The Voice Inside

4

Rudy Cutter listened for the boots of the prison guard. He’d been waiting for him for hours. Waiting for news.

It was late afternoon. Shadows stretched across the lower bunk of his cell at San Quentin. People said the nights were worst in prison, but really, it was the long, dull, dead afternoons. He heard the noises of the south block around him. Smack talk bounced from cell to cell. Someone sang. Someone prayed. Above him, his cellmate, Leon, played the same rap by Lil Wayne over and over. “Hustler Musik.” When Leon played the song more than ten times in a stretch, Rudy would kick the mattress to shut him up, but he didn’t like to anger Leon. If you wanted to stay alive in here, you learned to get along.

Lying in his bunk, Rudy stretched out his arms. He could touch both stone walls on either side of the cell. He did that sometimes, to remind himself where he was, to confirm that this wasn’t a dream.

It wasn’t. This was life. Fifty-four square feet. A sink. A toilet. Two men.

The chaplain had told him to make the most of his time inside. Read. Take classes. Find God. The first step was to accept your fate. Instead, Rudy had spent the last four years making plans. The people of the State of California had said that he would never be a free man again, but the people were wrong.

The day was almost here, and he was ready.

Rudy stared into nothingness. His blue eyes were sunken into his face, surrounded by deep wrinkles and dark bags. Haunted eyes, some people said. Or predator eyes, others said. They were focused and unblinking, like alligator jaws that clamped around you without letting go. His skin was pale and freckled, his blond hair short and dirty. When he rubbed his chin, he felt the roughness of half-gray stubble. He was fifty-three years old, but one advantage of prison was that he was in the best shape of his life. In here, it paid to be muscled and strong and to develop a sixth sense for what was happening behind your back.

Over his head, Lil Wayne rapped about not being a killer. The lyrics always annoyed Rudy when he heard them. If you weren’t a killer, you couldn’t understand what it felt like, so don’t sing about it, don’t talk about it, don’t write about it. The only way to really know was to do it. That was the fraternity of murderers.

He thought about his late wife, Hope, who was part of that fraternity. She was always with him. She never went away. When he closed his eyes, she was in his dreams. When he stared outside the cell, he could see her taunting him on the other side of the bars. Her smile. Her blood. Her grotesque pride in what she’d done.

Thirty years in between had changed nothing.

Looking back, he wondered why he’d ever married Hope. They were both only twenty years old then. He was still in college, and she was in nursing school. What did he see in her? It wasn’t her looks. She was slightly heavy, and it showed in her face. She had puffy cheeks and a rounded chin. Her mousy hair was short and practical. Her face was forgettable. Ten minutes after meeting Hope, you’d struggle to describe her.

What was it?

Maybe he’d thought he could fix her. Hope was bipolar, and when she had her episodes, she would scream, she would explode in jealous rage, she would throw things, she would cut him, she would hit him. When he talked about leaving, she would tell him how much she needed him, how much she loved him, and how she would kill herself if he left her. So he stayed.

It wasn’t all bad. For a while, after college, things got better. He got a job as an underwriter at a savings and loan; it was a boring job, but boring worked for him. He didn’t have to deal with people. He could focus on numbers and formulas. He could plan, analyze, and make risk assessments, and he discovered that he was good at it. Like a chess player, he could anticipate options and alternatives ten moves away. The company promoted him quickly.

Hope became an ER nurse. She got on meds, which smoothed out her moods. She started seeing a therapist, who advised her to turn to her artistic side and paint or sketch when she felt the stress of life overwhelming her. Her violent outbursts faded. He began to think that they were happy.

And then came Wren. Their daughter.

Until Wren, Rudy had never had a clue what love really was. That little girl, in his arms, became his reason to live. She was beautiful. She was innocent. She was perfect. He found it nearly unbearable to leave for work in the morning. On the bus coming home, he would grow agitated, because he was so anxious to see his daughter again. Seeing her face made every bad thing in the world vanish.

He was so enraptured with Wren that he hardly noticed Hope beginning to disintegrate again.

Her moods swooped up and down; her meds seemed to have no effect. The art she used to escape wasn’t nearly enough. She began to lash out at him, the way she had in college, and she spent less and less time with their daughter. When she held the girl, her face grew empty and pained. Eventually, the doctors would tell him it was postpartum depression, magnified by her existing mental illness, but by then, it was too late. The baby sucked up all of Rudy’s time and love, and Hope herself seemed incapable of giving any love to either of them.

He thought it would pass with time. He didn’t realize how volatile the situation had become. And how dangerous.

Not until the November night that changed everything.

Hope had come home late from an exhausting shift at the ER. She found Rudy holding Wren in the nursery, and she flew into a rage, screaming obscenities, telling him that he loved his daughter more than he loved her — and it was a difficult accusation to deny, because it was true. He tried to calm Hope without success. Wren began crying and was inconsolable. Eventually, he put their daughter in his wife’s arms to give the two of them time to be together. He’d always believed that Wren had magical healing powers. If the little girl could make him happy, then she could do anything at all.

Rudy slept. He slept until the middle of the night. He didn’t know what awakened him, but maybe it was the sudden silence. Wren was crying, and then she was not. Hope wasn’t in bed. He got up and called his wife’s name, several times, louder and louder, and she didn’t answer. A feeling crept over him, like a foreboding of evil, strong enough to make it hard to breathe.

He went to the nursery and crossed the river into hell.

His girl, his angel, his perfect daughter, was blue. In that instant, he could physically feel God reach into his chest, remove his heart, rip it to pieces, and tread on it. He wailed. He bellowed. He went to Wren to revive her, but she was gone, her life suffocated by nothing more than a bunny pillow that lay next to her. He held her, sobbing, pacing back and forth.

Wren was dead. Rudy felt as if he had died with her.

Only then did he notice the blood on the floor, trickling in little ribbons downhill from under the crib.

He went around to the other side and found Hope on her back, arms and legs spread wide. She had a terrible, wicked grin fixed on her face. Her eyes were open, lifeless but still staring at him. She had a kitchen knife clutched in one hand that she’d used to slice open her own throat in a grotesque U from below one ear to the other.

Thirty years had passed since that moment, and yet he could still recite every detail of that scene from memory, like a photograph. His dead daughter in his arms. His dead, murdering wife on the floor.

And on the nightstand next to the crib, a digital clock showing him the time.

3:42 a.m.

The strange thing was, the tears stopped when he saw Hope on the floor, and they had never come back. Every emotion drained out of him, like Hope’s blood. He couldn’t feel pain. He couldn’t feel anger. He wanted to cry for his daughter; he wanted to feel rage at his wife. Instead, he felt nothing, and nothingness was far worse than grief. From that moment forward, he’d lived his life in a kind of void, and when the void became unbearable, he’d tried to kill himself. Four times he’d tried, but each time he had failed, as if God didn’t want him.

Day became day, month became month, year became year, melting away like spring snow.

Twenty years passed that way.

Twenty years of numb, interminable, empty time.

Until the numbness finally stopped.

It stopped nine years ago, on April 1, in a coffee shop in the Ferry Building. It was luck or fate or destiny or whatever else people believed in. He’d never been to that coffee shop before or since, but his brother, Phil, had been late to pick him up for the Giants game, so he’d ordered an iced latte from a chatty barista named Nina Flores. It was Nina’s birthday. She was a sweet kid. Hispanic. Cheerful. Fluffy pile of brown hair. So perky it was annoying. She talked and talked, about her job, about school, about her parents and siblings, about her best friend, about her birthday. She showed him childhood photos made into buttons on her T-shirt. She sang “Happy Birthday” to herself.

Nina was an ordinary girl, but for Rudy, she was also a thunderbolt. Nina woke up the monster in him. Seeing her brought Hope back to life, like an evil ghost in Rudy’s head, and he knew that ghost had to be destroyed.

By the time Rudy finished his coffee, everything had changed for him. He’d found his path to revenge because of that girl in the Ferry Building. He became nothing but cold, implacable anger. After twenty years of emptiness, he finally had a purpose and a plan.

Rudy had smiled at Nina as he left, but he was already considering the next steps in his strategy. He’d paid by credit card; he wouldn’t make that mistake again. He had to be careful; he had to choose, observe, think, and anticipate, but those were his best skills. Even then, he’d known Nina would be the first, but she wouldn’t be the last. There were many others, and he knew exactly where to find them.

Nina Flores, Rae Hart, Natasha Lubin, Hazel Dixon, Shu Chan, Melanie Valou. Dying one by one in the years that followed.

Do you remember them, Hope?

And he wasn’t done. Oh no.

The time in San Quentin was only a temporary delay, caused by a detective who refused to play by the rules. Jess Salceda hadn’t beaten him; she’d cheated. Now Rudy would show her what happened to those who got in his way.

He put his hands behind his head and waited. His senses were hyperalert, although he knew he was being impatient. Maybe it wouldn’t be today. Maybe it would be tomorrow. Or the next day. But finally, finally, he heard the sound he’d been anticipating. Footsteps. Boots on the concrete walkway, coming closer. Coming for him.

He saw the bulky prison guard stop directly outside the bars. The guard called to him in a growly voice. “Cutter?”

“Yeah, what is it?”

“You have a visitor.”