CHAPTER 16
1
Clint was about to ask Tig Murphy to buzz him out through the main door, but Assistant Warden Lawrence Hicks came buzzing in first.
“Where are you going, Dr. Norcross?”
The question sounded like an accusation, but at least it came out clearly. Although Lore Hicks looked disheveled—his hair a mussed halo around his bald spot, stubble on his jowly cheeks, dark circles under his eyes—the Novocain from his morning dental procedure seemed to have worn off.
“To town. I need to see my wife and son.”
“Did Janice okay that?”
Clint took a beat to control his temper. It helped to remind himself that Hicks had either lost his wife to Aurora or would soon. That did not change the fact that the man standing before him was the last guy you wanted in charge of an institution like Dooling in a time of crisis. Janice had once told Clint that her second-in-command had less than thirty credit hours of Prison Management—from a degree-mill in Oklahoma—and no hours at all in Prison Administration.
“But Hicksie’s sister is married to the lieutenant governor,” Janice had said. She’d had an extra glass of Pinot on that occasion. Or maybe it had been two. “So you do the math. He’s great at scheduling and checking inventory, but he’s been here sixteen months, and I’m not sure he could find his way to C Wing without a map. He doesn’t like to leave his office, and he’s never done a single duty tour, although that’s supposed to be a monthly requirement. He’s scared of the bad girls.”
You’ll be leaving your office tonight, Hicksie, Clint thought, and you’ll be touring, too. Strapping on a walkie and making three-wing rounds, just like the other uniforms. The ones that are left.
“Did you hear me?” Hicks asked now. “Did Janice okay you leaving?”
“I have three things for you,” Clint said. “First thing, I was scheduled out at three PM, which was . . .” He checked his watch. “About six hours ago.”
“But—”
“Wait. Here’s the second thing. Warden Coates is asleep on her couch, inside a big white cocoon.”
Hicks wore thick glasses that had a magnifying effect. When he widened his eyes, as he did now, they looked ready to fall out of their sockets. “What?”
“Long story short, Don Peters finally tripped over his own dick. Got caught molesting an inmate. Janice canned his ass, but Don managed to load up her coffee with her prescription Xanax. It put her down fast. And before you ask, Don is in the wind. When I see Lila, I’ll tell her to put out a BOLO for him, but I doubt if it will be a priority. Not tonight.”
“Oh my God.” Hicks ran his hands through his hair, further disarraying what was left of it. “Oh . . . my . . . God.”
“Here’s the third thing. We do still have the other four officers from the morning shift: Rand Quigley, Millie Olson, Tig Murphy, and Vanessa Lampley. You are number five. You’ll need to make midnight rounds with the others. Oh, and Van will bring you up to speed on what the inmates are calling Super Coffee. Jeanette Sorley and Angel Fitzroy are pushing it.”
“Super Coffee? What’s that? And what’s Fitzroy doing out? She’s not trustworthy, not at all! She has anger issues! I read your report!”
“She’s not angry tonight, at least not yet. She’s pitching in. Like you need to. And if nothing changes, all these women are going to fall asleep, Lore. Every single one. Super Coffee or no Super Coffee. They deserve some hope. Talk to Van, and follow her lead if a situation comes up.”
Hicks grabbed Clint’s jacket. His magnified eyes were panicky. “You can’t go! You can’t desert your post!”
“Why not? You did.” Clint saw Hicks wince and wished he could have called those words back. He took Hicks’s hand and removed it from his jacket gently. “You checked on your wife, I need to check on Jared and Lila. And I will be back.”
“When?”
“As soon as I can.”
“I wish they’d all go to sleep!” Hicks burst out. He sounded like a petulant child. “Every last thieving, whoring, drug-taking one of them! We ought to give them sleeping pills instead of coffee! That would solve the problem, wouldn’t it?”
Clint merely looked at him.
“All right.” Hicks did his best to square his shoulders. “I understand. You have loved ones. It’s just . . . all this . . . all these women . . . we have a jail full of them!”
Are you just figuring that out? Clint thought, then asked Hicks how his wife was doing. He supposed he should have asked earlier. Except, hell, it wasn’t as if Hicksie had asked after Lila.
“Awake, at least so far. She had . . .” Hicks cleared his throat, and his eyes shifted away from Clint’s. “She had some pep pills.”
“Good. That’s good. I’ll be ba—”
“Doc.” It was Vanessa Lampley, and not on the intercom. She was at his elbow in the hall by the main door. She had left the Booth unmanned, a thing almost unheard of. “You need to come and see this.”
“Van, I can’t. I need to check on Jared, and I need to see Lila—”
So I can say goodbye, Clint thought. It occurred to him suddenly. The potential finality. How much longer could she stay awake? Not much. On the phone she had sounded—far off, like she was part of the way to another world already. Once she nodded off, there was no reason to believe she could be brought back.
“I understand,” Vanessa said, “but it won’t take more than a minute. You too, Mr. Hicks, sir. This . . . I don’t know, but this might change everything.”
2
“Watch monitor two,” Van said when they reached the Booth.
Two was currently showing the A Wing corridor. Two women—Jeanette Sorley and Angel Fitzroy—were pushing a coffee trolley toward the soft cell, A-10, at the end. They stopped before they got there to talk to an extremely large inmate who for some reason had taken up residence in the delousing station.
“So far we’ve got at least ten women asleep inside that webbing crap,” Van said. “Might be fifteen by now. Most in their cells, but three in the common room and one in the furniture shop. That shit spins out of them as soon as they fall asleep. Except . . .”
She punched a button on her console, and monitor two showed the interior of A-10. Their new intake lay on her bunk with her eyes shut. Her chest rose and fell in slow respirations.
“Except for her,” Van said. There was something like awe in her voice. “New fish is sleeping like a baby, and the only thing on her face is her Camay-fresh skin.”
Camay-fresh skin. Something struck Clint about that, but it slipped away in his surprise at what he was seeing and his concern about Lila. “She’s not necessarily asleep just because her eyes are shut.”
“Listen, Doc, I’ve been doing this job longer than you’ve been doing yours. I know when they’re awake and I know when they’re asleep. That one is asleep, and has been for at least forty-five minutes. Somebody drops something, makes a clatter, she kind of twitches and then turns over.”
“Keep an eye on her. You can give me a full report when I get back,” Clint said. “I need to go.” Despite Van’s insistence that she could tell the difference between sleep and closed eyes, he wasn’t sold. And he had to see Lila while he still had the chance. He didn’t want to lose her with this—this, whatever it was, why she was lying—between them.
He was out the door and heading for his car before the thing that had been bothering him finally coalesced in his mind. Evie Black had struck her face repeatedly against the wire mesh of Lila’s cruiser, and yet only a few hours later, the swelling and bruises were entirely gone. Nothing where they’d been but Camay-fresh skin.
3
Jeanette drove the coffee wagon while Angel walked beside it, banging on one of the urns with the lid and yelling, “Coffee! Special coffee! I got a peppy brew for all of you! Keep you leapin instead of sleepin!”
They had few takers in A Wing, where most of the cells were open and empty.
Earlier, in B Wing, Ree’s reaction had been a preview of what was to come. The special coffee might be a good idea, but hard to swallow. Ree had winced and handed her cup back after giving it a taste. “Jeez, Jeanette, I’ll take a juice, but this is too strong for me.”
“Strong to last long!” Angel proclaimed. Tonight she had traded her normal southern accent for a maniacally perky ghetto patois. Jeanette wondered just how many cups of their special coffee Angel had ingested herself. She seemed to have no problem drinking it down. “It’s a power batch, so down the hatch, unless you’re a dummy, want to end up a mummy!”
One of the A Wing women stared at her. “If that’s rapping, honey, I say bring back disco.”
“Don’t be dissing my rhymes. We’re doin you a favor. If you ain’t drinkin, you ain’t thinkin.”
But was postponing the inevitable really a good idea? Jeanette had thought so at first, roused by the thought of her son, but she was getting tired again, and she could sense hopelessness waiting right around the corner. And they weren’t postponing the inevitable by much; when they’d brought their Super Coffee proposal to Officer Lampley there had been three sleepers in the prison, but several more had gone since then. Jeanette didn’t raise the issue, though. Not because she was afraid of Angel’s famous temper, but because the idea of discussing anything was wearisome. She’d had three cups of the special coffee herself—well, two and a half, her stomach refused to take all of the third cup—and she was still exhausted. It seemed like years since Ree had awakened her, asking if Jeanette had ever watched the square of light from the window as it traveled across the floor.
I just can’t be bothered with a square of light, Jeanette had said.
I say you can’t not be bothered with a square of light, Ree had replied, and now this played over and over in Jeanette’s mind, like some crazy Zen koan. Can’t not be bothered didn’t make sense, did it? Or maybe it did. Wasn’t there some rule about a double negative making a positive? If so, maybe it did make sense. Maybe—
“Whoa! Hold up, girlfriend!” Angel bellowed, and gave the coffee wagon a hard butt-shove. It rammed into Jeanette’s crotch, temporarily bringing her wide awake. The special coffee sloshed in the urns and the juice sloshed in the pitchers.
“What?” she asked. “What the hell is it, Angel?”
“It’s my homegirl Claudia!” Angel shouted. “Hey, baby!”
They were twenty feet or so up the A Wing corridor. Sitting slumped on a bench next to the Kwell dispenser was Claudia Stephenson, known to all the inmates (and the officers, although they did not use the nickname while in gen-pop) as Claudia the Dynamite Body-a. The bod in question wasn’t quite as dynamite as it had been ten months ago, however. Since her intake, starches and gallons of prison gravy had packed on thirty or forty pounds. Her hands were resting on her brown uniform pants. The top that went with them lay crumpled at her feet, revealing an XL sports bra. Claudia’s boobs, Jeanette thought, were still pretty amazing.
Angel ladled coffee into a Styrofoam cup, splashing some on the floor in her amped-up enthusiasm. She held the cup out to Claudia. “Drink it up, Ms. Dynamite! Made strong to last long! Power by the hour, my sister!”
Claudia shook her head and kept staring at the tile floor.
“Claudia?” Jeanette asked. “What’s wrong?”
Some of the inmates were jealous of Claudia, but Jeanette liked her, and felt sorry for her. Claudia had embezzled a great deal of money from the Presbyterian church where she had been director of services in order to underwrite the ferocious drug habits of her husband and oldest son. And those two were both currently on the street, free as birds. I got a rhyme for you, Angel, Jeanette thought. Men play, women pay.
“Nothing’s wrong, I’m just getting up my nerve.” Claudia didn’t take her eyes from the floor.
“To do what?” Jeanette asked.
“To ask her to let me sleep normal, like her.”
Angel winked at Jeanette, let her tongue loll from the corner of her mouth, and made a couple of circles around one ear with her finger. “Who you talking about, Ms. Dynamite?”
“The new one,” Claudia said. “I think she’s the devil, Angel.”
This delighted Angel. “Devil-Angel! Angel-Devil!” She made scales in the air, lifted them up and down. “That’s the story of my life, Ms. Dynamite.”
Claudia droned on: “She must be some kind of wicked, if she’s the only one who can sleep like before.”
“I’m not getting you,” Jeanette said.
Claudia raised her head at last. There were purple scoops under her eyes. “She’s sleeping, but not in one of those cocoons. Go see for yourself. Ask how she’s doing it. Tell her if she wants my soul, she can have it. I just want to see Myron again. He’s my baby, and needs his mama.”
Angel dumped the cup of coffee she’d offered Claudia back into the urn, then turned to Jeanette. “We are goin to see about this.” She didn’t wait for Jeanette to agree.
When Jeanette arrived with the coffee wagon, Angel was gripping the bars and staring in. The woman Jeanette had glimpsed while Peters assaulted her now lay loose-limbed on her bunk, eyes closed, breathing evenly. Her dark hair spread out in a glorious fan. Her face was even more beautiful close up, and it was unblemished. Not only was she clear of the webbing, the bruises Jeanette had seen were gone. How was that possible?
Maybe she really is the devil, Jeanette thought. Or an angel, come to save us. Only that didn’t seem likely. Angels didn’t fly in this place. Other than Angel Fitzroy, that was, and she was more of a bat.
“Wake up!” Angel shouted.
“Angel?” She put a tentative hand on Angel’s shoulder. “Maybe you shouldn’t—”
Angel shrugged Jeanette’s hand off and tried to roll the cell door, but this one was locked. Angel grabbed the lid of the coffee urn and began to whang it against the bars, creating an ungodly racket that made Jeanette slap her hands over her ears.
“Wake up, bee-yatch! Wake up and smell the motherfucking coffee!”
The woman on the bunk opened her eyes, which were almond-shaped and as dark as her hair. She swung her legs down to the floor—long and lovely they were, even in her baggy intake coverall—and yawned. She stretched her arms, thrusting forward a pair of breasts that put Claudia’s to shame.
“Company!” she cried.
Her bare feet hardly seemed to touch the floor as she ran across to the bars and reached through them, grasping one of Angel’s hands and one of Jeanette’s. Angel instinctively pulled away. Jeanette was too stunned. It felt like some mild electricity was passing from the new woman’s hand and into her own.
“Angel! I’m so glad you’re here! I can talk to the rats, but they’re limited conversationalists. Not a criticism, just a reality. Each individual creature on its merits. My understanding is that Henry Kissinger is a fascinating discussion partner, yet consider all the blood that man has on his hands! Force me to choose, I’ll take a rat, thank you, and you can print that in the newspaper, just be sure you spell my name right.”
“What in the hail are you talking about?” Angel asked.
“Oh, nothing really. Sorry to blabber. I was just visiting the world on the other side of the world. Scrambles my brains a little to go back and forth. And here’s Jeanette Sorley! How’s Bobby, Jeanette?”
“How do you know our names?” Angel asked. “And how come you can sleep without growin that shit all over you?”
“I’m Evie. I came from the Tree. This is an interesting place, isn’t it? So lively! So much to do and see!”
“Bobby’s doing fine,” Jeanette said. Feeling as if she were in a dream . . . and perhaps she was. “I’d like to see him again before I fall aslee—”
Angel yanked Jeanette back so hard she almost fell. “Shut up, Jeanie. This ain’t about your boy.” She reached into the soft cell and grabbed Evie by the admirably filled front of her coverall. “How’re you stayin awake? Tell me or I’ll put a hurtin on you like you never had. I’ll make your cunt and your asshole swap places.”
Evie gave a jolly laugh. “That would be a medical marvel, wouldn’t it? Why, I’d have to learn how to go to the bathroom all over again.”
Angel flushed. “You want to play with me? You want to? You think just because you’re in that cell, I cain’t get at you?”
Evie looked down at the hands on her. Just looked. But Angel screamed and staggered back. Her fingers were turning red.
“Burned me! Bitch burned me somehow!”
Evie turned to Jeanette. She was smiling, but Jeanette thought there was sadness as well as good humor in those dark eyes. “The problem is more complex than it first might appear—I see that. I do. There are feminists who like to believe that all the world’s problems go back to men. To the innate aggressiveness of men. They have a point, a woman never started a war—although, trust me, some were definitely about them—but there are some bad, bad chickadees out there. I can’t deny it.”
“What is this shit you’re spouting?”
She looked back to Angel.
“Dr. Norcross has his suspicions about you, Angel. About the landlord you killed in Charleston, for one thing.”
“I didn’t kill nobody!” But the color had drained from Angel’s face, and she took a step backward, bumping the coffee wagon. Her reddened hands were pressed to her chest.
Evie redirected to Jeanette, speaking in low tones of confidence. “She’s killed five men. Five.” And now she turned again to Angel. “It was a kind of hobby for awhile there, wasn’t it, Angel? You out hitchhiking to nowhere in particular, with a knife in your purse and a little .32 in the side pocket of that rawhide jacket you always used to wear. But that’s not all, is it?”
“Shut up! Shut up!”
Back to Jeanette those amazing eyes went. Her voice was quiet but warm. It was the voice of a woman in a television ad, the one that told her friend that she also used to have problems with grass stains on her children’s pants, only this new detergent had changed everything.
“She got pregnant when she was seventeen. Covered it up with big loose layers of clothes. Hitchhiked to Wheeling—didn’t kill anyone that time, good for her—and took a room. Had the baby—”
“SHUT UP, I SAID!”
Someone with a video monitor had taken note of the confrontation: Rand Quigley and Millie Olson were pounding down the corridor, Quigley with Mace in hand, Olson with a Taser set on medium power.
“Drowned it in the sink, dropped the body down the incinerator chute.” Evie grimaced, blinked a couple of times, and added, softly, “Pop goes the weasel.”
Quigley tried to grab Angel. She whirled instantly at his touch, threw a punch, and overturned the cart, coffee, juice, and all. A brown wash—no longer scalding, but still hot—poured over Millie Olson’s legs. She screamed in pain, and fell on her behind.
Jeanette watched in amazement as Angel went full Hulk Hogan on Quigley, grasping his neck with one hand and clawing away the Mace with the other. The can hit the floor and rolled through the bars of the soft cell. Evie bent, picked it up, offered it to Jeanette.
“Want this?”
Jeanette accepted it unthinkingly.
Officer Olson was paddling around in a brown puddle, trying to get out from under the overturned coffee wagon. Officer Quigley was trying to keep from being choked out. Although Angel was skinny and Quigley outweighed her by at least fifty pounds, Angel shook him like a dog with a snake in its jaws, and tossed him into the coffee wagon just as Millie Olson was getting up, and they went down together with a thump and a splash. Angel whirled back to the soft cell, her eyes huge and glittering in her narrow little face.
Evie spread her arms as wide as the bars would allow and held them out to Angel, like a lover beckoning her beloved. Angel held her own arms out, her fingers bent into claws, and rushed at her, screaming.
Only Jeanette saw what happened next. The two officers were still trying to untangle themselves from the overturned coffee wagon, and Angel was lost in a world of fury. Jeanette had time to think, I’m not just seeing bad temper; this is a full-blown psychotic episode. Then Evie’s mouth yawned open so widely that the entire bottom half of her face seemed to disappear. From her mouth came a flock—no, a flood—of moths. They swirled around Angel’s head, and some caught in the peroxided up-spout of her hair. She screamed and began to beat at them.
Jeanette rapped Angel on the back of the head with the can of Mace. I am going to make an enemy here, she thought, but hey, maybe she’ll go to sleep before she can come back on me.
The moths flew toward the caged overhead lights of A Wing and into the main prison. Angel turned, still tearing at her head (although all the insects in her hair now seemed to have joined their fellows), and Jeanette triggered the Mace directly into the screaming woman’s face.
“You see how complex the problem is, don’t you, Jeanette?” Evie said as Angel blundered into the wall, howling and furiously rubbing her eyes. “I think it might be time to erase the whole man-woman equation. Just hit delete and start over. What do you think?”
“That I want to see my son,” Jeanette said. “I want to see my Bobby.” She dropped the can of Mace and began to cry.
4
While this was happening, Claudia “the Dynamite Body-a” Stephenson emerged from the delousing station and decided to seek climes more serene and vistas new. Just too noisy in A Wing this evening. Too upsetting. That special coffee was spilled everywhere, too, and it smelled really bad. You didn’t want to go and attempt to parlay with the devil when your nerves were jumbled, that was common sense. She could talk to the lady in A-10 later. She passed the Booth and walked into B Wing. She left her top behind.
“Inmate!” Van Lampley leaned out of the Booth, where she had seen the fight about to break out. (Angel with her fucking Super Coffee; Van was too bushed to castigate herself, but she should never have consented to the plan.) She had sent Quigley and Olson to defuse the situation, and was about to rush out to join them when Stephenson passed through.
Claudia made no reply, just kept walking.
“You forgot something, didn’t you? This is a prison, not a strip joint. Talking to you, Stephenson! Where do you think you’re going?”
But did she, Van, really care? Lots of them were wandering now, probably just trying to stay awake, and meanwhile, there was a fuckaree going on down at the far end of A Wing. That was where she was needed.
She started that way, but then Millie Olson—splashed with coffee all down her front—waved her back. “Under control,” Millie said. “Got that crazy bitch Fitzroy locked up. Situation back to normal.”
Van, thinking that nothing was under control and nothing was normal, nodded.
She looked around for Stephenson and didn’t see her. She returned to the Booth and called up the first floor of B Wing on one of the monitors in time to see Claudia entering B-7, the cell occupied by Dempster and Sorley. Only Sorley was still in A Wing, and Van hadn’t seen Dempster in quite awhile. Inmates were not above a bit of petty theft if they found a cell empty (the favorite targets of opportunity were the two Ps—pills and panties), and such depredations inevitably caused trouble. She didn’t have any reason to suspect Claudia, who was no nuisance in spite of being big enough to cause plenty of hassle, would do such a thing. Nonetheless, it was Van’s job to be suspicious. It wouldn’t do to have a rhubarb break out over a case of stolen property. Not with everything else that was going wrong.
Van decided to make a quick check. It was just a feeling, but she hadn’t liked the way Claudia was walking, with her head down, her hair in her face, and her smock top cast off God knew where. It would only take a minute, and she could stand to stretch her legs. Get the blood flowing again.
5
Claudia didn’t have theft on her mind. All she wanted was a bit of calm conversation. It would pass the time until A Wing settled down and she could speak to the new woman and find out how she, Claudia, could also go to sleep and wake up like on any other day. The new woman might not tell her, but then again, she might. The devil was unpredictable. He had been an angel once.
Ree was on her bunk with her face turned to the wall. Claudia noted for the first time, and not without pity, that Ree’s hair was starting to turn gray. That was true of Claudia as well, but she dyed hers. When she couldn’t afford the real stuff (or when none of her few visitors could be persuaded to bring her some Nutrisse Champagne Blonde, her favorite), she used ReaLemon from the kitchen. It worked pretty well, but didn’t last very long.
She reached out to touch Ree’s hair, then jerked back with a little cry when some of the gray stuck to her fingers. The threads wavered in the air for a second or two, then melted away to nothing.
“Oh, Ree,” Claudia mourned. “Not you, too.”
But maybe it wasn’t too late; there were only a few strands of that cocoon stuff in Ree’s hair. Maybe God had sent Claudia to B-7 while there was still time. Maybe this was a test. She took Ree by the shoulder and rolled her onto her back. The webbing was spiraling out of Ree’s cheeks and her poor scarred forehead, strands of it were emerging from her nostrils and eddying in her breath, but her face was still there.
Well, mostly.
Claudia used one hand to begin scrubbing the crap from Ree’s cheeks, going from one side to the other, not neglecting the whitish threads emerging from her mouth and strapping themselves across her lips. With her other hand, Claudia grabbed Ree’s shoulder and began to shake her.
“Stephenson?” From down the hallway. “Inmate, what are you doing in there? That’s not your cell.”
“Wake up!” Claudia cried, shaking harder. “Wake up, Ree! Before you can’t!”
Nothing.
“Inmate Stephenson? I’m talking to you.”
“That’s Officer Lampley,” said Claudia, still shaking and still scraping at the relentless white threads—God, it was hard to stay ahead of them. “I like her, don’t you? Don’t you, Ree?” Claudia began to cry. “Don’t go away, honey, it’s too soon to go away!”
And at first she thought the woman on the bunk appeared to agree with that, because her eyes snapped open and she began to smile.
“Ree!” Claudia said. “Oh, thank God! I thought you were—”
Only the smile continued to spread, the lips drawing back until it wasn’t a smile at all but a teeth-baring snarl. Ree sat up and clamped her hands around Claudia’s neck and bit off one of Claudia’s favorite earrings, a little plastic kitten-face. Claudia screamed. Ree spat out the earring along with the attached scrap of earlobe, and went for Claudia’s throat.
Claudia outweighed the diminutive Ree Dempster by seventy pounds, and she was strong, but Ree had gone insane. Claudia was barely able to hold her off. Ree’s fingers slipped from Claudia’s neck and her fingernails dug into the larger woman’s bare shoulders, bringing blood.
Claudia staggered from the bunk and toward the open cell door, Ree clinging to her like a limpet, snarling and gnashing and jerking from side to side, trying to break Claudia’s hold on her so she could move in and do real damage. Then they were in the hall and inmates were shouting, Officer Lampley was bellowing, and those sounds were in another galaxy, another universe, because Ree’s eyes were bulging and Ree’s teeth were chomping inches from Claudia’s face and then, oh God, her feet tangled and Claudia went sprawling in the B Wing corridor with Ree on top of her.
“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.”