“You don’t have anything to say?” the guard prompted.
Eat shit and die came to mind, but that was his anger talking.
Closing his eyes, Virgil relegated this gatehouse ass**le to the list of people not worth hassling. It wasn’t difficult to tell the kid was all talk. He’d run if Virgil ever confronted him one-on-one. Virgil had received similar comments from other C.O.s dozens of times. They acted tough when they had every advantage. But they were merely attempting to cover their own inadequacies.
“It’s probably better not to provoke some people,” Nance told him.
“He doesn’t scare me. We’ve got fourteen hundred of these hard-asses.” Wearing a self-satisfied grin, he searched the inside compartments and undercarriage of the car.
“What an idiot,” Nance grumbled as the kid waved them through the second gate.
Virgil ducked his head to gaze out at the prison ahead of them. Shaped like a giant X, the Security Housing Unit took up one side of the property. The regular maximum-security prison took up the other. It consisted of eight cell blocks radiating, like the spokes of a wheel, from a yard of at least three acres.
They parked next to a bus that had held other prisoners, judging by the crowded intake area and the C.O.s waiting there.
Parquet got out and opened Virgil’s door. “Welcome to twenty-first-century hell.”
The belly chain connecting his handcuffs to the shackles on his ankles rattled as Virgil climbed out of the backseat and stood in the dwindling afternoon sunlight, squinting up at the edifice he’d call home. The chill wind whipping over the treeless grounds reminded him of how cold and sterile it could be in prison.
But he’d been to hell before. It didn’t scare him. At least Laurel and the children were safe. Besides, he was taking something with him this time that they couldn’t strip away—his memories of that night with Peyton, the hope of seeing her inside these concrete walls and the phone number she’d slipped him at breakfast.
Peyton stared out her office window at the empty yard and a section of blacktop where the inmates played basketball. She couldn’t see R & R—Receiving and Release—from the administration building, but she knew Virgil had arrived on the heels of the bus transporting thirty men from other prisons in the state. The C.O.s down there had called her, as requested.
Normally, new arrivals were given a Fish kit—underwear, sheets, a blanket and one change of clothes—and housed in a separate unit called the gym until staff could observe their behavior and determine where they should be placed. But the gym provided a home for those with a “bit” or short prison sentence, too, and was severely overcrowded at the moment. The whole prison was. Originally built for 2,280 inmates, it held a thousand more, and that gave her a good excuse to drop Virgil into gen pop. It was important to get him into regular circulation as soon as possible. She wouldn’t rest easy until he was out of this place and safely away. The 2002 riot, when blacks and Hispanics started stabbing one another in the exercise yard known as Facility B, had taken one hundred and twenty guards and thirty minutes to stop, and that was using everything from pepper spray, to tear gas, to rubber bullets, to wooden bullets, to two dozen .223-caliber rounds from Ruger Mini-14 rifles. The inmates wouldn’t quit fighting until someone was killed.
Although there was only one death, due to a rifle shot, many convicts were injured, mostly by other prisoners. Once it was all over, the staff found fifty makeshift weapons in the yard.
“Hey, you got a minute?”
Surprised that she had company, Peyton turned to find Lieutenant McCalley standing in the doorway. Shelley wasn’t at her desk—probably out having a smoke—and Peyton had left the door open. She’d been too anxious to shut herself in, had wanted to hear and see everything going on around her, even though the administration building was beyond the electrified perimeter that enclosed all the level-four inmates. She’d never see or hear a disturbance involving Virgil from where she worked.
“Sure.” Concerned by the serious expression on McCalley’s face, she gestured that he should take a seat. “What’s wrong?”
He walked into the room and sat down but got right up again. “The disciplinary action we’re taking against John Hutchinson?” John again? “Yes? What about it?”
“A few more details have come to light.”
Finally able to forget, for a moment, that Virgil was entering the prison at this very moment, Peyton came around to sit on the edge of her desk. “What kind of details?”
“One of the C.O.s who helped break up the fight came to see me this morning.”
“Who—Ulnig?”
“No, Rathman.”
“And?”
“He’s changing his story.”
“Why do you think he’s doing that?”
McCalley began to circle the room but paused at the picture of her father, even though she knew he’d seen it many times before. “No clue. He says I misunderstood him. That he doesn’t believe Hutchinson over-reacted. He’s now claiming Riggs was trying to come after Hutchinson with a sharpened toothbrush. He said if Hutchinson hadn’t kicked Riggs, he would’ve been shanked.”
“But Riggs had no weapon. We already established that.”
The lieutenant ran a hand through his hair, mussing the only long part—the bangs he usually combed off his forehead. “Rathman produced the toothbrush Riggs supposedly had.”
“But it was Riggs who was jumped by Weston Jager. It’s also Weston who has a history of violence, both inside and outside the prison. Why would Riggs have a shank?”
“Rathman says he knew what was coming and wanted to be prepared. When it finally happened, he decided it was time to get himself out of gen pop and into the SHU, where he wouldn’t have to watch his back anymore. If that meant he had to stab a C.O., he was willing to stab a C.O.”
Peyton scowled as she tried to assimilate this information. “Why didn’t Rathman explain this before?”
“He said he told me what he thought had happened but has since realized he made a mistake. He said Riggs must’ve dropped the weapon after he hit his head. Weston Jager picked it up, and once Rathman saw Weston with it, he didn’t believe it had belonged to Riggs.”
“That part I can understand.”
“And Rathman’s been able to prove it was Riggs’s weapon, not Jager’s.”
“How?”