“The real question is, is the wonderful world of corrections ready for me? That’s how ready I am. How about you, Janice?”
She shrugged faintly and blew smoke. “The same.”
He nodded to her cigarette. “Thought you quit.”
“I did. I enjoy quitting so much I do it once a week. Sometimes twice.”
“All quiet?”
“This morning, yes. We had a meltdown last night.”
“Don’t tell me, let me guess. Angel Fitzroy.”
“Nope. Kitty McDavid.”
Clint raised his eyebrows. “That I would not have expected. Tell me.”
“According to her roommate—Claudia Stephenson, the one the other ladies call—”
“Claudia the Dynamite Body-a,” Clint said. “Very proud of those implants. Did Claudia start something?”
Nothing against Claudia, but Clint hoped that was the case. Doctors were human, they had their favorites, and Kitty McDavid was one of his. Kitty had been in rough shape when she arrived—a self-harm habit, yo-yo moods, high anxiety. They’d come a long way since then. Anti-depressants had made a huge difference and, Clint liked to believe, their therapy sessions had helped a bit, too. Like him, Kitty was a product of the foster systems of Appalachia. In one of their first meetings, she had asked him, sourly, if he had any idea in his big suburban head what it felt like not to have a home or a family.
Clint hadn’t hesitated. “I don’t know what it felt like for you, Kitty, but it made me feel like an animal. Like I was always on the hunt, or being hunted.”
She had stared, wide-eyed. “You… ?”
“Yes, me,” he had said. Meaning, Me too.
These days Kitty was almost always on Good Report, and, better still, she had made an agreement with the prosecutors’ office to testify in the Griner brothers case, a major drug bust that Dooling’s own Sheriff Lila Norcross had pulled off that winter. If Lowell and Maynard Griner went away, parole for Kitty was a distinct possibility. If she got it, Clint thought she might do all right. She understood now that while it was going to be up to her to find a place in the world, it was also going to take continued support—both medical and community—to meet that responsibility. He thought Kitty was strong enough to ask for that support, to fight for it, and she was getting stronger every day.
Janice Coates’s view was less sanguine. It was her attitude that, when dealing with convicts, you were better off not letting your hopes rise too high. Maybe that was why she was the warden—the bull goose—and he was just the resident shrink in this stone hotel.
“Stephenson says McDavid woke her up,” Janice said. “First talking in her sleep, then yelling, then screaming. Something about how the Black Angel was coming. Or maybe the Black Queen. It’s in the incident report. With cobwebs in her hair and death in her fingertips. Sounds like it could be a pretty good TV show, doesn’t it? Syfy channel.” The warden chuckled without smiling. “I’m sure you could have a field day with that one, Clint.”
“More like a movie,” Clint said. “Maybe one she saw in her childhood.”
Coates rolled her eyes. “See? To quote Ronnie Reagan, ‘There you go again.’ ”
“What? You don’t believe in childhood trauma?”
“I believe in a nice quiet prison, that’s what I believe in. They took her over to A Wing, Land of the Loonies.”
“Politically incorrect, Warden Coates. The preferred term is Nutbar Central. Did they have to put her in the restraint chair?” Though it was sometimes necessary, Clint loathed the restraint chair, which looked like a sports car bucket seat that had been converted into a torture device.
“No, gave her a Yellow Med, and that quieted her down. I don’t know which one, and don’t much care, but it’ll be in the incident report, if you care to look.”
There were three med levels at Dooling: red, that could only be dispensed by medical personnel; yellow, that could be dispensed by officers; and green, that inmates not in C Wing or currently on Bad Report could keep in their cells.
“Okay,” Clint said.
“As of now, your girl McDavid is sleeping it off—”
“She’s not my girl—”
“And that is your morning update.” Janice yawned, scrubbed her cigarette out on the brick, and popped it under the milk box, as if once out of sight it would somehow disappear.
“Am I keeping you up, Janice?”
“It’s not you. I ate Mexican last night. Had to keep getting up to use the can. What they say is true—the stuff that comes out looks suspiciously like the stuff that went in.”
“TMI, Warden.”
“You’re a doctor, you can handle it. You going to check on McDavid?”
“This morning for sure.”
“Want my theory? Okay, here’s my theory: she was molested as a toddler by some lady calling herself the Black Queen. What do you think?”
“Could be,” Clint said, not rising to the bait.
“Could be.” She shook her head. “Why investigate their childhoods, Clint, when they’re still children? That’s essentially why most of them are here—childish behavior in the first degree.”
This made Clint think of Jeanette Sorley, who had ended years of escalating spousal abuse by stabbing her husband with a screwdriver and watching him bleed to death. Had she not done that, Damian Sorley would eventually have killed her. Clint had no doubt of it. He did not view that as childish behavior, but as self-preservation. If he said so to Warden Coates, however, she would refuse to hear it: she was old-school that way. Better to simply finish the call-and-response.
“And so, Warden Coates, we begin another day of life in the women’s prison along the Royal Canal.”
She hoisted her purse, stood up, and brushed off the seat of her uniform pants. “No canal, but there’s always Ball’s Ferry down the road apiece, so yeah. Let the day begin.”
They went in together on that first day of the sleeping sickness, pinning their IDs to their shirts.
Magda Dubcek, mother of that handsome young pool-polisher-about-town known as Anton the Pool Guy (he had incorporated, too, so please make out your checks to Anton the Pool Guy, LLC), tottered into the living room of the duplex she shared with her son. She had her cane in one hand and a morning pick-me-up in the other. She flumped into her easy chair with a fart and a sigh and fired up the television.
Normally at this hour of the day she would have tuned in the second hour of Good Day Wheeling, but this morning she went to NewsAmerica instead. There was a breaking story that interested her, which was good, and she knew one of the correspondents covering it, which was even better. Michaela Coates, Michaela Morgan she called herself now but little Mickey to Magda, forever and always, whom she had babysat all those years ago. Back then Jan Coates had just been a guard at the women’s lockup on the south end of town, a widowed single mom only trying to hang in there. Now she was the warden, boss of the whole shebang, and her daughter Mickey was a nationally known news correspondent working out of DC, famous for her tough questions and short skirts. Those Coates women had really made something of themselves. Magda was proud of them, and if she felt a flicker of melancholy because Mickey never called or wrote, or because Janice never stopped in to chew the fat, well, they had jobs to do. Magda didn’t presume to understand the pressures that they operated under.
The news anchor on duty this morning was George Alderson. With his glasses and stooped shoulders and thinning hair, he didn’t look anything like the matinee idol types that usually sat behind the big desks and read the news. He looked like a mortuary attendant. Also, he had an unfortunate voice for a TV person. Sort of quacky. Well, Magda supposed there was a reason NewsAmerica was number three behind FOX and CNN. She was eager for the day when Michaela would move up to one of those. When it happened, Magda wouldn’t have to put up with Alderson anymore.