Without waiting to see if the bystander would do as ordered, Lila shifted to drive and rolled back up Ball’s Hill toward where the woman stood, being careful to swerve around the dead mailbox. She could hear her bent front fender scraping one of her tires.
The radio blurped. It was Terry Coombs. “Unit One, this is Four. You there, Lila? Come back. We got a couple of dead meth cookers out here past the lumberyard.”
She grabbed the mic, said, “Not now, Ter,” and dropped it on the seat. She stopped in front of the woman, unsnapped the strap on her holster, and, as she got out of Unit One, pulled her service weapon for the sixth time in her career as a law enforcement officer. As she looked at those long, tanned legs and high breasts she flashed back to her driveway—could it only have been fifteen minutes ago? What are you looking at? she had asked. Anton had replied, Morning glory.
If this woman standing in the middle of Dooling Town Road wasn’t morning glory, Lila had never seen it.
“Hands up. Put them up, right now.”
The Avon Lady, aka Morning Glory, raised her hands.
“Do you know how close you just came to being dead?”
Evie smiled. It lit up her whole face. “Not very,” she said. “You had it all the way, Lila.”
The old man spoke with a slight tremble. “I didn’t want to move her.”
The cat, a brown tabby, was in the grass. Judge Oscar Silver was down on the ground beside her, staining the knees of his khakis. Sprawled on its side, the cat almost appeared normal, except for its right front leg, which hung loose in a grotesque V-shape. Up close you also saw the curls of blood in her eyes, washing up around the pupils. Her breath was shallow and she was, according to the counterintuitive instinct of wounded felines, purring.
Frank squatted beside the cat. He propped his sunglasses back on his head and squinted against the harsh morning light. “I’m sorry, Judge.”
Silver wasn’t crying now, but he had been. Frank hated to see that, although it didn’t surprise him: people loved their pets, often with a degree of openness they couldn’t allow themselves to express toward other people.
What would a shrink call that? Displacement? Well, love was hard. All Frank knew was that the ones you really had to watch out for in this world were the ones that couldn’t love even a cat or a dog. And you had to watch out for yourself, of course. Keep things under control. Stay cool.
“Thank you for coming so quickly,” said Judge Silver.
“It’s my job,” Frank said, although it wasn’t exactly. As the county’s sole full-time animal control officer, his department was more raccoons and stray dogs than dying cats. He considered Oscar Silver a friend, though, or something close to it. Before the judge’s kidneys had put him on the wagon, Frank had shared more than a few beers with him at the Squeaky Wheel, and it was Oscar Silver who had given him the name of a divorce lawyer and suggested he make an appointment. Silver had also suggested “some kind of counseling” when Frank admitted he sometimes raised his voice to his wife and daughter (taking care not to mention the time he’d put a fist through the kitchen wall).
Frank hadn’t seen either the lawyer or the therapist. In regard to the former, he still believed he could work things out with Elaine. In regard to the latter, he felt he could control his temper quite well if people (Elaine, for instance, but also Nana, his daughter) would only realize he had their best interests at heart.
“I’ve had her since she was a kitten,” Judge Silver was saying now. “Found her out behind the garage. This was just after Olivia, my wife, passed. I know it’s ridiculous to say, but it seemed like… a message.” He drew his forefinger through the valley between the cat’s ears, rubbing gently. Although the cat continued to purr, it did not extend its neck toward the finger, or react. Its bloody eyes gazed steadily into the green grass.
“Maybe it was,” said Frank.
“My grandson was the one who named her Cocoa.” He shook his head and twisted his lips. “It was a damn Mercedes. I saw it. I was coming out for the paper. Had to be going sixty. In a residential neighborhood! Now what reason is there for that?”
“No reason. What color was the Mercedes?” Frank was thinking about something Nana had mentioned to him months earlier. A fellow on her paper route who lived in one of the big houses at the top of Briar had some kind of fancy ride. A green Mercedes, he thought she had said, and now:
“Green,” said Judge Silver. “It was a green one.”
A gurgle had entered the cat’s purr. The rise and fall of its flank had quickened. She was really hurting.
Frank put a hand on Silver’s shoulder, squeezed it. “I should do this now.”
The judge cleared his throat, but must not have trusted himself to speak. He just nodded.
Frank unzipped the leather pouch that contained the needle and the two vials. “This first one relaxes her.” He poked the needle into the vial, drew it full. “The second one lets her sleep.”
There came a time, long before the events recounted here, when the Tri-Counties (McDowell, Bridger, and Dooling) petitioned to have the defunct Ash Mountain Juvenile Reformatory converted into a badly needed women’s prison. The state paid for the land and the buildings, and it was named after the county—Dooling—that provided most of the money for refurbishing the institution. Its doors opened in 1969, staffed by Tri-County residents who badly needed jobs. At the time it had been declared “state of the art” and “a benchmark in female corrections.” It looked more like a suburban high school than a prison—if one ignored the rolls of razor wire that topped the acres of chainlink surrounding the place.
Nearly half a century later, it still looked like a high school, but one that had fallen on hard times and a diminishing tax base. The buildings had begun to crumble. The paint (lead-based, it was rumored) was flaking. The plumbing leaked. The heating plant was badly outdated, and in the depths of winter, only the admin wing could maintain temperatures above sixty-five degrees. In summer, the inmate wings roasted. The lighting was dim, the elderly electrical wiring a disaster in waiting, and the vital inmate monitoring equipment went dark at least once a month.
There was, however, an excellent exercise yard with a running track, a basketball court in the gym, shuffleboard, a midget softball diamond, and a vegetable garden adjacent to the admin wing. It was there, close to the flourishing peas and corn, that Warden Janice Coates sat on a blue plastic milk box, her beige-colored knit purse collapsed on the ground beside her shoes, smoking an unfiltered Pall Mall and watching Clint Norcross approach.
He flashed his ID card (unnecessary since everyone knew him, but it was protocol) and the main gate rumbled open on its track. He drove into the dead space beyond, waiting for the outer gate to shut. When the officer on duty—this morning it was Millie Olson—got a green on her board, indicating the main gate was locked, she opened the inner gate. Clint brought his Prius trundling alongside the fence to the employees’ parking lot, which was also gated. Here a sign cautioned MAINTAIN SECURITY! ALWAYS LOCK YOUR CAR!
Two minutes later he was standing beside the warden, leaning a shoulder against the old brick, his face turned up to the morning sun. What followed was akin to the call-and-response in a fundamentalist church.
“Good morning, Dr. Norcross.”
“Good morning, Warden Coates.”
“Ready for another day in the wonderful world of corrections?”