Adam looks like one of those guys who spends two hours a day in the gym and two hours in the evening in front of a mirror watching his hard work pay off. The other guard, Glen, looks like he’s probably right there alongside Adam the entire time. I bet they get together once or twice a week to fuck each other senseless and talk about how much they hate gay guys. Adam stands in front of me, muscles bulging at his uniform, the kind of muscles that a blunt screwdriver could bounce off. Some of the guys in here have found religion since being locked behind bars. They say Jesus will provide. I look around, but Jesus doesn’t provide me with a sharp screwdriver. All He’s giving me are the same two assholes who have used those muscles He provided them to push me around almost every day since being here. Into walls. Into the floor. Into doors.
“Let’s go,” Adam says.
“Where am I going?”
He shakes his head. He looks angry. Maybe the bench press is broken. “Un-fucking believable,” he says, “but you’re going home, Joe.”
My heart skips a couple of beats and I develop some kind of tunnel vision, where the walls disappear and all I can see is Adam as he’s talking to me. But that’s not all I can see—I can see myself walk through the door of my apartment and lie down on my own bed. I see women in my future. I see other dead people too—like Adam, like Barlow, like Glen. I can’t talk. My mouth hangs open and my eyes stretch wide and I can feel a goofy smile forming and I just. Can’t. Talk.
“The charges have all been dropped,” Glen says, and his face is scrunched up like he’s been sucking on a bad piece of fruit. Or on a good piece of Adam.
“Some stupid fucking technicality,” Adam adds.
I still can’t talk. All I can do is smile.
“Let’s go,” Adam says, and he almost spits the words at me and, just like that, my prison experience is over.
Chapter Four
The days are getting shorter. Colder. Most days the forecast says tomorrow is going to snow yet it doesn’t get there, and Schroder is never sure whether to blame the weatherman or Mother Nature. Last year had a summer that felt like it wasn’t going to end, with warm days late into May. This summer was on the same track until a few weeks ago. Earlier in the year a heat wave scorched the city and took lives. In this weather it’s hard to remember those times. The good thing about the cold is that it keeps the loonies inside because it’s too miserable to be outside mugging people. Crime always has a way of being scaled back in the winter. People at work are leaving houses that feel like refrigerators and nobody really wants to break into those. So it’s a good time of the year to be a cop. Only Carl Schroder isn’t a cop anymore. Hasn’t been for over three weeks, since the night he killed that woman and his rank—along with his gun and badge and all the shitty benefits that came along with it, including the shitty pay—was taken away.
Every day since losing his job he’s still felt like a cop. It’s annoying. Every day for the first two weeks he woke up and wanted to put on the badge and ended up putting on sweatpants and a jacket and hung around the house all day helping his wife and being a better dad to his kids. Every night he went to sleep seeing the woman he shot and hating that he had to make that decision and knowing he’d make the same one again. The third week he worked. His new job doesn’t require him to shoot people.
This is now his second week on the job. The drive out to the prison is miserable. It was raining when he woke up, raining when he ate breakfast, raining when he got the phone call to come out here, and even though the forecast for tomorrow is supposed to be fine, he’s sure it’ll be raining then too. The window wipers make it all clear before the rain turns it back into a blur. There are paddocks full of cows standing in mud, sheep wearing drenched woolen jerseys, and still there are farmers out there making the circle of life happen, making food, making milk, making money, driving around in their tractors as the rain keeps on coming. The grass shoulders off the side of the road are flooded. Small shrubs are under water. Birds are flapping around in it. The window wipers are struggling to cope. Every few miles there are warning billboards about not driving tired, or speeding, or driving drunk. One says The faster you go the bigger the mess. Superman would disagree. The faster he went the more people he saved. He once went so fast he went back in time and fixed a lot of messes before they began. Christchurch needs somebody like him.
A truck coming toward him hits a flooded section of road, splashing water up over Schroder’s windshield—more than the wipers can immediately handle—so for two seconds he can’t see a thing, a scary two seconds when you’re driving blindly on a motorway. He puts his foot on the brake and slowly presses it down until the windscreen clears. When it does, the view doesn’t change. Just more rain, more gray sky.
He has the radio on as he drives. He’s listening to a national talk radio station. People are phoning in and the DJ is making conversation. It’s current events, and the current event people want to talk about is the death penalty. It’s been ongoing for the last few months. It’s the national debate. People are for it. Other people are against it. Emotions are strong. Those for it hate those against it. Same goes for the other side. There is no middle ground. No sitting on the fence. People can’t understand other people’s point of view. It’s dividing the country, dividing neighbors, dividing family and friends. Schroder, personally, he’s for it. He sees no problem dishing out a little of the same pain that killers have inflicted on this city. Half the people phoning in to the radio station share his opinion. Half don’t. Either way they want to be heard.
“It’s not about justice,” somebody says, a guy by the name of Stewart who is phoning in from Auckland, where, according to Stewart, the rain is of biblical proportions. “It’s about punishment,” he says, which is pretty biblical too, come to think of it.
It’s a twenty-minute drive to the prison that takes thirty-five in this weather. He hears a dozen different viewpoints. The DJ is trying to be impartial. Schroder could flick the dial and hear the same debate on about six other stations. The good news is that there is going to be a referendum. A vote is taking place. For the first time that Schroder can remember, the government is going to listen to the people. At least they are saying they will—after all, it’s an election year. The leading question to the prime minster and to those running against him is: Will the next government follow the will of the people? And the answer is yes. That means, technically, by the end of the year the death penalty could be back in place, if that’s what the people want. He wonders what direction that will take the country. Back into the dark ages? Or into a future where people aren’t killing each other as often?
Hard to know.
But depending on the vote, he may just get a chance to find out.
Schroder turns the radio off. Next week, when Joe Middleton’s trial begins, will be a nightmare. He’s heard a rumor that the prosecution is going to ask for the death penalty if indeed the death penalty becomes law. There are going to be people outside the courthouse. They’re going to be carrying signs. Pro-death. Anti-death. Victim rights. Human rights.
The prison comes up on the left. He slows down and takes the turnoff, a speeding van almost rear-ending him, and a minute later he comes to a guard post. He shows his identification to a guard with the same amount of humor as a tumor. Up ahead is the entrance. Beyond that construction workers are assembling another wing of the prison. Even in the rain they’re working, eager to get the job done, eager to make more room for more criminals. Whoever said crime doesn’t pay also should have added that crime is a billion-dollar industry with all that it touches—new prisons, lawyers, funerals, insurances. It’s the only thing booming. Another car pulls in behind him into the parking lot. He parks and sits still for a few moments, wishing he had an umbrella, but knowing he probably wouldn’t use it even if he did. He looks over at the car parking next to him. A woman, all alone. She kills the engine and he can’t see her clearly enough to know what she’s doing, but he’s been around enough women to know she’s probably putting something into her handbag or getting something out, a simple job that can take his wife five minutes to do since her handbag is like a time capsule dating back to before they met. She opens the car door. She’s pregnant. From the looks of the way she’s trying to squeeze herself out of the car, she got pregnant sometime about a year ago.