Without Mercy (15 page)

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

—W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

South Central Correctional Facility
Clifton, Tennessee

IT WAS NEARLY NOVEMBER, YET THE EXERCISE YARD
shimmered with unseasonal warmth, the masonry walls and concrete basketball court basking in the midday sun. Leaning against the wall of the mess hall, two guards, Testerman and Burchfield, sought the scrap of shade created by the stingy geometry of the roofline, wall, and angle of solar incidence.

Out on the cracked court, ten shirtless men—six black, two Hispanic, two white, killers all of one sort or another—shoved and elbowed and jockeyed in a tight scrum. The wet slaps of skin on sweaty skin mingled with grunts and muttered curses, the scuffing of leather soles, and the clatter of the basketball rattling the rusty rim bolted loosely to the backboard.

Suddenly inmate number 00255787—the tall, muscled white man named Satterfield—bellowed and dropped to his
knees beneath the goal, both hands clutching his belly. Blood oozed across his knuckles and poured onto the pavement, and glistening loops of intestine protruded between his splayed fingers.

The guards, both of them hefty men, heaved themselves off from the wall and lumbered toward the prisoners, fumbling at their belts for the only weapons they were allowed to carry inside: small canisters of pepper spray—absurd, sissified stand-ins for guns.
Shit
, Testerman thought for the thousandth time,
a man can carry a gun anywhere in Tennessee except the one place he needs it most—in a bunch of cold-blooded killers
. It was a favorite complaint of his.
Like sending a soldier into battle with a damn slingshot
.

“Break it up, break it
up
,” Testerman shouted, bulling his way through the sweaty bodies. The nine standing men had bunched up around Satterfield, either spectating or camouflaging, or—most likely—both: watching the action, while also making sure the guards couldn't.
Sons of bitches
, Testerman thought.

A long, bloody shank glistened on the concrete beside Satterfield, and Testerman's first move was to plant his left boot over the business end of the thing. From the round shaft and hexagonal head protruding from beneath his midsole, Testerman saw that it had been crafted from a six-inch bolt, the threads scraped against concrete for weeks or even months to hone a wicked, scalpel-like blade at one end. An opportunistic eye, a deft hand, and infinite patience: any inmate who possessed that unholy trinity of attributes could, sooner or later, procure a piece of metal and fashion a weapon sharp enough to stab a stoolie or gut a guard.

Testerman's trigger finger twitched atop the pepper spray. “Jesus,” he said, seeing the blood and entrails. Over his shoulder,
without taking his eyes off the prisoners, he shouted to Burchfield: “Call for some backup. And a stretcher.” Glancing around the group, he said, “Anybody wanna tell me who did this?” No one spoke. “Thought not. Too bad—I was gonna write up a commendation. Y'all go over there and line up along the fence. Go on now.
Git
.”

Once they were twenty feet away, Testerman set down the pepper spray and reached into the lower thigh pocket of his cargo pants, tugging out a pair of purple nitrile gloves. In Testerman's mind, the gloves were even more essential than the pepper spray. In here, one man in every three was HIV-positive; in here, blood and saliva and semen erupted like deadly little geysers on a daily or even hourly basis. After his hands were protected, he took another pair of gloves from his pocket, and—removing his boot from the bloody shank—he slid the weapon carefully into the purple sleeve of the index finger, using the glove as a makeshift bag, not worrying much about whether he smeared whatever fingerprints might've been on the shaft. He knotted the second glove around the blade and tucked it into his shirt pocket, careful not to pierce either the glove or himself. Only then did he turn his cursory attention to the wounded man.

Eyeing the bloody coils spilling through the clawlike fingers, Testerman shook his head slowly. “Satterfield, Satterfield,” he said, a grim smile spreading across his face. “Couldn't've happened to a nicer guy.” He sat back on his heels, musing, then nodded thoughtfully. “That's a whole mess of chitlins hanging out of your belly there, stud. You might just bleed out right here in the yard.” He chewed the inside of one cheek, musing. “Yep. Infirmary's probably pretty busy today. Might just take a while for them to get here with a stretcher. Might just take
quite
a while, matter of fact.”

Satterfield spoke through clenched teeth. “Listen to me, you fat fuck. I've got friends. Friends in here, and friends outside. You let me die and you'll wish you hadn't. Now and for the rest of your sorry little life.”

The guard snorted. “I don't think so.”

“Think again,” Satterfield muttered. “What's the name of that good-lookin' little wife you've got, with the blond hair and the hot body? Christie? And that boy of yours—Sammy?”

Testerman's face hardened. “You shut your mouth,” he snarled. “Don't you ever talk about my family.”

“Sammy,” Satterfield went on, as if he hadn't heard. “Something's not right with Sammy. Autistic, or something? But making progress, I hear.”

“I'm warning you, Satterfield. You keep talking, I'll finish you off myself.”

“I'm thinking it might set Sammy back a bit if he was to see a few days' worth of bad things happen to his mama. Really bad things. What do you think, Testerman?”

“I think you're a dead man, Satterfield. You can't touch them.”

“Can't I? They're at your place on the lake right now,” he said. “Got there about an hour ago. She called to tell you they'd made it. Said it took an extra thirty minutes because there was a wreck on I-24.” Testerman stared at him now, wild-eyed, trying to figure out how the hell Satterfield could possibly know that. Could the inmate really have enough connections on both the outside and the inside to keep track of her? “She didn't tell you she had company, because she didn't know it yet. But she knows it now. You better bet she knows it now.” The guard's jaw clenched rhythmically, twin knots of muscle throbbing on either side. “Here's the deal, Testerman,” Satterfield went on. “If I don't make it to the infirmary in five
minutes, you're gonna have one hell of a mess to clean up at that cabin. And one fucked-up retard of a motherless child.”

The guard's chest heaved, his nostrils flaring, electro-shocks of rage pulsing down his beefy shoulders and arms and into his twitching fists. “You sick sonofabitch,” he hissed at Satterfield. “If I find out you're messing with me, I'll strangle you with your own guts.” Then—over his shoulder, loud and urgent: “Burchfield! We need that stretcher! And I mean
now
!”

OVER THE COURSE OF SIXTEEN YEARS AT THE PRISON'S
infirmary, Asa Dillworth, M.D., had seen thousands of bites, hundreds of fractures, and scores of stab wounds—some minor, others fatal. A skull shattered with a baseball bat to protest an umpire's call at home plate in a softball game. A loose eyeball gouged out by a thumb in a lovers' quarrel. An ear bitten off during a dining-hall food fight that got out of hand. But never before had he seen a man clutching two handfuls of his own intestines.

Dr. Dillworth whistled appreciatively. “That's a hell of an incision,” he said to Satterfield. “I'm amazed you're conscious.”

“I'm tough,” Satterfield said. His voice was barely above a whisper, and the doctor had to lean down to hear him.

“I need you to move your hands so I can get a better look.”

“Doc?” Satterfield's voice was barely audible now. “I need to tell you something important.” The doctor bent closer, not without trepidation. Was it possible this guy was about to go Hannibal Lecter on him? Lunge up and chew off his face? “Doc, you need to call your wife on her cell phone. Don't tell
anyone what you're doing, or why. Stay right where I can see you and hear you. Call her right now, and keep your mouth shut and listen. Then put me in an ambulance.” Dillworth stared at Satterfield, uncomprehending. “Better hurry, Doc,” the inmate whispered. His eyes bored into the physician's like lasers. “There's not much time. For me or your wife.”

Leaving the baffled nurse standing on the other side of the gurney, awaiting his instructions, Dillworth backpedaled a step, fumbling in a pocket for his cell phone. After a few moments he opened his mouth to speak, but whatever he heard on the other end of the line made him keep quiet. He listened, his eyes darting back and forth, as if he were watching a high-speed tennis match that he found terrifying. Sixty seconds later he closed the phone, his face ashen. “We've got to get this man to the hospital right away,” he said to the nurse.

Ten minutes later, an ambulance backed up to the infirmary's loading dock, the doctor and nurse standing on either side of the gurney where Satterfield lay, the sheet over his belly glistening with blood. The two EMTs looked startled—disbelieving, even, when the doctor told them the patient had been partially eviscerated. In response, Dillworth raised the sheet to reveal the bloody coils, still clutched by Satterfield. “Holy shit,” said the younger of the two, the driver.

“Take him on our gurney,” said the doctor. “It'll save time, and he shouldn't be moved. You can leave yours here for now.”

“What have you done so far?” the older one asked.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? What do you mean, nothing?”

“I mean nothing.”

“How much blood has he lost?” The doctor made no response. “What are his vitals?” The doctor shook his head enigmatically. “Is he in shock?”

At that, Dillworth lifted a hand, as if asking for silence or bestowing a blessing, then turned and walked away. Baffled, the EMTs looked to the nurse. She shrugged apologetically and said, “Don't ask me. Dr. Dillworth said not to touch him. Said we didn't have time, and there was nothing we could do. That's all I know.”

“Christ,” said the older EMT. “This guy could code any second. Let's go.” Together the medics maneuvered the gurney into the ambulance and secured it, then the younger man latched the rear door and hurried to the driver's seat.

He hit the siren as soon as he cleared the prison gate and turned onto the long, straight stretch of highway headed toward town. His older colleague—riding in back with the patient—unbuckled his seat belt, leaned over the gurney, and put his stethoscope on the blood-smeared chest. His face registered surprise when he heard the heart. He'd expected it to be weak and irregular, but it thumped strongly, seventy beats a minute, steady as a metronome. He folded down the sheet far enough to expose one of the man's biceps and cinched a blood-pressure cuff around the arm. The reading—120 over 80—was better than the EMT's own blood pressure. “Damn, hoss, you're one strong son of a gun,” the medic said to Satterfield. If Satterfield heard, there was no sign of it; his eyes remained closed, his face clamped in what seemed a permanent grimace of pain. “Let's just take a closer look at that belly.”

The EMT folded back the sheet far enough to expose Satterfield's bloody hands, still clutching the coils of intestine. “Can you hear me?” he asked. There was no response. “I think I'd best irrigate this mess with betadine,” the EMT went on, “and then wrap it. If you were to lose consciousness and let go, your insides might be all over the floor. Not good.” He took hold of Satterfield's wrists and lifted them up, then laid
them on the gurney beside him. Just then the ambulance hit a bump, and the gurney jounced. The pile of intestines jiggled and shifted. Then—as the EMT made a frantic but unsuccessful grab for them—they slid sideways and down, landing on his feet with a sticky plop. “Oh
shit
,” he gasped. Then: “What the
hell
?” The patient's belly was covered with blood, but the gaping wound the EMT expected to see—the wound through which the intestines had emerged—was simply not there. The EMT ran an exploratory hand over the skin to make sure his eyes weren't deceiving him.

That's when his wrist was seized in a grip like a vise. “Pig,” said Satterfield calmly. “Pig guts and pig blood.”

The EMT stared at the prisoner's face. Satterfield stared back, holding the EMT's gaze, as he slipped a second shank—the twin of the one he'd dropped on the basketball court—out of his waistband. Driving it into the man's belly, he sliced upward until the blade hit the breastbone. The EMT grunted, his own entrails spilling out—as if in some sadistically parallel-universe echo of the sham disemboweling Satterfield had staged—and then he sank to his knees, clutching the gurney until he toppled. In a better world—a world in which rural ambulance services had ample funding—the gutting would have been captured by an interior video camera, thus alerting the driver. But this was not a better world; this was cash-strapped Wayne County, Tennessee, where one-quarter of children lived in poverty. By the time the ambulance pulled up to the hospital's emergency entrance, the dead EMT was strapped to the gurney and covered with a sheet, and by the time the unsuspecting driver switched off the engine, the blade in Satterfield's hand was already slicing the young man's carotid artery.

Thirty seconds after cutting the driver's throat, Satterfield—dressed
in scrubs, his features concealed by a surgical mask—wheeled the gurney into the hospital, parked the corpse in a hallway, and followed a labyrinth of corridors to the main lobby. He walked out the front entrance, a free man, for the first time in more than twenty years.

By the time the hospital, police, and prison staff pieced together the bloody puzzle, Satterfield would be long gone: eastbound toward Knoxville, and toward Brockton, and toward the bloody reckoning Satterfield had lovingly imagined every day for two decades.