Jeanette spoke up. “Officer, unless this Aurora gets solved pronto, people in here are going to get restless.” This fully dawned on her even as she articulated it. Except for Maura Dunbarton and a couple of other lifers, there was at least a distant beacon of hope: the end of their sentence. Freedom. For all intents and purposes, the Aurora Flu was a sudden dousing of that hope. No one knew what came after sleep, or if anything did. It was like heaven that way. “They’re going to get worried and they’re going to get upset and scared, and you could have a serious . . . problem.” Jeanette was careful not to employ the word riot, but that was the problem she was envisioning. “They’re already worried and upset and scared. You said it yourself, there’s already been three of us that have come down with this thing.
“And we got the ingredients right in the kitchen. You just have to let us in and we’ll do the rest. Look, I’m not trying to be pushy here or cause a ruckus. You know me, right? I try to get along. My time has been clean. I’m just telling you what my concern is and proposing an idea.”
“And your special coffee is going to fix that? Some accelerant is going to make everyone copacetic with the situation?”
“No, Officer,” said Jeanette. “That is not what I think.”
Lampley’s hand found her bicep tattoo of the gravestone, YOUR PRIDE. She let her fingers wander over the lines. The focus of her gaze drifted up, to something above the screen of the Booth.
A clock, Jeanette thought, most likely there’s a clock hanging there. Lampley was morning shift. She probably went to bed around nine to get up at five or five thirty AM and drive to work. From the clock in her cell Jeanette knew it was around five PM now—getting late.
The officer rolled her head around on her thick neck. There were circles under her eyes, Jeanette noticed. That was what a double shift did to you. “Fuck,” said Lampley.
Jeanette couldn’t hear it through the soundproofed barrier, but she saw the officer mouth it.
Lampley leaned back into the intercom. “Tell me more, inmate. Sell me.”
“I think it’ll give everyone a little hope. Make them feel like they’re doing something. And buy a little extra time for this thing to blow over.”
Van’s gaze darted upward again. The discussion went on for awhile longer, eventually turning into a negotiation, and finally into a plan, but that was the moment when Jeanette knew she’d won Officer Lampley over—there was no denying the clock.
2
Clint and Coates had the warden’s office to themselves again, but at first neither of them spoke. Clint had gotten his breath back, but his heart was still going bang-bang-bang, and he guessed his blood pressure, borderline at his last physical (a fact he had neglected to share with Lila; no need to worry her, she had enough on her plate) was redlining.
“Thanks,” he said.
“For what?”
“Covering for me.”
She knuckled her eyes. To Clint she looked like a tired child back from a play date that had gone on too long. “I just got rid of the bad apple in our basket, Doc. That had to be done, but I’m not getting rid of anyone else, not when I’m already shorthanded. At least everyone else has stayed on so far.”
Clint opened his mouth to say I wanted to kill him, closed it again.
“I will say . . .” Janice opened her mouth in a jaw-cracking yawn. “. . . that I was a little surprised. You went after him like Hulk Hogan back in his steroid-assisted heyday.”
Clint lowered his head.
“But I need you for at least the time being. My assistant warden is AWOL again, so you get the job until Hicks turns up.”
“I imagine he went home to check on his wife.”
“I imagine he did, too, and while I understand, I don’t approve. We’ve got over a hundred women locked up in here, and those women have to be our priority. I don’t need you losing your grip.”
“I’m not.”
“I hope that’s true. I know you come from a difficult background—I’ve read your file—but there’s nothing in there about a talent for choking people to death. Of course, juvenile records get sealed.”
Clint forced himself to meet the warden’s eyes. “That’s right. They do.”
“Tell me what I just saw with Peters was an aberration.”
“It was an aberration.”
“Tell me you’d never lose it that way with one of the women. Fitzroy, for instance. Or one of the others. The new one, maybe. Evie the Weirdo.”
Clint’s shocked expression must have been answer enough for her, because she smiled. As it turned into another yawn, her phone rang.
“Warden.” She listened. “Vanessa? Why are you calling me when you have a perfectly good intercom at your dispo—”
She listened some more, and as she did, Clint observed a queer thing. The phone kept sliding up from her ear and toward her hairline. She’d bring it down, and then it would start that upward journey again. It could be simple tiredness, but it didn’t exactly look like tiredness. He wondered briefly if Janice had a bottle in her desk, and dismissed the idea. He and Lila had been out to dinner with Coates a few times, and he’d never seen her order anything stronger than a glass of wine, which she usually left unfinished.
He told himself to stop jumping at shadows, but that was hard to do. If Warden Coates went down, who would that leave until Hicksie got back? If Hicksie got back. Lampley? Him? Clint thought about what it would be like to become acting warden, and had to suppress a shudder.
“Okay,” Coates said into the phone. Listened. “Okay, I said. Yes. Let them do it. Go ahead and put it on the intercom. Tell gen-pop that the coffee wagon will be rolling.”
She ended the call, tried to put the phone back in the cradle, missed, and had to do it again. “Shoot,” she said, and laughed.
“Janice, are you all right?”
“Oh, couldn’t be better,” she said, but couldn’t came out in a slur: coont. “I just gave Van the go-ahead to let Fitzroy, Sorley, and a couple of others make super-coffee in the kitchen. Essentially a form of crank.”
“Say what?”
Coates spoke with deliberate care, reminding Clint of how drunks spoke when they were trying to appear sober. “According to Van—who got it from Angel, our own Walter White—our coffee is light roast instead of dark, which is good because it has more caffeine. Then, instead of one bag per pot, they’re going to use three. Gonna make gallonsh.” She looked surprised, and licked her lips. “Gallons, I mean. My lips feel all numb.”
“Are you kidding?” He didn’t know if he was talking about the coffee or her lips.
“Oh, you haven heard the bes part, Doc. They’re gonna dump all the Sudafed from the infirmary into the coffee, and we’ve got quite a stock. But before they drink the coffee . . . the inmaitches . . . inmates . . . have to chug a mixshure of grapefruit juice and butter. Speeds up the abshorpshun. That’s what Angel claims, and I don’t shee the harm . . .”
Coates tried to get up and fell back into her chair with a little laugh. Clint hurried to her side. “Jan, have you been drinking?”
She stared at him, eyes glassy. “No, of coursh not. Thish isn’t like being drunk. Thish is like . . .” She blinked and reached out to touch a small leather bag beside the IN/OUT basket on her desk. Coates patted it with the tips of her fingers, feeling for something. “. . . my pillsh? They were here on the desk, in my clutch.”
“What pills? What are you taking?” Clint looked for a bottle, but saw nothing on the desk. He bent and looked beneath. Nothing but a few dust bunnies left behind by the last trustee who had cleaned the place.