“You know someone’s going out of here in handcuffs,” whispered the quiet man near me. “They’re just looking to violate one of us so we don’t take off like Langstrom.”
Beside me, Pulsifer had remained quiet, but I could sense the tension in his muscles, the same way you can sense when someone beside you in bed is still awake.
Hawken had reached the end of her already-limited patience. “Don’t be shy, boys. Someone’s got to be first.”
The pudgy man, Dudson, stood up. He articulated his words carefully, striking every syllable. “I’ll go first. Worst thing that can happen is they send me back to Bucks. At least my cell there was warm and didn’t smell like farts all night.”
“Hail, Fartacus!” one of the men said.
Foss opened and closed his hands, as if to keep the blood circulating through those sausage-size fingers. “Enough!”
It might have ended there if not for Hawken. “What’s the matter, Dudson? You have a better job offer than cutting trees?”
Dudson flushed a shade brighter. “You think it’s funny, but you’re not working outside all day in the freezing cold, waiting for a tree to fall on you like it did on Lovejoy.”
Who was Lovejoy?
“That’s enough, Dudson,” said Foss.
“Yessuh, massa!” said the sex offender.
“I said that’s enough!” The floor shook as Foss stepped down off the dais and crossed the room to Dudson’s table. He seized the soft-looking man by the arm and pulled him away from the table.
“Ouch! Ouch!”
Each of the other sex offenders in the room had frozen in place, as if playing a game of statues.
Foss looked like he could have flung Dudson into the next room if he had chosen to. The man was seriously angry. “The rest of you, remain here,” he boomed. “You’ll be called when it’s your turn to be interviewed. You have my permission to step outside briefly if you need to smoke. But don’t force me to go chasing you.”
There could be no doubt: The men who worked for Foss were terrified of him.
Foss dragged Dudson into an adjoining room. Clegg and Hawken followed close behind. The door swung shut.
I could hear the sound of breath being exhaled.
“What are we supposed to do?” I whispered to Pulsifer. “I thought we were going to be part of the interviews.”
“Hang out for a minute while I go see what’s up.”
Pulsifer disappeared through the far door. The men began to whisper among themselves and cast furtive glances in my direction. I had dealt with enough felons to know that most of them had no fear of law-enforcement officers, but these ex-cons were as timid as jackals. That Dudson character might be defiant, but the rest were frightened of doing anything that might result in their probation being revoked.
And why shouldn’t they be frightened? As long as he had Shaylene Hawken backing him up, Foss could work these men into the ground and risk no fines from the government, because who among them was going to report that their work conditions were unsafe or they weren’t being paid a minimum wage? As long as POs like Hawken kept sending him warm bodies, Foss would turn a profit.
If Adam had been even half as rebellious as I was, he wouldn’t have stood for it.
While I waited for Pulsifer to return, I took the opportunity to poke around. A fetid odor hung in the air: a combination of grease, wood ashes, burned coffee, and Murphy oil soap. The room had all the charm of a cash-strapped summer camp for troubled boys.
I made eye contact with an old man sitting by himself at a corner table. He had crazy hair that stood up in every direction like a cartoon character who’d just been struck by lightning. It took me a few seconds to realize that I recognized him.
“Wallace Bickford?” I said.
“Yeah?” He was missing assorted teeth.
“It’s Mike Bowditch.”
Not a flicker of recognition showed in his eyes. He just kept smiling his jack-o’-lantern smile.
“Jack’s son,” I said.
He seemed to suck in his stomach. “Jack’s dead.”
“Don’t you remember?” I said. “I was with the police that night they raided your cabin looking for him.”
Wally Bickford had been one of my father’s several sidekicks, a former logger who had received a traumatic head injury in the woods and had made his living thereafter as a trapper and collector of roadside cans and bottles. The last time I’d seen him had been during the manhunt. Search dogs had tracked my dad to the squalid shack where Bickford was then squatting. The brain-damaged man had been wounded during the ensuing police assault on his cabin, but my father had already managed to slip through the closing net.
I remembered hearing that the district attorney had drawn up accessory charges against Bickford for aiding my dad in his escape but that a judge had ruled Wallace wasn’t mentally capable of understanding his crime. So how had he ended up in Pariahville?
“What are you doing here, Wally?”
“I work for Don.”
“Did you come here from jail?”
“I got probated out of Windham last year.” He twisted his little finger inside his ear to remove some wax.
“Why were you incarcerated?”