“Inmate!” Van shouted. “Inmate, let loose!”
Women were screaming. Claudia did not, at least to begin with. Screaming took strength, and she needed hers to hold the lunatic—the demon—away from her. Only it wasn’t working. That snapping mouth was closing in. She could smell Ree’s breath and see drops of Ree’s spittle, with tiny white filaments dancing in each drop.
“Inmate, I have drawn my weapon! Don’t make me fire it! Please don’t make me do that!”
“Shoot her!” someone screamed, and Claudia realized the someone was her. It seemed she had enough strength, after all. “Please, Officer Lampley!”
There was a huge bang in the hallway. A large black hole appeared high in Ree’s forehead, right in the middle of the grid of scar tissue. Her eyes swiveled up, as if she were trying to see where she’d been shot, and warm blood spattered across Claudia’s face.
With a final galvanic effort, Claudia pushed Ree away. Ree hit the corridor with a limp thud. Officer Lampley stood with her legs braced and her service weapon held out before her in both hands. The smoke curling from the muzzle reminded Claudia of the white threads that had stuck to her fingers when she had brushed Ree’s hair. Officer Lampley’s face was dead pale save for the purple pouches under her eyes.
“She was going to kill me,” Claudia gasped.
“I know,” Van said. “I know.”
CHAPTER 17
1
Halfway to town, Clint Norcross had a thought that caused him to pull into the lot of the Olympia Diner and park beside the easel sign reading MY OH MY, TRY OUR EGG PIE. He pulled out his phone and searched HICKS. He didn’t have his number, which said everything about his relationship with Dooling Correctional’s assistant warden. He scrolled further and found LAMPLEY.
Lampley picked up on the second ring. She sounded out of breath.
“Van? You okay?”
“Yeah, but you left before the fireworks. Listen, Doc, I had to shoot someone.”
“What? Who?”
“Ree Dempster. She’s dead.” Van explained what had happened. Clint listened, aghast.
“Jesus,” he said when she was finished. “Are you all right, Van?”
“Physically unhurt. Emotionally fucked to the sky, but you can psychoanalyze me later.” Van made a vast watery honking sound, blowing her nose on something. “There’s more.”
She told Clint about the violent confrontation between Angel Fitzroy and Evie Black. “I wasn’t there, but I saw part of it on the monitors.”
“Good thing you did. And Claudia. Sounds like you saved her life.”
“It wasn’t a good thing for Dempster.”
“Van—”
“I liked Dempster. If you’d asked me, I would have said she was the last woman in here to go postal.”
“Where’s her body?”
“In the janitor’s closet.” Van sounded ashamed. “It was all we could think of.”
“Of course.” Clint rubbed his forehead, eyes squeezed shut. He felt he ought to say more to comfort Lampley, but the words weren’t there. “And Angel? What about her?”
“Sorley, of all people, got hold of a Mace can and blasted her. Quigley and Olson bullrushed her into a cell in A Wing. She’s currently beating on the walls and yelling for a doctor. Claims she’s blind, which is bullshit. She’s also claiming there are moths in her hair, which might not be bullshit. We’ve got an infestation of the bastards. You need to get back here, Doc. Hicks is having a meltdown. He asked me to surrender my weapon, which I refused to do, even though I suppose it’s protocol.”
“You did the right thing. Until things settle down, protocol’s out the window.”
“Hicks is useless.”
Don’t I know it, Clint thought.
“I mean, he always was, but under these circumstances, he could actually be dangerous.”
Clint searched for a thread. “You said Evie was egging Angel on. What exactly was she saying?”
“I don’t know, and neither do Quigley or Millie, either. Sorley might. She was the one who slowed Angel’s roll. Chick deserves a medal. If she doesn’t crash out, you can get the whole story from her when you come back. Which will be soon, right?”
“ASAP,” said Clint. “Listen, Van, I know you’re upset, but I need to be clear on one thing. Angel started in on Evie because Evie wasn’t in one of those cocoons?”
“That’s my sense. I just saw her whacking on the bars with a lid from one of the coffee urns, and yelling her head off. Then I had my own fish to fry.”
“But she woke up?”
“Yeah.”
“Evie woke up.”
“Yeah. Fitzroy woke her up.”
Clint tried to make something coherent of this, and couldn’t. Maybe after he got some sleep himself—
The idea caused a flush of guilt to heat his face. A wild idea came to him: What if Evie Black was male? What if his wife had arrested a guy in drag?
But no. When Lila arrested her, Evie had been buck naked. Presumably the female officers supervising her intake had seen her that way, too. And what would explain all her bruises and scrapes healing in less than half a day?
“I need you to pass on what I’m about to say to Hicks and the other officers who are still there.” Clint had come back around to the thought that had occurred to him in the first place, why he had pulled into the diner parking lot and called the prison.
“Won’t take long,” she said. “Billy Wettermore and Scott Hughes just came in, which is good news, but still, to call this a skeleton crew would be an insult to skeletons. We’ve got just seven warm bodies, counting Hicks. You’ll make eight.”
Clint ignored this broad hint. “It struck me as I was driving into town, this stuff about Eve Black being different from the rest of the women, on top of what you’ve told me now—I just don’t know what to make of it. But I know that we can’t let it leave the prison, not yet. True or false. It could cause a riot. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“Um . . .”
That um gave Clint a bad feeling. “What is it?”
“Well . . .”
He liked that well even less.
“Just tell me.”
There was another wet honk. “I saw Hicks using his cell phone after the free-for-all in A Wing was over, and after I refused to give him my weapon. Also, after Millie updated Scott and Billy, they were both using their phones.”
Too late, then. Clint closed his eyes. A quick fairy tale formed itself:
Once upon a time there was an obscure prison psychiatrist who dressed all in black, ran out into the night, and lay crosswise in the middle of a length of interstate. A Trailways bus came tooling along and put him out of his misery and everyone else lived happily ever after or maybe they didn’t, but it was no longer the obscure prison psychiatrist’s problem. The end.
“Okay, okay,” Clint said. “Here’s what we do: tell them no more calls, not to anybody. Have you got that?”