“True?”
Evie stretched, and smiled, and gently, with her eyes still closed, kissed the wall.
“True,” she said.
7
Evie’s head snapped up and her eyes snapped open. She was staring directly at the camera—and, seemingly, at Don.
In the Booth, he jerked in the chair. The pointedness of the look, the way she’d fastened on the camera lens the instant she awoke, unnerved him. What the hell? How had she woken up? Weren’t they supposed to get covered in webs if they fell asleep? Had the bitch been dekeing him? If so, she’d been doing a heck of a job: face slack, body totally still.
Don pushed down the mic. “Inmate. You’re staring at my camera. It’s rude. You got a rude look on your face. Do we have some kind of problem?”
Ms. Unit 10 shook her head. “I’m sorry, Officer Peters. Sorry about my face. There’s no problem.”
“Your apology is accepted,” said Don. “Don’t do it again.” And then: “How did you know it was me?”
But Evie didn’t answer the question. “I think the warden wants to see you,” she said, and right on cue, the intercom buzzed. He was needed in Administration.
CHAPTER 11
1
Blanche McIntyre let Don into the warden’s office and told him Coates would be along in about five minutes. It was a thing Blanche shouldn’t have done, and wouldn’t have, had she not been distracted by the strange events that seemed to be happening in the prison, and in the world at large.
His hands were shaking a bit as he helped himself to coffee from the pot in the corner of the office, situated right under the stupid fucking poster of the kitten: HANG IN THERE. Once he had his coffee, he spat into the black liquid that remained in the urn. Coates, the vicious old bitch, smoked and drank coffee all day. He hoped he had a cold coming on and his spit gave it to her. Christ, why couldn’t she die of lung cancer and leave him alone?
The timing, added to the unnerving prediction by the freaky female in Unit 10, left Don with no doubt that either Sorley or Dempster had snitched on him. This was not good. He should not have done what he had done. They had been waiting for him to slip and he had gone right from seeing Coates that morning and done exactly that.
No reasonable man, of course, could have blamed him. When you considered the kind of pressure that he was subjected to by Coates, and the amount of whining that he dealt with every single day from the criminals he was supposed to babysit, it was a wonder that he hadn’t murdered anyone, just from the frustration.
Was it so wrong to grab a handful now and then? For Christ’s sake, it used to be if you didn’t pat a waitress on the ass, she’d be disappointed. If you didn’t whistle at a woman on the street, she’d wonder what the hell she’d bothered getting dressed up for. They got dressed up to be messed up, that was just a fact. When did the whole female species get so turned around? You couldn’t even compliment a woman in these PC days. And that’s what a pat on the ass or a squeeze on the tit was, wasn’t it, a kind of compliment? You needed to be pretty stupid not to see that. If Don squeezed a woman’s rear, he didn’t do it because it was an ugly rear. He did it because it was a quality rear. It was a playful thing, that was all.
Did stuff sometimes go a little farther? Okay. Now and again. And here Don would take some of the blame. Prison was hard on a woman with healthy sexual feelings. There were more bushes than a jungle and no spearmen. Attractions were inevitable. Needs couldn’t be denied. The Sorley girl, for instance. It might be entirely subconscious on her part, but on some level, she had wanted him. She had sent plenty of signals: a swing of the hip in his direction on the way to mess hall; the tip of her tongue sweeping over her lips as she carried an armful of chair legs; a dirty little come-on glance over her shoulder.
Sure, the burden rested on Don not to give in to these sorts of invitations, made as they were by felons and degenerates, who would seize any opportunity to set you up and get you in trouble. But he was human; you couldn’t blame him for succumbing to his normal masculine urges. Not that a flea-bitten nag like Coates would ever understand.
There was no danger of a criminal action, he was certain—the word of a crack whore, or even of two crack whores, would never count for more than his in any court of law—but his job was definitely in jeopardy. The warden had promised to take action after another complaint.