Ascension Day

14

Death. Everyone at Libreville thought about it. Those on Death Row perhaps more than they should: even if their execution might be five or ten years away, with any number of possible lifelines in-between — appeals and clemency pleas, State Governors offering across the board pardons upon retirement from office, as had happened once before — death was still there in some dark corner of their minds where they pushed everything they didn’t want to face, gnawing steadily away.

But with an impending execution among their number, only thirty-six days away, it was that much harder to push away and not think about. Larry Durrant’s approaching death hung over all of them. Sudden, stark reminder that it could be them next. And maybe not so long away as they thought.

Death reached out its icy hand to every corner of the prison, trickled down cell walls along with the ingrained grime and sweat, the smeared blood and faeces, brought a chill to the air and to inmates’ spines, even when it was touching 90?. And if Death Row was the nucleus of that at Libreville, the queen bee’s hive, it didn’t lack for supporting drones.

Eighty-two per cent of inmates incarcerated at Libreville would die there; of pneumonia, heart failure, cancer, tumours, drugs overdoses, AIDS, murdered by fellow prisoners, or simply of old age. So there was a prison hospice, a chapel for prayers for the dead, and a graveyard. Libreville seemed reluctant to let go of its inmates, even in death. And while most prisoner’s families would choose to take the body home for burial — their only chance to get loved ones back — many had been so long forgotten by their families that burial at Libreville remained the only option.

Of that amount, the executioner would grim-reap less than two per cent. But that small number by far overshadowed all other deaths, because it underscored the reason they were all there. You commit murder, we kill you. When we’re good and ready.

And the passage of time, while helping inmates push the spectre of death away in their minds, also made it like a slow-drip torture; death might be trickling down their cell walls slowly, but that ensured its omnipresence. Paradoxically, of all of them Larry Durrant was probably the least worried, because he’d resigned himself to death long ago. But others on Death Row watched with foreboding that passage of approaching death as the days wound down to Larry Durrant’s execution, wondering when it might next reach out to claim them.

There were spaces though in the prison where you could escape: places that breathed life, transported you to the world outside in your mind, or simply numbed you, made you forget where you were.

For Rodriguez, it was the prison radio and communication room, all that contact with the outside world made it easy to transport himself, if only for a few moments here and there, to where that contact came from; or when he was playing songs, closing his eyes and imagining he was a DJ at some far-flung station — TKLM, Tahiti — or remembering where he’d been and what he’d been doing when he’d first heard that song. For Larry, it was the library and his books that would let him drift to other places in his mind.

And for other inmates it might be working the ranch, the annual rodeo or the muscle yard. Rodriguez had never been much for muscle training and category A prisoners weren’t allowed to work the open ranch, so the only common area where he found a quiet corner was the showers. Not for the reason they were favoured by many inmates — scoping for prison bitches — but because, with his head back, eyes closed and the water running down his body, he could escape.

He could be anywhere: under a waterfall on some South Pacific isle, waiting for one of his stable of fine women to join him under its spray, or maybe at home when he was younger and his mom calling out if he was going to be long because dinner was ready.

It washed away the sweat and grime, the invisible aura of stale and trapped humanity, of oppression and death, that seemed to cling to the skin like a sticky blanket within hours.

Wash it away. Wash it away.

Rodriguez scrubbed hard. Then, when he felt he’d washed the prison away, he tilted his head back and closed his eyes, letting himself drift with the spray hitting his face and running down his body. Pacific waterfalls, fine women soaping his body, at home and about to put on his best threads for a Saturday night out.

And he’d been more successful in his reverie this time, Rodriguez thought, because he’d even managed to tune out the clamour and echo of the other voices in the showers.

The hand clamping suddenly over his mouth snapped his eyes sharply open.

Two striplights his end of the showers had been switched off and the five guys showering in his section and the guard by the showers’ open entrance had suddenly gone.

Probably the other people showering and the guards further along out of sight were still there, but as Rodriguez writhed and tried to call out to get their attention, he made no more than a muted whimper. The hand across his mouth was clamped too firmly.

Rodriguez couldn’t see who was holding him — the arm too across his chest was clamped tight — only feel his breath against the back of his neck. The only person he could see, in that instant sliding into the side of his vision a few paces away, was Tally Shavell: a towel around his waist, upper body glistening, muscles tensed like steel chords, the veins in his neck taut as he grimaced malevolently.

‘Sorry. Didn’t bring no reading matter wi’ me this time.’

The open razor at towel level in Shavell’s right hand was flicked out silently, imperceptibly, as he stepped closer.

And Rodriguez knew in that moment that death had come for him sooner than he had thought.

‘Should be no problem handling two addresses. I got a friend, Mo, who does much the same as me. I’ve only got one Bell uniform, but I can head over to his place after I’ve finished and hand it to him.’

‘Are you sure it will fit?’ Nel-M quipped.

‘Very funny,’ Barry responded dryly. ‘But if it looks like there’s a problem, I can always stitch up the back for him.’

Barry Lassitter had become Barry-L, then simply ‘Barrel’, since he’d been three hundred pounds for more years than he cared to remember. But he was one of the best ex-Bell men that Nel-M knew and, from the name he’d given his company, ‘Warpspeed Communications’, he obviously didn’t mind the world knowing that he was an ardent ‘Trekkie’. Nel-M would have put in the bug himself if it wasn’t for the fact that Truelle would recognize him; also, he needed someone who could do it in one minute flat rather than five or six.

‘Nothing like a good stitch up,’ Nel-M commented. ‘Also, make sure there’s no tell-tale egg or ketchup stains down the front that might give the game away that it’s the same uniform.’

Barrel huffed and muttered a response that Nel-M didn’t hear.

‘And let me know as soon as they’re both in place and we’re live.’

Larry had just gone through the gate at the end of his cell block to head down to the showers when he was approached by one of the guards, Dan Warrell.

‘You’re wanted up in the library.’

‘Am I back on duty there, then?’

Warrell shrugged. ‘Don’t know about that. All I know is the guy up there, Perinni-’

‘Peretti.’

‘Yeah. Well, he’s apparently stuck with something. Needs a hand.’

‘Okay,’ Larry nodded. He wasn’t suspicious. Warrell didn’t have any allegiances with Bateson, was very much his own man. If you had a grievance and wanted it dealt with fairly and evenly, Warrell or Torvald Engelson were the best to go to.

‘I’ll see your way up there.’ Warrell led the way up the two flights of steel steps, then along forty yards of corridor, half of it flanked by cells.

Warrell took out his security card as they approached the gate. Beyond lay store rooms, a guards’ watch room and canteen, and the library.

Peretti was at the far end of the library and looked surprised to see Larry, though pleasantly so.

‘Back to give me a hand then?’ He smiled crookedly. ‘Couldn’t trust me to be on my own too long in case I screwed everything up?’

‘But you said you wanted a help out with something?’ Larry pressed, one eyebrow arching.

‘Not me. Naah.’ Peretti shook his head.

Larry turned to Warrell, his eyes narrowing. ‘I thought you said I was wanted here?’

‘Yeah. That was what I was told.’

‘Who told you?’

With the intensity of Larry’s glare and his cutting tone, Warrell flinched slightly. ‘Uh… Bateson. Glenn Bateson.’

Jesus.

Larry ran ahead of Warrell, realizing he needed him as he came up to the gate.

‘Get me back through this. And quick.’

Under Larry’s icy glare, Warrell’s hand shook uncertainly as he slid in his card. He wasn’t about to argue or question.

Back along the corridor, down the two flights of stairs, leaping them three and four steps at a time, Larry was already breathless as he hit the passage by his cell block at full pelt. One more flight down to the shower stalls, and another thirty yards of passage before the security gate by the shower stalls.

Breath ragged, heart pounding, Larry saw that there were five or six men by the gate to the showers, being handed towels and waiting for that same number to come out so that they could go through; the normal routine.

But what was not normal, Larry quickly picked out, were the lights out at the far end and no guard looking into that section.

‘Man in distress at the far end!’ Larry shouted, pushing through the men waiting.

The guard by the gate, Fisk, in thick with Bateson, blocked his way defiantly. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I said man in distress at the far end!’ Larry raised his voice to screaming pitch. His only hope was rousing the attention of the three guards by the early sections, and hoping to God they weren’t all in on it with Bateson. ‘Man in distress!’

One of the guards looked uncertainly towards the rear cubicles then back at the gate, confused.

Larry saw the alarm button a yard to one side, and, remembering Rodriguez in the boiler-room, leapt across and hit it.

The jangling bell finally galvanized the guard into action, Larry keeping up his mantra, ‘Man in distress… man in distress,’ as the guard darted towards the rear cubicles. Though Larry feared that it was already too late.