Absolute Rage (55 page)

“So change it. What do you want to do?”

“What I've been doing here, minus the crazy stuff. Prosecuting cases. I want to be like Domino's Pizza, we deliver hot—no politics, no social work, no supervision: somebody gives me an ass, I put it in jail.”

“If they're guilty.”

He grinned. “Picky, picky! And what about you? You're leaving today. I presume you'll stay in the City for a while.”

“Yeah. I need to marshal the neurological resources of New York to focus on Giancarlo.”

“You think something can be done?”

“I don't know. I already talked to some people. Occipital-lobe injuries are funny. Sometimes it comes back, sometimes there's partial impairment, sometimes it's dark for life. At least he's alive. And cheerful, considering. It's funny: there's no one I know that it's less fair to make blind than Giancarlo, and at the same time there's no one I know who could take being blinded with less bitterness than Giancarlo. He's talking about getting a guide dog and taking up the piano. A lot less bitter than Mom, which isn't hard.”

“Yes. That's going to be an issue.”

“You and her.”

“Yeah. I knew she did sneaky and probably fairly dirty stuff for years, but this is different. It's murder for hire, when you cut to the chase. I don't know if I can . . .” He stopped and closed his eyes briefly. “Anyway, I shouldn't be talking to you about this kind of stuff. We'll work it out.”

Or not, he thought. “What about you and her?”

“I don't know. I can't look at her and she can't look at me. It's not just the killings. It's her, the way she thinks, what she does. I love her, but I can't be in the same room as her anymore. A failure of charity, I know. It's something I still have to work on.”

They finished their meal and he walked Lucy to her truck. A hug and a kiss and she was gone. Karp walked across the square and into the courthouse.

*  *  *

She drove to Dan's brother's place and found Dan in the back, in a deck chair, in cutoffs, with a cooler of beer within easy reach and a thick astrophysics text propped up on a board athwart the chair arms. She marched up to him, removed the board and books, and plopped herself down on his lap.

When he was able to breathe again, he said, “Does this mean you've decided to be nice to me?”

“It could be. Or it could be I am planning to plumb new levels of cruelty and this is the softening-up phase.”

“I'm betting on the latter. When are you splitting?”

“Now. You're the last soul in McCullensburg I will see, forever.”

“You can't leave without telling me what that Chinese writing on your shirt means.”

“No. It says
zhi si bu wu,
meaning roughly ‘unable to understand until death.' It's from a Tang-dynasty story about a hunter with a pet deer who gets along with the hunter's own dogs. The hunter warns it that not all dogs are like his pals, but the deer doesn't listen. It runs off, meets a strange pack of dogs, and gets eaten, without ever understanding why. It's an idiom used to refer to an incorrigibly stubborn person.”

“You got that part right. So . . . will I see you in Boston, or what?”

“Oh, yes, I certainly hope so. But I don't know how long I'm going to stay in school.”

“What will you do instead, and will they need a computer geek?”

She laughed. “I don't know. I'll let you know when I find out.”

“So we just, you know, go on like this? Necking? And, you know, raising the tension to the heart?”

“I hope so. I'll understand, however, if you feel the need to consort with women of easy virtue.”

“You'll wait there patiently, like a stained-glass window, huh?”

“Yes, until you ask me to marry you, at which point I will say yes.”

“What if I marry someone else? One of those easier-virtue ones?”

“Then I'll dance at your wedding and stifle my disappointed tears, and then join the Ursulines. But if you wait, I will show you delights beyond the range of your adolescent fantasies. We will have to honeymoon at the Mayo Clinic, you'll need IV tubes, to replenish your bodily fluids, which I will have
sucked
from your pulsing flesh.”

“You are such a
lunatic,”
he said, after which she did suck a little fluid from his mouth.

She then leaped to her feet. “So long and God bless you, Dan Heeney, until we meet again.” She ran out of the yard.

He stood up and watched her. Later, that was how he most often remembered her: running down the narrow lane to her truck, with her long legs, and those floppy shorts and the clunky boots kicking up the gravel, and the grin she gave him over her shoulder, and the head of the great black dog hanging out of the window as the truck pulled away.

ATRIA BOOKS PROUDLY PRESENTS

RESOLVED

ROBERTK.TANENBAUM

Now available in hardcover From Atria Books

Turn the page for a preview of
Resolved . . .

T
HE INTERIOR OF
N
EW
Y
ORK
state gets surprisingly hot in the summer, and this was a hotter than usual week, even for the last of August. The guards at the Auburn Prison, located nearly in the center of this region, were more than usually interested in the weather reports, for hot weather does not play well in the cell blocks. Auburn is a maximum security joint, like Attica, its more famous sister. Most people have forgotten that in 1929, in a similar hot spell, the prisoners had rebelled and burned the whole place down. But the guards remember. Prison cell blocks are not air-conditioned. Air-conditioning would be coddling convicts and the legislature will not countenance it, although if it were up to the guards, they would chill the whole place down so low that frost would form on the bars.

The fight started on a Monday, which is the worst day in prison, because Sunday is visiting day. Those who have received visits from loved ones are pissed off because they can't actually make love with their wives or hug their kids, and the ones who haven't are pissed off because they haven't, and the air is stale and stinking that monkey-house stink, and in the shadeless yard the sun boils the brain. Twelve hundred men, not one of whom has particularly good impulse control, all with little to lose, most with grudges against the world, mingle on that barren plain in the wilting heat. There are gangs. Half the prisoners are black, a third Hispanic, the rest white, and the gangs track this assortment. Someone makes a remark, and if the ethnicity of the remarker and the remarkee differ, that's all it takes. The guard in his tower sees a rapid movement, a coalescence of men's bodies around a center, like dirty gray water sucking down a drain. He goes for his radio and picks up his shotgun. The guards rush out with clubs swinging. They disappear into the mass.

Felix Tighe woke up in the prison infirmary with an aching head and a dull pain in his side. It took him a little while to recall where he was and what had put him there. It was hot, he remembered that, and he was on the bench in the yard, doing bench presses, 380-pound presses, with some Aryan Nation cons around him, also working out, ignoring the niggers at their weights, as usual, and then one of the niggers had said something about the sweet little white-boy ass of Kopman's punk, Lulu, which was bad enough, but then—it was Marvelle, the Crimp, he now recalled—Marvelle had actually grabbed Lulu and started dry-humping him right there in front of everyone, and all the white guys had dropped their weights and gone after him.

Felix had picked up a weight bar and gone in, too. After that it got blurry. He remembers cracking some heads with it, before the screws came in and started whacking everyone they could reach. He touched his side, moved his left arm. It stung, but didn't feel that bad. Someone had shanked him. He'd have to find out who and get even. Felix always got even and everyone knew it. It was one of his two main things, which was why no one had fucked with him after the first week, and now it was going on nineteen years here in Auburn. He was nearly forty-two.

A face swam into his field of view. A thin, pale brown face, the color of a sandy dirt road, shaven-headed, beak-nosed over a cropped gray beard, with prison glasses glinting in front of wide-set intelligent eyes. The Arab.

“How do you feel?” the Arab asked. He had a soft voice, only slightly accented. The Arab had been the chief trustee attendant at the infirmary for at least ten years. The Arab wasn't in a gang, not even in the Muslim Brothers, although he was an actual Muslim. Everyone left him alone for two reasons: one, you never could tell when you might have to go into the infirmary and hence find yourself in his power, and two, he provided dope for the whole prison. The doc was a junkie, and nodded off half the time. The Arab ran the place. Actually, three reasons. There was something about him, a look. The toughest cons, the yard bulls, could read it, and they treated the Arab with respect, and so, accordingly, did everyone else, including Felix. The prison records gave his name as Feisal Abdel Ridwan, which was somewhat true, and the crimes for which he had been sentenced as felony murder and armed robbery were also somewhat true. His actual identity and his actual crimes were kept secret, even from the prison authorities. This was part of the deal his lawyers had negotiated, to keep him safe, and to keep the information in his head on tap, should any of a number of U.S. government agencies wish to tap it.

“Okay, I guess,” said Felix. “My head hurts. What the fuck happened?”

“You were knocked out, a concussion. Also you were stabbed, but the blade twisted against a rib and did not penetrate far. Would you like some pills for the pain?”

“Fuck yes.”

The pills were produced, two tabs of Percocet. After swallowing them, Felix asked, “So I'm okay? No permanent damage, huh?”

“Not to your body. Your legal situation is not so good, I am afraid.”

“My legal . . . ?”

“Yes. The guard Daniels is dead. They are saying you killed him.”

“The fuck they are! That's bullshit! Who's saying I killed him, the niggers?”

“No, you were seen by several guards, apparently. Daniels was killed by a blow to the side of the neck, a blow from a naked hand. There are not many men who could deliver such a blow.”

Without thinking, Felix looked at his hands. A heavy rind of callous ran along the edge of each. The knuckles barely rose above the thick hornlike skin that encased them. Felix had been a karate black belt before coming to the prison, and he had been scrupulous about practicing during his time here. That was his other main thing—his body and its effectiveness as a weapon. Had he killed Daniels? He wasn't sure, although some details were returning now, as the drug relaxed him. The iron bar had been torn from his hands, and then he'd felt the jab of the knife. There were angry black faces all around him and he'd kicked and struck out at them. Someone had tried to grab him from behind and he'd whirled and chopped at a neck. Then nothing. That could have been Daniels. By then everything was a blur, the red haze of rage, sweat in his eyes. They couldn't hold him responsible for that. It was Marvelle who'd started the whole thing anyway.

“It was Marvelle started the fucking thing. Whyn't they fuck with
him
for a change?”

The Arab ignored this. “I think you are in a lot of trouble, Felix, you know? A great deal of big trouble. Killing a guard is murder in the first degree. They have the death penalty now. I think they intend to pin you for this murder.”

“Let them fucking try,” said Felix, “I didn't kill anyone. Not on purpose anyway.”

Later that same day, however, two state police detectives arrived at Felix's bedside, to interview him and to confront him with the evidence against him. The whole thing had been captured by the video cameras perpetually trained on the yard, they said, and it was perfectly clear who had killed the guard. They desired a confession, which Felix did not give them. It was an essential part of his psychology never to confess to anything, not for strategic reasons, but because, in his own mind, he was incapable of wrongdoing of any kind. That any act of his was justified, correct, blameless was, in a sense, the core of his being. Felix Tighe was a psychopath.

He asked for a lawyer then, which meant that they had to stop questioning him. It did not mean, however, that they had to stop talking to him, and one of the state detectives did that, describing in some detail what would happen to him after he was convicted of first-degree murder. New York had never executed anyone under the new statute, but it was the detective's belief that the state was merely waiting for someone just like Felix: white, a convicted murderer of a woman and a child, who had killed an officer in the line of duty. “A poster boy for capital punishment” was the phrase he used more than once.

The next day, a lawyer appeared, a court-appointed local, bored and irritably earning his twenty-five dollars per, who explained to Felix the legal doctrine of intent. It did not matter, he said, that Felix had not arisen that Monday morning planning to murder Officer Phillip K. Daniels. He had directed a blow against the victim's neck, knowing his own power and skill, knowing that it was potentially deadly. It was precisely the same as shooting a cop in the commission of a crime. “I didn't mean it” was not exculpatory under law. The lawyer advised Felix to take the plea, and he'd try to work out something that did not involve lethal injection. Felix refused. The lawyer explained what a refusal meant: that he would be tried locally, in Cuyahoga County, before a jury composed of people having zero sympathy for New York City bad boys, who all knew someone who knew someone who worked as a corrections officer at the prison. Felix then cursed out the lawyer so violently that the man got up and left.