He knew that voice.
“Duncannnn,” MacNally screamed, a guttural yell that carried the pain and sorrow of a man who had something of infinite value slip uncontrollably through his hands.
His chest was heaving, his body drenched in instant perspiration. He pulled himself erect, and he leaned forward into the wall of bars. He put his face up against the cold metal and forced his eyes to the extreme left, trying to see into Duncan’s cell.
The man was standing there. Laughing.
“Who did this to me?” MacNally asked. “You started that fight on purpose. To keep me from getting out of here. Was it Rucker? Rucker, you bastard. I’m gonna kill you!”
“I’ll kill you before you kill me, you son of a bitch,” Rucker’s voice answered back. “Much as I’d like to take credit, wasn’t me.”
“I’ll find out the truth, Duncan, and then I’m gonna carve you up. Fucking pull your heart out of your chest. I will! I will kill you.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Duncan said. “You’re all talk, MacNally. You ain’t got it in you.”
MacNally fell back onto his cot. The gash in his lip had reopened, and the stitches in his thigh were bleeding through his clothing. The pain, the swelling, the blood- He didn’t feel any of it. Instead, he put his hands to his face and wept, silently.
TWO HOURS LATER, THREE MEN appeared at his celclass="underline" Captain of the Guards William Anderson and two FBI agents. MacNally was led to the warden’s office, where he was placed in a chair and left in shackles.
“I’m extremely disappointed in you,” Associate-currently Acting-Warden Arthur Dollison said. He wore a bowtie and a charcoal wool suit, and sported a calm demeanor. “I thought you had made tremendous strides, a concerted effort to follow the institutional rules. You’ve been a good worker in Industries. But now I’m told you were one of the principal architects of the escape. And to think you were no doubt planning this when you sat before me in A-Block at your hearing…” He shook his head, sighed deeply, then took a seat behind his desk. “Deeply disappointed.”
“We know you were complicit in the escape,” one of the agents said. “We’re in the process of conducting a shakedown of the cellhouse and we just found the same kind of fake ventilation grille in your cell that we found in Morris’s and the Anglin brothers’ cells. We’re going to need the details. Everything you know. Whatever you tell us will be kept confidential, and you will not be identified as the source of information.”
“When did they leave?” MacNally asked, his gaze fixed on the warden’s desk.
Dollison glanced at the agents, then decided to answer. “Sometime during the night. In his interview this morning, inmate West told us the three men left their cells sometime around 8pm. But we’ve determined that they didn’t leave the cellhouse roof until 10:30.”
“West,” MacNally said. He leaned forward in his seat. “Didn’t he go with them?”
“He claimed that he couldn’t get out of his cell,” the agent said. “There was a hunk of cement he had a hard time removing. We checked the utility corridor, and confirmed a large chunk of concrete was lying just outside his cell. West stated he finally dislodged it around 1am, but by then Morris and the Anglins were gone.”
“So,” Dollison said, pinching the bridge of his narrow nose. “Now that we’ve answered your questions, it’s time you answered ours.”
MacNally looked at Dollison. “Warden. I’ll tell you everything I know. But in return, can you go easy on me on setting my time in the Treatment Unit?”
“You were fighting in the yard a couple days ago. You’re already likely to get a month just for that.”
“I was attacked,” MacNally said. “Just like last time.”
“That, sir, seems to happen to you a lot.”
“Mr. Dollison. I think one of the men who escaped got Billy Duncan to start that fight. Just so I wouldn’t be able to go with them.”
Dollison looked dubious, but nevertheless made a note on his pad. “We’ll look into that.”
“One other thing.” MacNally looked from Dollison to the FBI agent. “Did they make it?”
Dollison held MacNally’s gaze a long moment, then said, “They’re not on the island. Whether they made it to shore, we don’t know.”
IN THE ENSUING WEEKS, MACNALLY would learn that all three men had made it off The Rock, as Dollison had said. The remnants of their life jackets were located floating off a beach in the Marin headlands, three miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, along with one of the wooden paddles and two partially deflated life jackets, their canvas laces still tied-indicating they were discarded by the wearers; if they had failed while being worn, the preservers would still be attached to the bodies.
A waterproof wallet that Clarence Anglin had fashioned from raincoat material, containing a list of phone numbers and photos of relatives, was also found. MacNally laughed. Anglin had told his brother to construct two of them, one containing a number of pictures and an identical list of family contacts; he planned to drop the copy over the side of the raft to lead officials to conclude that they had drowned; the hope was that they would suspend their search. Morris had suggested they dump their life preservers when they made it ashore, lending credence to the authorities’ drowning theory, which he figured would inevitably develop.
Perhaps more importantly, MacNally also had determined that Billy Duncan had been working on Anglin’s behalf when he had him start the fight that put MacNally in the Hole. With Anglin long gone, Duncan no longer needed to hide his motives. He said that he had owed Anglin a favor dating back to their time while serving out robbery sentences at Raiford State Prison.
And he now surmised that Anglin had been working with Harlan Rucker in setting him up for getting caught. Rucker had also done time at Raiford-but why Anglin had something against MacNally, he did not know.
As he gathered information, in a subsequent interview with the FBI agents, he learned that the second raft had never been completed-and that the raft they had found was only designed for three men, four if they sacrificed safety. The triangular design described by the agent conflicted with the style the men had discussed constructing; perhaps the Anglins and Morris had never intended to take him along. He might never know for sure, but it did not matter. His best guess said that the Anglin brothers and Frankie were free.
And MacNally was still behind bars.
He was released early from the Hole, for “good behavior,” he was told. After spending three months in segregation, leaving his cell only once a week for a visit to the yard and two showers a week, his only psychological escape was through reading. But it was not much solace to a man who sat in a cement room with only a 25-watt lightbulb and two enemies-that he knew of-close at hand.
He had withdrawn into himself, anger simmering like a frying burger left in a pan too long: well done, charred beyond recognition, and brittle to the touch.
MacNally was setting his new kit of supplies on the shelf when Clarence Carnes rolled the library cart up to his cell. He handed through a new Popular Mechanics issue, atop which was a postcard.