A human hand fell onto the purple shag. It had been severed at the wrist and it lay there like a small dead thing. Satan T. Bone's voice screamed through the expensive speaker system:
It is a very strange night. The bitch didn't fight.
Tashay Roberts stared at the hand and then slowly picked it up with her latex-gloved fingers. She looked at it carefully. It was delicate, probably a woman's hand. She could see that the fingertips had been surgically removed.
"This is so fucking cool," she said softly, but she was also afraid. There was no postmark; the box had been hand-delivered by someone. Whoever sent it was definitely way out there… way, way out there. Tashay wondered if she should call Satan or Carl. She knew if she told Satan, he would want to keep the hand. He was a crazy son of a bitch. Keeping the hand could be trouble. Her first boyfriend, Carl Zeno, was a county sheriff. He was also her stepfather. He'd started fucking her brains out when she was just fifteen. He'd kept it up all the years her mother had been on the night shift at the drugstore. Occasionally, when Satan was on the road, she would still go and see him. Carl was her secret addiction. She knew the hand was very bitchin' but very dangerous. Carl would know what to do. After all, he was a cop. She looked at the hand, which was lying on the purple shag, fingers up. If Satan didn't know it had been sent to him, then he couldn't be angry at her.
She decided she'd go ahead and get the nipple pierce the way he wanted. It was a way to make up for her little deception. She moved to the phone and dialed a number.
"Carl," she said, the excitement ringing in her voice. "The coolest thing just happened."
Behind her, through the speakers, Satan T. Bone screamed his degradation.
Chapter 8
After spending the night in two cheap motel rooms in Lompoc, Lockwood and Karen pulled up to the guard shack for visitors' parking at 7:30 on Sunday morning. John showed his Federal buzzer and identified both of them. He got out of the car before even being asked and handed over his gun and holster, which he had packed in his briefcase. They pulled inside the barbed-wire fence and drove to the parking lot.
They walked in under a huge stone arch where pigeons cooed down like bubbling pon. The visitors' room was ugly. Yellow linoleum, probably left over from some Federal housing project, butted up against turgid green cement walls. The sagging couches were cracked red leather. There was an interior window on one wall where a female prn guard was fielding visitors' requests. The only artwork on display was tattooed on the arms and backs of the men and women who were queued up, waiting to visit. Lockwood moved to the front of the line and shoved his badge under the glass. The stout female guard took his shield and ID, then entered his U. S. Customs badge number into her computer. After a second, Lockwood's picture and ID information came up on the screen. He motioned that Karen was with him, and the guard nodded and buzzed them through. They moved into a back room where a black prn officer sat behind a desk. A sign said this was the:
VISITING POLICE LOUNGE.
"John Lockwood," he said to the guard. "I need to have a chat with Malavida Chacone in a secure room. This is Dr. Karen Dawson; she's a civilian employee with U. S. Customs Service in D. C."
The guard looked at both John's and Karen's IDs, then motioned for them to be seated. "I'll have to find out where he is and get him transferred up," he said, then moved off to an enclosed phone station.
"Okay, what we're going to do is solicit this kid. We gotta get him interested. I busted him, so he'll sling a buncha barrio attitude at me, but, bottom line, he wants out of here. So after he's through dissing me, he should jump in our lap. Your job is to show him how much you care. Give him a reason to say yes. The real trick is gonna be putting a move on his counselor. We've gotta score that guy somehow. Leave that up to me."
"Counselor?"
"A young con like Malavida always has a counselor to help him through problems. It's usually just a prn guard with an unread subscription to Psychology Today. I'll find a way to co-opt him once I get a look at him."
"Why not just hand over the paper from Harvey Knox?"
"That paper is puppyshit. It won't smell right if anyone looks at it too long. Once we get in there, we've gotta move fast. We're either walking out of here with Malavida in an hour, or we're back in the prn Administrator's office, trying to talk our way out of an official reprimand."
She smiled at him and he looked at her sternly. "It won't be so funny if we get busted. These guys have no sense of humor. It's not like getting a late-paper markdown in college."
"I'm not worried. I don't mind risk," she said.
"You don't know what you're talking about."
"When I was twelve, I designed an airfoil. It was sort of like a hang-glider, but this was way before hang-gliders. I called it the ALFA Wing. Stood for Airfoil Light Flight Apparatus. I calculated weight and lift. I designed a rudder assembly with a ten-to-one gear ratio. I made this thing out of aluminum rods with plastic sheets and nylon line. My two brothers dared me to test it, so I took it up to the top of Eagle Rock Dam near our house. There was this three-story sheer drop. I harnessed myself in, and my brothers were now scared shitless, begging me not to do it. They released me from the dare. They promised to clean my room for a year. They were panicked I'd kill myself. But it was too late. I ran and jumped off."
"How did it work?"
"I had rudder failure. I looped back into the concrete dam and hit about one story from the bottom. I broke both legs and had a severe concussion. I was in the hospital for two months. Moral of the story, in case you missed it, is I don't mind risk if the reward seems worthwhile."
Lockwood didn't doubt the story was true, but he wondered what it really said about Karen Dawson. Ten minutes later, they were led by another guard with a weight lifter's body out of the police lounge and through a sally port.
They climbed some narrow wooden stairs at the end of the corridor and into the Attorneys' Wing. There were several small, windowless rooms with metal doors. In each room was a table and three or four chairs. The muscle-bound guard led them to the nearest one.
"I'll bring him up."
He left, and Lockwood made a quick search of the room and the furniture.
"What're you doing?" Karen asked as he was crawling under the desk.
"Hold on a minute." He stood and showed her a voice-activated tape recorder he'd removed from under the table. He opened the back and turned the batteries around, putting them back in backwards. "I don't need to face this conversation we're about to have at a trial board. This way they'll just think it didn't work because they misloaded the batteries." He clipped the now-defunct recorder back into the bracket under the table.
"They bug these rooms?" she said, dismayed.
"J. Edgar Hoover said knowledge is power."
"No, he didn't. That was Sir Francis Bacon."
"Well, Hoover shoulda said it… And, Karen, I know you can divide my IQ into yours and come out with Bill Clinton's hat size, but we'll do much better if you stop making me feel like an imbecile."
"Then stop sounding like one," she deadpanned.
He nodded and they sat down in the straight-backed wooden chairs and waited.
Malavida Chacone worked in D Block, which was the old death row. That building had one of the best air-conditioning systems in the prn, the theory being that men who were waiting to die should not be subjected to the cruel and unusual punishment of summer heat in central California. The corridors were narrow and there were no windows, but frigid air flowed through the rooms, chilling skin and nerve endings like uncut heroin. The death row inmates had been transferred to the state prn when California stopped dispensing lethal doses of Edn-Medicine and began killing its condemned with the far more humane lethal injection. Because of the air conditioners, the prn's new computers were in D Block, and because Malavida Chacone could hack into anything for anybody, he had been offered a coveted job at the computer center. He ordered food, medical supplies, tires, and shotgun shells for the prn from 7:30 till 11 in the morning. After his coffee break from 11 to 12, he opened his store for the guards and inmates, scoring everything from Nike running shoes to lifetime subscriptions to Penthouse. His preferred customer was any hardcase who thought it might be fun to grab him and give him a hot beef injection in the "trick bunk" located in the back of C Block. He had made himself too valuable to rape.