In The Falling Light (39 page)

Trent retreated from her sudden fury until
his lower back was hard against the iron railing, leaning away from
her. “Wait, I…”

“Fuck you, Whitmore. Fuck your questions and
your story.” She said the last word like she was spitting out
something nasty. “The story’s over. It ended when he put my child
in the ground.” She snatched up the trash bag. “Now get away from
my house.”

Trent watched her go down the stairs and
around the corner of the building, suddenly realizing that for just
a moment, he
knew
she was going to kill him right there on
the stairs. He went back to his car faster than he would have
liked, quickly pulling out of the neighborhood.

What was he going to do about all this?
Carla Rodriguez…Mendez, whatever she called herself, wasn’t just
near her daughter’s killer, she was on top of him. Why? Then he
thought about her burst of rage and realized the real question was,
why hadn’t she done it yet? Surely that was at the heart of it all.
Where to go with this? It was a game-changer, an explosive turn of
events in an already spectacular story. What to do? It was a
question he wouldn’t try to answer alone, and so once he pulled out
onto the highway he called the brass at HBO. Let them make the
decision. He already had a good idea what they would say.

Ahead, lightning flashed on the horizon, and
thunder rolled across the sky.

Carla wasn’t on again until third shift the
following night, and from the moment she met Trent Whitmore on her
steps until she pulled into the staff parking lot at Deacon Valley,
she didn’t sleep. The storm which had been threatening since the
previous day had arrived with a vengeance, and now, at a quarter of
eleven, it was punishing this entire corner of Oklahoma. Rain
hammered the roof, and curtains of water marched across the parking
lot, driven by a high wind which made the car shake.

She sat for a while with the engine off,
watching the storm, thinking of what was to come. She had received
a call late this afternoon from Warden Epps – and he never called
officers at home – which she let go to message. The warden’s voice
was low, without a trace of humor, and he called her Sergeant
Mendez, instead of the familiar Carla he had used with her for
years. Epps instructed her to report to Lt. Dykestrom, the third
shift watch commander, as soon as she arrived at the prison. He
gave no further details, and hung up without saying goodbye.

So this was the end of it. Trent Whitsome
reported what he had learned about her, and that was that. She
would be fired, certainly. Would they prosecute her for
falsification of her employment and background records? Probably.
The state didn’t have a high level of tolerance for misconduct from
its employees. It didn’t matter. What did matter was that she had
missed the many chances to exact revenge for Anita’s murder, and
tonight would be the last time she would ever be allowed inside the
facility. She would never get another shot at Kelvin Finch, and
there was no way they’d let her get near him tonight.

She had failed, and she started to cry. She
didn’t tell Anita how sorry she was, again, didn’t tell her
daughter how much she loved her. She simply cried. When the
internal storm had wrung her out, Carla stepped into the downpour
and hustled towards the entrance. There was no point trying to
avoid the consequences of her actions. By the time she got inside
she was soaked and shaking.

The on-duty officer checking in staff gave
her a pleasant good evening as she passed through the metal
detector. He didn’t look at her funny or order her to wait for an
escort. She passed half a dozen more officers in the corridors, all
exchanging greetings, none of them acting unusual. Carla struggled
to act the same. One officer told her that the power from OMPA, the
Oklahoma Municipal Power Authority, was down and the prison was
running on its emergency generators. He said there were tornado
warnings as well.

Carla ducked into the ladies locker room to
towel off and rub at her hair before going into the Pen, the
central ready area for COs. Outgoing second shift officers were
mixing with oncoming third shifters, some sharing the day’s
stories, but in most cases talking sports or families or anything
other than about the prison. None of them acted any differently
with her. She headed into the briefing room, where all that changed
when Dean saw her.

“Come over here,” he said softly, taking her
elbow and leading her over to the cluster of desks the sergeants
used. She went without protest. He looked around, keeping his voice
low. “Dykestrom called me into his office a few minutes ago. He
said he got a call from the warden, who got a call from some HBO
executive.”

She just looked at him.

“What the hell, Carla? You’ve been lying to
everyone? To me, all these years?” He frowned at her. “What’s your
real name?”

“Mendez is my maiden name. When I was
married it was Carla Rodriguez.” There was no sense trying to keep
up the charade.

“And your daughter…Finch…”

“Kelvin Finch abducted my daughter eleven
years ago,” she said, surprised at how calm her voice was. “He held
her for three months, repeatedly raping and torturing her, and when
he was finished he killed her, cut her into pieces and buried her.
It was almost a year before we knew she was dead, and not just
missing. We didn’t recover her body until after Finch was
caught.”

Dean stared at her, slowly shaking his head
at her words, too stunned to speak. How was it she was still sane
after something like that? And then she had worked so very hard to
position herself inches from the man who had done it all. For what
purpose? The easy answer was revenge, but over all these years she
would have had hundreds, thousands of chances to kill him. But she
hadn’t. None of it made any sense.

“I don’t even know what to say to you.” Dean
still had her by the arm, but it wasn’t a grip, more a touch of
comfort.

“I wish I had an answer that you would
understand,” she said, her eyes starting to well up. She saw he was
hurt, and had never thought about how this would affect him if it
all came out. It was never meant to until it was over, and then she
wouldn’t be around to see it. But now here was this man whom she
still cared for, wounded and confused, and she couldn’t even
explain it.

“Dykestrom’s looking for you. He’s going to
suspend you and send you home.”

“I know.”

“Carla, you could be prosecuted on several
counts, fraud for one.”

She sighed. “I know. And I’ll take what’s
coming.”

He looked around again. “Or you could just
turn around and walk out of here right now. No one else knows, no
one will stop you. Get in your car, pack some things and leave,
just disappear.”

She smiled at him and touched his face.
“You’re a sweet man, Dean Frye. I missed out on a good one.”

He started to protest, but she shook her
head. “I did all this. I’ll face it.” She wished she felt the
conviction of her words. Fired, locked up or simply kicked out, how
would she face the rest of her life knowing she’d had the chance
and failed to give Finch the justice he had coming? It wasn’t a
life worth living. But then, had it ever been? Not for eleven years
now.

“I’ll walk with you,” he said, reluctantly
letting go of her arm. His voice was thick as he struggled to keep
his emotions in check. Carla nodded, and then glanced past him, her
breath cut short.

Anita was standing in the corner of the
briefing room.

She was like smoke, and Carla could see
through her to the wall beyond, but it was Anita. Her little girl’s
eyes were far away and sad, and she stood with her arms loose at
her sides, hair limp about her face. Carla had never seen anything
so forlorn in her life, and her heart broke all over again.

Anita looked at her mother, and then turned
and walked through a door.

Carla looked quickly at Dean. “I need to
make a stop before we go.” She moved to her desk and unlocked the
bottom drawer, pulling out the nylon sports bag which had rested
there in the dark for so many years. “I need to take care of some
girl stuff first.”

He barely glanced at the bag, and didn’t
notice the way it sagged in the center from the weight.

Carla hurried through the briefing room and
out the door her daughter had taken. The corridor beyond was empty
except for the gray little shape drifting down its center ahead of
her, feet unmoving and not touching the floor. A trail of cold air
followed behind her.

“Mommy’s coming, sweetheart,” she breathed,
quickening her pace, the contents of the sports bag clanking. She
knew this hallway well, and where it led. A few moments later Anita
paused, turned, and passed through another door. When Carla reached
it she had to flip through her keys to find the one which unlocked
it. A few seconds later she was alone in a small room, the hallway
door closed and relocked behind her, the only light a thin white
line shining under the door from the hallway. She set down her bag
and stood there in the dark, facing the outline of a steel door. If
Anita was in the room, she couldn’t see her.

Carla waited, her heart pounding, the room
freezing.

“Mommy’s ready, baby.”

Deacon Valley Correctional Facility relied
on OMPA for all its power needs. In the event of a power failure
from that source, the prison automatically shifted to the emergency
generators housed in a cinderblock building just outside the wire.
Within the loud, oily smelling building sat a trio of big yellow,
air-cooled 975kw Caterpillars with the capacity to produce well in
excess of the roughly 2,400 volts needed to run the prison.
Properly fueled, the generators could run indefinitely, or at least
as long as it took to restore central power, permitting the
facility to carry on without disruption. In the unlikely event the
big Cats failed, a few smaller, individual units around the
facility would kick in to continue providing power to the top
priority areas; the main gates, perimeter and tower lights, and
parts of the administrative building. There was no such third level
failsafe for the majority of the prison itself, including the
blocks.

The tornado dropped out of the sky without
warning at ten minutes past eleven, a violent funnel as black as
the devil’s heart. It cut a savage trough across the killing fields
outside the wire, and then slammed into the generator building,
obliterating it in an explosion of cinderblock and mangled yellow
metal that spun out into the screaming wind and rain. Two of the
big Cats were torn apart instantly, and the lights at Deacon Valley
flickered and surged. The third generator, untouched by the
twister, struggled to take on the full load, whining up like a
turbine engine until it was squealing louder than the storm. Unable
to keep up with the drain, it exploded like a little star, and
Deacon Valley was dropped into darkness.

The energy of the storm already had the
prison’s population awake and wound up in much the same way intense
lightning and thunder will agitate zoo animals in their cages. When
the power crashed and the cell blocks went black, it pushed them
over the edge. Violence erupted almost immediately in most of the
forty-eight man, dormitory-style housing units. Some was directed
at the glass of CO bubbles, some against bunks or wall-mounted
televisions protected by steel mesh. There was yelling and
screaming, fires were started. And there in the dark, with only the
hellish light from a burning mattress to see by, well-hidden shanks
came out and old grudges were settled. Men were stabbed and kicked
to death and had their heads bashed in with knees and doubled
fists, rapists and pedophiles and Aryans and Crips and whoever had
done something to someone else and was owed a death. In minutes the
prison was rocked by riots in six of the cell blocks. The alert
siren was one of the few devices able to run on backup power, and
it howled throughout the facility.

It was the series of events which Carla had
needed, had waited on for eleven years. In that little room, she
used a big brass key on the steel door and opened it, heaving it to
the side. A wall mounted, battery-powered emergency light on one
wall lit the arsenal in black and white, and Carla went to work
with the speed of someone who had drilled for years. Her fingers
flipped through the key ring with trained precision as she unlocked
the assorted racks and cabinets, selecting what she would need and
slinging the gear across her chest and over her shoulders. When she
was ready, she retrieved the weighted sports bag, left the steel
door standing open, and moved back out into the hall, taking off at
a run.

Chaos. Over the blare of the siren, men were
running in the dark, orders were shouted, and in the distance was
the muffled roar from the cell blocks. Thunder shook the prison as
the storm descended in force, and outside the shooters huddled in
their towers as the twister shredded a hundred yards of fence and
razor wire, then lifted an unmanned patrol jeep and spun it away
into the night sky.

Dean Frye met Lt. Dykestrom in the hallway,
both of them carrying mag-lites.

“DV-2 through DV-6 is coming apart,” the Lt.
said, “and they’re almost through the bubble at DV-4. Looks like
the sprinkler system is still working, though. Three’s bubble
reports the fires are out.” Both of their radios crackled with
shouting voices and confusion.

“Any losses?” Dean was opening the outer
door to the arsenal as running COs started forming up in the
hallway behind him.

“Negative. All bubbles have reported in.”
The Lt. looked around. “Where’s Mendez?”

“She came this way a few minutes ago,” Dean
said, pushing open the door. The Lt. followed him in. They saw the
open steel door immediately, and then they were both inside,
panning their lights around. There were only three people with keys
to the arsenal, and two of them were standing right here. They
looked at the unlocked weapons racks and open lockers, then at each
other as officers pushed past them. The COs started pulling on body
armor and helmets, arming themselves with shotguns and batons,
gasmasks and Plexiglas shields.