The only convenient sanitary facility was a single, wretched Porta-John from the same construction site. More popular was the snow-filled woods, which was fine for the men but not for FBI Special Agent Chloe Gimms now sharing on-scene command with a shaken Warden James. A thin woman with electric gray hair, she had survived forty-two years without peeing in the woods and was not about to break that streak now. She paced inside the small camper, ignoring the urge, tapping her thighs with red-mittened hands.
Warden James listened to the sporadic gunfire and the prison alarms. He sat in a small chair with his fists pressed to his eyebrows, wondering if he was supposed to be able to feel his pulse in his forehead. Chloe Gimms asked him about cutting power.
“No,” he said. “The crash gates would all come down. We’d be trapping guards inside with the inmates, with no way to get them out.”
“So even if we retook the Command Center, we couldn’t wall off the units. Personnel would still be trapped inside.”
Warden James looked up. “Correct.”
“That’s it, then. Nothing else we can do until more support arrives.”
The warden stood and looked out one of the small camper windows. The outline of the facility was visible through the snow at the end of the long lane of trees lining Prison Road, black smoke from the dispensary fire rising behind. He tried reaching out to his charges, tried to understand them. “They’ll have a lot of anxiety. After years in isolation, of being spoon-fed—”
“It’s a free-for-all,” said Chloe Gimms. “Old scores are being settled. A kill-off.”
“No,” said Warden James, shaking his head. “They’ll be looking for someone to take my place. A guiding force. A leader.”
“That’s the nice thing about psychopaths. They’re too crazy to group up. Nobody could hold these cons together.”
The warden turned. “Luther Trait could. For a while anyway. The riot started in his unit.”
“Trait? You think this is him?”
“It couldn’t be anyone else.” He stepped away from the window, distressed. Correctional officers were rarely murdered during an uprising. Something wasn’t right. “Where is your partner?”
“Police station in town. We needed a landline to talk to Washington — regulations.” She crossed her arms, tucking in her mittened hands and looking out the window the warden vacated. Local police walked the barricade between the campers and the TV trucks. “Those cops better keep the media away,” she said.
Forty yards away, producer Justin Keane sat inside the CNN satellite van on the phone with his boss back in Atlanta, coordinating their live-report schedule and establishing a protocol in case of breaking news. They were still the only cable channel on the scene, benefactors of fortuitous timing, having detoured on their way back from covering the birth of the Gallimard Sextuplets in L’Assomption St. Jérôme, Canada, just as the snow was really starting to hit. Their reporter had flown back separately, so Justin’s cameraman, Buzzy — the suit jacket fit him best — was doing what he could with the on-air remotes.
Justin hung up and scribbled his notes, then sat back to stretch his arms in the confined quarters of the satellite van. “May this all end so very, very soon.”
“Amen,” said Buzzy, wearing the jacket over sagging blue jeans. As he drained their last can of Mountain Dew, the overhead lights inside the truck flickered.
Justin checked the console. The image on his monitor snapped and went black.
“No, no,” Justin said, rising. “No way. Not now.”
He slid open the door, and two big guys in flannel and watch caps stood outside, looking up at him.
Locals. “Hiya,” said Justin, surprised.
The first guy pulled a large silver handgun from his waistband. “Back inside.”
Justin retreated obediently as, behind him, Buzzy’s empty soda can clinked and danced along the floor.
The armed man and his partner climbed inside.
Gilchrist police chief Rot Darrow lifted off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. FBI agent Coté was talking on Chief Roy’s phone and rooting around in Chief Roy’s desk for a pen. But Chief Roy held his patience. The truth was that he was glad to have big law there, he was relieved to be in the presence of a higher power. This thing was more than his men could handle.
It was hysteria. What else to call it? The flight of the townspeople, which he first took for a lack of confidence in him personally, he saw now as something essentially helpful. Had they all stayed, every stray noise and they would be calling the new 911 system saying that an escaped serial killer was outside their door.
“Dad!”
It was Roy, Jr., waving him to the front. The floor of the station house was coarse with boot grit and Chief Roy winced at all the snow people were tracking in. This was like coming home early from a trip and finding your kids hosting a beer party.
Tom Duggan dogged Chief Roy to the glass doors, a shadow in undertaker’s clothes, haunting him.
“Just go home, Tom. Or throw on a uniform and help me out. One or the other. I’m up to my ears—”
“My mother, Roy.”
“I know what I said. But I can’t do anything for her right now.”
“You said you’d send a car.”
“I don’t have a man or a car to spare. Hell, these aren’t even my men anymore.”
“She’s all alone.”
“She will be all right, and so will you. So will the rest of us. Just get her on the phone.”
“You know she doesn’t answer. She doesn’t like the phone.”
Roy, Jr., was holding the door, and the three of them moved out onto the stoop. The line of cars had diminished at that late hour, as word had gotten out that the roads were jammed. The town center was quiet and blue, five streetlights brightening the snowy common like an empty stage set for a pageant.
“Tom.” Chief Roy put his hand on Tom Duggan’s narrow shoulder, a strange gesture for him. “You’re feeling guilty about this whole thing. My advice is: don’t. Go on home. Don’t try to drive out there yourself, we got enough problems on the road already and nobody to take care of them. Once things start to look better, maybe I can free up a man to check on her. And if, God forbid, things don’t get better, I imagine the National Guard will be sweeping through here to check on her for you. All right?”
Tom Duggan nodded once in resignation, turning and moving in his somber way down the brick steps to the snow, toward Duggan’s Funeral Home on the corner across the street.
Roy, Jr., came in front of the chief and adjusted his father’s clip-on police necktie. “What the hell are you doing?” said Chief Roy.
“CNN, Dad. They want to interview you. Might want the both of us.”
A crew of three men waited on the sidewalk below, big guys, the bigger one holding a camera. “Can we do this inside?” said the chief.
“Want to get the snow and the brick in,” one of them said.
The chief nodded as he fussed his way down four slippery steps. They had to think visually, he understood. Image is everything. “Good ’nough,” he said. “But let’s make it quick.”
One of them regarded Roy, Jr. “This your son, Chief?”
“It’s in the blood.” Chief Roy nodded as he spoke his usual refrain. “My father and grandfather before me.”