Guilty Wives (27 page)

LUISA WALKED DOWN
G wing toward the infirmary. She passed by the guard station at the door leading down to the underground parking garage, G-3. Empty. That was odd, but not entirely unheard-of at this time of night, when all prisoners were locked down. Budgets were tight. This time of night, the prison often wasn’t staffed at full capacity.

Luisa could see from a distance that the guard booth at the infirmary, G-2—her assigned position—was empty as well. When she reached the booth, she found the check sheet—the form the departing guard had to fill out, verifying her head count and containing an inventory of all equipment—was resting on a clipboard, not filled out.

Sabine, she thought. Fucking Sabine.

Sabine, the head guard, would have anyone else written up for this. But Sabine seemed to think that the rules didn’t apply to her. She was probably gallivanting around somewhere and would expect Luisa not to complain about the check sheet. In fact, she’d probably expect Luisa to do the inventory herself.

Luisa raised her hand radio and spoke into it. “This is Luisa at G station two for Sabine,” she said in French. “Luisa at G station two for Sabine. Over.”

She waited a minute and got nothing back.

She looked around the booth. The inmate sheet said they had an overnight guest tonight—Abbie Elliot, one of the president’s assassins. If someone was staying overnight, that meant the secured room.

She looked at the security monitor. Sure enough, in bed 1, the bed closest to the camera, a motionless figure with dark hair was lying on her left side. The black-and-white picture was somewhat grainy, and the lighting was dim. The lights didn’t turn all the way off in the secured room, because the camera couldn’t see in the dark, but they dimmed enough to allow the inmates to sleep at night while still allowing the camera to monitor them. So Luisa couldn’t quite make out the facial features of the sleeping figure, but she didn’t think twice about it.

Filling out the form that Sabine should have completed her own damned self, Luisa checked the box for the inmate head count—easy in this case, just one person. Then she went to the equipment inventory. The four rifles were locked and loaded. The tear gas and batons, check. Mobile first-aid kits, check. Handcuffs, check. Glocks—

Wait.

There was a Glock missing from the stash. The guards weren’t typically armed, for obvious security reasons—an inmate who subdued a guard with a gun would become very dangerous very quickly. Why did Sabine need a handgun right now?

“Luisa at G station two for Sabine,” she said into her radio. “Luisa at G station two for Sabine. Over.”

As she waited for a response, Luisa peered closely at the four screens corresponding to the infirmary cameras. The pharmacy was empty. The main room, empty. The secured room, just the one sleeping prisoner.

In terms of protocol, the next step was clear. Having found a serious equipment breach—it didn’t get much more serious than a missing gun—and having been unable to immediately clarify the situation to her satisfaction, Luisa was supposed to call this in to administration as a “code 3 alert.” Every guard on duty would be alerted that there was a gun unaccounted for.

But this would mean ratting out Sabine, of all people. Snitching on the head guard. The one who set the schedules and assignments, who allocated vacation time. The last place you wanted to be in this prison was on Sabine’s bad side.

And there wasn’t a single inmate in this entire prison who wasn’t locked up in her cell, or, in Abbie Elliot’s case, in the secured infirmary room.

Luisa thought a moment, then raised the radio to her mouth.

I FOLLOWED THE
three cars ahead of me at a normal speed toward the mammoth outside gate and the guard tower, which was elevated ten feet above the ground. Following the routine I’d observed over the last several months, when I would gaze out the window of the infirmary, the guard in the first car swiped her key card and waved to the guard in the tower. The gate opened and then closed behind the car after it had driven through.

The second car rolled up. The guard in the second car swiped and waved and the gates opened. But the guard in the tower was feeling chatty and there was an exchange of small talk.

“C’mon, dammit.” The car clock clicked over to 2:03 a.m. In my rearview mirror I saw four, now five cars lining up behind me. I hoped the guard would see them, too, and show the rest of us a little courtesy, for God’s sake.

At 2:04 a.m., the second car exited and the third car, the one just in front of me, pulled up. I rolled down my window. The third car’s driver swiped and waved. The gate parted and the car drove out. There. That’s more like it.

I rolled the car forward to the spot for the key card. I’d already lowered my window, so I put out the key card and swiped. I waved up at the guard tower with my left hand and looked up and to the left at the guard. I momentarily caught her eyes. The lighting was good, as it should be on the perimeter of the prison. I wasn’t sure how clearly she saw me. I didn’t recognize her, which was probably good; she’d probably never seen the face of Abbie Elliot before.

But she presumably had seen the face of Lucy the guard before.

The tower guard held her stare on me. She seemed to crane her neck a bit.

An objective observer might say that she stared at me for one or two seconds. It felt to me like one or two hours. I wasn’t sure what she was seeing.

I did know that she was looking at someone in a prison-guard uniform driving Lucy’s car, with Lucy’s key card, with Lucy’s hair color, and with Lucy’s gauze bandage across half her face. And the person driving was doing so at a shift change, and the guard’s records would clearly show that Lucy had just gone off the clock. Every ounce of logic transmitting signals to her brain told her that I should be Lucy the guard.

What she
wasn’t
seeing were the two things that primarily distinguished me from Lucy: one was our weight differential, which was largely obscured because I was seated in a car. And the second was our faces. As much as I hated to admit it, I did bear some resemblance to Lucy, but our facial differences were still obvious. However, they were masked at the moment by the large gauze bandage, the distance of ten feet or so between the guard tower and me, and the guard’s angle of view, which was downward and partially blocked by the roof of the car.

So yes, I had a lot going for me. But still she watched me.

And she had the right to order anyone, even prison staff, out of a vehicle at any time.

With my right hand, I felt Lucy’s gun, tucked under my right leg.

My heartbeat did a little dance. A thought raced through my mind: what if she was friends with Lucy? What if she said something to Lucy, some inside comment that I didn’t understand? What if she asked me a—

I jumped as her voice crackled through the speaker near the key-card pad.

“J’ai entendu ce que vous est arrivé aujourd’hui,”
she said.
“Êtes-vous bon?”

I heard what happened to you today. Are you okay?

Not surprising that my attack on Lucy had been news throughout the prison.

“Oui, c’est bon,”
I answered.

The car clock said it was 2:06 a.m.

Poor kid, the tower guard, Rhonda, thought. But what a soldier. She was attacked very early into her first shift today by that prisoner Abbie Elliot, but here Lucy was, working until the end of her double shift. The word was she’d had twenty, maybe thirty stitches on her face today.

“Bonsoir,”
Rhonda said to Lucy. She pulled the toggle switch to open the main gate. Lucy drove through and the next car pulled up. Rhonda knew this next driver pretty well; she was one of the deputy administrators in—

“Addie, this is Luisa at G station two,” said a voice in French through the tower guard’s radio. “I have a code three alert.”

“LUISA, THIS IS
Addie confirming a code three alert on a missing Glock handgun at G station two.” The voice of the administrative commander—“Addie”—crackled through Luisa’s radio.

“That’s affirmative, Addie,” Luisa responded in French.

“This was Sabine’s post, Luisa?”

“Affirmative. I can’t locate her.”

“Are you secure at G station two?”

Luisa looked at the monitors. Nothing in the infirmary except the prisoner, sleeping peacefully. “Affirmative.”

“All officers, this is Addie. All officers shall arm themselves immediately. And we’ll issue a no further movement order pending a head-count confirmation.”

Luisa frowned. This was turning into a big deal. In all likelihood, Sabine was fooling around somewhere with the Glock and had killed her radio. Maybe hazing one of the new prisoners or something. Oh, was she going to be pissed at Luisa.

Well, screw her. She gave the rest of the guards a bad name.

Luisa removed a Glock from the stash and stood near her station. Guarding the infirmary wasn’t exactly a trying job. She had all of one inmate, who was locked inside a room. But the order was to arm, so she did.

She listened to the radio as each station called out its confirmation that all prisoners were accounted for. When they got to G wing, she called out, “Affirmative, one prisoner.”

Then a thought occurred to her. It
was
Sabine, after all. One of the more sadistic guards. And the word was she was none too friendly toward Abbie Elliot. Maybe—maybe she’d decided to have some fun with Abbie tonight. Maybe a game of Russian roulette or something.

Kind of hard to believe, but there
was
a gun missing. Maybe Sabine was careless enough to leave it in the infirmary, knowing that Abbie was locked into that secured room.

Careless would be an understatement. It would be reckless as hell. But stranger things had happened around here. Luisa buzzed open the infirmary door and walked in.

She walked from bed to bed, scanning the place for the missing Glock. Her eyes passed over the clock on the wall.

It was 2:11 a.m.

When the roll call was completed a few moments later, Addie announced over the radio that all prisoners were present and accounted for. The no further movement order—requiring that all inmates basically freeze in their tracks until further notice—was moot. There wasn’t a single prisoner out of her cell at twelve minutes past two in the morning: “All secure at zero two twelve hours,” Addie said. “But let’s find that weapon, officers.”

Luisa looked under pillows and sheets in the main room. She kicked towels on the floor. She sighed. It was probably nothing. The odds of that Glock being in this room were slim to none.

“Rhonda at perimeter one, this is Addie. What is your status on Sabine?”

“Addie, this is Rhonda at perimeter one. Sabine has not passed through the gate.”

Luisa approached the secured room but stopped short of the door. If she was considering every possibility, she had to consider the possibility that Abbie Elliot had the weapon, and she was waiting for an opportunity to use it in an ambush.

She wouldn’t give her that opportunity.

She pushed the intercom button outside the room.

“Elliot, wake up,” she said. “Stand away from the bed and raise your hands.”

The body lying in bed 1 didn’t stir. Luisa watched her chest expand and contract with the rhythms of sleep.

“Elliot!” she cried.

No movement.

Getting a little hot herself now, Luisa walked to the door. It was bulletproof; she’d be safe as long as she stayed on this side.

She raised a fist, prepared to pound on the glass. When she reached the door, she almost jumped out of her skin. She bounced backward, then righted herself, moved a few steps to the left so she could see more clearly what it was she thought she saw in her peripheral vision, in the far front corner of the room.

Something she couldn’t see from the security camera monitor.

Because it was directly
under
the security camera.

It was Sabine, unconscious, handcuffed by the hands and feet to a chair.

“This is—this is Luisa at G station two,” she stammered into the radio, her nerves choking her throat. “This is a code one alert. That’s code one. Request an immediate lockdown.”

I DROVE LIKE
my life depended on it. Because it did.

The prison was set apart from the rest of Limoges, and only one fairly narrow and poorly paved road led out of JRF toward the town. I had no choice but to follow the pace set by the three vehicles in front of me until we reached the first intersection.

Once I was free of them, I picked up the pace, though I didn’t want to be overly reckless and draw attention. It didn’t take me long to reach the train station, the Gare de Limoges-Bénédictins, located just north of the town center, opposite the Champ de Juillet garden and its majestic fountain.

I parked as close to the station as I could, in a small lot nearby. It wasn’t a parking space per se; in fact, the lot was full and I was blocking two cars in the corner. Sorry about that, but I had more urgent matters on my mind.

I ran past several parked cars. A red compact. A blue Mini Cooper. A white Audi sedan. Tucked in the rear window of the Audi was a little teddy bear. My heart did a flip. Linette, my dear friend, always slept with one, even in prison.

I’m doing this for you as much as for me, honey, I thought.

I sprinted toward the train station. I’d heard it was a source of architectural pride here in Limoges, but at night it looked like a scary, scowling monster. It was a massive Gothic concrete structure with a domed glass top, pillars framing each side of the building, square lights resembling eyes on top of the pillars, and a concrete arch, in the shape of a frown, over the entrance. Next to the station was the monster’s “staff”—a tall bell tower that could have doubled as a lighthouse for ships at sea.

Pulling Lucy’s gauze bandage off my face, I ran into the station, got my bearings, and found the window marked
BILLETS
. I was still wearing Lucy’s ill-fitting uniform and perspiring badly. I must have been quite a sight.

“Quand le prochain train part-il?”
I asked the man behind the counter.

When is the next train leaving?

“À où?”
he asked. To where?

I looked behind the man to the clock on the wall. It was 2:15 a.m.

“À n’importe où.”

To anywhere, I answered. The next train to anywhere.