“She did, huh?” a guard wearing horn-rimmed glasses said, taking the can and opening it. Unlike the woman, the guard stuck his bare finger into it and swirled it around.
“What are you looking for?” he asked. “You’re getting your germs in it.”
The guard looked up, not sympathetic. “People try to smuggle things in here all the time,” he said. “How do we know you didn’t mix something in here?”
He felt his neck get hot. “But she said it was okay. It’s a gift.”
“Nope,” the guard said. “Leave it here. You can get it on your way out.” The guard replaced the top, and wiped his finger on his uniform pants.
Go wash your hands . . . Don’t put your finger in your mouth, he wanted to warn. But all he said was, “Oh, come on . . .”
The guard shook his head no. It was final.
“For Christ sake,” he said. His plan was already going a little awry. But he had a backup.
“Keep Him out of it,” the guard said. “Do you want to go inside or not?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then leave it here and go get in the van.”
He nodded, figured he’d better shut up. As he went down the hallway where another guard was waiting at an open door, he heard a metal clunk as the tobacco was tossed inside a metal waste can. He let out a breath and walked ahead. A van was outside.
He settled into the first seat behind the driver. He was the only visitor in the van. The driver climbed in after him, turned on the motor, shut the door, and did a slow U-turn. He looked outside the window at the bare, rocky hills. There were wisps of clouds in a high blue sky and nothing, absolutely nothing, else. Except some antelope, up there on the hillside. Hiding in plain sight.
IT WAS A mile from the Administration Building to the prison. The driver said, “First time?”
“Yep.”
“You want to know what you’re looking at?”
He really didn’t care, but to be friendly, he said, “Sure.”
“That’s the ITU,” the driver said, nodding in the direction of a boxy gray building behind a fence topped with razor wire. “Intensive Treatment Unit. Ultra-rehab. That’s where the drug addicts get sent when they arrive. Or if an inmate needs extensive psychological treatment.”
“That’s probably a lot of them, I’d guess,” he said.
“You’re right about that.
“This is a state-of-the-art prison,” the driver continued, saying it in a way that suggested he had repeated it a hundred times, like a tour guide at a theme park. “It’s a city unto itself. Everything is on premises, cooking, laundry, hospital, everything. It would continue to function if the rest of the world didn’t, at least for a while. We have six hundred and eighty inmates in A, B, C, and E buildings, or pods. The inmates are segregated based on their crimes and their behavior, and you can tell their status by the shirts they wear. Yellow means newbie, or rookie. Blue shirts and red shirts are general population. Orange means watch out, that man is in trouble or he’s dangerous. White means death row.
“The whole place is watched twenty-four/seven by two hundred cameras that are everywhere. I mean it, everywhere. There are also motion sensors everywhere, and I mean everywhere. No one moves in this place that somebody isn’t watching him.
“That includes visitors,” the driver said, looking at him in his mirror to make sure he had heard him.
“It’s slow today for visitors. Summer weekends, we get more than a hundred people. The average day is fifty. Are you meeting your inmate in the contact or noncontact area?”
He wasn’t sure. “Noncontact, I think.”
“Who is it?”
He told him.
The driver nodded. “Yeah. Noncontact. He’s in for murder, right?”
He said yes. Multiple homicide. Death row. He’d be wearing white.
“He doesn’t get many visitors,” the driver said, leaving it at that.
HE STOOD IN another waiting area. He wished the driver hadn’t told him about the cameras, even though he should have known. If he’d felt exposed standing in a parking lot, he really felt exposed here. He’d been told the conversation he was about to have wouldn’t be recorded. But how could he be sure of that? He’d have to keep his comments obscure, the way he had in his letters to the inmate. Get things across without actually saying them.
Beyond the waiting room, through three-quarter-inch glass, was the big visiting room with tables and chairs in it. A guard, a woman, sat at a desk in the corner, doing paperwork. On the desk was the biggest box of sanitizing wipes he had ever seen. He grimaced, thinking about what it was she had to wipe up out there, what kinds of fluids oozed out of these people, this scum. There was a table with an urn of coffee and columns of white Styrofoam cups. Bright plastic toys were stacked in a corner. A television was on with a game show on it. Jesus, the place is almost cheery, he thought. It reminded him of a modern high school without windows.
A guard came into the room with a clipboard.
“You’re John Wayne Keeley?”
“Yessir.”
“You’re here to see Wacey Hedeman?”
“Yessir.”
“Follow me.”
SIX YEARS BEFORE, Wacey Hedeman had gone crazy. Until it happened, he had been a game warden working for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department in northern Wyoming, near the Bighorn Mountains. He had a good reputation and was well liked; a former champion rodeo bull rider in the PRCA, star of the university rodeo team, state champion wrestler before that. He was gregarious, ambitious, and cut a wide swath. He was, in practically everyone’s opinion, paid the highest compliment a Wyomingite paid another: He was thought “a good guy.”
But that was before he got the urge to run for Twelve Sleep County sheriff. He had needed money and influence to win, and he hooked up with former supervisor and mentor Vern Dunnegan, who had reappeared in the area as an advance landman for a natural-gas pipeline. Dunnegan could deliver the office to Wacey because he had the goods on the current sheriff, if Wacey would clear the way and anyone in it for the pipeline project. The situation spiraled downward into places no one anticipated and in the end, Wacey murdered four men and shot a pregnant woman before he was stopped.
Keeley had been told some of the story, and had looked up the rest. Wacey Hedeman had been sentenced to die by lethal injection, but he was still waiting for it to happen. His partner in crime, Vern Dunnegan, was serving out his sentence in the same prison, but in the general population, not maximum security.
KEELEY WAS TAKEN through a door labeled NONCONTACT VISITS and down a narrow hallway. The guard opened another door and Keeley went into a narrow cubicle with a desk, a stool bolted to the floor, a foot-wide counter, and a thick piece of glass that revealed a setup on the other side that was similar. A half-inch slot was cut in the glass near the counter, enough room to pass papers through. A black phone was mounted on the wall.
He sat down, straddling the stool, his palms flat on the counter, his nose just a few inches from the glass.
The door in the other room opened, and Wacey Hedeman stepped in and looked at him.
Hedeman was smaller than he thought he would be, Keeley thought. The old newspaper photos he had seen of Hedeman made him look taller, and more than a little dashing. His drooping gunfighter mustache was still there, though, but streaked with some gray. He had a bantam rooster kind of cockiness to his step, and the way he looked at Keeley from beneath his eyebrows . . . he looked like someone you wouldn’t want to mess with. One of Wacey’s sleeves flopped around as he moved. That’s right, Keeley thought, his arm got shot off. Idiot.
The guard behind Wacey Hedeman said, “I’ll be right outside”—Keeley could read his soundless words through the glass by watching his mouth—and Hedeman nodded but didn’t look back at him. The guard withdrew and the door closed. Wacey sat down. Their faces were no more than eighteen inches apart, through the glass. They reached for the handsets simultaneously.