The Innocent

CHAPTER FORTY

1971 IS THE YEAR Attica State Prison goes insane.

Here’s how:

I sit cross-legged and barefoot in a mud puddle in D-Yard. Mike Norman sits directly across from me mumbling something that makes no sense. His eyes are dark and glassy, his face sunken and pale. His yellow jumpsuit is soaked through to the bone. He is covered in mud. So is Wash Pelton. He sits beside me, so close I can feel his trembling shoulder rubbing up against my own. His knees are tucked up into his chest, arms wrapped around his shins. He’s crying again. I feel my own eyes welling up. Everything around me-the stone wall, the soupy earth, the overcast sky-is gray-brown. A high-pitched whistle goes off inside my head. When I hear the screams of the CO who is being castrated with a double-edge razor, I have to hold back the tears and the shakes. My body goes numb as the officer is pushed to his knees. His pants are pushed down and his skinny legs are exposed, the white skin streaked with veins of mud. Two rebel inmates hold him by the arms and by the hair on his head. They press his knees into the mud. He screams in agony as the razor cuts through the pale flesh and opens up the purple artery, the blood spurting five feet into a rainy sky. The scream is the kind of primal scream you feel more than hear. It is a scream that goes beyond anything human. I try to turn my mind off to the blood, rain, mud, and death. I try to turn my mind off completely. But I know this corrections officer and because I know him I feel he is a part of me. He is fifty-four years old and the grandfather of a new baby boy.

John Pendergast has been emasculated with a razor blade.

He lies bleeding to death in the middle of D-Yard.

I am eighteen years old. My name means nothing to the rebel inmates. My death would mean everything.

“Our Father,” we begin to pray together on the muddy floor, “who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…“

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

AT FIVE O’CLOCK I got back into the white Pontiac and drove out of the supermarket parking lot. I knew I had to do something about the pastor. If I were a real killer, this would have been the part of the mystery where I’d have to bump him off, execution style. Just one shot from the.45 to the back of the head would do the trick. Then I’d lose his body in a patch of heavy woods somewhere off the highway, well above the Albany city limits. North, above Lake George.

The pastor knew too much. He could finger Cassandra and me in a lineup. At the very least, I’d have to take him with me, lock him up in the potato cellar underneath my grandfather’s cabin. He knows too much, I’d keep telling myself. It’s either him or me.

But I wasn’t a killer and it made me sick to my stomach to be thinking like one. Maybe I was beginning to unravel from the inside out. Maybe I was beginning to disintegrate. Maybe, with my back up against the wall, I was becoming one of them.

There was an orange-red sky on the horizon, and a steady north wind bucked against the Pontiac, making it veer to the right. I pulled off the highway onto the ramp for Pottersville, not far from the Pottersville Inn-a century-old, three-story, wood-framed building that took up one full square block in the small upstate town.

As I came to the end of the exit and made a left turn onto the road to the inn, I was suddenly stricken with vivid memories of my grandfather. It was thirty-five years ago and we were on our way from Albany to his cabin. But first he turned off the highway for a “cold one,” and led me into the inn. Driving now through Pottersville I could still see the long mahogany bar and the wide, gilt-framed mirrors behind the shelves of bottled liquor; I could see the giant moose head mounted above the ladies’ room and the fire going in the woodstove; I could smell the burning hardwood and stale beer and the distinct, steamy fish smell from my grandfather’s oversized mackinaw as the snow melted off it. Then I remembered my grandfather’s callused hand wrapped around my smaller hand, and I smelled the sweet smell of Scotch-sour on his breath, and I recalled the weird feeling in my stomach when I realized, even at eight or nine years old, that this short man, with black-and-gray stubble on his face and a halo of light brown hair around his head, was my father’s father and how different the two men looked and how differently they acted-one slow and methodical and tender, and the other (my father) fast and direct and always occupied.

I pulled the Grand Prix over to the soft shoulder.

Cassandra turned to me.

“Why are we stopping?” she said.

“This is where the pastor gets out,” I said.

She opened her eyes, wide. Her first real emotional response since we’d borrowed the pastor’s car.

“But he can recognize us now,” she said. “We can’t just let him go.”

“I’m not a kidnapper.”

“Short-term memory can be a real bitch,” she said. “Trust me. I used to study stuff about the brain, how it works.”

“What college?” I said.

She rolled her eyes.

“The University of Bad Breaks,” she joked.

“I see.”

“I used to take correspondence courses, before Eddy hired me on.”

“So you think we ought to keep the pastor with us.”

“All I’m saying is he can spot us now.”

“We’re innocent, remember?”

“Innocence never kept anyone from jail. You of all people should know that.”

“That’s a chance we’ll have to take.”

Cassandra retreated back into herself again, as if I had scolded her. But then, she didn’t seem quite like the kind of person who could be easily scolded by anyone, least of all me. She gazed down at the rubber foot mats on the Grand Prix and tried to tune me out, just like that.

“Listen,” I said. “By the time he finds his way back to Albany, we’ll be long gone.”

But she said nothing, as if I couldn’t possibly convince her that letting the pastor go was the right thing to do. I reached around the bucket seat anyway and pulled the gag out of his mouth. I undid the belt tied around his wrists, tossed it onto his lap.

“End of the road, Father,” I said. “You’re free to go.”

He wiped away the white patches of dried saliva that had collected on his lips, and he coughed.

“You mean you’re not going to kill me?” he said in a strained voice.

Cassandra laughed suddenly and glanced over her left shoulder.

“Would you like us to kill you, Father?”

“You two are wanted murderers.”

“I think the padre here wants to be a martyr,” Cassandra giggled.

“That’s enough,” I said.

But Cassandra turned away and shook her head and laughed a little bit more. When she moved her head quickly, her shoulder-length hair bobbed, exposing the red, heart-shaped tattoo on her neck.

“Despite public opinion, Father,” I said, “the lady and I are not Bonnie and Clyde.”

I got out of the car and pushed the driver’s seat in toward the steering column so that he would have an easier time getting out. At the same time a car passed and then another. As far as I could see, neither driver seemed to suspect that anything was wrong.

“You have any money, Father?”

The red-faced, gray-haired pastor gave me a look like the skin was melting off my face. He patted his pants pocket with open hands.

“I wasn’t planning on needing any,” he said, clearly fearing a mugging.

I pulled the roll of bills out of my pocket, peeled off two tens.

“Here,” I said. “Now I’m going to ask you, as a Christian and a man of God, not to call the police for at least one hour. That’s all I’m asking. And I’m asking you in the name of the Father.”

The pastor stood there, mouth open, little tufts of gray hair blowing in the wind that trailed each passing car and truck.

He said, “One hour.”

His stringy hair stuck up on one side and the bald spot in the middle of his round head made him look like a friar more than the pastor for the Church of the Nazarene. His collarless shirt now hung out of his pants. He had two tens folded up in his fisted hand.

“You did not harm me,” he said, looking down at his hand. “You are letting me go free. You’ve given me money. Maybe you are innocent, maybe you are not. But I will give you the hour you ask for.”

He took a deep breath and raised his face to mine.

“Then I’m going to call the proper authorities and tell them what I know.”

“I’m sorry, Father,” I said.

He started to walk away. But before he got far, he stopped and turned back to me.

“What about the car?” he said. “The car belongs to the parish.”

“I’ll take good care of it,” I said, trying to work up a semblance of a smile. “I’ll return it when I no longer need it.”

The pastor looked down at the ground, most likely convinced he would never see the car again. He was certainly justified in thinking that way. But then, for a second or two, both of us were drawn to Cassandra. She sat motionless in the Grand Prix, her eyes peeled on the Pottersville Inn just ahead. She seemed transfixed by the old building. But then, I had the feeling that she saw something completely different.

“She going to be okay?” the pastor said.

“Her boyfriend was just blown away by the very same people that want to see me go down,” I said.

“I’ll say a prayer for both of you,” he said.

“Do it now,” I said, getting back inside the car. “Do it often.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

WE GOT TO THE cabin at a little past seven-thirty.

The five-room cabin had been built by my grandfather in 1947, just a couple of years after he’d come back from the war in Europe, where, during the Battle of the Bulge, he’d taken rounds in the leg and the shoulder from a Tiger-tank-mounted machine gun. He’d set the cabin into the base of what some locals referred to as a very small mountain called Old Iron Top because of the way the metal aggregates in the bald, granite hilltop glistened in the sun when it shined down directly at noontime.

The cabin had been constructed of timbers felled from the forest that surrounded it. The roof was framed in the shape of an A and shingled with wood shakes that had been replaced only twice that I knew of since the old man had died from stomach cancer back in ‘81. The cabin had been set so far into the base of Old Iron Top that you could access the roof from the back without using a step ladder. Coming up the paved drive I was besieged with childhood memories of warm summer nights, and of sneaking out the bedroom window and shimmying up onto the roof, and of how in the morning my grandfather would swear he’d heard animals running around overhead during the night.

When I tried to wake Cassandra, she wouldn’t budge. Maybe it had been days since she’d slept so soundly. Or maybe Vasquez’s death had some kind of tranquilizing effect on her. Some sort of shock to the system. Whatever the case, she slept like the dead, and I was thankful for it.

Like we had done to the pastor only a short while before, I took off my belt, wrapped it carefully around the wrist of her right arm, and at the same time slipped it through an opening in the passenger-side door handle. I secured the belt as best I could without jarring her and started my walk up the drive with the silence of the black forest all around me and my.45 in hand-a round chambered, safety off. I made it to the stack of piled firewood stored under a carport connected to the west side of the cabin, and moved on slowly until I reached the side door. In the light from the headlights, I could make out the little black mailbox bolted to the wall beside the door frame. The golden eagle that had once been attached to the black box was gone now, leaving only an outline.

I stepped up onto the first of the three wooden risers and slipped my hand into the small space between the mailbox and the exterior cabin wall. The key was there hanging by a nail, just like I hoped it would be. It had been my grandfather’s idea to hide the key in that space. Now it was left there by the caretakers so renters could access the place in the summer and early fall months.

I slipped the key into the lock, twisted it, felt the deadbolt give way cleanly and smoothly. I opened the door and stepped inside and smelled the familiar mud-and-wood smell. It was a very personal smell that had not changed in all the years since I had last stepped foot inside the place. Feeling my feet on the rough plank floor, I walked blindly but confidently-the.45 leading the charge-knowing my way across the sitting room and into the kitchen where I knew a wrought-iron lamp would be bolted into the log wall above the kitchen table.

I felt for the lamp.

It was still there. I reached inside the lampshade, felt for the switch, and then there was light.

In the kitchen, cast-iron pots and pans hung from metal hooks above the black gas stove, and white plates were stacked on the exposed pine shelving beside the cabinets. There was the same black rotary phone I remembered as a kid, sitting on a small table in the far corner of the room, below the window and behind the kitchen table. I picked up the handset, brought it to my ear. The phone worked.

I returned to the great room and took a good look at the fireplace my grandfather had constructed with Adirondack fieldstone cut out of Old Iron Top. The fireplace rose up through the ceiling. A railroad tie had been mounted above the box to serve as a mantel. I gazed at the crossbeams that supported the roof-exposed beams that, once upon a time, seemed so massive to me and so high off the floor. Now I could reach the beams by raising my hands above my head.

I took a quick second or two to listen for anything out of the ordinary. When I heard nothing, I went back to the kitchen and pulled down the shade on the window. Another house or cabin could not be found for five miles in any direction, but I knew it was not unusual for the occasional car to pass by along the hard-packed east-west road. Why draw unwanted attention in a place where even a sudden shift in the weather was cause for an Ironville town meeting?

After all, if the cabin was going to be my safe house, it had to be safe.

I slipped across the kitchen into the short hall that accessed the bathroom and two back bedrooms, aiming the.45 into each room as I passed. Nothing but empty walls and empty beds. Back out in the great room, I eased the hammer back on the.45, clicked on the safety, and slipped the piece into my belt.

The light shining into the cabin from the headlights on the Pontiac reminded me of the white spotlight that lit up my office at Green Haven on those occasions when I worked well into the night, which was more often than not now with Fran gone. It also reminded me that I had to get Cassandra inside before she woke up. I had no idea who she really was or what she was capable of. She had gone along with me so far, but then her life was on the line as much as mine was. I knew she could easily undo that belt and run off, and I wasn’t about to allow that to happen.

When I checked on her and found that she was still asleep, I carried in some of the wood from the stack under the carport. Maybe it was warmer than normal down in Albany, but up here it was downright cold. I cut up some kindling using a small hatchet that hung by a strip of leather from a rusty sixpenny nail pounded into the log wall. Using some newspapers left behind in an old wooden vegetable crate and my lighter, it didn’t take a lot of effort to get a good fire going.

When I was certain the fire could sustain itself, I went out and drove the car up under the carport to keep it hidden. Then I unraveled the belt from Cassandra’s wrists and slipped it around my waist. I cradled her in my arms, carried her into the cabin, and laid her down on the mattress in one of the bedrooms. In the kitchen, I searched under the sink for anything resembling a rope. But I found nothing. So I took a towel from the bathroom, tore it into two long strips, and used them to secure one of her wrists and one of her ankles to opposing posts of the single bed. I covered her with a black-and-white-checkered blanket left behind by a summer vacationer. Then I returned to the kitchen of our new safe house and began my search for food and, God willing, booze.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

AS LUCK OR GOD would have it, I found two cans of beef stew, a large can of baby peas, and an entire case of Beaujolais still packed away neatly inside its cardboard case. I set the.45 within arm’s reach on the counter while Cassandra continued sleeping in the back bedroom. Then I mixed the stew and peas together in the same pan.

I reached under the sink to open the gas valve. The gas hissed as it passed through the line and fed the stove. I lit the front burner with my lighter and stood at the stove to watch the stew heat and to think about my next move. But very soon the thick gravy began to bubble and it was suddenly impossible to think logically what with the aroma of beef stew filling the cabin.

I guess it was impossible to sleep, too. Because that was when Cassandra started screaming.

Perfect timing.

I grabbed the.45, rushed into the bedroom. She was struggling to free her limbs from the bedposts. She popped her head up from the pillow. With the pale moonlight shining in through the window against her face, her expression reminded me of The Exorcist.

“Just what do you think you’re doing?” she spat.

“Protecting my assets,” I said, knowing I shouldn’t have.

“You gotta sick sense of humor, Marconi,” she said.

I was waiting for her head to spin completely around.

“Can’t take a chance on you running off.”

“Just where precisely would I run off to?”

A good point, considering that we were miles away from any kind of civilization and light-years away from New York City, her home turf.

I began undoing the knot in the cloth strip wrapped around her ankle.

“At this point,” I said, “I can’t take any chances. It’s only a matter of time until someone knows we’re here, and then the cops will find out, and then it’s all over.”

“So,” Cassandra said like a question, shaking out her now-free ankle.

“So,” I said, starting on her wrist, “I have to know I can trust you.”

“What was all that nonsense with the priest? A nice little act? I mean, I could’ve bolted right there and then. But I didn’t. Because I know you’re in trouble, and you know I’m in trouble, and maybe we can help each other out, right?”

When the last strip of cloth was undone and Cassandra could sit up, she slapped me.

“Thanks,” I said, bringing my hand to my stinging cheek.

“That was for not trusting me,” she scolded.

I might have slapped her back if she hadn’t started crying.

She looked weary now, not in the moonlight, but in the dim light that leaked in from both the kitchen lamp and the fire. She ran her hands through her thick hair, got up off the bed, and marched into the kitchen. I followed her out and noticed how she paused just long enough to get a quick look at the beef stew cooking on the stove. Then she went into the great room and sat down in front of the fire.

I followed her in.

She brought her knees to her chin, wrapped her arms tightly around them, stared into the flames.

“First comes the denial,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Then comes the grief. Just wait till I get to the angry part.”

The case of Beaujolais was under the kitchen table. I took out a bottle, opened it with a corkscrew I’d found inside the junk drawer next to the sink. I ladled some of the beef stew into a couple of bowls and poured some red wine into two coffee mugs. Mugs in one hand and plates in the other, I managed to carry everything into the living area of the cabin and set it down by the fire without spilling even a single drop of wine or gravy.

Cassandra took one look at her plate and turned back to the fire.

I sat down, picked up my plate, and set it carefully in my lap.

“I think it’s time we had a little talk,” I said in my best diplomatic, let’s-make-peace tone of voice.

Cassandra dipped the tip of her index finger into the thick stew, brought it to her lips and tongue. Her teardrop eyes glistened from the fire and her crying.

I took a bite of the stew. It was hot and tangy on my tongue.

“I’m ready to listen if you’re ready to talk,” I said. But I could see that it would be no use pressing her. Cassandra was in too much pain to talk. I suppose I couldn’t blame her. Her boyfriend had just taken a round in the back of the head, point-blank. I knew what it was to lose someone you loved.

“Would it help,” I said, “if I told you it can only get better?”

She looked at me with a blank stare and said, “Look who’s predicting the future.”

I finished off my beef stew and wine in silence. I finished it all, right there on the rough wooden floor of my grandfather’s cabin, in the exact spot where he used to sit after an afternoon fly-fishing Putt’s Creek, the narrow stream that ran parallel to the east-west road.

I took the empty bowl into the kitchen and put it in the sink. I filled my mug with more wine. I knew the time was ripe for me to get some answers. I also knew the longer I waited, the longer it would take for me to figure out just who was responsible for this mess. I stood there in the kitchen with the wine in my hand and it was all I could do not to grab hold of Cassandra and make her spill the truth right there and then. But all she could manage right now was tears. And I couldn’t blame her.

It was getting close to eleven o’clock. I hadn’t slept in what seemed like days. Maybe this was as good a time as any to get a little rest. There was no telling when I’d get the chance to sleep again. So that’s what I decided to do. Get some rest. While I had the time and the opportunity.

Maybe I was taking a bigger chance than I realized. But Cassandra was still sitting by the fire, on her own, when I took the bottle with me into the bedroom so that she could be left alone with her thoughts about a past and a future I knew she wanted nothing to do with.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

BUT THEN I KNEW all about the power of the past, about the power of sleep. I knew that sleep could make my past come alive again in dreams, so that one second I am staring at the cabin ceiling and the next it is morning inside Attica State Prison on the fourth and final day of an insurrection that has already claimed a dozen lives and will claim dozens more before it is finished. I am walking the catwalk-the narrow concrete platform that spans the perimeter of D-Yard’s interior-thirty feet above the naked ground. The walk is protected on both sides by connected lengths of pipe railing. My right hip rubs against the railing as I walk toward the place where the catwalks from this and the other three yards merge in the center of the Attica State Prison complex to form a cross. The area in the center, where the catwalks intersect, is called Times Square by inmates and COs alike.

A rebel inmate presses a shiv up against the back of my neck where the spine meets the brain and pushes me along by the collar of my yellow prison jumpsuit. He presses the razor up against the tight flesh surrounding the spine, until I feel the eye-watering sting of a blade on the verge of popping through the skin.

Up ahead, another inmate holds a service revolver against Wash Pelton’s skull. Like me, Wash is dressed in a yellow inmate jumpsuit. Unlike me, he is lucky enough to have a pair of work boots to protect his feet. He struggles with the pistol-bearing inmate, trying to break free from the arm the man has wrapped around his neck. He pushes and pulls until the rebel inmate clips him on the back of the skull with the service revolver. Wash goes down on his knees, onto the concrete.

I try to keep up with the pace of the inmate who pushes me along. I haven’t eaten in three days, haven’t slept in four. I can’t maintain my balance.

It seems like hours pass before we finally make it to Times Square. It’s there that Wash Pelton is pulled back up to his feet by the rebel inmate after having been literally dragged. Then the inmate forces the barrel of the revolver into Pelton’s mouth. That’s when Pelton begins to cry. Tears and saliva drip down the barrel of the revolver. The hum from the crowd of inmates that fills D-Yard dies down. All eyes are on Pelton and myself and a third hostage who takes his position by my side. Norman is unconscious or catatonic, I don’t know which. He shows no sign of waking. Two rebel inmates hold him up, one on each arm. The inmate on his right points the skinny barrel of a prison-issue M-16 at his head. But the M-16 has no effect on Mike Norman.

There are puddles of muddy water. There are piles of clothes and garbage. In a far corner of the yard a fire is blazing. It rained hard all night. And the corrections officers had been left out in the rain. No one except Mike slept. From over the prison PA system comes the tinny voice of the Commissioner of Corrections for New York. “Give up your hostages or you will be met with force.” No one pays even the slightest attention to the voice. Not the hostages or the inmates. The Commissioner, after all, addresses us from outside these stone walls.

Above us a black-and-white state police chopper makes a flyby. The rebel inmates aim their weapons at the helicopter. From Times Square I can make out the squad of state troopers poised along the west wall. Sharpshooters with scopes and rifles (.270caliber sniper jobs, I assume) aimed in my direction. The rebel inmates are dressed in corrections officer uniforms. The hostages are dressed in yellow inmate jumpsuits-suits designed specifically for transporting prisoners outside the prison walls. I wonder if the state troopers can tell the difference between a hostage and a rebel inmate from that distance. I wonder if it will really matter to them once the shooting starts.

Behind the row of sharpshooters the live television crews are watering at the mouth, hoping for one or more of our heads to be blown away. What a scoop it would make. What a report. What had become a gentle hum among the rebel inmates in D-Yard has once again become screaming. “Kill the screws! Blow their brains out!”

The two inmates who support Mike Norman lay him down into a shallow pool of water that has collected inside a depression on the concrete catwalk. The white inmate who has forced the blunt barrel of the black-plated service revolver into Wash Pelton’s mouth pulls back the hammer, closes his eyes, faces away…

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

I WOKE UP TO the sound of footsteps on the roof. I didn’t know quite where I was until I focused my eyes on the half-light that leaked in from the fire in the great room. I wasn’t sure if I had truly heard footsteps on the roof or if it had been my imagination, the result of a dream, the recollection of which had disappeared as fast as it had come.

I felt for my gun.

Then I looked at my watch and realized I had only been out for an hour. But it felt like ten hours of drugged sleep. Taking a deep breath, I got out of bed and made it to the bathroom with eyelids at half-mast. You might say I was operating on instinct, on a physical knowledge of the cabin interior that had not left my body in more than three decades.

At the sink, I threw cold water on my face and took a good look in the mirror. I gazed at the heavy brown eyes, at the three-day-old growth, and at the thick black hair cut close to the scalp. I felt more than tired, more than exhausted, as if my body had waited until this very moment to feel everything it was supposed to feel since the trouble had begun on Monday afternoon when Vasquez bolted from the iron house.

Despite the persistent chill in the cabin (even this late in May), I took off my shirt and gazed at the washboard ripple of my stomach muscles and the way my chest heaved, defined and elastic, when I took deep breaths. Maybe all the running and weight training had kept me in some kind of shape, but I also knew that the cigarettes were getting to me, making my lungs ache, killing me. Although the real pain would take its own sweet time.

But something else was also taking its own sweet time.

Since Fran had died, I hadn’t slept well, or eaten well, or been without a bottle of Scotch or Jamesons close by. Since Fran had died, grief alone had made me drop eighteen pounds in twelve months. At that rate I’d be down to eighty pounds in five years. A frightening prospect. Standing at the sink, with the hot and cold water running down against the white porcelain bowl, and staring at my pale face in the mirror, I knew it was time to begin living again. The trick was learning to live without the grief and without the guilt. The trick was to create a life worth living, a life no longer conscious of death.

I made a cup with my hands, filled it with cold water, splashed it over my face and chest. I felt unbearably cold until I dried my face with the towel and hung it back on the rack behind the door. It was only after I looked up again that I saw his face in the mirror. With the water running, I hadn’t heard him slip out from behind the plastic shower curtain. He was dressed in a full-length wool overcoat and he held a bowie knife the size of my leg up against my Adam’s apple.

“Don’t make a sound,” the overcoat man said, covering my mouth with his free hand.

How could I make a sound?

His hand smelled like sweat. I felt dizzy, weak. The footsteps I’d heard on the roof were his. I hadn’t dreamt them after all. The footsteps were real.

The water was still going steady, from both spigots, swirling down the drain of the sink. He took his hand away from my mouth slowly. At the same time, he pressed the blade tighter against my throat so that it was an effort just attempting a swallow.

“Now,” he said, voice smooth and evenly toned, like a pro, “we’re going to take a walk.”

“Who sent you?” I said.

He rapped me on the side of the head with the blade. The rap stung, but I knew the damage was nil.

“No talking,” he ordered.

I raised my hands in surrender.

“Turn off the water. Use your right hand, nice and easy.”

I lowered my hand and brought it to the cold-water faucet. I twisted, clockwise, all the time wracking my brain for a way out of this, searching the immediate area for a knife, a comb, a razor blade, anything that would give me a semblance of a chance.

“Come on,” he whispered. “The next one.”

I put my hand on the hot water faucet and hesitated.

“Now,” he insisted. “Do it.”

The hot water steamed up onto my bare chest and face. I could feel the sting of it as it splattered into the white porcelain sink. I began to turn the knob. But instead of turning it counterclockwise, I slowly turned it clockwise, opening up the valve, the hot water pouring out faster and heavier and hotter.

“No,” he said, still using that evenly toned whisper, but somehow more urgent now. “The other way. Left is Lucy. Right is tight.”

And that was when he fell for it. He reached out to the faucet with his free hand. But I grabbed his wrist and held his hand down under the scalding water and went for the knife. The overcoat man screamed and yanked back hard. He stumbled backward a few steps and I brought my fingers to my throat to see if he’d cut me. When he raised the knife to drive it into my chest, I looked closely at the blade to see if it was streaked with red. But before I had a chance to see, his body crumpled and collapsed.

Without thinking, I went down for the knife.

Standing over me was Cassandra.

She had buried the kindling-wood hatchet smack into the back of his head. He never knew what hit him.

I dropped the knife to the floor and got back up on my feet. For a second or two, Cassandra and I stood there stunned, looking at one another with blank faces, breathing hard but steady.

Then I went down on my knees again.

“Grab a towel,” I said.

She did it.

I held the towel in one hand and jerked the hatchet out of the skull with the other. Blood came gushing out along with the blade. I pressed the towel up against the wound and got a good look at his face. His eyelids were blinking and his mouth was opening and closing, but no sound was coming out and I was fairly certain that his life had left his body before his nervous system had had a chance to register it.

I laid him down on the floor, the weight of his head pressed against the now blood-soaked towel.

“Oh God,” Cassandra said, bringing her hands to her face, turning her head. “Oh my sweet Lord.”

I had no way of telling if her reaction was the result of what she had done or of recognizing whom she had done it to, or both.

I felt the jugular for a pulse.

Nothing.

I brought my ear to his mouth, listened for breathing.

Nothing.

I shook him hard.

“Who sent you?!” I shouted. But it was all useless.

All I could get out of him was a death rattle and even that stopped after a few seconds. He was gone and I knew it.

I pressed his head back down onto the towel and looked up at Cassandra.

“You recognize him?” I said.

She had her back to me.

“I’m talking to you!” I snapped.

“No,” she said.

“You’re lying,” I said, bounding up.

She said nothing. I grabbed her shoulders, turned her around. She was crying.

“Who the hell was he?” I said. “You saw his face and you recognized him. Who was he?”

“I don’t know!” she screamed. “I’m telling the God’s honest truth. Please…” Her voice just trailed off.

I let go of her, took a deep breath, and glanced back down at the dead man. The bath towel was saturated now and there was a small puddle of blood on the floor behind his head.

“How am I supposed to know if you’re telling the truth?”

Cassandra gritted her teeth, gazed at me wide-eyed.

“Because I just saved your ass,” she said, with a voice that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up stiffer than the overcoat man’s dead body. Tearing the plastic shower curtain off the metal rings, she draped it over the body.

“There,” she said, walking out. “I did my part. Now you clean up the rest.”

I took a deep breath and proceeded to do exactly that.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

IT DIDN’T SURPRISE ME one bit that I found nothing on the man after going through his pockets. No wallet, no ID, no photos, no badge (thank God), not even a stick of gum. He was a thorough professional, probably a freelancer. And I was quite sure he had been sent either by Pelton or Schillinger or both. It only made sense for them to place a tail on me seeing that I posed such a threat. What did surprise me was how the hell he located us all the way up here. He must have tailed us the whole way.

Under the cover of night, I dragged his body out to the woods behind the cabin and buried him in a shallow grave marked with a stone cairn and piles of oak leaves and pine needles for camouflage. It wasn’t much but at least his body would be hidden until I devised some kind of plan for disposing of it before the stink of decomposition took over. I’m not sure exactly why I did it, but before I covered him in dirt I put the knife back in his hand.

It took about an hour to clean up the mess in the bathroom and to burn the blood-soaked towels in the fire. By the time I got settled, it was going on two o’clock in the morning.

Cassandra was a tough one.

She never lifted a finger to help with the mess. She sat by the fire taking deep, calming breaths, her shoulders shaking, trying to bring herself to grips with the fact that she had just buried a hatchet in somebody’s skull. Like Eddy Vasquez’s sudden death, this was something she had to swallow. But in another sense, it was something I had to swallow too. Cassandra had saved my life and I knew I should be grateful. And I was. Not for my life necessarily, but for providing me with at least one very good reason to place my trust in her.

I sat down beside her. She seemed somewhat calm now, although I had no way of knowing for certain just how she really felt.

“Thanks,” I said, staring not at her, but into the fire.

“For what?” she said.

“For preventing that paid assassin from planting that knife in my solar plexus.”

“Oh,” she said. “That.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That.”

I looked at her, saw her make a slight, corner-of-the-mouth smile, then break down in tears once more.

“You did what you had to do,” I said.

“No,” she said in a soft, whisper voice. “That’s not it at all.”

“What then?” I was trying my best to stay calm and patient, despite the fact that I needed answers and needed them quickly.

“I’m not sure that I loved Eddy at all after he shot that cop,” she said. “It’s just that I felt this need to be there for him once he’d been put in prison. Like my being there somehow gave him a good side or somehow destroyed the bad. And now that he’s dead, I can’t help but feel like I somehow let him down.”

She hesitated for a few seconds. Her entire body was trembling, and for good reason.

“But there’s something else, too,” she said. “I can’t help but feel relieved.”

I felt the heat from the fire on my face, but in my brain I pictured the overcoat man coming up on me from behind, knife in hand.

“How can I help?” I said. But what I really wanted to say was this: Just what the hell do you know and how do I know you’re going to tell me the whole truth and nothing but the whole truth, regardless of the way you just saved my life?…

Of course, I’d have to be gentler than that.

“You don’t know what I’m going through,” she said, louder this time, more forceful.

I looked at her eyes, wide and brown, filled with fire both real and reflected.

“I almost feel good, like this weight has been lifted from my shoulders because I know I won’t have to be there for him anymore, won’t have to play his or anyone else’s games. Like I can live a life of my own now that Eddy has lost his.”

I put my hand on her knee. She made no attempt to move it.

“Don’t confuse relief with guilt,” I said. “From the moment he killed that cop, his going down was only a matter of time.”

I wasn’t sure if I should have said it like that, but I said it anyway, because it was the truth and I wanted to get beyond this whole thing as soon as possible. But the facts were plain enough: Eduard Vasquez shot a cop. A cop with a pregnant wife. He had to pay, one way or the other.

Cassandra put her head down again, chin against chest. She wiped the tears from her eyes with the backs of her hands. But then, suddenly, she snapped her head up so that her heavy eyes and long black eyelashes once again reflected the radiance of the fire.

“That’s it,” she said. “I’m not going to mourn for a man I did not love.”

“Good,” I said, lifting my hand from her knee to her shoulder. “Then let’s get to work.”

I checked the time. Two-fifteen in the A.M.

Before I knew it, daylight would be breaking over the valley and Val would be waiting for me at our rendezvous off Exit 28 of the Northway. That is, if the bastards didn’t get to us first. What I mean is, if the overcoat man had been sent by Pelton or Schillinger and he didn’t return or contact them at some designated hour, somebody was going to become a little suspicious.

I got up, tossed two more chunks of wood into the fire. Sparks shot up and a couple of air pockets burst like intermittent blasts from a light-caliber revolver. It was hard to believe in a way. A fire during the month of May, during an unusually warm spring. But that was the difference between the north country and the suburbs that surrounded Albany only a hundred fifty miles or so to the south. As I sat back down again, I knew that even during the summer months it was not unusual to get a frost up here.

“Now look, Cassandra,” I said, in as steady a voice as I could summon given our situation. “I want to ask you some questions and I want you to tell me the truth.” I tried looking her in the eye, but she looked away as if the effort were just too painful. “We have to be honest with each other, help one another out as much as possible, hold nothing back. Or else we both risk going away for a very long time. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

She stared at the fire like it was her lifeline, like we had all the time in the world. I took her by the shoulders, shook them just enough to get her full and undivided attention. “Do we understand one another?” I repeated.

She said nothing. Instead she nodded her head yes.

“Good,” I said, standing and pulling the.45 out from under my belt, checking the safety and the round I had chambered earlier. “First question. How’d you get mixed up with a crook like Vasquez?”

“So you want to know about Cassandra’s fucked-up past, is that it?”

“It might help if we start from the beginning,” I said, pacing now from one end of the great room to the other. “It’ll definitely be a start if I get to know you a little better.”

Cassandra laughed, but I wasn’t sure why.

As for me, I pulled back the shade on the picture window just enough to get a look outside, slightly anxious that the overcoat man might not have been alone when he tailed us here.

Cassandra cleared her throat as if about to make a speech. Then she breathed and started in.

“In ‘87,” she said. “I was working as a waitress in one of those cheap Mexican buffet joints down by NYU. I was barely getting by, so I decided to answer a classified to become an exotic dancer. You know, a stripper. No prior experience required, the ad said.”

“On the pole training.”

“At the same time,” Cassandra said, “I was taking some home-study courses from a cable television correspondence school.”

“In what?” I said, peeking out the window once more, but seeing only the flat, black darkness.

“I already told you in the car,” she said.

“The brain.”

“Psychology, to be exact,” she said.

“So you were an intellectually motivated student, slash, exotic dancer, is that it?”

“A very broke dancer, slash, correspondence student,” Cassandra said. “I had bills to pay, and dancing more than paid for them. I even had my own apartment on the West Side. Try supporting that on waitressing money.”

“Dancing was cost-effective,” I said.

“I guess that was the sensible side of it all,” she said. “But then there was the other side.”

“What do you mean?”

“I used what I was doing at work to come up with a topic for a term paper. ‘Striptease,’ I called it, ‘For Fun or Money?’ “

“What’d you get?” I said, now leaning against the windowsill.

“For what?”

“For a grade?”

“For a grade?” she said. “They didn’t even bother to grade it. The teacher wrote a little note saying that my topic had little to do with the intention of his course and that it might help if I turned myself in to the pornographic hot line or the rape crisis center or some shit like that.”

I wasn’t sure why, but part of me wanted to laugh.

“I guess they weren’t used to term papers written by strippers,” Cassandra admitted.

“Which was it for you, then?”

“Which was what?”

“Dancing,” I said, picking up a scrap of kindling from the floor and tossing it into the red-yellow flames. “Fun or money?”

“I’m not sure. But like I told you, it was a way to make the green. It wasn’t like I hated it either, you know.”

I sat down next to her again, sat the.45 in my lap, barrel pointed to the fireplace, and gently brushed away the hair on her shoulder exposing the heart-shaped tattoo.

“What about Vasquez?” I said. “What about this tattoo?”

“He saw me dancing one night and offered me a job in Tribeca that paid almost twice the cash, and suddenly I’ve got this career.”

“But what about the tattoo?”

“All his dancers had their mark. Their brand you might say.”

“And yours came in the shape of a heart.”

“You catch on quick, Mr. Marconi,” Cassandra said. “Do I call you Mr. Marconi or is it Warden Marconi or General Marconi?”

“Keeper,” I said, in the interest of killing off any formality. Besides, she knew by now what people called me. “What I don’t understand, though, is how a smart kid like you could be coaxed into being branded by Vasquez?”

“Lots of recreational drugs went with the job,” she explained, “which, by the way, kind of added to my term paper.”

“Research is research,” I said.

“I ended up doing a couple of films for him. Nothing heavy. Strictly cheesecake. But by then the drugs were becoming an everyday event and I was snorting a lot of junk and making more money in a single week than my father made in three months when I was growing up. All of this went into the paper. That and a lot of graphic description.” She smiled. “In terms of language, I left nothing to the imagination.”

“I’m beginning to understand your teacher’s concern,” I said, getting up from the floor once more, replacing the pistol in my belt, and going for another bottle of wine. “Suddenly the researcher becomes the subject.”

“I was making the green,” she said, “and getting off on the excitement. My father struggled for years selling wholesale toilet paper from the dining room table of our flat in Queens and then died a lonely, broke old man. I wasn’t going to let something like that happen to me.”

“What about your mother?”

“My mother?” she said, grabbing the fresh bottle of wine from my hand. “My mother died not long after my tenth birthday. And as for my father? They should have buried him alongside her.”

“After a while,” Cassandra went on, “I had no idea what I felt or what I was doing. It was like suddenly the mythical Cassandra-the babe who’s supposed to be able to tell the future-can’t make any sense out of her past or present. It wasn’t like I was worried about having a future. It was like I didn’t want a future at all.”

“Drugs, pornography, correspondence school,” I commented. “It all adds up.”

“I fell into this trance,” she said, taking another sip of wine from the bottle and passing it back to me. “Did you know there’s been studies done as to why women turn to hooking or stripping or both?”

“Women who normally wouldn’t turn to that sort of thing,” I said.

“Some shrinks think that these women work from some kind of…how do they put it…some kind of pathological base, but not identical pathological bases, if you get my drift.”

“Pathological, as in crazy?”

“Do I look crazy to you?”

“I hardly even know you. But here I am needing you.” The memory of her burying that hatchet flashed through my mind.

“Believe me,” she said, “the word pathological can even mean that some women are born into this kind of thing. Doesn’t matter if they’re rich or dirt-poor like I was, they’re attracted to the allure of it all, attracted to the trance. They don’t give a rat’s ass about doing anything else.”

“In other words,” I supposed, “it’s not just a way of making a quick buck, after all.”

“You’re not going to believe this,” Cassandra said, “but some prostitutes don’t need the money at all.”

“So much for mythology. But what about you? What snapped you out of the trance?”

She took a breath and another swallow of wine.

“One night, as Eddy and I were coming back from the club in his Mercedes, he ran a stop light. A cop tailed us and made us pull over, close to the sidewalk. When the cop came up to the car, Eddy opened the door and slammed it into him. It caught the cop by surprise and he fell back hard. I screamed at Eddy to stop it, but he just backhanded me, told me to shut up.

I couldn’t believe it. I’d seen him mad before, but not like this. He just went berserk, like the cop triggered something inside his brain. He shot out of the car and kicked the cop in the head and dragged him into an alley on the opposite end of the sidewalk. It was late night and dark, and you know how it is in the city when it’s hot and people just hang out at all hours of the night. Some people had gathered, a few black kids and a black woman I remembered whose eyes were as big as pools, even through the tinted windows of Eddy’s Mercedes. It took only a second or two, but then I saw the flash and heard the pistol go off.

“I got out of the car and screamed, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ But Eduard never answered. He just pulled the trigger again.”

Cassandra fixed her eyes on the fire now. Finally, she was opening up to me. At the same time, I knew she was trying to come to grips with a past gone horribly wrong.

“I started to run,” she said. “I ran as far as I could for as long as I could. And then I ran some more. The next morning I found myself outside the doors of Penn Station. I wanted to go straight to the police but I was afraid of what they’d do to me. So I went into Penn, went downstairs and called 911 from a pay phone, told them I knew who killed the police officer. I gave them Eddy’s address and by the time I got up the nerve to go back there, Eddy was under arrest. That black woman with the big eyes, she had given the police a description of Eddy, too. A description that must have matched mine.

“But here’s the strange thing. During the time Eddy was being questioned, he never let on that I was with him. Even though witnesses were sure there was a girl with him at the time. But then, he’s always held that over my head, along with the fact that I called the police. I mean, it’s one thing that I told him I turned him in. It’s another he didn’t kill me right away. It’s why I stayed with him, even after he went to jail. It’s why I did everything.”

“Because if you left him,” I said, “he’d have had you killed.”

“I was a part of his brood, his property.”

“Branded property.”

Cassandra took a deep hit off the bottle.

“But with Eddy Vasquez,” she said, now looking into my eyes, “you always knew where you stood. You were either his friend or his enemy; you were either alive or dead.”

Three o’clock was approaching, fast.

If time is relative, then the speed of time had doubled since Cassandra and I had made it to the cabin just a few hours before. But for now there was little to do but look at the fire and drink the wine left behind by the summer people and hope that Eddy Vasquez’s girlfriend could feed me all the information I needed to know. I also had to be sure I could trust her and that she wouldn’t go running off on me somehow. On the other hand, it would not be a bright idea to tie her up again if I was to consider her my ally. These were the things that were going through my head that night.

But in my thoughts I pictured that rookie cop on his knees on the damp concrete of a New York back alley. I imagined the feel of the barrel pressed up against his head and I wondered if he’d known for certain that his time was up. I wondered if he’d known what had hit him when the first shot exploded. I wondered if he’d heard the sound of the exploding round before the bullet had penetrated his skull.

I knew that only a cold-blooded killer was capable of that kind of execution. An animal who flew off the handle when provoked. As the keeper of the iron house, cold-blooded killers were my business, my trade.

Cassandra put her hand on my leg and leaned in close.

“I heard about your wife,” she said. “You must think about her a lot.”

She kept her hand on my leg.

“I’m having a little trouble shaking her,” I confessed.

“Oh,” she whispered, squeezing my leg a little. “I see.”

“What do you see?”

She tried to work up a smile.

“Looks like you haven’t gotten far beyond the guilt and remorse stage.”

“Hark, the correspondent student, slash, exotic dancer speaks.”

There was a thick silence that seemed to cover everything in the room like glue.

“Keeper, hear me out,” she said, removing her hand from my leg, her voice trembling. “I speak from my own experience.”

When she started to cry again, I felt the sudden urge to hold her tightly against my chest. I wanted her to hold me, too. But I didn’t know her and she certainly didn’t know me. Not that knowing one another was a prerequisite for commiserating together, each of us over our separate losses. But then, I also knew that getting so close to her at a time when she was so vulnerable would be a grave mistake. For me and for her.

She wiped her eyes and forced a smile.

“I’m not just sad,” she said, “and I’m not just wiped out with a token dose of the guilts.”

“What is it then?”

“I’m happy, too,” she went on, letting go with a strange-sounding laugh drowned in tears and sniffles.

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“I’m all mixed up,” she said. “Right now, I’m sad and I’m guilty and I’m scared and most of all I’m happy because that son of a bitch is dead, and I feel like I don’t deserve a second chance at living my life without Eddy over my head.”

Then Cassandra did something extraordinary. She took off her boots and socks and sat up straight. She took another long drink of wine, and she stood up and began doing a dance, moving her narrow hips from side to side, gyrating with her stomach and midsection. She closed her eyes and let her hair fall to one shoulder so that I could see the heart-shaped tattoo pulsing with the muscles in her neck. She held her arms out away from her breasts and twisted her hands and fingers in and out and all around, her every limb and digit separated from her body but somehow in sync and all the time whispering a song I’d never heard before but beautiful and seductive. With the firelight surrounding her, she was like an angel or an apparition.

For a moment she seemed suspended, her bare feet hardly touching the plank floor. But then she was suddenly in my arms, her face only inches from mine, and I could feel her heart beating, and I could smell her sweet breath, and I was taken in by her teardrop eyes, and I wanted to touch her. Time had just stopped and all that she’d confessed about living with a cold-blooded cop-killer had never happened and I badly wanted to kiss her and feel her mouth with my mouth, but I knew it was not me who wanted to kiss her, but someone inside of me whom I could not trust to take control.

I pushed her away.

“No,” I said.

“No,” she said, “as in no you can’t? Or no you won’t?”

“Both.”

“Your wife is dead and gone, Keeper.”

I stood and pulled Cassandra up by her arms. I put my face in hers and shook her, hard.

“Now look,” I said, “since your boyfriend took off from my prison my life has gone to hell and it’s taken a Herculean performance to keep some semblance of it together.”

Cassandra was wide-eyed now and silent, regardless of the tears that streaked down her face.

“So you listen to me, little sister. What I don’t need now is some half-baked psychoanalysis or exotic dances or temptations of any kind. Do you hear me? What I need is answers, you got that?”

I let her go.

“I’m sorry,” I said, brushing back my hair with both hands in an attempt to regain control. “Maybe I don’t know what I need.”

Cassandra stepped back, wiped her eyes.

“What you need,” she said, now picking up her socks and boots from off the floor, “is a really long steel shank.”

“What for?” I said.

“To kill the bug that is lodged inside your ass.”

What was supposed to be a safe house suddenly didn’t seem so safe anymore. I had to get the hell out, even for a few minutes. I went outside and lit up a cigarette. As I smoked I looked up at the stars and breathed in the cool mountain air and tried my best to regain some semblance of my ever-diminishing composure. The stars were so bright up north, unencumbered by the lights of the city. Layers and layers of them. I thought about Fran and I thought about the rookie cop lying dead in a back alley and I thought about the overcoat man rotting in the woods and I thought about going to prison and I thought about Attica and I thought about the way Cassandra had just danced for me and I thought about so many things I didn’t know what the hell to think next.

None of this stuff matched the warden’s job description.

Then she came out, took the cigarette out of my hand, and took a deep drag. She raised her head just a little when she exhaled, allowing her hair to fall back against her shoulders. In the light of the moon, she was truly beautiful. There was no other way to put it. But I couldn’t allow myself to be taken in by the beauty. I had to concentrate on the problem at hand. Hell, the problems.

“Hey,” Cassandra said, her arms crossed at her chest for warmth, “I’ve got an idea.”

“I’m all ears,” I said, as antisocial as possible.

“Let’s start over.” Handing back the cigarette. “Like we never even met until this very moment.”

The two of us had our eyes locked on the moon and stars. But then we both turned to each other at the same time.

“What the hell,” I said, cigarette tucked in the corner of my mouth, right hand extended for her to shake. “Keeper Marconi, Green Haven Prison.”

“Cassandra Wolf,” she said, taking my hand, curtsying slightly. “Eddy s Blue Bayou.”

“Pleased to meet you, Cassandra.”

“Same here, Keeper.”

I stamped out the butt with the sole of my boot, blew out the last breath of smoke.

“So Cassandra Wolf of Eddy’s Blue Bayou, what would you like to talk about?”

“What if I were to tell you I was in possession of information that could change your life?”

“What’ll it cost me?”

“How’s about a drink?” she said, a smile now planted on her face.

“You read my mind,” I smiled. “How’s a Beaujolais circa 1995 sound to you?”

“A very happy year as I recall.” She started for the cabin door.

“Funny you should say that,” I said. “That was the last year I remember being happy.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

“IT WAS SUPPOSED TO be a simple operation,” Cassandra said, as we stared into the dying firelight, an empty bottle of Beaujolais on the wood-plank floor between us beside the full bottle I had just uncorked. “Eddy would handle the trade and the customers, while Washington Pelton handled the upfront money and the security. To make the whole thing work, Eddy had to latch onto some guards he could trust. Guards who had no problem taking a bribe.”

It was going on three-thirty in the A.M. Neither of us had slept, except sporadically. And although Cassandra had finally started on the information I needed to know, I got the sense that she was choosing her words carefully, stopping midsentence to take little breaths or to release a sigh that I assumed contained as much guilt as it did sadness.

“Let me think,” I said, as sarcastically as possible, “guards from Green Haven Prison who have no moral quandaries about taking a bribe. Must have taken Vasquez forever to find two men to fit those qualifications.”

“Of course, he immediately found two men willing to sell out,” Cassandra confirmed, taking a swallow of wine.

“Money talks in the iron house.”

“Loud and clear,” she agreed. “They came up with a system of outside visits, all of them under the pretense of visiting a dentist. Pelton had to get them on the outside, free, at least for a while. You see, Mister Marconi – “

“Keeper, remember?”

“Okay then, Keeper,” Cassandra said, catching her breath. “When it comes to making some serious cash, those iron bars and concrete walls can be a real problem.”

I nodded.

“There’s this dentist,” she added. “Has a weird name. A. J. Royale.”

“We’ve met,” I said with a roll of my eyes.

“A real ladylike kind of guy. He agreed to work with Eduard and Pelton for a price. He got paid a flat fee per visit and in turn did some kind of dentistry work on Eddy’s teeth, just to make the whole thing look good. Afterward, he’d cosign the release form in exchange for a pile of cash, I don’t know how much. Since Eddy had to be on the outside at least six or seven times in order to make the plan effective, A. J. Royale agreed to do a root canal on a perfectly good tooth. A molar that eventually had to be pulled because the tooth went bad. For six months Eddy saw the dentist once every three weeks. You should know about that, Keeper. You signed the releases for his outside visits.”

“I recall them,” I said. “All six or seven.”

“Don’t you see?” Cassandra said. “You were the main man, Keeper. The whole operation would have been dead in the water without you.”

“Glad to be of service,” I said under my breath, but the humor was nowhere to be found.

“Pelton and Eddy figured that in three months they could clear six hundred grand, cash. They would split four hundred, fifty-fifty. The remainder would be divvied up between whoever helped out indirectly.”

“Even a serial killer like Giles Garvin?”

“That’s correct. And it worked out all right, for a while anyway. Until Eddy and those guards, Logan and Mastriano, started taking stupid chances.”

“How stupid?” I said, pouring some of the wine into my coffee mug, taking a drink.

“After visiting the dentist, they’d change into civilian clothes right there inside the prison station wagon, and they’d find a nice cozy bar and they’d set up shop for a while. Eddy would meet me in some hotel room we’d prearrange and we’d have sex for an hour. Or at least, he’d try, but it was all pretty useless. I just didn’t want him anymore. Not like that.”

“You don’t have to explain.”

“Afterward, Logan and Mastriano would rendezvous at the hotel room and they’d change back into their corrections officer grays, Eddy into his yellow jumpsuit. They’d head back to the prison but not before I produced a list of buyers and the up-front money that came from Pelton.”

“You did his dirty work.”

“Pelton wouldn’t meet with Eddy directly,” she said. “Claimed it was too risky.”

“Then who would supply you?”

“The lists came directly from Pelton’s second-in-command, Jake Warren. He’d meet us at the prearranged spot, which was usually the hotel. He’d toss us the list and we’d toss him Pelton’s cut of the money. Then, on their way back to Green Haven, Logan and Mastriano would pull into the Stormville airstrip where Marty Schillinger would be waiting for them. He’d oversee the retrieval of the drop and the payoff for the dealer. After that they’d bring the stuff in through the service entrance around back and begin dispersing the rest of the payoffs and the buys.”

My God, I thought. The operation had been going on at the airstrip directly across the street from my house in Stormville, and I’d never known the difference. I thought about all the nights I’d sat outside slow-drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes while the planes came in and took off again.

“Tell me more about Garvin,” I pushed. “He seemed pretty agitated when I tried getting some information off of him on Tuesday.”

Cassandra ran her hands through her soft brown hair and touched her heart-shaped tattoo with two fingers.

“Giles Garvin,” she said, “that horrible man.” Hesitating for a minute, as though choking on her own words. “I’m sorry, but it’s hard for me to believe I was involved with a creep like that.”

I drank some more wine while I waited for her to compose herself.

“Giles Garvin, Martin Schillinger, Tommy Walsh,” she said along with a deep breath, “all of them assisted Eddy in handling the inside trades to prisoners and guards. But mostly, his customers were visitors coming into the prison to see their quote, loved ones, end quote.” Cassandra made quotation symbols with her fingers. Then she said, “Schillinger and Walsh would get their payoffs directly from Pelton, but Garvin was supposed to get his payoff from Eddy since they were both on the inside. You have to understand, I never once met Garvin, but I knew who he was and what he had done to those poor kids.”

“So why’s he so bent out of shape now?”

Cassandra’s face lit up.

“Jeez, don’t you get it, Keeper?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“Listen, when Eddy took off on Monday, he left with Garvin’s share for three months’ work. Ninety thousand dollars. Cash Eddy had already shipped to Olancha, California, where I keep a trailer just outside Death Valley. He stuffed the cash into three plastic baby dolls and packaged them inside a cardboard box. I shipped them out by way of the Athens post office.”

I pictured the envelope I’d found in Vasquez’s cell with the Olancha address and the Athens postmark. Then I pictured Schillinger traipsing around Vasquez’s cell in his Burberry trench coat like he had no idea in the world who the cop-killer was or how he could have escaped from Green Haven. I pictured Tommy Walsh standing in the door frame of my Stormville home and I knew he would have been capable of tearing me in two if Pelton gave the order because sometimes loyalty and devotion to duty have nothing to do with right and wrong.

“I was all set for leaving the country once Eddy managed the escape. If he could manage the escape, which turned out to be a piece of cake.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “There never were any masked bandits to steal Vasquez away from Bob Logan or Bernie Mastriano.”

“On Tuesday Eddy and I heard Logan’s story on television. He was nearly in tears he laughed so hard. Especially the part about those two taking a terrible beating. Don’t you see, Keeper? Once Bob Logan and Bernie Mastriano discovered Eddy and me missing from the hotel rendezvous in Newburgh, they must have panicked and beat each other up just to make it look like they were attacked by a bunch of ‘shotgun-carrying assailants.’ “

“Okay,” I said, tossing another log onto the fire. “So you were free. What next?”

“We had our cut of the money to live on, plus Garvin’s. More than enough to start over in Mexico or South America. But then Eddy got greedy. Once he was out, he turned the tables on Pelton. Told him that if he didn’t get more money, he’d expose the entire operation. He threatened to send an anonymous letter to The New York Times. He would accuse the entire department, including Pelton’s main man, senatorial hopeful John ‘Jake’ Warren. The accusation itself, Eddy figured, would be enough to make Pelton jumpy. So instead of heading directly to the California desert, which had been the original plan, we holed up in Athens.

“But it all went bad because something happened that none of them had counted on. Pelton retaliated. He made you take the fall for Eddy’s escape. He set you up, Keeper, as a scapegoat for the entire deal. He made you take the fall not only for Eddy’s escape but for Logan and Mastriano’s misfortune in the field. He managed to get to you just as Eddy was getting to him. And, after all, you’d signed those releases. It was something no one had counted on and it made Eddy’s plan completely worthless so long as the cops bought into it. You’d been a tough man to get around during the first couple of years of your appointment, Keeper. You were shaking down cells, drug-testing inmates and guards. Eddy was even aware of the wiretaps you’d planted on a few of the guard and inmate informers. But then something happened to you, some kind of shock. Your wife died and you backed off. You kind of retreated into yourself. Maybe you didn’t realize it at the time, but you must have been clinically depressed. One thing was for sure, things got easier for Eddy then. That’s when he said yes to Pelton’s plan-only a few weeks or so after your wife was killed.”

Cassandra said nothing for some time. As for me, I thought about melting into the woodwork. Since that was impossible, I went to the window, pulled back the shade, and looked out onto the blackness of the early morning. I took a breath and glanced at my watch again. Four in the morning. In just two hours’ time, it would be daylight. “I found photographs of you and another man inside Vasquez’s cell,” I said, finally.

Cassandra swallowed a breath and chased it with some wine, as if the breath were that bitter.

“Pelton began to demand a different kind of payoff,” she exhaled. “That is, once Eddy was safely behind bars after each of his field trips outside the prison gates. At first I kept the news from Eddy. But then I told him because I didn’t know what to do anymore. I didn’t know how to make Pelton stop. But do you know what Eddy told me? He told me he expected me to do exactly what Pelton wanted. When it came to Wash Pelton, he said, neither of us was bargaining from a position of power.”

She took another deep swallow of the wine.

“But there was a way to get back at Pelton without him knowing,” she said. “Eddy came up with the idea of making the still photos, since I couldn’t exactly send a video to him inside the prison.”

“VCRs are hard to come by inside the iron house,” I said.

“Exactly,” Cassandra said. “We could somehow use the stills against him. That is, if we could get them into the right hands, at the right time. In order to make it work, I had to steal a video while I was with Pelton. Then I’d have the stills made and I would ship them to Green Haven. Eddy would take care of things from there.”

“Tell me,” I said, feeling sudden warmth from the thousand-watt bulb that ignited inside my brain, “is Schillinger on the video, too?”

Cassandra looked at the floor surrounded by the half-light from the dying fire.

“Yes,” she said, “that creep, Schillinger, too.”

Why couldn’t I have seen through the forest earlier? I pictured the three stills I’d found in Vasquez’s cell. The unidentified man with the scar on his neck just above the breastbone. It was Pelton all along. The scar left over from the blade the rebel inmate had pressed up against his throat during the Attica riot. I thought I’d found the photos by accident. Now I knew they had been planted by Vasquez for someone to find, for someone to use against Pelton. That someone had to be me all along. He must have known I’d shake down his cell once he escaped. And then I went and handed them over to Marty Schillinger, who couldn’t grab them out of my hands fast enough.

“You could have done better with the stills,” I said, stepping away from the window, back toward the fireplace.

“You can hardly make out Pelton. And you didn’t get Schillinger at all.”

“The video is that bad,” she said. “It was the best I could do. I mean, it’s not easy trying to convince a video mechanic that the skin flick you’d like to have transferred to stills is purely for your own enjoyment. And think of it this way. Pelton’s been in the news a lot lately. Can you imagine the attention I would have gotten if I’d left it up to a total stranger to develop a clear photograph of Pelton in bed with two other people-one of them another man, the other the girlfriend of a convicted cop-killer? Jesus, Keeper, I had to be a little smarter than that. I had to take another route.”

I knelt down next to Cassandra.

“So now what?” she said.

“We’re going to get that video back,” I said. “And the money.”

“It’s in Olancha, like I told you. It’s all inside the same big box.”

“I have friends who can take care of getting it back,” I said. “In the meantime, you have to stick with me. You and that video are my way out of this mess. I’ll see to it that you get some sort of immunity by testifying against Pelton and the rest of them, even if they do try and charge you as an accessory in Eddy’s escape once we’re cleared of his murder. I’ll see to it that you get the money you need and a one-way ticket to Mexico.”

“No way in hell,” Cassandra said, slapping the wine bottle down on the plank floor and knocking over one of the empties. “I’m not about to testify for anybody or anything.” She started to lift herself up from the floor, but I reached out, grabbed hold of her arm, and pulled her back down.

“You’re hurting me,” she said, gripping her forearm where I had taken hold of it.

“You are going to testify because I’m going to make it all right for you,” I said. “Don’t you understand? We prove you were a victim of circumstances, the courts go easy on you.”

Cassandra relaxed her grip and looked down at her lap.

“I’ve done questionable things,” she said, under her breath.

“You’ve also done nothing they can keep you in jail for. So long as you agree to cooperate.”

She raised her head.

“Well then, what if I don’t want to go to Mexico, after all?”

“Even if you’re off the hook, you’ll always be looking over your shoulder. Pelton’s a powerful man. Who knows what kind of connections he’s got. That dead man outside in the overcoat is proof. The way I see it, you’ve got no choice. But before we do anything, I’ve got to get Mike Norman, Wash Pelton, and Marty Schillinger in one place at one time.”

“When do you plan on pulling this off?”

“I’ll start on it tomorrow morning after I meet up with a friend. With a little luck we could be out of this in a couple of days.”

“And what happens to me if your plan doesn’t work?”

“We could always stay here,” I said.

“For how long?”

“Until the wine and the Dinty Moore run out.”

As the night wore on I could not keep myself from remembering.

On a Monday morning a year before Fran was killed, I sat at the kitchen table of the Albany home I saw only on weekends. The sun poured in through the wide kitchen window beside the table, and gazing outside I could see the green grass and newly budding trees at the perimeter of the yard and a black-and-white cat I had never seen before walking aimlessly across the lawn. My morning newspaper was laid out flat beside my coffee cup. The headline read, “Warden Tightens Belt on Prison Security!” There was a photo of me sitting at my desk on the phone inside my office on the second floor of Green Haven Prison.

On this Monday morning, Fran sat across from me nibbling on a piece of toast coated with a thin layer of strawberry jam.

“You’re still making friends, I see.” She wore only a terrycloth robe because she wasn’t expected at school for another hour and a half.

“Don’t kid yourself, Fran,” I said, folding the paper in half and placing it back down on the table next to my third cup of coffee since five that morning. “The inmates would rather have it that way, believe it or not.”

Fran had her long hair pulled back in a ponytail. When she smiled, small dimples formed in the lower corners of her prominent cheeks. She placed a small piece of toast in her mouth and squinted her eyes as if to say, How?

I leaned back in my chair and, looking outside, watched the black-and-white cat move stealthily over the lawn, nose to the grass, sniffing out the grubs. “It’s all very simple when you think about,” I said. “If I’m not in charge of the prison, then the gorillas are in charge.”

“And what are the gorillas like, Keeper?”

“Nice fellas,” I said, as the cat jerked a grub out of the lawn with its claws, “who like to rape and kill for fun.”

Cassandra got up from the floor and went into the bedroom. She returned carrying two woolen blankets and a pillow. She spread out the first blanket on the floor in front of the fire and placed the pillow on the far end. Then she lay down on the makeshift bed and covered herself with the other blanket. She reached out for my hand.

“I know it’s corny,” she said. “But will you stay here with me, at least until I fall asleep?”

I nodded and smiled. Rather, I attempted a smile.

But as Cassandra slowly drifted off to sleep, I felt myself sinking into a gorge of self-pity. I had been duped by the men I had worked with and trusted. By Wash Pelton and Marty Schillinger and Mike Norman, even though a part of me could not help but believe that Mike did what he did, not out of spite, but out of pure desperation.

When I was a boy, my father once told me that there are three points of realization that occur in a young man’s life. The first is the knowledge that his parents will die one day. The second is that he, too, will die. The third-and this is the most important-is the knowledge that he must create a life worth living.

But I think there is a fourth point of realization that my father left out. What he didn’t tell me is that a man is on his own in this life. No matter whom he trusts or whom he loves or whom he calls his friend and confidant, he is on his own. And the sooner he realizes it, the better.

I tuned my thoughts to the events of the past five days.

First, there was the bogus story of Logan and Mastriano’s escape. Truth is they must have panicked when Vasquez took off while they waited for him at some bar in Newburgh. The entire story about three shotgun-packing assailants in a black van was nothing more than a fabrication-a fiction designed to fool me and, at the same time, arouse public sentiment. If what Cassandra told me was true (and as a warden who has spent his career trying to sift through inmates’ lies in order to get at the truth, deep down inside I felt she was on the level), then I had no further reason to believe that the statement Robert Logan had issued in my office on Monday afternoon contained even a semblance of truth. If I had to come up with a motive for Logan’s lie, it would have been this: Logan and Mastriano must have put the pressure on Pelton because they weren’t about to take the blame for Vasquez’s sudden escape. They had been involved in the drug racket from the beginning. They knew too much. On the other hand, they were the most obvious patsies available to Pelton. Pelton, sensing the two guards meant business, must have paid off Dr. Fleischer to fabricate the serious blow to Mastriano’s head. Now I was certain that Mastriano’s coma had been faked and that Fleischer was pumping him daily with something to keep him out of it. In fact, I had the distinct feeling that Pelton was going around paying off everybody and his brother in order to keep his scam under wraps.

Then there were Cassandra’s porn stills that were now in Schillinger’s possession. Would he have used the illicit photographs against Pelton? First he would have had to get the original film and destroy it, along with any copies that might have been made. If Lt. Martin Schillinger was really on the video, like Cassandra said, then she and Vasquez had made a mistake by not making stills of him-no matter the quality of the film, no matter who might have found out about it later. It was a missed opportunity no matter how you looked at it. There was, however, one proverbial ace-in-the-hole. And it was this: If Schillinger and Pelton cared even the least little bit about their reputations, their careers, and their lives, they would want that video back-stills or no stills.

All I had to do was to get at that film. The film would allow me at least a little power to bargain with. But before anything else, I had to trust in Cassandra, believe that she was telling me the truth. But then, how does a man go about trusting a woman who had been an integral part of a convicted cop-killer’s pornography ring? How do you learn to trust a woman who saves your life by axing a man in the head when all she had to do was knock him cold? How did I know I wasn’t being duped all over again?

I had to go with instinct. And now, watching her sleep on the floor of the cabin my grandfather built with his own two hands, bathed in the golden firelight that came from the fieldstone fireplace, I wanted to believe that she was telling the truth.

Now I pictured Mike Norman. I saw his thin red face in the flames of the fire. He must have known about Pelton’s drug operation even if his knowledge was based on rumor, because he had used the evidence I’d picked up at the Lime Kiln gravel pit directly against me. My guess was that he’d seen an opportunity to make a quick buck and had taken it to Pelton without thinking about what could happen to me, not to mention himself. Pelton would pay Norman anything he asked if he believed it would present the perfect opportunity for me to be convicted in his place. Was it true that innocent men went to prison and stayed there for the rest of their lives? It was true, absolutely true. And I had never considered the reality of it as much as I did right then. Because an innocent man going to prison is what really was at stake. This wasn’t about corruption and conspiracy in the prison system or about exposing the people who perpetrated it. What was at stake was my life. Of all people, a warden, indicted for crimes he did not commit. A warden sentenced to life would be sentenced to death. Once incarcerated in an iron house, I was a dead man; no two or three ways about it. That’s what this was about. These were the stakes. Because in prison there was no such thing as a guardian angel.

I sat on the floor of the fifty-year-old cabin, but for some reason, I did not feel the floor beneath me. Beside me, Cassandra slept soundly. The tattoo on her neck rose and fell with the rhythm of her silent breathing. I had to trust her, whether I liked it or not. At least, I had to believe I could trust her. Together we were on the run. Like me, she had been accused of the murder of Eduard Vasquez. I had to believe she was innocent, because what would she have gained by killing him?

To be honest, she had a lot to gain.

She had three hundred thousand dollars cash to gain and a videotape she could use to blackmail Pelton for even more money. Still, I had to go with instinct, and my instinct told me she was innocent. After all, if she had killed Vasquez and managed to elude the police, why would she have come this far with me?

I believed this: that Cassandra Wolf had not shot Vasquez. The trigger man had to have been Pelton or Schillinger, or both. Or more likely, it had been Tommy Walsh acting on Pelton’s orders, or maybe even the overcoat man.

Cassandra slept soundly, breathing steadily, like a baby. She was no baby, though. She was a grown woman on the run. And I needed her more than anything else in the world. I would guard her with my life. Maybe protection was her reason for staying with me. But then, maybe protection had nothing to do with it at all.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

THE NEXT MORNING I parked the Pontiac in an observation area overlooking the Champlain valley to the south. Getting out of the car, I cut through the second-growth woods at a jog until I sighted the blinking red stop light that hung over the place where Exit 28 met the Champlain road. From within a small patch of pines and birch trees located beside a garage used to house snowplows and dump trucks for the Champlain Valley Department of Transportation, I waited for Val’s Town & Country station wagon to pull up.

At exactly one minute before nine A.M., the car rolled to a stop off the exit. I watched Val look one way along the Champlain road, then the other. Until she hooked a right, keeping her speed as slow as possible. The closer she came to the garage, the easier it was to see her lovely sandy-brown hair and her deep, almond-shaped eyes, and the more I felt my lungs deflate, my heart swell. She drove slowly, twisting and turning her head, surveying the open road, until she finally decided to pull the wagon over to the shoulder, not ten feet away from the asphalt drive that led up to the metal doors of the DOT garage.

I walked out of the woods and made my way downhill to the car. I opened the passenger-side door of the wagon, slipped inside, and smelled the good, sweet smell of Val. I wanted to take her in my arms and kiss her and hold her, swallow her. But I knew there was no time for that.

“Drive,” was all I said.

I told Val to make a right-hand turn into the observation area.

“I have everything,” she said.

“I knew you would,” I said.

The observation area had been built along a natural clearing in the mountainside. The clearing looked out onto a view of the southern portion of the Champlain valley, where it abutted the northern portion of Lake George. The observation area itself was nothing more than a concrete sidewalk and a short, knee-high wall made from fieldstones topped with polished slate.

I got out of the car and unlocked the trunk to the Pontiac.

Val opened the hatch of the wagon.

Without a word, we made the exchange of clothes, food, and weapons. Val tried not to show that she was nervous. She kept a straight, tight face the whole time, never once smiling or, for that matter, submitting to a frown. Her face was flat and expressionless, her motions direct and to the point. When the exchange was over, the two of us got into the car.

She wore dark slacks, a white, button-down shirt, and a blazer. Her shirt was unbuttoned at the collar and a gold crucifix hung from a gold chain against the smooth bronze-colored skin of her chest. But now I could tell by the sudden downtrodden expression on her face that something wasn’t right. Something besides the obvious. She wouldn’t look at me directly. When I tried to catch her glance, she looked away and pinched the underside of her chin like she somehow forgot it was attached to her face.

“Val,” I said, grabbing her elbow. “What’s wrong?”

Looking down at the floor of the station wagon she started to cry. She reached behind the seat and picked up a copy of the morning’s Times Union. She laid the newspaper in my lap, headline staring at me.

APD Officer Found Hanged!

I folded the newspaper in half and slammed it against the dash of the wagon. The impact was like a blast from a.45 and just as shocking. Val jumped and emptied her lungs of oxygen. I let the paper fall to the floor, sat back in the seat, and drew a deep breath.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “So am I.”

I took her in my arms and held her, and she held me.

“Do you really believe Mike could have killed himself, Keeper?”

“What I think is that Pelton could have made it look like a suicide.”

Now that we had calmed down, I was holding Val’s hand and giving her the play-by-play behind the Vasquez-Pelton drug operation. I relayed exactly what Cassandra had told me just hours before, without altering a single detail of her story.

“It’s true,” I said. “Mike turned the evidence I found at the gravel pit over to Pelton. But he must have done it out of desperation, for the promise of money.”

“In turn,” Val said, “Pelton may have considered him a security risk. I mean, the last thing Pelton needed was for Mike to get drunk and shoot his mouth off.”

“Wouldn’t take much to make Mike look suicidal. I know how you felt about him, Val, but we both know he was a hopeless boozer, and we both know that the department had continually passed him by, right? Attica was a long time ago but the scars stay with you forever and there’s no way in hell they were about to let him forget about his breakdown.”

“But my God, Keeper,” Val said, squeezing my hand hard, “that was so long ago.”

“So long ago but not long enough. When you saw what we saw during those four days, twenty-five years may as well be twenty-five seconds.” I stopped there, but I wanted to go on. I wanted to tell Val that you never forgot the smell of the dirt or the look of the rain when it fell in sheets into puddles filled with the blood from a man who’s been castrated, or a man who’s had his skull pounded in with an iron bar. It never leaves you, I wanted to tell her. There wasn’t a single day at Green Haven that I didn’t think about it. I never pretended for even a second that Attica couldn’t happen again, because it would. And when it did, it was going to be worse, and more officers and inmates and civilians were going to die, but they wouldn’t die easily. I wanted to tell her all this. But I let it go.

Val pulled her hand away and used the other to rub the feeling back into it.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I drew in a deep breath.

“I’m the one who’s sorry,” I said. “It’s just that those feelings are so ingrained and I never talk to people about Attica, except to myself.”

For a minute or two we said nothing. Then I said, “I just can’t help but think that Pelton had Mike killed.”

“To Wash Pelton,” Val said, “Mike’s failings must have seemed like an opportunity.”

Below the article about Mike’s suicide was a smaller headline.

Warden and Cop-Killer’s Girlfriend, Fugitives!

Planted below the headline was the face of the pastor whose car I’d stolen. A small caption beneath it read, “I asked them to place their trust and forgiveness in the Lord.” Below that, another headline advertised,

Day Number Five for Corrections Officer Mastriano!

I folded the paper in half once more and this time slid it into the space between the armrest and the bucket seat.

I said, “The three stills I found in Vasquez’s cell on Monday afternoon were lifted off a home video Pelton took of him and Cassandra having sex. She claims that Marty Schillinger, of all people, is in the same video.”

“Let me get this straight, boss,” Val said, her eyes nearly popping out of her skull. “Not only has Pelton been running a major drug ring inside our own prison, but he and Schillinger have been making pornographic films with Vasquez’s girlfriend?”

“By the looks of things, Vasquez and Pelton forced her into it. Vasquez didn’t like it, but claimed he wasn’t bargaining with Pelton from a position of power, which was probably an accurate assessment.”

“Tell me something, Keeper,” Val said. “Why should a man like Vasquez make such a difference in Cassandra Wolf ‘s life? I mean, how did he hold so much power over her?”

“She was there the night that rookie cop took two slugs to the back of the head. She ran from the scene and called the cops. She turned her own boyfriend in, and for all these years he’s held it over her head, made her feel like an accomplice and a traitor.”

“And you believe her?” Val said. “You think a little guilt trip is enough to make a girl stay with a man who kills and runs drugs, even when he’s in prison?”

I thought about Cassandra lying on the floor of my grandfather’s cabin, her chest rising and sinking with steady, even breaths, and I pictured her eyes and the tattoo on her neck that appeared to pulse when she swallowed. It was true, I had no idea who she really was, what she had done, or what she was capable of doing. I could have told Val about the overcoat man and about what Cassandra did to him for me, for my life. But then I thought better of it. Knowing I was that vulnerable would not sit well with Val. It would only make her more concerned, more nervous. On the other hand, maybe Val’s concern was something I just wanted to believe in.

“Listen,” I said in as soft a voice as I could summon. “I believe Cassandra is telling the truth.”

“But don’t you think you’re forgetting one thing, Keeper?” Val said, taking my hand once more. “Maybe it’s not your heart that’s speaking to you at all. Maybe it’s your conscience. Maybe you feel you have no choice but to believe that Cassandra is telling the truth.”

From the front seat of Val’s station wagon we could see the mountains and the lush green valley to our right and the empty Champlain road to our left.

“Let me get this straight, Keeper,” Val went on. “Pelton was having sex with Vasquez’s girlfriend and getting it all on tape.”

“Like I already told you, Pelton was the sugar daddy for the drug operation, and now everyone is trying to blackmail him for more money, or so it appears.”

“So then Pelton’s been trying to pin this thing on you from the start, to try and save himself when news of the operation goes public.”

“I’m going to beat Pelton out of the gate,” I insisted. “But first you have to do me another favor.” I lit a cigarette and blew the initial hit of smoke out the open window.

Val nodded.

“I want you to call Tony Angelino for me. Tell him I want to hire his Guinea Pigs.”

“His what?”

“I’ll explain another time,” I said, taking another hit on the cigarette. “I want them to retrieve the videotape of Pelton and Cassandra, and the three hundred grand.”

Val smiled.

“Location,” she said, pulling out a pen and a cocktail napkin that said T.G.I. Friday’s on it out of her blazer pocket. She triggered the ballpoint and, at the same time, spread the cocktail napkin on her thigh for something to write on.

“It’s at a post office in Olancha, California. It’s a big cardboard box, like the kind televisions come in, and it’s addressed to Cassandra. Inside the box are three baby dolls. You know, oversized plastic dolls for little girls who like to play mommy.”

“I remember, boss,” Val said.

“Inside one of those dolls is a videocassette. Inside all three dolls is the three hundred grand. All in big, unmarked bills. Tell him there’s a hundred grand in it for him and his Guinea Pigs. All he has to do is get to it.”

“Maybe Tony’s got an L.A. contingent who can have it in hand by tonight,” Val said.

“If I know Tone,” I said, “that’s the case exactly. Just have him send the entire package overnight express to me at the Ironville post office.”

“What name do they use?”

“Use my grandfather’s name,” I said.

Val wrote fast.

“Go ahead,” she said.

“My grandfather’s name was Pasquale,” I said, taking a quick drag on my cigarette. “Pasquale Marconi.”

“There’s just one thing that bothers me,” Val revealed.

“What is it?”

“Can you trust Tony?”

“As much as I can trust you.”

Val smiled.

“What next?” she said.

“Then I want you and Tony to arrange a meeting.”

“With?”

“Schillinger and Pelton,” I said. “I want them both at the cabin tomorrow night at nine o’clock sharp. Tell them I’m aware of the truth now-the drug deal, the blackmail. Tell them I want to work it all out, that I know I made a mistake by running. Make it sound like they set me up real good and now I realize there’s no getting out of it without doing things their way. Ask them for their complete assurance, complete protection, and secrecy. No cops. Make sure you tell Pelton that all I want is my job back and that I know I made a mistake not working with him in the first place. Tell him I looked tired, haggard, scared, defeated. Really pour it on.”

Val looked out the window for a second or two. Then she looked at me and said, “What’s Pelton got to gain by coming all the way up here, Keeper? You’re already taking the rap. I mean, Pelton and Schillinger, they’re on easy street.”

“I’ll have the magic videotape by then,” I said. “They refuse to come up here, I’m going to deliver it directly to Chris Collins at Channel 13 news.”

“What if they still don’t go for it? Couldn’t they just claim the film was made for private viewing?”

“Then I’ll have no choice but to bring Cassandra in on my own terms, throw us both on the mercy of the court, if there ever was such a thing. That way, she’ll have her chance to testify not only about what she witnessed inside the hotel room in Athens yesterday afternoon, but about the entire drug operation. A jury will either believe her or they won’t. But one thing is for sure, a trial will make a big stink for everyone involved with Pelton, including Schillinger and Jake Warren, our illustrious senatorial hopeful.”

“So a little road trip may be worth it to them,” Val surmised.

“It’s important that I meet them on my own terms, on my own playing field.”

“I get it. Your turn to join the blackmail squad.”

“Time to clear my name of this thing, once and for all.”

Val smiled for the first time since she’d arrived. It was a sly, corner-of-the-mouth kind of smile that made me want to melt into the bucket seat.

“I’ll need detailed directions to the cabin,” she said.

“Tell Tony to be in his office tomorrow evening at five o’clock,” I said. “That’s when I’ll call him with the directions. In turn, he can relay them to Pelton and Schillinger.”

“You could just cut to the chase, give me the information right now.” She balanced the ballpoint pen above the T.G.I. Friday’s napkin as if to exaggerate her point.

“The less you know the better,” I said. “A lot can happen between now and tomorrow night.”

As if on cue, Val and I glanced at the headline reporting Mike Norman’s apparent suicide.

“If they can get to Mike,” I said, “they can get to you and Tony. So take care of yourself. I need you.” I flicked the spent cigarette out onto the parking lot. Sparks flew up when the butt hit the pavement.

Val returned the pen and paper to her pocket, took my hand and squeezed it. She moved in closer and I breathed in her sweet smell and looked into her eyes.

“You’ll be happy I wanted it this way,” I said.

“Especially if they torture me, boss,” Val said, coming even closer, but not yet touching.

“You are one pleasant administrative assistant,” I said, my lips only inches from hers, nearly touching, but somehow better than touching.

“Pleasant,” she said, “is my middle name.” And then I laid one on her.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

I GOT OUT OF the car, closed the door behind me, and leaned inside the open window.

“You sure you’re going to be okay?” Val asked. How she was able to maintain a happy face was a testament not only to her strength, but to her blind faith in me.

“I am now,” I said. “But you and Tony’s Guinea Pigs have to come through for me. Otherwise this thing is shot to hell, and I go straight to jail, do not pass go, do not clear my name, do not save my reputation or my life.”

Val pressed her lips together.

“I’ll make the necessary arrangements right now. But I have to know you’re going to be all right.” She went to turn over the ignition, but I reached inside the car and took her arm.

“Val,” I said, “do you know what they’ll do to a warden inside an iron house?”

She nodded and placed her hand on my hand.

“Don’t worry about a thing, boss man,” she said. “Not about me or Tony or those Guinea Pigs.”

I squeezed Val’s forearm gently. When I let go, she turned over the ignition and smiled again. But I knew the smile was forced. The big eight-cylinder on the Town & Country revved for a few quick seconds, then settled down to a gentle purr. Val put her hands on the steering wheel. She looked small sitting behind the big black wheel, almost fragile. But deep down, I knew she wasn’t anything like that.

“One hundred thousand bucks,” she said. “Sounds very reasonable.”

“Tony has to come through,” I said, leaning away from the window. “Tomorrow morning. Ironville post office. Attention Pasquale Marconi.” I thought about Cassandra’s testimony. I had to believe she’d told me the truth. I had to believe in the power of instinct.

“It’ll be there,” Val insisted, switching the automatic transmission into reverse.

I stood away from the car so she could back out. Then she pulled out onto the Champlain road and left me in the observation area, more alone than I’d ever felt in my life.

It was all I could do to wait until Val’s car was out of sight before I doubled over, went down on my knees, and heaved. The acid from the bile in my stomach burned the insides of my chest, my throat. The bile soured my mouth, made tears run down my face. That was my excuse for the tears, anyway. The salty tears ran between my lips and combined with the sour taste in my mouth. I left a clear brown puddle on the black lot. My body felt like it had been ripped inside out. I closed my eyes, winced from the burning pain.

I saw Mike Norman’s face. Tommy Walsh sat in Mike’s dark office in Albany. I saw Mike downing shot after shot of ginger brandy out of his I LOVE MY JOB! mug. Walsh was holding a Glock to Mike’s head, ordering him to drink up. Then, when the time was right, Tommy unbuckled Mike’s belt, slid it out from under the loops, wrapped it around Mike’s neck and ran it back through the buckle. He strapped the belt to one of the overhead steam pipes that rose up the wall and ran across the ceiling. Tommy lifted Mike up. Mike’s emaciated body was like lifting a baby for a muscle-man like Tommy. He stood Mike up on his swivel chair with that belt wrapped around his neck, and just walked away.

Out of desperation, Mike maybe managed to balance himself for a second or two on the swivel chair. He was sober suddenly, and he must have tried to shout, but no words would come. He tried to go for the 9 mm. usually kept in his leather shoulder holster. But in his position, a move like that would mean certain death. And besides, his piece would have been long gone. With his fingers he tried to make a space between the belt and the flesh of his neck, but the belt was too tight and he was too drunk. Sober, but drunk. He’d leave claw marks where the belt was. And as the windpipe in his throat closed up, he reached out for Tommy as if his killer could also be his savior. But Tommy was already gone out into the night, and Mike realized that he was already as good as dead and that the life he had left was merely a formality. That’s when Mike lost his balance on the swivel chair. That’s when he fell away, and there was no one in the office to hear the distinct, sharp crack of his neck.

Mike’s death appeared to be suicide.

But it also could have been murder.

To me, it didn’t matter what anyone called it. It was murder no matter how you looked at it.

CHAPTER FIFTY

IN A STATE OF mild shock, I drove back to the cabin. I’m not sure where my feelings had gone, but one thing was certain: I wasn’t feeling much of anything anymore. Suddenly, after having collapsed in the observation parking lot, it seemed like someone had peeled off my skin and scraped away the nerve endings. At the same time, I had to believe that I was over the hump and that Val, Tony, and Cassandra were working with me now as one big happy family. Even the Guinea Pigs were on my side. In any event, I had to keep in control, clear my head, stay positive.

I got back to the cabin at around ten o’clock that Friday morning, just four days after Vasquez had escaped from Green Haven Prison, just one day after his murder. I turned the car around in the drive and backed it into the carport, beside the woodpile. I got out and opened the trunk. Then I took the cabin key out from behind the old black mailbox and unlocked the side door. But when I went inside to find Cassandra, she wasn’t there.

I looked in the kitchen, the two bedrooms, and the closet-size bathroom. I pulled back the shower curtain, looked inside the empty shower. I looked behind all the doors, inside the closets, under the bed.

No sign of her anywhere.

The sensation of being trapped somewhere between feeling and not feeling suddenly disappeared as fast as it had hit me. Now I couldn’t help but give in to the wave of dread that swept through my veins like a three-stage lethal injection.

Here’s how lethal injection worked:

First, you were strapped down on a black gurney, arms extended like in a crucifixion. Then an execution technician (who cannot be a doctor or a registered nurse because their code of ethics forbids it) swabbed your forearm with alcohol to prevent infection, of all things, and probed your arm for a vein. When the vein was found he inserted a needle into it. The needle was connected to an intravenous line that channeled sodium Pentothal into your veins to knock you out. After that, panchromium bromide and potassium chloride were introduced. The first paralyzed your diaphragm, collapsed your lungs, and made it impossible to take a breath. The second stopped your heart from pumping. How long your brain continued to receive and transmit messages and brain waves was undetermined.

During the first death by lethal injection that I witnessed, it took nearly a half hour to kill the man. The tube that had been attached to his arm broke away. The witnesses were sprayed with the deadly chemicals and the condemned inmate began to convulse and foam at the mouth and nostrils. His eyes were wide open the entire time.

During “my” second death by lethal injection, the execution technician gave the inmate too weak a dose of the chemicals, causing him to choke and heave blood for nearly fifteen minutes before he died with a blue face.

The third and last time I witnessed an execution, the conditions were considered perfect all around though the “patient” heaved, spit, choked and even broke a rib from the strain.

I’d witnessed three lethal injections during my time in the department, all of them in states where execution was still legal. If I ever found the man who’d killed Fran, I’d see a fourth. That is, if I ever got myself out of this mess. But first I had to find Cassandra. Without her and her testimony, I faced jail. What I faced in jail was more horrible and just as deadly as lethal injection.

I took a deep breath and lit a cigarette. I sucked in the smoke and felt the rush of nicotine and the slight rise in blood pressure that always accompanied it. I knew I had no choice but to try and relax, to try and think logically. It was a beautiful spring day with unusually warm temperatures. Maybe Cassandra had spring fever, literally. Maybe fourteen hours spent in a five-room cabin had become too confining for her.

I had to do something to prevent myself from thinking, because I didn’t want to suffer the anxiety that went with thinking. So I busied myself with transporting the supplies from the trunk of the Pontiac to the cabin. I made every attempt to be as organized as possible, making slow deliberate movements under the assumption that this would make the time pass faster. Maybe, I thought, she would come back while I was working.

I placed the extra clothing on the bed in the back bedroom and stacked the few canned goods on the exposed shelves in the kitchen. I put the milk and the beer in the refrigerator, and the three loaves of white bread on the table my grandfather had built into the kitchen wall. I checked the chambers and the chokes on the two Remington 1187 twelve gauges to make certain they weren’t loaded, and then I leaned them against the waist-high bookshelves beside the fireplace.

When there was nothing left to do, I started thinking again, and this gave new life to the old anxieties.

In the seventeen or so minutes it had taken to transfer the supplies from the car to the cabin and to arrange it systematically, Cassandra had not come back. I knew then, as I slammed the trunk of the Pontiac closed, that if she was not coming back to me, I’d have to go looking for her. And that’s exactly what I set my mind to doing.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

I SEARCHED THE PERIMETER of the cabin looking for footprints. But the earth around the cabin, although muddy in spots, was fairly dry from the strange bout of spring heat that had affected the entire northeast, even as far up as the Adirondack mountains (although the nights were still cool, if not downright cold).

I swatted a black fly from the sweat-covered skin on the back of my neck and I walked the length of the driveway, downhill, until I came to the hard-packed east-west road. I looked across the road and across the trout stream, and I surveyed the empty field beyond it.

Again, not a thing.

I turned west and then faced east.

Nothing but open road and the constant hum of black flies.

Suddenly, I felt like the lost one.

Standing there in the middle of the open road, I turned and faced my grandfather’s cabin. Directly behind it, I could see Old Iron Top, its bald, granite summit sparkling in the late-morning sunshine.

And then it hit me. That’s where I would find her.

I walked back up the drive and went to the edge of the second-growth forest surrounding the base of Old Iron Top. The trail my grandfather had cut decades ago was still accessible about thirty yards southwest of the cabin. The summer renters must have used the trail often because the narrow footpath was still freshly cut. Footprints were plainly visible in the mud. Cassandra wore cowboy boots similar to my own. But the heels on her boots were shorter and flatter. The prints at the beginning of the trail could not have been made more than an hour earlier. I could even see how the groundwater that had been squeezed away from the dirt had puddled in the heel area of the print.

Here’s what I did before I entered the woods: I pulled out the.45, pointed the barrel up toward the tops of the trees, and chambered a round, safety on. I slipped the piece back through my belt, this time against my backbone, and walked into the woods.

Maybe the forest had lived without me for more than three decades, but there was something about it-about the birch trees and the scattered sections of pine and the grouse that nearly made my heart stop when it drummed and took off from the soft, pine-needled floor-that made it seem like time had stood still. But the forest was not the same, and I knew it had changed as I had changed. But then there was the rich smell of vegetation, there was the way the sunlight broke through the leaves and branches of the trees, and the way the mosquitoes buzzed around my face that made it all seem the same. These were sights and sounds and feelings you just did not get inside a maximum security prison. A few feet in, I felt the tingle of a spider web that broke off against my face when I unknowingly walked through it. My blue-jean work shirt turned damp at the arms from the dew that clung to the vegetation even at midmorning on this hot spring day, and the world seemed suddenly foreign to me. Foreign but the same.

The dimensions of the trail were as I remembered them, too.

The trail dipped at first, descending for about twenty-five yards until it reached the base of the hill where the trail went severely vertical again. I wasted no time starting the climb, wishing, after five or six raised steps, that I was wearing hiking boots instead of cowboy boots. In a word, these boots weren’t made for hiking. But then, what choice did I have? I moved uphill, the branches scratching and snapping at my face, stinging the sensitive facial skin beneath the three-day beard growth. A small twig poked me in the eye, filled me with enough pain to draw a tear.

But I didn’t stop for anything, not even to take the breath that I desperately needed.

One thing was certain: I was drowning in my own inhalations. Too many cigarettes for too many years. As the arteries pressing against my temples began to pound with blood, I promised myself that if I got out of this mess, I would quit smoking for good. I would get my life back together, start living the good life again-like a man who cares about the life he’s got left.

But in the woods, I began to drown in something else, too. I couldn’t shake the image of Cassandra being left for dead on the summit of Old Iron Top. This time I was seeing the future, and the future in my mind was crazy, morbid even. What if Pelton’s men had followed us out to the cabin, gotten to Cassandra this morning when I was with Val? What if Pelton’s men had dragged her into the woods and shot her or sliced her neck with a straight razor? In my mind, I pictured a razor moving across the smooth bronze flesh of Cassandra’s neck the same way I had witnessed a CO die at Attica. As I forced myself up the hillside, I knew that with Cassandra dead I was as good as finished- porn film or no porn film to use against Pelton. I needed Cassandra alive to testify on behalf of what she’d witnessed, not only during the last five days, but during all the years of her relationship with Vasquez.

Maybe it was the lung-scraping breaths or the way the blood pulsed and boiled inside my skull, but I couldn’t prevent an image of Cassandra’s head cut completely away from her body, just the way Fran’s had been when the black, four-door Buick sedan ignored the do-not-enter and slammed into the side of the car at sixty-five-per in a thirty-mile-per-hour zone. It had taken only a split second for Fran to be thrust forward, her head and shoulders through the windshield, the jagged edge of which, like a razor, took her head clean off at the base of the neck, her body slumping back into the passenger seat like nothing had ever happened. Like our lives had not been changed by the split second of time it took for a windshield to shatter. And then nothing but the sight and sound of the battered Buick tearing away from the scene of the accident, only the back of a man’s shaved head visible…

How do I describe the shock, the timelessness of the moment, the rapid beating of my heart, the buzz in my brain that sucked the air out of my lungs, filled them with the poison of instant grief? The sickness rose up from my stomach and spread through my body and my veins, like rigor mortis.

All I could do was close my eyes, try to convince myself that the accident had been a figment of my imagination, like a nightmare. But they had revived me in the hospital bed I’d been strapped to some thirty-six hours before, and they had made a point of telling me the entire story of the accident, detail for detail, as if I had not been a part of it or the cause of it, or as if I had not been stained with my wife’s blood or as if I had not been there to smell the smoke or feel the fire. As if I had not seen the flashing red-and-white lights of the cop cruisers and useless ambulances. As if I had not seen the tears shed, not for Fran, but for me. And when I asked them why they had to tell me all this so soon and in such detail, they said, “So you’ll believe it.”

They called themselves doctors, priests, and friends, and they surrounded my bed and told me the story of my wife’s death as if the reality of it was good for me. You must tackle the grief head-on, they’d said. The Lord dishes out only what you can handle, they’d said. The death of my wife was like a commendation from the Lord because He knew I could take it. Your wife, they said, she’s an angel now.

Go fuck yourself, I said.

I felt the anger boil inside my gut, and I would have killed them all if I’d had the chance. I would have ripped their heads off. But all I could do was lie in the hospital bed and feel my face distort and my muscles wrench because they had me strapped to that mattress and they had the God awful nerve to tell me the truth about my dead, decapitated wife and the bald-headed man who’d gotten away with it.

And somehow, one year later, I was climbing a hill I had not climbed in thirty-five years. And as my lungs began to collapse from the strain, it did not seem possible that it had taken only thirty minutes to make the entire climb, because it seemed to have taken much longer when I was a kid. And when I reached the peak of Old Iron Top, I could plainly see Cassandra through openings in the heavy vegetation surrounding the rocky clearing. She stood on the rock face, dressed in blue jeans and a white button-down shirt that was now unbuttoned. Under the shirt was an elastic band, like an Ace bandage, only wider. The flesh-colored elastic was wrapped flat around her entire stomach as if to hold it in, like a makeshift girdle. And as she began to button her shirt up over it, I could only assume that Cassandra was pregnant and didn’t want anyone to know about it, least of all me.

I quickly moved to the left of the trail and ducked down in the tall grass while Cassandra buttoned her shirt. She ran both hands through her long brown hair so that I could see the tattoo on her neck, and then, from where I crouched in the tall grass, I saw her pull that.32 caliber pistol out of the pocket of her jeans. I saw her walk to the opposite side of the clearing and toss the pistol into a patch of thick briars. She made a quick check of the surrounding area and only when she was certain no one had seen her did she begin to make her way back across the rocky summit toward the trail. I was forced to lie down flat in the grass and remain as still and quiet as humanly possible. More than humanly possible. Because, after all, she was about to pass right by me, and I did not want her to know that I had seen everything and that I now knew for certain that she was not the woman I had thought she was.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

I WAITED THERE IN the tall grass for more than three minutes after she’d passed. During that time I held my breath and listened to the steady, rapid pulse pounding against my temples. I could only hope that she would not make out my tracks in the soft earth. I hoped her concern about getting rid of that.32 and concealing her pregnancy was so great that she wouldn’t worry about footprints.

When all was clear, I moved out of the grass and sprinted across the granite clearing. Stepping down into the thick vegetation, I fought my way through the briars and pine scrubs. I squatted and felt with my hand around the area where I thought the pistol might lie. It took about five minutes of tearing and scraping the skin on my left forearm, but eventually I found the piece resting on a nest of thick tree roots.

I stood up and began picking the briars away from my shirt and pants. Maybe it was the cold, almost slimy feel of the tree roots, but for some reason I began to picture a nest of snakes and I moved back onto the clearing as quickly as I could. I cracked the cylinder of the snub-nosed revolver and brought the six-round chamber up close to my face. I smelled each chamber separately. The pistol had been fired in the past three days. I was certain of it. The smell of the exploded gun powder was that fresh, that pungent. The question was this: Had Cassandra fired the pistol? If not, then why would she go to all the trouble of hiding the piece on Old Iron Top?

Standing on the open rock face, I knew that the answer most likely lay in the events that had gone down in Athens the day before. Maybe the answer lay with Vasquez. But then everybody knows that dead men don’t talk.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

ON THE CONCRETE FLOOR of the Times Square catwalk, three buck steers pin Wash Pelton down on all fours. They pull his pants down and stick it to him from behind. They make no attempt to squelch his screams because the louder he screams the more they like it, the more it turns them on.

Oh God, I say, as his screams burn a hole through my skull. Get me out of here.

To my left, the blunt barrel of a black-plated.38 service revolver is stuffed inside Wash Pelton’s mouth, while a shiv made from a razor blade planted inside a plastic toothbrush handle is pressed up against his throat. The rebel inmate holds Pelton’s head back, mouth open. He manages this by grabbing onto a fistful of hair, pulling the hair back like the reins on a horse. Pelton gags on the pistol barrel. I see his eyes rolling in their sockets while the rebels take turns on him. His Adam’s apple does a bobbing dance. Blood runs from the gash in his neck. Sweat oozes through the pores of his forehead, runs down his face, off his nose, mixes with the blood on his neck.

I try and turn away, but the inmate who has hold of me won’t allow it.

Pressed against the back of my head is a spoon that’s been lifted from the mess hall. The spoon has been scraped along the concrete floor of a prison cell until razor-sharp. Directly to my right, the barrel of a police-issue M-16 is aimed, point-blank, at Mike Norman’s head. But Norman can’t stand up. Norman lies on his stomach on the wet concrete floor of Times Square. A black-and-white helicopter hovers overhead. Below, a crowd of twelve hundred inmates faces us, the hostages on parade. They wave their fists in the air, not in solidarity, but in a defiant show of force. Why give a sign of peace when you can wave a fist?

I lower my head, stare at my bare feet flat against the gray concrete. I feel the edge of that sharpened spoon suddenly pressed harder against the back of my head, ready to spear the skin and bone.

“On three,” the inmate behind me says. “We execute on three.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

I MANAGED TO MAKE the hike down from Old Iron Top without falling, despite the smooth-soled cowboy boots. I jogged the entire way, feeling the muscles in the backs of my legs tense up as I grabbed onto the thick branches and tree trunks lining the narrow footpath. The day was growing noticeably hotter, even in the shaded woods, and by the time I reached the bottom, I was drenched in sweat and out of breath.

When I came to the edge of the woods, just a dozen or so yards from the cabin, I waited until I was certain that Cassandra was inside and had no plans for coming back out. I crouched and moved quickly to the Pontiac. I found the car keys in my pocket, opened the trunk, and peeled back a portion of the black carpeting. I slipped the.32 out of my pants and put it in the trunk, then I pressed the carpeting back in place and closed the trunk as quietly as I could. I turned, took a breath, and walked into the cabin like nothing had happened at all on the summit of Old Iron Top.

Cassandra was already asleep on the floor in front of the fireplace, on the same wool blanket she had slept on the night before. I knelt down, shook her shoulder. She stirred and looked up at me with glazed eyes. She gave me a dreamy smile, and for just a quick second, I had the distinct sensation that she was going to kiss me on the mouth.

“What took you so long?” she said, yawning and curling back into the blanket, hands pressed together as though praying, only using them for a pillow under her head.

I sat down on the floor and did my best to suppress the urgency building up inside my sternum. It was a sensation that screamed, Tell me everything you know; hold nothing back! But I knew I had to take it slowly, carefully, not give Cassandra any reason to back away.

I felt the gentle heat from a fire now reduced to glowing embers.

“You never told me,” I said, “who pulled the trigger on Vasquez.”

She leaned up on her right elbow, tilted her head slightly so that it nearly rested on her shoulder. Her smooth, long hair gravitated toward the floor. Other than her breathing and the steady hiss of the fading embers, there were no other sounds inside the cabin.

“Who pulled the trigger, Cassandra?” I pictured the black-plated.32 she’d tossed into the briars and pine scrubs. I could smell the freshly fired gunpowder. I pictured the way she’d wrapped the Ace bandage around her waist so as to conceal what was growing inside her.

She sat up straight but stared at the floor. Until I grabbed her shoulders.

“I want to know,” I said in a forced whisper. “No matter how much it hurts.”

I was so close to telling her what I’d seen only minutes ago on the granite clearing of Old Iron Top that I could almost taste it. But that would have been the wrong thing to do. That would have put her on the defensive and that’s not what I wanted at all. I wasn’t after the truth about who’d pulled the trigger on Vasquez, so much as I was after the truth about Cassandra. I had to be sure I could trust her. Because if she could lie about the murder and if she could conceal her pregnancy, then she could easily lie about the victim-of-circumstances role she’d played in Pelton’s drug operation.

“Keeper stop it,” she begged.

I let go of her shoulders. She took a deep breath and then another.

“Like I told you,” she said, in a long drawn-out voice. “Yesterday afternoon, Martin Schillinger and Pelton came to see us in our room at the Stevens House.”

“Pelton and Schillinger together,” I said. “You’re sure about that?”

“I worked with them for a long time. I made that horrible movie with them. I know what they look and sound like.”

I nodded.

“They pounded their fists against the door, threatened to knock it in if we didn’t open it right away. Eddy took the.32 from the desk drawer and stuffed it in my hand, he pushed me into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. And all the time I’m hearing the sound of fists and feet kicking down the door. And just like that, they were in.”

“You couldn’t see them,” I said. “But you could hear them.”

“I heard them fighting, struggling. Then I heard the shots.”

“How many shots?”

“Two,” she said, with a shaky voice that verged on tears.

I stood up and, using the pointy tip of my cowboy boot, stamped out a lit ember that had popped out of the open fireplace.

“Two shots,” Cassandra repeated. “Back-to-back.”

I wondered how many chambers had been fired from the.32. Two, maybe three. I couldn’t be sure. There was no sure way to tell.

“Did you hear what Pelton and Schillinger said before they shot Vasquez?”

“Pelton called Eddy a ‘back-stabbing bastard.’ He called him some other things, too, but that’s what I remember most. They fought and some glass broke and then they must have had Eddy down on his stomach because Pelton said, ‘Let me see his face.’ And the room went silent for a minute and I wanted to unlock the door and run out of the bathroom and blow them all to hell.”

“But the.32 had no bullets.”

“I didn’t know that then,” she said. “I thought I’d lose it right there. I was afraid. You know, fear-a normal human response to danger.”

“Trust me, I know what it is,” I said.

“I called out for Eddy, but he wouldn’t answer. Then came the first shot and I thought I would fall dead on the floor like the bullet had hit me. I heard Schillinger. He said, ‘Shoot him again and then shoot the bitch in the closet.’ And then they shot Eddy a second time. But before they started after me I was already out the window, down the fire escape, and making a run for the river.”

“So Pelton was the trigger man?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I couldn’t see, remember?”

“But whoever did it used two caps. You’re sure about that.”

This time, Cassandra wouldn’t answer. My questioning was getting to her. I could see it in the wear and tear on her face. Maybe she was telling the truth, maybe she wasn’t. There was no way to be certain one way or the other. All I knew was that I had seen her up-close-and-personal, tossing that.32 into a patch of heavy vegetation on Old Iron Top where no one would ever find it. But then, maybe she had other reasons for tossing it away and maybe those reasons had nothing to do with the shooting death of Vasquez. In the end, what it came down to was whether or not I could trust Cassandra. I had been racking my brain over it for almost twenty-four hours. I had to choose, one way or the other. If I chose not to trust her then I had to make her a prisoner, lock her up in one of the rooms and tie her to the bed until I was ready to haul her in to the authorities on my own terms. On the other hand, if I chose to trust her, I had to make her an asset, an ally to the cause, which was nothing other than getting out of this mess as fast and as cleanly as possible. I had to choose; there were no two ways about it. The sooner I made the decision and the commitment, the better off I’d be. What little time I had-before the police or Pelton’s goons, or both, had me trapped-was precious.

Choose, Keeper, whispered the voice inside my head. Choose now.

I looked at Cassandra on the floor, her head hung in sadness.

I chose to trust her.

With that clearly in mind, I decided to pursue another avenue. Instead of focusing on the killer, I decided to focus on the weapon.

“Cassandra,” I said, “were you able to see the pistol they used?”

She was crying now. Long, drawn-out tears.

“I told you before,” she said. “The bathroom door was closed.”

That’s when it hit me.

I pulled out the.45 and discharged the clip. I began to empty the rounds, one by one, into the palm of my hand. There should have been eight rounds in the magazine. But only six were ejected from the clip.

It hit me a second time.

When Pelton’s men raided and ransacked my Stormville home on Wednesday, as I was detained in the Albany County lockup, they must have found the.45 under the mattress and taken the two shells they would eventually need to kill Vasquez and pin the whole thing on me. Of course, I couldn’t be sure. But the alternative was to believe that Cassandra had killed Vasquez and was now lying about it along with everything else. But I had no way of knowing just what caliber round Vasquez had been shot with, and it was possible that my.45 had only had six rounds in the clip to begin with. So in the end, I had no real way of discerning the truth.

Using my thumb, I pressed the shells back into the clip. Cassandra wiped the tears from her face and took some deep breaths, composure regained. I couldn’t get the image of that Ace bandage wrapped around her torso out of my mind. I wondered how many weeks or months along she was. She couldn’t have been that far into the pregnancy, because she was only just showing.

“What do you plan on doing now, Keeper?” she inquired. “We can’t stay up here forever and I can’t take any more of your damned third degree. I saved your life, for God’s sakes. Remember that.”

With the.45 in hand, I stood by the heavy wooden door that led to the carport, beside the corner where my grandfather stored his fly rods. I turned and looked at Cassandra.

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is, after all that, you’re not thinking of leaving me, are you, Keeper?”

I slammed the clip back into the.45 and returned the weapon to my belt.

“I need you,” I said. “And I think you need me. But there’s something we have to do first, and like I told you before, it involves getting Pelton and Schillinger in one place at one time. And that place has got to be here, in this cabin, because this is my turf and this is where I’ll have the most control.”

I went into the kitchen and took a beer out of the refrigerator. I cracked the tab with my thumb and took a deep drink. Cassandra followed me. She suddenly seemed far from tears, curiosity and concern having replaced fear and loathing.

“What about all the others?” she said. “What about the guy who turned you in? What about Mike Norman?”

I drank the rest of the beer in one long swallow and fired up a cigarette.

“Norman’s dead,” I said. “They found him late last night, hanging from a steam pipe in his office in Albany.”

Cassandra went pale. She reached out to the kitchen table for balance.

“It could have been suicide,” I added. “Or it could have been murder. But the result was the same.”

I took another beer from the fridge and opened it. As opposed to the last one, this beer would get sipped.

“They got to him, didn’t they?” Cassandra said. “The bastards got to him, too, just like they got to Eddy and almost got to us.”

She stood up straight and breathed and took the beer out of my hand and drank deeply.

“How can I help you?” she said, handing the beer back to me. “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Please, just tell me.”

My father used to tell me that when things got bad, all you had to do was sit down, regroup, think things out, and make a plan. Just the act of making the plan, he said, seemed to make you feel better, like you were in control again. And that’s what I was about to do. And I think the strategy was about to pay off because Cassandra seemed to perk up just a little bit.

“Cassandra,” I said, “how good are you at working a video camera?”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

THERE WAS A REMOVABLE panel in the wood floor of the great room between the fireplace and the door. While most of the cabin had been built on a concrete slab, my grandfather had dug out a small cellar to use as storage for onions and potatoes. Occasionally he used it for smoking trout or perch or venison strips. Just a room in the ground, maybe six feet deep by eight feet wide, accessible only by a removable panel and a stepladder. A great hiding spot for me when I was a kid.

I turned on all the lamps in the great room, and I got on my knees and began feeling around for the edges of the removable panel. The edges had been smoothed out in the many years since the cellar had been used and had I not known it was there, I would never have known the difference. Dirt had filled the tiny groove between the square panel and the planks that surrounded it so that the surface of the cabin floor appeared perfectly homogeneous. But once I began my search, I found the edges right away.

I went into the kitchen and took two steak knives out of the drawer. I got back on my knees and stuck each blade into opposite ends of the panel while Cassandra stood over me. I braced myself and lifted the panel off the floor.

As I’d expected, the hole was dark, and a cool, moist air rose from it. I asked Cassandra to look under the sink for a flashlight. She found one and brought it to me. I hit the switch and shined the bright light into the hole. The place was covered with spider webs and, aside from the insects, seemed absolutely dead. Until I heard the distinct sound of something scurrying back and forth on the dry plank floor at the bottom of the hole. I must have disturbed some animal. From where I lay on the floor, I was amazed to see the shriveled remnants of petrified potatoes and onions left behind by my grandfather on the wooden shelves lining the walls of the cellar. Still, I wasn’t able to make out the far side of the crawl space -the portion covered by the cabin floor.

“I’m going in,” I said.

“Better you than me,” Cassandra said.

With flashlight in hand, I eased myself down onto the stepladder, pressing my weight onto the top rung to make sure it was sturdy enough to support me. Shining the flashlight on the floor, I stepped into the hole. The change in air temperature was immediate. The hole was warm but clammy, and the air smelled funky. I swiped away at the spider webs and ducked under the floor structure and it was then that I discovered the source of the animal sounds. In the far corner of the otherwise empty space, a family of snakes had taken up residence. Garden snakes, the biggest I’d ever seen. The snakes were piled up into one corner like a stack of black-and-yellow garden hoses. Maybe four of them. I wasn’t the type to be spooked by the occasional spider or rat or multi-legged insect. But snakes were a different story. Just the sight of a snake, even on television, had a way of making me catatonic if only for a few seconds until I was able to pull myself together. So here’s what I did: I pulled out the.45, emptied the entire six rounds into them, watched their black-and-yellow flesh bounce and tremble from the blasts.

The entire cellar lit up like the Fourth of July.

“Keeper!” Cassandra screamed. “What’s happening?”

I climbed up the ladder, the three dead snakes in hand.

“Oh my God,” Cassandra chanted, backing away fast. “Oh dear sweet Jesus.”

“Don’t worry. They’re dead and the hole is now clean.”

“So why should I be worried?” she said, as I went for the door of the cabin, opening it and tossing the dead snakes out beyond the woodpile. “What’s that hole got to do with me?”

“That cellar,” I said, closing the door behind me, “is going to be your post tomorrow night during the party.”

“Party,” she said. “What party?”

“The TV party we’re going to have with our good friends, Wash Pelton and Marty Schillinger.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

IT TOOK SOME DOING to convince Cassandra that the cellar would be clean and that no snakes could possibly get into it again. And she agreed that snake phobias-like all phobias-made little sense, considering that garden snakes, at least, were harmless. I told her that for a psych 101 correspondent student, she had certainly covered a lot of territory. Knowing the truth about fear, she said, didn’t make it any easier for her.

“Me neither,” I said, although my sympathy did little to calm her nerves.

We took the car into town and rented a VCR. Then we drove thirty miles to the closest Radio Shack in the little ski town of North Creek. As luck or providence would have it, I was able to charge a video camera along with a thin, flexible scope that could take pictures from any place and any position at any time of day. The snakelike lens cost about ten times what the camera cost, but would be worth its weight in diamonds if my plan succeeded.

By the time we got back to the cabin it was late afternoon. I set the camera up on its tripod in the potato cellar and I attached the video probe. It took a bit more convincing, but eventually Cassandra climbed down with me.

“All we have to do,” I said, forcing the black, super thin camera lens through a knothole in the floorboard beside the access panel, “is snake this baby through here.”

“Bad choice of words,” Cassandra said, examining the controls on the video camera.

In the meantime, I climbed out of the cellar and stood near the door to the cabin.

“Can you see me?”

“Right on,” Cassandra said. “You look about three feet taller and twenty pounds lighter.”

I suggested that the vision must be a real improvement. Cassandra laughed and disagreed saying she preferred solid muscular men to skinny wimps.

Next I repositioned the TV so that the screen faced the cellar and the camera lens.

“How about the TV screen?” I inquired.

“I’m getting the whole thing,” Cassandra said. “You and the TV.” She came back out of the cellar, brushed away some of the dust and dirt from her pants. “There’s just one thing that’s got me perplexed.”

“What is it?” I said, moving away from the door and pulling back the shade on the picture window, making my usual check outside.

“Why don’t you just make a copy of the video once you get ahold of it, and send it off to the governor or some bureaucrat like that. I mean, why go to all this trouble?”

“We don’t have time for all that,” I said, letting the shade fall back. “Besides, it’s not the film I’m so concerned with. It’s Pelton’s and Schillinger’s reactions to the film that I’m more interested in.”

She nodded.

“I want to see their faces when I get them to admit that they pulled the trigger on Vasquez, and I want them to see my face when they admit that they set me up to take the fall, and I want to record the event on tape-not just for the governor, but for all the world to see.”

Cassandra turned away and stood in front of the picture window that looked out onto the east-west road and the trout stream alongside it.

“You may have a tough time getting them to do that,” she suggested.

“Who knows,” I said, “I’ve been known to get lucky from time to time.”

“Not lately.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

THE NEXT MORNING, I drove to the Ironville post office to retrieve the box that Tony’s Guinea Pigs had (God willing) found and overnighted from Olancha. The post office was a small brick building with a slate roof and old, French windows. The Formica counter held a cash register as well as a weight scale for packages. On both sides of the counter were walls of post office boxes. The boxes were the same old, wrought-iron compartments I recalled from my youth when I’d ridden shotgun beside my grandfather going to pick up his mail on Saturday mornings. On display in a glass booth below the counter were the featured stamps of the month, which, it turns out, were the faces of jazz legends the likes of Duke Ellington, Mel Torme, and even the chairman of the board himself, Sinatra. Maybe one day there’d be a stamp of the keeper and his famous drums.

On the drive from the cabin to the post office I’d wondered how good an idea it had been to use my grandfather’s name on the package. Considering that things never changed this far north, there was the distinct possibility that the man or woman working behind the counter would have known my grandfather. Luckily, the kid behind the counter could not have been more than eighteen years old. He had long hair parted in the middle. The hair had been dyed yellow as opposed to natural blond. It probably hadn’t been washed in two, maybe three weeks, and it hung down in clumps, like starchy spaghetti. He wore a T-shirt, on the front of which was the visage of Kurt Cobain, the self-assassinated rock star who seemed to be the model for the kid’s obsession with the same straggly yellow hair, the same it-sucks-to-be-alive expression, and the same three-day-old growth. Below Kurt’s picture were the dates 1967-1994. It bothered me to know someone could be so young, so rich, and so resentful of the world. Maybe old Kurt’s death was really murder, a cover-up for something else? Maybe someone should have interrogated his wife?

I stepped up to the counter.

“Package for Marconi,” I said.

“First name,” the kid said.

“Pasquale,” I said.

“What?” the kid asked, eyebrows upturned.

“Pasquale,” I repeated. “It’s Italian for Patrick.”

“Hang on,” the kid said. He turned and went through the swinging, restaurant-style door that led to the distribution area in back. It seemed like the entire operation would be a piece of cake. But then I spotted a stack of the FBI’s most wanted posters tacked to the bulletin board on the plaster-coated wall beside me. I imagined my face there for all of Ironville to see as they retrieved their junk mail. All twelve hundred people. The five-by-seven, black-and-white poster would show my face, head-on, and a left-side profile. In the photo, I would be frowning, my mustache covering my upper lip, my eyes dark. My face would not have been shaved in many days and the salt-and-pepper stubble would match the slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair on my head. My thick, muscular neck would meet my overdeveloped trapezius muscles at the bottom of the photograph. My neck would support a thin chain supporting a placard with a seven-digit ID number, and to the innocent bystander, I would appear more like a hit man than a lawman.

Kurt Cobain returned with a box cradled in his skinny arms.

“This just came in, overnighted from California.”

I signed for the box and took it in my arms. Then I did something very strange. What I mean is, I should have sprinted for the door, jumped into the Pontiac, raced back to the cabin. Instead I found myself hesitating for a second or two.

“It’s a shame,” I said, nodding toward the Kurt Cobain T-shirt. “I understand he was a father.”

“Yeah,” the kid said, “so what?”

“Maybe,” I said, “old Kurt never thought life was worth living. Not even for the sake of his child.”

“You sound like my old man,” the kid said, now leaning against the counter. “He likes to sit inside the trailer, watch satellite TV, drink beer, and talk about the good life. Whatever that is.”

“It’s life anyway you look at it,” I said. “And it’s the only one you got.”

The kid frowned.

I left.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

BACK AT THE CABIN, I opened the package with a steak knife, slicing through the layers of duct tape and cardboard, careful not to destroy any of the contents in the process. When I peeled back the folds, I found three plastic baby dolls inside, just like Cassandra said I would. The dolls were protected with piles of crumpled-up newspaper. I pulled out the paper and tossed it into the fireplace where it quickly caught fire.

Beneath the newspaper, I found the money, neatly stacked.

There had to be hundreds of hundred dollar bills. Thousands actually.

“You took a real chance shipping cash this way,” I said.

“What choice did I have,” Cassandra argued, “UPS?”

For a moment or two, I just looked at her.

Then I said, “Yeah, UPS would have been good.”

I picked up the first doll, placed it against my right ear, shook it, discovered a slight rattling.

Cassandra held her hands out to me, took the doll into her arms and cradled it, as if the doll were a real baby. She turned it over and pulled up the white taffeta gown the toy-maker had dressed it in. The back of the doll had been cut up and down along the spine and then sewn back together with fishing line. Not a very neat job, but it seemed to have done the trick. Cassandra placed the doll down on the table.

“Cut along there,” she said, pointing to the suture in the doll’s back.

I opened the baby doll’s back with the steak knife and uncovered more money and one compact videocassette. The cassette was a lot smaller than the VHS-style cassette I was used to-more compact, more modern, I supposed. The cassette contained no stick-on label, no identification of any kind.

I cut through the backs of the other two dolls and found three hundred thousand dollars, of which I would owe Tony Angelino one hundred thousand. The remainder would go to Cassandra Wolf. For Mexico and a new life, for her and her baby.

I held the videocassette in my right hand, held it up to Cassandra’s face.

“How do you know for certain that this is the one?”

With her right hand she pointed to the TV and the attached VCR.

She said, “I put the package together myself. But if you have to be sure…”

“Not a bad idea,” I said. “That is, if you don’t mind me looking at the film.”

Cassandra looked at me with sad eyes and a slight smile.

“If it’s for our freedom,” she said, “then I suppose it’s for a good cause.”

I smiled and for a second or two we said nothing.

I reached out for her arm.

“You going to be okay?” I said, slipping the cassette out of the transparent plastic protector.

She crossed her arms tight, as though embracing herself.

“Maybe we should pop some popcorn,” she said, “really make a show of it.”

“Hey,” I smiled, “a flick isn’t a flick without the popcorn.”

But it wasn’t the least bit funny.

The picture on the video was blurry, with only a bed and a bare wall for background.

“Where did Pelton film this?” I inquired.

Cassandra sat behind me on the wood floor in what had become a near permanent perch beside the fire. She had both arms crossed and locked tightly at the chest, a wool blanket wrapped around her torso. She was rocking back and forth, as though freezing.

“At the Coco’s Motor Inn,” she revealed, “near the Albany airport.”

“Hotel-no-tell,” I said.

In person, a very tragic-looking Cassandra stared into the newly stoked fire-a fire on what had become a very warm afternoon. But then, I think the fire was necessary. I think the fire helped Cassandra cauterize her memory of Wash Pelton. In the video she wore black thigh-high stockings and a black garter belt, no panties. Despite the way the film moved in and out of focus, I could plainly see the heart-shaped tattoo on the left side of her neck. I knew the film was nothing more than a porn film, whether it was meant for Pelton’s private viewing or not. Still, I couldn’t help noticing how beautiful Cassandra looked with bare breasts and flat stomach, and there was the way she moved in the bed, smoothly, not the least bit abrupt, her eyes closed the entire time.

Pelton, on the other hand, looked terrible. He had undergone a drastic change in the years since we had been corrections officers together. His gut had become large and fleshy, his arms lanky, if not atrophied. The same went for his legs. His appendage was long, veiny, and purple. The little bit of hair he had on his head was snow-white. In a word, he had gone soft. Irreparably soft.

I knew I could have watched the film from start to finish without Cassandra interfering. She knew the stakes as well as I did. But once I saw the jagged scar on Wash’s neck, I knew without a doubt that I could make a positive ID in a court of law. And a positive ID is exactly what I needed to turn the tables on him.

But then another man appeared in the viewfinder. A tall, portly man. Schillinger, of course. He stood in front of Cassandra, took hold of her hair, pulled her up onto the bed.

I turned and looked at the real-life Cassandra sitting on the floor staring into the fire, that wool blanket wrapped around her on a hot spring day in May.

Enough is enough, I thought.

I got up, hit the eject button on the machine, pulled the cassette tape out, and slipped it back into the plastic case. I took a pot out of the kitchen and placed the video inside it, along with some of the cash. I filled two more pots with the rest of the cash. Then I took up the square panel from the floor and stored the pots in the far corner of the cellar, in the exact place where I had shot the snakes. When I was finished, I climbed back up the ladder, secured the cellar, and got two beers out from the fridge. One for me and one for Cassandra, courtesy of my love, Val Antonelli, and my lawyer, Tony Angelino.

By that time, it was going on four o’clock. I needed to call Tony with directions to the cabin so that he could feed them to Schillinger and Pelton. But what if they decided to blow the whole thing off? What if they decided to take a chance on me exposing the video to the entire world? What if they figured I was already screwed or way beyond screwed, video or no video? What if they knew for certain I was going down, not only for the aiding and abetting of Eduard Vasquez’s escape, but also for his murder?

If it all happened that way, then prison was inevitable.

The corrections officers would not bother protecting one of their own. In the maximum security prisons of the 1990s, the gorillas were in charge, not the hacks or the screws. Certainly not “the man.” The COs would stand off to the side while the inmates held me down flat on the concrete floor and cut away my flesh piece by piece with a shiv made from a disposable, prison-issue razor. The inmates would hold me down by the arms and legs and cut along the back, making shallow slices, then deeper slices. They would peel the skin, roll it back, expose the fleshy-white under-layer until no skin was left on my back. Then they would string me up by the neck, maybe slice my gut so that my intestines would spill out onto the cold concrete.

Anything I imagined could come true, and worse.

Schillinger and Pelton had to take the bait.

I felt a hand against my shoulder. I turned fast, grabbed it.

“Jesus,” Cassandra said.

I dropped an open beer to the floor and pressed her up against the wall of the kitchen.

“Don’t ever do that again,” I said. I released my hold on her. “I’m sorry,” I said. I pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

Cassandra wiped her eyes, combed her brown hair with open fingers.

“You need help,” she said. “Maybe if you had found a way to resolve your wife’s-”

“Don’t,” I said, pointing the lit cigarette at her in place of my index finger. “You have no idea.”

The white foam spread out in all directions on the floor.

She took a step toward me. “Don’t talk to me about being alone. You’re not the only one who’s alone. You’ve got no right to think you’re the only one who is alone.”

I pictured her image on the video and I pictured what she was doing to Pelton in that white hotel room. I pictured what she did with Schillinger. Then I saw her tossing that black-plated.32 off the side of the granite clearing and into the heavy growth on top of Old Iron Top.

Maybe she was right.

More accurately: I had no right to feel like the only one who had suffered.

I bent over, picked up the now empty beer can, and set it on the kitchen table. Then I put my hands on Cassandra’s shoulders, pulled her toward me, into me.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“Maybe you’re just scared,” she said. “But then who isn’t?”

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

AT FOUR O’CLOCK, CASSANDRA and I changed into black jeans, black turtlenecks, and black lace-up combat boots. I pulled a black watch cap over my head. We painted one another’s faces with black face paint to make the get-up complete. I slipped on a pair of black leather gloves that fit so tightly that they might have passed as a second skin, and I spent the next half hour squeezing my hands in and out of fist position so as to loosen up the gloves and make sure my trigger finger was free.

I laid out the Remington 1187s on the kitchen table and loaded the weapons with five two-and-three-quarter eight-shot all-purpose magnum loads. I handed one of the shotguns, barrel up, to Cassandra.

“You know how to use this thing?”

She pulled back the chamber device on the semiautomatic and popped the release. The cabin was filled with the sharp, solid, metallic sound of a round being chambered.

“Eddy Vasquez was my lover,” she said, depressing the safety latch on the trigger as if that was answer enough. Then she went into the great room and pulled up the floor-board panel. She climbed down and leaned the shotgun against the wall beside the ladder. When she climbed back out of the hole, she said, “Maybe you’d better make that call now.”

“It’s the only thing left to do,” I agreed.

Using the old rotary phone in the kitchen, I dialed the number for Tony Angelino’s private line at his office inside Albany’s Council 84. The time was four-fifteen.

He answered after the first ring, not bothering with a formal hello. “Go,” is all he said in his raspy baritone.

It took me a little less than fifteen seconds to give him precise directions from Albany to Ironville and the cabin.

“Sounds like my L.A. Guinea Pig contingent came through,” Tony said.

“Pelton and Schillinger are definitely coming?” I probed.

“Pelton was happy you came to your senses. Said he’ll figure out a way to back you up, if you’ll only give him back that video.”

“They ask about copies? What if they think we made copies?”

“I told them it was a chance they’d have to take, paisan. I told them all you wanted was your name back, and your job, and that it would not be in your best interest to further piss them off. That you wanted to work with them now, not work against them. Capisce?”

“And Cassandra?”

“Told them you sent her on her way. That she’s probably in Mexico by now.”

“No cops,” I said.

“No cops,” Tony said.

“And you’re sure they bought it, Tone?”

“Sure as I’ll ever be,” he said.

“I’ll be in touch,” I said.

I drank two more beers over the next two hours. I could have drunk more. In any case, the adrenaline or the fear or both seemed to burn the alcohol away as fast as I put it in. Cassandra drank nothing. She seemed calm, casually sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace in her black jeans and turtleneck, the fire having been allowed to die completely for the first time since we’d arrived. For now, the cabin interior was lit with the dim light that came from the brass table lamp on top of the three-tiered bookshelf abutting the stone fireplace. We said very little. Not even small talk. I paced the cabin floor and said nothing.

Nothing seemed like the easier alternative.

CHAPTER SIXTY

BLOOD RUNS FROM THE base of Wash Pelton’s neck, down the front of his yellow inmate jumper. It hits me then: Why bother holding a shiv to a man’s neck if you already have the barrel of a.38 service revolver pressed up against his head?

In the four days since the rebel inmates took control of D-Block and D-Yard, they have not fired a single round. The murdered COs were cut open with shivs, not blown away by bullets.

Beatings and shivings, but not bullets.

The situation is simple, but deadly. The rebel inmates have firearms, but they don’t have bullets.

As the afternoon of the fourth day wears on, the rebel inmates make their demands once more. Demands for food, money, medical supplies, helicopters, weapons, freedom, and, of course, bullets. Lots of bullets. With fists raised high and bandannas wrapped around their heads and sunglasses covering their bloodshot eyes, they scream insane orders over government-issue bullhorns from the center of Times Square to the state troopers who line the west wall, sighting us in with their.270 caliber standard-issue sniping rifles. Their firearms are loaded and locked.

No question about that. The question, on the other hand, is this: Do the troopers have orders to take out three corrections officers in the interest of saving the lives of two dozen others?

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

AT EXACTLY ONE MINUTE past eight o’clock on a warm Saturday night in May, just five days after convicted cop-killer Eduard Vasquez escaped from Green Haven Maximum Security Prison-and just two days after his assassination- two egg-shaped headlights broke through the darkness of the north country. What I guessed was a state-owned, four-door Ford Taurus rolled slowly along the east-west Ironville road until the driver turned off and pulled into the driveway that led to the cabin.

I moved away from the picture window and turned toward Cassandra.

“You know what to do,” I said, keeping my eyes planted on the headlights, remembering her pregnant condition.

“Yes,” spoke a voice in the darkness, “I know what to do.”

The white light from Cassandra’s four-battery flashlight sliced through the thick darkness like a laser beam. From where I stood, I heard her lifting the wood panel off the floor. I heard her steps when she climbed down the ladder. I heard her replace the panel.

What happened next was up to me.

And luck.

I pulled the.45 out from behind my back, pulled back the slide and felt the good solid feel of racking a live round. Using my thumb, I clicked on the safety and stuffed the piece, barrel first, behind my belt buckle. I jogged into the back bedroom and picked up the twelve-gauge Remington with the flashlight I had duct-taped to the barrel. I opened the bedroom window and climbed out, hind end first, so that I was sitting on the windowsill with my legs still in the room. Then I stood on the sill and heaved myself up onto the roof.

I shimmied up onto the wood shakes, crawled on my chest and stomach, propelled myself with my legs, arms, and hands, feeling the brittle wood shakes crack underneath my weight. I slid up to the apex of the A-frame and looked down on the driveway. From this position, I watched the headlights cut through the blackness of the early evening. The car moved slowly up the hard-packed dirt road, sweeping up pebbles and stones against the underside of the carriage until the driver turned into the driveway and stopped.

The headlights from the car shined on the front of the cabin but not in my eyes. From my position on the roof I was able to see Tommy Walsh squeeze his massive body out from behind the steering column. And I was able to see Wash Pelton get out of the passenger side. And I saw Marty Schillinger crawl out of the backseat.

“What the heck is going on here?” Pelton said. “Keeper Marconi, you here?”

His strained voice echoed against Old Iron Top and then drifted out over the grassy fields opposite the Ironville road. When Pelton took three or four steps forward I was able to see that he wore a black business suit tailored to fit his soft, middle-aged body. He wore a bright red tie that showed well in the light that came from the headlamps on the Taurus. He looked out of place in the middle of the Adirondack forest. Unfortunately for him, the tie would make a good target if I needed one.

Tommy pulled out his service pistol and assumed a sharpshooter’s stance-legs spread, feet flat, knees cocked, arms out straight, two hands supporting the Glock’s grip. Like the turret on a tank, he shifted his aim from left to right to left again. He seemed more suited to the occasion, with his work boots and jeans and jean jacket with the sleeves cut off.

“Keeper Marconi,” Pelton shouted again, this time with his hands cupped up around his mouth like a megaphone.

I felt the old wood shakes snapping and breaking underneath me.

Tommy pivoted, waving the Glock in the direction of the east-west road, as if suspecting an ambush.

“Put that thing away, Tommy,” Schillinger ordered, “before you get lucky and shoot yourself.”

Schillinger looked like a Sam Spade detective out of Hammett novel with his shin-length Burberry trench coat.

“This your idea of a joke, Marty?” Pelton said, now looking at his partner.

I held my breath and considered Pelton’s and Schillinger’s attitude toward each other a good sign. No conveyance of even the most minimal courtesies between them. Antagonistic allies at best.

“I don’t joke,” Schillinger spat. “You should know that by now.”

“Let’s just get back in the car and go,” Pelton said, now stepping toward the Taurus.

It was then that I shined the barrel-mounted flashlight on the three men.

Schillinger and Pelton brought their hands up to their foreheads in a mock salute to shield their eyes. Tommy Walsh pivoted on the balls of his feet, aiming the barrel of his piece at the source of the light.

“Lose the cannon, Tommy!” I shouted.

All three looked up at me, squinting their eyes as if straining to see me.

“Lose it now!”

But Tommy wouldn’t listen. He just planted a solid bead on me with his weapon as I spread my legs and anchored my weight against the roof. I pulled open the chamber on the Remington 1187 and, purely for effect, released it again. No other sound in the world carries more weight than the sound of a twelve-gauge semiautomatic when it’s locked and loaded. The metal against metal sound echoed and bounced off the south face of Old Iron Top, as if, somehow, the old hilltop were alive and well and on my side.

“Do it, Tommy,” Pelton said with an even, businesslike voice.

“Yeah, dummy,” Schillinger said, “lose the toy.”

Tommy turned and gave Pelton and Schillinger a disgusted, sour look. He tossed the piece a few feet away, onto the lawn. “I told you he was gonna try and shoot us,” he said. “Just like he blew that drug addict Moscowitz away.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Pelton said.

“Moscowitz wear a wool overcoat?” I said.

“Yeah,” Schillinger broke in. “The drug addict wears a wool overcoat. Cold, all the time, the freak.”

“Old Tommy here is not so dumb after all,” I said.

Tommy let out a laugh.

“Told you, douche bag.”

Schillinger bobbed his head.

“Keep laughing, fat ass,” he said. “Pretty soon you’re gonna be road-kill, too.”

“Both of you, stop it,” Pelton shouted while remaining perfectly still, hands up. “Let’s hear what he’s got to say.”

“Move closer to the cabin,” I said, feeling the sharp sting of the splintered wood shakes piercing my black jeans, needling the skin on my stomach, chest, and thighs.

No one moved.

“Closer to the cabin,” I said again. “Move away from the car.”

“This wasn’t part of the deal,” Pelton said.

“Tony told us no cops, no guns,” Schillinger added.

I braced myself and let off a round that shattered the windshield on Pelton’s Ford Taurus.

“Move!”

The explosion bounced off the south wall of Old Iron Top and echoed into the empty valley across from the east-west road.

“Move now!”

The three men made for the woodpile under the carport, in the direction of the door. It was all I wanted.

“Open the side door and walk inside,” I yelled, shifting my weight back down off the roof, maneuvering my legs onto the sill of the open bedroom window. “And lock it behind you.”

“You’re digging yourself into one hell of a giant chasm, Keeper,” came the sound of Pelton’s voice. “In my estimation, you’re about to put the proverbial screws to yourself.”

I slid back into the bedroom and ran toward the front of the cabin, shotgun barrel poised ahead of me. “Stand right where you are, gentlemen,” I said, loud enough for Cassandra to hear me through the floorboards.

The three men stood only a foot or two in front of the closed door, within perfect range of the video probe. “Now,” I said with a smiling face, “I hope you guys are movie fans.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

DRY-MOUTHED, HANDS WRAPPED tightly around the smooth wood stock of the Remington 1187, I aimed the barrel at the chests of men I had once considered fraternal brothers. I shined the barrel-mounted flashlight in their eyes, kept them in constant view, especially Tommy. No telling his capabilities in the name of loyalty, allegiance to duty, and good old-fashioned recklessness.

I sidestepped to the bookshelf, keeping the shotgun steady, and reaching under the lampshade, I hit the switch.

“You’re a wanted fugitive,” Schillinger said, his long arms dangling against his loose-fitting Burberry trench coat. “I should warn you, in case you’re planning something stupid.”

“Something more stupid than this?” Pelton said. “I thought we had a nice peaceful exchange set up?”

I could only hope that Cassandra was getting all this on tape under the floorboards of the cabin.

“Look, Marty,” I said, feeling the weight of the shotgun on my left arm, feeling the tightness of the leather glove on the trigger finger of my right hand, “I’m entirely aware of your partnership with Pelton. So stop the good-cop-bad-cop routine before my finger gets itchy.”

“You’re in a position,” Schillinger smirked.

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings,” I said, “but you know how it is when you don’t have control of your own future.”

“I do now,” Schillinger said.

“We kept our part of the bargain, Keeper,” Pelton said, arms out stiff by his side, fingers moving in and out of fist position. “Now give us the film and I’ll see about getting you cleared of this thing.”

If I squeezed the trigger of the twelve-gauge just a fraction of an inch, one round alone of the eight-shot magnum loads would have been enough to take off all three faces. Someone might live through the experience, but what would have been the point of carrying on without a face?

I picked up the remote control for the television and VCR with my left hand, all the time holding the shotgun in my right. I turned on the machines and began to roll the porn flick.

“Now, gentlemen,” I said, “watch carefully. What you see may change my life for the better.”

There were a few seconds of static on the screen. But through the blur, I could make out Wash’s face and the scar on his neck as he sat on the edge of a bed inside a room at the Coco’s Motor Inn. Cassandra was down on her knees. All I could make out of her was her naked back, the garter belt wrapped tightly around her waist. But when she leaned into Wash-between his legs-you could clearly make out the heart-shaped tattoo on her neck, just above her left shoulder.

From where I stood by the bookcase, I could see the sweat break out on Pelton’s forehead. I could almost hear the anger flush into Schillinger’s face. As for the ever-silent Tommy, I could see his eyes moving from the screen to me, then back to the screen. I knew this: He was looking for the perfect opportunity to jump me. But I also knew this: I had to keep all three in one spot long enough for Cassandra to get a shot of them, long enough for them to admit to setting me up.

On the screen, Pelton scrunched the muscles of his red face. He was close to something, I could tell. I recalled the feeling. You could see his lips move but you couldn’t hear what he was saying. Cassandra moved her face out of the way when he finally did come to it. She turned to the camera, opened her eyes wide, disgusted and terrified. When Pelton was through, she held her face down. In a word, she looked defeated.

Then Schillinger came into the picture.

At first all I could make out of him were his skinny legs. But then I could see all of him when he bent over, grabbed Cassandra by the hair, and pulled her onto the bed. I couldn’t hear the words he said, but I could plainly hear Cassandra crying out in pain when Schillinger yanked hard on her thick brown hair.

Now that Schillinger had clearly made his presence known inside the cabin and on the video, it was time for me to lose my weapon. To add emphasis (and drama), I slid back the chamber of the Remington 1187 four distinct times, forcing out four unspent shells. It was an important move losing that shotgun. But it was definitely not in my best interest to continue being the aggressor. It was important for them to think I was the victim.

The heavy shells made a thumping sound on the floor. I handed the shotgun over, stock first, to a shocked Tommy Walsh. He looked at me like my brain had suddenly oozed out of my face through my nostrils. I bent over, picked up each shell, one by one, and put them in the pocket of my black jeans.

“Sorry about the greeting, boys,” I said. “But I had to make sure it was safe.”

Wash appeared to be tongue-tied.

Schillinger appeared to have gone mute.

But then Tommy let the surrendered shotgun fall to the floor. He grabbed me, turned me around, threw me face first against the bookshelf, knocking the brass lamp over. A half-dozen or so books cascaded to the floor.

He held on to me, his thick forearm around my neck.

“Wait,” Pelton said. “Let’s hear what he’s got to say.”

I felt the pain shoot up my back and down my neck between the shoulder blades. Tommy had twisted my arms behind my back. He pressed them up, palms out. I took as deep a breath as I could with my constricted diaphragm, tried to stem the pain, tried to stay calm, clearheaded. It was my one and only shot.

“I say we off the motherfucker now,” Tommy said. “I say we kill him, take the video and our chances.”

“We need him alive,” Wash said.

Schillinger took a few steps forward. “You mean you’re nothing without your fall guy,” he said. Exactly what I wanted him to say. Precisely. That was the good-luck part of the proceedings. But there was the bad-luck part, too: Schillinger reached into his trench coat, came out with his own.9mm Glock. “I agree with Tommy,” he went on. “I say we kill him while we still have the chance. That’s the only reason I agreed to come up here in the first place. To see that the Keeper bites the big one.”

Schillinger handed the pistol over to Tommy, who then jammed the weapon against my temple. I heard the distinct sound of the hammer being thumbed back. My eyes watered, my heart skipped a beat and verged on stopping altogether.

But then Pelton screamed. “I said no!”

There was an explosion, and I felt my body freeze. Tommy broke his grip on me and dropped down flat and lifeless to the cabin floor. I turned fast and saw Pelton with a pistol in his hand, and I saw right away that it was a fancy chrome-plated.38 with an eight-inch barrel and a walnut grip, and there was a thin trace of smoke rising up from the barrel.

Pelton raised the weapon, aimed it at the back of Schillinger’s head. He cocked the hammer a second time, and Schillinger dropped the Glock. When I kicked the Glock away toward the other end of the room, it smeared the puddle of dark red blood that gushed out of the exit wound in Tommy’s head.

“Now,” Pelton said, “we listen to what he’s got to say. Got it? Then we decide what to do with him.”

Schillinger slowly backed away. It was hard to make out his face in the dim light. On the television, Cassandra was on her knees, straddling Wash like a horse while he lay on his back and pulled her long hair back like a rein. Her mouth opened painfully wide, I could clearly see the pain and strain on her face. But then I could see something else on the film too. Something I never would have guessed. Schillinger stood on the edge of the bed, very near the prone Wash. At first, what I saw didn’t register. At first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. But then I knew I couldn’t deny it. There was no denying it whatsoever. In the video, Wash let go of Cassandra and flipped over on the bed onto all fours. Schillinger was on him from behind doing something I had seen happen to him once before at Attica; only this time, he wasn’t screaming or trying to get away.

In all the craziness, both Schillinger and Pelton must have forgotten about the video, because together they turned and looked at the screen.

“Jesus H. Christmas,” Schillinger said.

“What difference does it make what he knows?” Pelton said. “All you want is your name back. Am I right, Keeper? You just want out of this mess.”

“Something like that,” I said. “But first, I want to settle the score.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

“I GAVE YOU A chance to get out of this with a slap on the wrist,” Pelton said, standing near the cabin door, the chrome-plated.38 in hand, eyes on both me and Schillinger. “And I would have compensated you nicely for your troubles.”

I gazed at the screen. Schillinger’s head was hanging back in ecstasy while he worked on Pelton, faster now, the flesh on his white butt cheeks trembling as Cassandra sat back on the bed and stared at the floor.

“Maybe all of this could have been avoided,” I said. The hole in Tommy Walsh’s head was still gushing dark red blood.

“Sure,” Pelton said.

“Pelton would have killed you anyway,” Schillinger said.

“You shut up,” Pelton snapped, waving the gun at his head. “I never wanted anybody killed nor have I killed anyone…of importance, that is.”

“You’re forgetting about Vasquez.”

“Not my doing, Detective Schillinger.”

“Let me guess,” I said, shifting my eyes from the naked bodies on the television screen to the fully clothed bodies in the dimly lit cabin. “I’m sure it never once dawned on you, Wash, that if I took the blame for the escape, I would also be accused of running the drug racket that was about to hit the press once your partners managed to pull off their separate back-stabbings.”

“It wasn’t supposed to work that way, Keeper,” Pelton said. “I never counted on Mike Norman and,” nodding at Schillinger, “my good friend Marty here betraying me.”

“I just want what I have coming,” Schillinger said, looking directly at Pelton and the barrel of that.38.

“So what happened, Wash?” I said. “Let’s see. I’ll bet as soon as I left Mike’s office on Tuesday he got this bright idea and gave you a call and offered you a sale you couldn’t refuse? A few thousand dollars in exchange for evidence that could put Keeper Marconi away and make it look like he’d been perpetrating the drug racket inside Green Haven, maybe even make it look like I was the one who helped Vasquez escape. After all, I signed the orders allowing him outside the prison grounds, and no matter what, I was the one who approached Mike with illegally obtained evidence.”

“In essence,” Wash Pelton said, cocking his head, “that’s what happened.”

“I guess it’s true,” I said, “that I initiated the whole thing through Mike-created a window of opportunity for you. You might even say I could be hating Mike right now, cursing his soul. But, you know what, I’m convinced the poor pathetic bastard must have called you out of desperation, to make a quick buck. In my heart I can’t believe that he would have done anything to hurt me. Not really. And you might have given him a few bucks and his bad conscience might have been a lot easier to handle with a wallet of cash pressed against his backside. But maybe, just maybe, you’d had enough of paying people off.”

“After a while,” Pelton said, the.38 still steady in his hand, “people thought of me as Fleet Bank.”

“You’d already paid Logan and Mastriano to keep their mouths shut,” I said, catching the rapid, wet finish of Schillinger’s act with Pelton on the screen. “And this is after you paid off A. J. Royale for performing an unnecessary root canal on Vasquez. And you had to pay off Doctor Fleischer for putting Mastriano into a fake coma to gain public sentiment and, at the same time, make me look like the bad guy, the insensitive warden. Because all wardens are insensitive tyrants, am I right? You must have figured that you could either take care of Norman with a payoff or have him killed.”

“I had no intentions of going into the hit-man business,” Wash said, shifting his grip on the heavy pistol.

“Choosing the less violent alternative, you gave Schillinger one last payoff to be distributed to Mike Norman in exchange for the bag of evidence. On Tuesday afternoon Marty returned with the evidence you would use against me on Wednesday morning, but what you didn’t know at the time was that he’d kept the payoff for himself, probably telling Norman that it would be delivered within a couple of days. But when Thursday came around, all Lieutenant Mike Norman got was a visit from Marty Schillinger and Tommy Walsh.”

Pelton was staring at Schillinger now. Schillinger was looking at Tommy dead on the floor. As for the video, it was finished and all you could see on the screen was snow.

“How is it you’re privy to all this information, anyway?” Pelted inquired. “I mean, you’re no detective, Keeper. You’re a stupid warden.”

“I paid a second visit to Mike only a few hours after my arrest on Wednesday. He told me flat out that Marty had come in and taken the evidence away from him, no explanations, no nothing. And I believed him.”

Pelton moved closer to Schillinger, put the barrel of the chrome-plated.38 up against his temple.

“So how you and Tommy do it, Marty?” I pressed. “Get Mike good and stinking drunk behind closed doors? Then string him up with his own belt once he passed out, make it look like the suicide he was sure to pull off ever since his nervous breakdown at Attica? With him dead, there was no chance for him to open his mouth about what was going down in the New York State Department of Corrections. Because Mike had been doing little jobs for you guys through the years, hadn’t he? But he could only be trusted just so far since he was a drunk and he wasn’t renowned for being too stable. In fact, Mike might have been gone from the department a long time ago had he not been considered a tragic hero-a survivor of those four bloody days in September 1971. You remember those four days, don’t you, Wash?”

I might have looked into Wash’s eyes, but instead I got a good look at Schillinger. The sweat poured off his brow, into his eyes, down his puffy red cheeks, and onto his Burberry trench coat. I could tell that he wanted nothing more but to wrap his hands around my throat and squeeze till Kingdom Come. But he could do nothing about it. There was nowhere to run and hide. He just had to stand there and take it. That was his only option.

“And you were next on Schillinger’s and Tommy Welch’s list, Commissioner Pelton,” I said. “But Marty here didn’t want to do it so soon after he’d pumped Vasquez.”

“You’re full of shit, Keeper,” Schillinger mumbled.

“You were going to wait until the cops picked up me and Cassandra and slapped us with first-degree murder. And you knew I’d go to Athens, Marty, because you’d planted that envelope on the floor of Vasquez’s cell on Monday afternoon. You knew I’d find it and if I didn’t find it, you would have picked it up yourself and pointed it out to me. You knew I’d be curious enough to go to Athens. You’d shoot Vasquez, and when witnesses would testify to seeing my 4-Runner there, I’d naturally take the blame. But somebody had beaten you to the punch. When you went to kill Vasquez, he was already dead. Still, no matter who killed Vasquez, the result was the same. The case against me and Cassandra would be open and closed. All that would be left would be to make sure Pelton had an accident. But you had time for that.”

There was a thick silence for a slow second or two, with only a clear blue screen on the television and a high-pitched whistling that indicated the porn video was about to run out of tape, and I found myself praying to Christ that the camera was still rolling under the floorboards and that Cassandra was all right. But just then, as I pictured the blood from Tommy Walsh’s head dripping through the cracks in the wood panel into the potato cellar, Schillinger suddenly looked at me and screamed, “I’m not taking a dive!” And just like that he took hold of Pelton’s revolver. “It’s him!” Schillinger shouted while he and Pelton struggled for control of the pistol. “It had to be him. We left the room together. Pelton must have gone back to Vasquez’s room, shot the fucker dead.”

Schillinger screamed and clawed at the pistol but Wash had the advantage with his chubby index finger already wrapped around the hair trigger; it went off and Marty dropped like a stone. He went down right beside Tommy’s body, his blood and his soul draining out of his face like water from a faucet.

For a second or two, Pelton and I just stared down at the two dead bodies. Then he raised his head to me.

“I didn’t kill anybody,” he said in a strained, out-of-breath voice. “I didn’t kill Vasquez. I needed him alive because I wanted my money back. This son of a bitch must have killed him, no matter what he said, he had to have done it. Or you, Keeper, but somehow I don’t think you’re capable. No, Schillinger must have killed Vasquez. Just like he killed Mike and would have killed me. The son of a bitch.” He extended his right arm, held out the pistol, and emptied another round into Schillinger’s body at the exact moment that he said, “bitch.” Schillinger’s dead body jumped when the bullet hit it.

I stood there watching the bleeding body as if I wasn’t in the room at all, like my body was still there but I was somewhere far away, like in a dream. I knew that it didn’t make even an ounce of difference who’d drawn whom into the smuggling and murder business, or who abused whose power or who double-crossed the other or if I had created an accurate scenario of what went down during the last five days or not. In the end what difference did any of my assumptions make? This wasn’t a case of whodunit. It was a case of don’t-blame-me. What I mean is, it didn’t really matter who took the blame for killing Vasquez, as long as it wasn’t Cassandra and as long as it wasn’t me.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

“SEEMS TO ME WE’VE been here before, Wash,” I said, taking a step forward, closer to where he stood. At the same time, I recalled that September afternoon when the rebel inmate held the barrel of the black-plated.38 service revolver inside Wash’s mouth and pressed a shiv against his neck, making the jagged scar that still existed today.

“You turned out to be some kind of hero,” Wash said. “This time I have the power to save your life or take it away.”

“What made you do it?” I said, now standing as still and as nonthreatening as possible. “Why go to all the trouble of arranging a drug deal that was destined to fail? After all we believed in?”

“What we believed in once upon a time, my friend,” he said, “is pure fantasy now. What we believed in was destroyed when Attica went down. They took away our power, handed it over on a platter laced with gold to the inmates. It was either us or the gorillas. Or there was a third option.”

“We could just join the gorillas,” I said.

“Precisely,” Wash said.

“But what do you really know about us or them? How much time have you spent inside a prison lately, other than to make a surprise inspection and take away my officers?”

“I was there, Keeper,” Wash said, shaking the barrel of the chrome-plated.38 in my face. “I was there a long time before I entered the political arena. I felt the pressure, maybe more than most, because of what happened to me at Attica.”

I knew what he was referring to and I knew it involved the four men who’d held him down on the concrete floor of Times Square.

“I felt the pressure too,” I said, “and I never gave in to the gorillas. Not once.”

“Yes, you bloody well did!” Pelton screamed. “You signed the releases for Vasquez a half a dozen different times. You knew he’d killed that rookie cop. You knew he was high risk and that you could have vetoed the releases. But you signed them anyway.”

He was right.

“Come on, Keeper,” he went on, “after Fran died, nothing was important to you anymore. So you let the gorillas take over in force.”

“My wife had nothing to do with this,” I lied.

“You went soft.”

For a moment, I zeroed in on the chrome barrel. If he’d let loose with a round right then, I’d never have known the difference. It’d be lights out, no pain, with the hope that I reached heaven an hour before the devil knew my soul was up for grabs. Right then, standing on the blood-soaked floor of my grandfather’s cabin, death seemed very near, and it was doing a job on me.

“Listen, Keeper,” Wash said, softer this time, “when we started out in this system, there were thirteen thousand inmates for twelve maximum security prisons in New York. Now there’s twice as many inmates living under the same twelve concrete roofs. And do you know what the governor expects of me? My assignment is to cut more officers, cut more programs. Now you tell me, Keeper Marconi, just what does the governor know about prison?”

He kept the barrel of that weapon pointed at my face like it would somehow help him drive his point across. A point that was absolutely valid, but had little to do with saving my life. I was defenseless and Pelton knew it.

“Maybe you had no choice but to go soft, Keeper. We all go soft at some point when the fight becomes pointless. Fran’s death was just the catalyst for your experience. If it hadn’t been her, it would have been something else. And as for Mike Norman? He’d barely gotten out of the starting gate before he crumpled under.” He started bobbing the weapon as though about to collapse under its weight. His finger was pressed against the trigger. I knew he might shoot me and not even intend it. “There is nothing more we can do for inmates. There is no such thing as rehabilitation. Never was. Nowadays, you either give up, or you give in. You gave up is all. I gave in.”

The Remington 1187 was on the floor, not far from my feet. But it wasn’t loaded. I’d unchambered the four unspent rounds myself. My only chance was to jump Pelton or call for Cassandra. But counterattacking Pelton would have blown my entire plan out of the water. I had no choice but to remain the victim for as long as possible.

But then something happened. Something I never would have expected given the dead men on the cabin floor. Pelton took a deep breath, lowered the pistol, eased back the hammer, and simply pocketed the weapon. He spent a second or two rubbing the feeling back into his shooting hand, and then he bent over and pressed the manual eject switch on the rented VCR. When the video was ejected, he popped it out of its VCR adapter and slipped it into his jacket pocket. He straightened up and looked me in the eyes. “You’re certain no further copies of this exist?”

“No copies,” I said, standing cautiously still despite the disappearance of his weapon. “I can’t be sure no one else made any. But Cassandra assured me, before she left.”

Pelton nodded.

“Well then, we had a shaky start, but I think I’ve seen enough to know you mean business.”

“Okay,” I said, not quite grasping his reference to two dead men as a shaky start.

“I’ll make sure you’re cleared of this mess,” he said. “As soon as I get back, I’ll make the necessary calls.”

I nodded.

“Then I’ll send someone up here to take care of the bodies.”

“The overcoat man…what’s his name?”

“Moscowitz.”

“He’s buried out back, underneath a pile of dirt and stones.”

“I see.”

“Key’ll be in the mailbox,” I said.

“Sorry all this had to happen,” Pelton said, running his hand through his gray hair as he turned for the door. “But people change. Things change. You saved my life once. I can’t take that away from you. No matter what, you saved my life. I owe you that. Consider this the fulfillment of a twenty-six-year debt of gratitude.”

I stood still as a statue while the pools of blood grew larger and combined. And just like that, Washington Pelton left through the side door, alone. But as sincere as he may have sounded, I knew he was lying about clearing my name. It was a gift I had, an ability to spot a liar at twenty paces, and it may have been the only thing I’d gotten out of working inside a prison for all these years. I knew that Pelton had no choice but to make me go down for the entire ball of wax. And frankly, I was a little insulted that he assumed I’d bought into his empty promise of vindication.

But there were more immediate problems at hand.

As soon as I heard the Taurus make the turn out of the driveway onto the gravel east-west road, I stepped over the puddles of blood and removed the panel to the potato cellar. Cassandra looked up at me.

“You get it?” I asked.

“You want to see it now,” she said with a killer smile. “Or do you want to see it later?”

“Grab the money,” I said. “We’re taking a little trip.”

“Where to?” Cassandra said, handing up one of the pots filled with cash.

“See an old friend of mine who works in television.”

“No business like show business,” she said.

I felt the weight of the three hundred thousand dollars in my hands, and for the first time in forever, I laughed.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

I SEE THE QUICK muzzle flash from the west wall a split second before I hear the sharp crack of the warning shot. When the round explodes against the concrete floor, it sends stony shrapnel into my face, stinging my chin and lower lip. I feel the edge of the shiv pressed up hard against my throat. But not hard enough to break the skin. I hear the breathing of the rebel inmate who holds me tight, forearm wrapped around my neck. I feel his body pressed against mine, his heart beating through my body. To my right, Mike Norman lies on his chest, facedown on the concrete walkway. He is motionless, has been for more than a day. For all I know he is already dead and there’s not a damned thing I can do about it. The M-16 is still aimed at his head.

An M-16 without rounds.

On my left is Washington Pelton. Blood flows steadily and thickly down the front of his yellow inmate jumper. His Adam’s apple bobs up and down. His face has taken on the chalky-white color of death. My face must appear just as lifeless. He is my mirror image. The troopers aim their sniper rifles steady, just waiting for the word, not even the whole word, just the first sound of the word.

Fire!

If I don’t do something now, I am going to die, one way or the other.

We’re all going to die, in the name of terror or in the name of the law.

Campfires spit red-and-yellow flame and black smoke. Steel tables are tossed on their sides, facing the wall like a barricade. The tables have been wrapped with razor wire. As the canisters of tear gas come hurling into the muddy yard and as the poison clouds rise from them like a gentle mist, I know that all negotiations have failed and that the only reason for keeping the corrections officers alive is suddenly lost to the wind like the pungent gas that begins to sting our faces, burn our eyeballs.

When the troopers storm the west wall, I take a deep breath and elbow the rebel inmate behind me in the ribs. I grab his wrist, jam my fingernails into it, feel the nails dig in. He drops the shiv and together we go down for it onto the concrete catwalk. But I’m quicker than he is, more desperate. I grab the shiv, swipe it across his neck. The flesh of his thick, ham-like neck opens up red and white. Blood spurts out, stains my face. He is dead before he hits the ground.

Rifle shots ring out in succession.

I am curiously aware of everything around me, as if four days without food has somehow, suddenly, enhanced my senses.

I see the rebel inmates take hits, one after the other. I see them drop dead in the yard.

I hear the cries of the wounded, the screams of the gut-shot. I am up and running for the inmate with the shiv pressed against Pelton’s throat. I catch the inmate from behind, run the blade across the back of his neck while he stares distracted and shocked at the hordes of troopers pouring over the walls.

I have just enough time to run the blade through the thick skin, digging deep until I feel the edge of the blade skip across his spine, finally piercing his spine, severing the nerve bundle. His reaction to the blade buried in his neck is more immediate than it was for the appearance of the troopers. He throws his head back, drops the shiv and the empty.38 onto the concrete catwalk. He falls back, looks up at me with wide-open eyes. He moves his mouth, but he cannot talk. Pelton falls beside him, takes hold of my leg. He is panting, bleeding, crying.

At least he is alive.

And as for Norman? He lies on his face, oblivious or dead. I don’t know which. The rebel inmate standing over him presses the trigger of the M-16 again and again, only no rounds burst from the barrel. The rebel inmate flips the M-16 over, butt first. He lifts the weapon by the barrel with two hands, swings it back like a war club.

I have to stop him.

I can make it if I lunge after him.

But I can’t move.

Wash Pelton has me by the leg. He won’t let go of my fucking leg. The rebel inmate takes a deep breath, tightens his stance. The butt of the rifle is up. I reach out for Mike, but I can’t reach out far enough or fast enough. Then it happens. Two separate shots from a sniper’s rifle nail the rebel inmate square in the chest. The sound of the bullets entering his barrel chest are like a baseball bat swung fast and hard against a feather pillow. The inmate’s eyes go wide. His body is not thrust against the stone wall of D-Block like in the movies. He just goes wide-eyed, lets out a breath, and drops down onto Mike Norman.

It’s then that Pelton stands, takes hold of my hand with his, holds them up to surrender to the uniformed men come to save our lives.