Last Shot (2006) (4 page)

Sasso offered a dry smile. "Long enough to remember your jacket, I'd imagine."

"Right. Sorry." In place of a union guidebook, Newlin had a pack of cigs stored in his breast pocket. On his belt, in addition to the normal accessories, was a latex-glove packet. Informed, relaxed, and prepared. He'd even referred to Walker's cellie by first name. Bear and Tim shared a quick, impressed glance.

"Listen," Tim said to Sasso and McGraw, "we've already taken up enough of your time. If...?"

"Cary Newlin." The youthful CO offered his hand to Bear first, then Tim.

"...wouldn't mind showing us the tape and walking us over, we can get out of your hair."

"Me?" Newlin shrugged his accord. McGraw bowed his head, extending his hands as if in benediction. Sasso steered them out, depositing them in the control center across the hall.

Manned by another team of zombie COs who barely noted Tim and Bear's entrance, a bank of closed-circuit TVs monitored the various prison buildings. The screen labeled "J" showed mini-frontloaders clearing away mounds of smoldering trash. Officers patrolled the perimeter of the mess while workers loaded more burned refuse into rolling bins. A few roaming COs wielding fire extinguishers continued to blast real or imagined embers, mist settling in a sci-fi layer about their knees. The barn-style steel door had been shoved back to accommodate the equipment, while an officer with an M4 guarded the ten-foot gap and checked the creds of the workers and COs passing through.

Newlin grabbed one of the three tapes atop the corner TV/VCR that Sasso had indicated and began fast-forwarding it. An unlit stretch of empty catwalk, blurred in bands by the tape's movement. It was a tight shot; the security camera must have been mounted on the tier just above.

"The brass chaffing you in there?" he murmured to Tim.

"How ever did you guess?"

"From the way you jumped on my bandwagon." He offered Tim and Bear a wink with a tip of his head. "Fellow chaffee."

Bear pointed at the activity on the live-feed J-Unit screen. "What are they still looking for in there?"

"Well, no inmate has technically left J-Unit," Newlin said. "The only door was secured seconds after Boss's body hit concrete. We figure maybe Walker's still lodged in a duct somewhere. Though at this stage it's wishful thinking. We've been through every inch of the unit twice. He literally vanished. Like, thin air, you know?"

"How'd you settle the riot so quickly?"

"This wasn't a riot, just a tantrum. We're only medium security. Once the last chair and TV get thrown, the inmates lose their juice. Plus, we had a full CO response and DCT--Disturbance Control Team. Power in numbers. We got the boys back in their houses without too much hassle."

"You notice anything different about Walker's behavior today?"

Newlin swapped out the tape for another one and resumed fast-forwarding. "Uh-huh."

The response caught both Tim and Bear by surprise. "Yes?" Tim said.

"Sure. His mood shifted at night. He was quiet--well, I guess Walker's always quiet. He seemed fine heading off for chow hall. But he came back from dinner, I dunno...off. Sat out TV time."

"Hadn't done that before?" Tim asked.

"Not that I remember."

Tim's gaze drifted across the bank of closed-circuit monitors, finding the "DH" screen. Rows of picnic tables, barely visible in the darkness. "Can we pull footage from dinner?"

"Hear that, Earl?"

One of the COs, without turning from the screens before him, offered Newlin a lethargic thumbs-up.

Newlin hit "play." The time stamp in the bottom right corner of the screen counted up from 20:14:32. Boss Hahn appeared, glimmering with sweat, his chest and stomach muscles pronounced above the towel. He moved with his weight on his heels, his arms bowed to accommodate their girth. A flash of shadow entered the screen, and Walker stood before him, facing away from the camera. A split-second pause, then the rise of the arm, the tap to the neck, the shove over the railing, and Walker vanished in the direction from which he'd come. An instant later the camera vibrated slightly on its mount--Boss Hahn's body hitting the floor.

The entire assault took place in about three seconds.

Rapidly, the catwalk filled with screaming inmates, churning and shoving. In short order they were heaving blankets and microwaves off the tier. The muted action and gloomy lighting gave the scene a sinister, old-fashioned feel.

"His cell's that way?" Tim pointed in the direction from which Jameson had entered and exited the screen.

Newlin nodded. "Just out of view. So he could've returned to his cell or kept going on the catwalk and shot down the south stairs. The thing is, the stairs are exposed, and the housing unit officer would've seen him."

"Unless Jameson waited for the riot and then split."

"Right. By that time the officer would've been out of the unit with the door locked."

"Anything on the other tapes?"

"They're limited view, as you can see. We've got one on the middle of each tier, like this, and then the general cam"--he pointed to the J-Unit screen--"which only really picks up the range floor and the center of the first tier. We've got a team going over everything, and they've yet to pick anything up."

"Let's roll the stabbing again," Tim said. "Tell me what you see."

Boss flew up over the railing, landed on his feet. The blood sucked back into his neck. He waddled backward, then headed forward to get murdered again.

"It's an expert strike," Newlin offered.

"Sure is." Tim's voice contained an element of admiration. "He struck right between the skull and the back shelf of the jaw, where it's good and tender. From the look of the blood pressure, he punctured the external carotid, straight up from the heart. Makes for a quicker bleed-out--about seven seconds. Jameson's right-handed, so it's a natural strike."

Newlin's eyes shifted from the screen to Tim's face, a reappraisal of sorts in the works. "How do you know he's right-handed?"

"Photo from his days in the Corps shows his rifle slung right to left." Tim tapped the screen. "Can we take another look at it?"

They watched the segment through a few more times. The spurt from Boss's punctured neck, when viewed frame by frame, was spectacular. They were just getting ready to leave when Newlin came out of his chair with excitement. "Hang on. Right there. Check it out." As Walker moved to shove Boss, his shirt pulled up on the left side, revealing the hems of several undershirts for a split second. "I thought he looked bulky. He layered up." Of Bear's puzzled glance, Newlin added, "Wearing a bunch of shirts. It's a defense against getting stuck. And it lets you pull a quick appearance change after you shiv someone."

"Why would he need to switch outfits?" Bear said. "He knows he's on tape."

"Plus, it's his ambush," Tim said. "I doubt he was worried about getting stuck."

"Maybe he put the shirts on earlier," Bear offered.

"Pretty damn hot in here to hang out in quadruple layers," Newlin said.

Bear bobbed his head in agreement. "Weird."

Newlin rose and headed for the door. "Not half as weird as his cell."

Chapter
5

Unlike Sasso, who pivoted corners on the ball of his foot to preclude a break in stride, Newlin slouched along, swinging the keys around an index finger. In the breezeway, cameras rotated to follow the three men's progress. They reached J-Unit and were promptly halted at the door.

"Creds and badges." The officer glanced quickly at Tim's and Bear's IDs, his hand never leaving the stock of his M4. "You're the marshals, huh? You figure this one out, you're better men than me." He handed Tim an electronic clipboard of the type carried by UPS drivers.

Tim perused the category labels--Name, Position, Time In, Time Out--before punching in his information. "You've kept this crime-scene log since the stabbing, right?"

"No one has crossed this threshold without signing here and walking past the barrel of my gun."

"Can we get a look at the records you've kept?"

The officer said sharply, "I know all these guys. Each name. And I look everyone in the face. No way our boy threw on a uniform and slid past me. No way."

"All the more reason, then, to give us a hand."

The officer tugged the clipboard out of Tim's grasp, entered a code, and returned it. The on-screen list had the names of everyone who had entered or left J-Unit after the Disturbance Control Team had secured the building and extinguished the small fires. McGraw was first, at 8:43 P.M. Then a host of COs. Maintenance men. Sanitation workers. The warden. More sanitation workers. Most names had been entered going in and out.

Anticipating Tim's next question, the officer said, "Yes, the eleven outstanding are all still inside, and I know every one of them."

Tim handed over the clipboard with a nod and pressed forward with Bear and Newlin. Stagnant air filled his lungs, thick with the bitter scent of burned debris. An ambitious tech had done his best to lay down a chalk outline on the range floor, but it had been blurred by swept ash. Elsewhere dark puddles remained. From the cells, inmates cheered the mini-frontloader's progress as its bucket tray scooped up detritus like the distended mouth of a bass. Tim stared up the dreary rise of metal and concrete, wondering if Walker could in fact be hiding inside the walls.

Their footsteps shuddered the metal staircase as they climbed. Newlin led the way along the third-tier catwalk, Bear fanning the front of his shirt against the humidity. The facility was on full lockdown, the cell doors secured. As they drew near, palm-size mirrors, held by dark arms, retracted back through the bars. A huge Samoan kid offered Tim the finger from his perch on the toilet, where he sat with one leg free, his loose pants puddled around a laceless sneaker. A few of the cells remained neat, their mattresses and spartan furnishings intact, but most were torn apart. Posters had been ripped from the walls, leaving behind taped corners of azure water or tanned flesh.

The inmates peppered Newlin with questions: "CO, you guys all buy your ties at the same place?" "CO, who're them Newjacks with you?" "CO, this clogged toilet's killin' me."

The correctional officers milling by Jameson's open door stepped aside, one sweeping his arms melodramatically toward the cell as if indicating a just-unveiled statue.

Perfectly centered on the floor stood the bottom halves of two plastic Coke bottles--makeshift cups that had been filled, one with green liquid, the other with yellow.

Newlin followed Bear's gaze and nodded, lips pinched. "Mouthwash and urine."

Bear peered around the cell, summing up Tim's thoughts: "What the fuck?"

Two of the grid window's safety-glass panes had been broken. No jagged edges, just fist-size circles and a scattering of glass pebbles on the sill. A roll of green dental floss had been tied to a bar and dropped through one of the holes. Tim glanced through the glass, eyes tracing the thread's path down to the quartz rocks forty feet below. A breeze picked up the floss, floating it over the razor wire. A bedsheet rope, complete with a cartoon-prisoner knot and secured in similar fashion to a bar, dangled through the second break, the end swaying no more than ten feet below the bottom of the window ledge. Any drop from the rope, even if Walker could have shrunk himself to Mighty Mouse proportions and squeezed through the bars and the tiny gap in the glass, would have resulted in a death plummet to the razor wire.

Tim lingered on the view--two vast fences, coast guard headquarters, Dumpsters piled with charred refuse, a couple royal palms.

He gestured for a pair of latex gloves, then picked through the trash can. Three balls of tissue unfurled to reveal snot. The other contents were equally enlightening: a few empty Styrofoam cups and lids, two plastic Coke-bottle caps, a shorter string of dental floss, a wad of red gum. He set the can back down and eased to all fours to look under the bed. It took him a moment to identify the delicate blue shavings: rubber gratings from where Walker had whittled the toothbrush against the edge of the metal leg.

Tim stood, mused for a moment, then rapped his knuckles on the steel platform of the top bunk. "He threw his mattress over the rail?"

"That's right."

"He usually participate in stuff like that?"

Newlin took a moment, reflecting on the question. "We don't have Attica break out that often, but no. Walker's not a joiner. He didn't take part in the May riot."

"He left his cellie's mattress." Tim crossed the space and crouched, studying the frayed prayer rug of two-ply tissue. "This would've made for good burning, too." He glanced up at the black velvet banner and the postcard of the Sultan Ahmet, its six minarets pushing into a rich blue sky. "And that."

"So he didn't trash Imaad's stuff," Newlin said. "What's your point?"

"Seems like a pretty selective temper tantrum."

Bear beckoned Tim over to a color newsprint photo adhered to the wall by the sink. It was a studio shot of a woman in her thirties, awkwardly posed, fist to chin. Sears, perhaps. Amused, private eyes, angled to the side as if the photographer couldn't hold her attention. Maybe she was self-conscious, but it looked more as if she would've rather been someplace else. A too-slender nose prevented her from being beautiful, but it also added a sharpness to her otherwise even features, conveying an impression of intelligence, of resolve. The lavender retro-eighties Swatch dangling loose from her right wrist matched a pattern repeat in her shirt. Noting that Dray had a similar, Target-bought button-up, Tim pegged the woman's outfit as stylish but basically cheap. The dated hair-cut--short and excessively windswept--and the woman's makeup suggested the photo was from the late nineties.