The Girls He Adored

20

Sheriff's Deputy Frank Twombley was a single man; Sheriff's Deputy Deena Knapp was a single woman. That being the case, Twombley couldn't see why Knapp wouldn't give him the time of day.

It was hard on a man, working in close quarters all day with a woman so attractive, so petite, and at the same time so youthfully and firmly stacked beneath that crisp tan uniform blouse that it was said of her by the male deputies, out of her hearing, of course, that she would be taller lying on her back than she was standing up.

“C'mon, just a drink to unwind after our shift,” he begged her for the last time, on Wednesday afternoon. “No harm in two”-he searched for the word-“ colleagues having a little drink after work.”

“Gimme a break, Frank.” Knapp was sitting at her desk with her back to the room, cramming for her criminology final. “I don't drink, and I don't date… colleagues.”

“Oh well, you can't blame a guy for trying.”

“One time, no. One hundred times, you're skating on thin ice, harrassment-wise.”

“Well, excuuuse me.”

“I don't need this shit, Frank. I'm trying to better myself here, and-”

“Deputy! Excuse me,deputy!” Someone calling from inside the cell block.

“Sounds like our G-man,” Knapp remarked.

“I'm not feeling so great. Could you let me out now? I have everything I need.”

“Jesus Christ, how unprofessional,” said Twombley. “I better get him out of there.” He flipped up the fourth knob on the door control panel, and cranked the wheel, then entered the dark cellblock. Twombley hurried past the first two cells, one packed with redjumpsuited prisoners, the other with orange, past the third, left empty to provide a buffer for Pender's interview, and peered into the fourth cell-Pender was lying on his side on the floor, with his back to the bars.

“I dunno, first he said he had a headache,” shrugged the man whom the deputies referred to as the Ripper. He was sitting on the bench with his knees drawn up as far as his shackles permitted. “Then he just fell over, hit his head on the cee — ment.”

Twombley slid the door open and entered the cell. “You stay right there,” he warned the Ripper.

“I ain't going anywhere,” the man replied, rattling his chains for emphasis.

Twombley knelt by Pender, saw the blood pooling around Pender's head, black as crankcase oil in the dim light. Pender's eyelids fluttered-his mouth opened and closed but no sound emerged.

“Just take 'er easy now,” said Twombley. “Everything's gonna be-”

The last word would have been okay, but Twombley never got it out. The chain came around his neck from behind; the links cut deep into his throat, shutting off his air. He heard a roaring in his ears; then, as he tried to reach for his pepper spray, he heard a popping sound, like knuckles cracking, only a hundred times louder.

It was, he understood as his body crumpled beneath him like a marionette whose strings had been cut, the sound of his own neck being broken; he noticed as he lay dying that there were little rainbows floating in the black pool of Pender's blood.

Deputy Deena Knapp, too, was thinking about blood, or more precisely, blood splatters.

“If a blood spot on level ground is 4 mm wide and 11 mm long, what is the angle of impact?” read the question on her sample test.

She punched in four divided by eleven on her calculator, came up with. 363636, and was in the process of converting that into a sine function when she sensed Frank Twombley's presence just behind her. She thought it was odd that she hadn't heard him returning from the cell block-normally the jingle-jangling of Twombley's keys drove her crazy over the course of a shift.

“Back off, Frank,” she said without turning around. “You're invading my personal space.”

Instead, he grabbed her by the hair, jerked her head back, and fired a burst of pepper spray into her face from point-blank range. Her chair tipped over, the back of her skull hit the linoleum with sickening force. She saw a flash of red against a field of black, then another as he grabbed her by the hair and slammed her head against the floor again.

Blinded, suffocating, in pain, she fought him as long and hard as she could. She clawed for his face with her nails, hoping at least to mark him. His weight shifted on top of her. He was straddling her upper chest now, pinning her arms with his knees. She forced her eyes open, saw a blur of orange through the tears, realized it wasn't Frank after all, but one of the inmates. She tried to scream; he fired another burst of pepper spray directly into her open mouth.

This second burst sent her into convulsions. Her eyes rolled back in her head until only the whites were showing; pink froth bubbled from her mouth. And although Max had climbed off her immediately after she lost consciousness, and hurried back into the cell block, Deputy Knapp's body continued to flop and jerk for a good five minutes afterward, as if she were still trying to buck him off.