And West Is West (24 page)

CHAPTER 52

Seminole City

“The rules are simple,” Ann says. “Though this is a special visit, you're to have no direct contact with the inmate. You'll be talking through a glass barrier on a phone. Keep in mind that everything you say will be monitored, so no jokes about saws in cakes or anything.”

It is 9 a.m. on this Friday morning. Ethan Winter has returned to Seminole City Correctional despite a brief reconsideration yesterday. If he doesn't owe it to himself, he owes it to Zoe to finish what he's started here—whatever this may be.

“If you've no questions, we'll be on our way,” Ann says.

“No questions,” Ethan says.

Ann picks up her phone and presses one of its function buttons. “I'm taking Mr. Winter over now, Warden.” Ann listens for a second and then hangs up.

“I'm really getting the VIP treatment,” Ethan says.

Ann gets up from her desk but is not looking at him when she replies. “We try to be sensitive when an inmate's suffered a death in the family.” Then she leads Ethan into the corridor.

Watching her slightly ahead of him, Ethan fixates on the woman's rust-colored hair—he can smell its fresh dye. Other random details imprint on his senses. A dent in the exterior exit door. The swelter of the outside heat. The raucous buzz of cicadas. They follow a concrete sidewalk and go completely around the building until they reach a door marked
VISITATION CENTER
. There must be a direct route through the building, Ethan notes, and why they didn't take it seems strange—maybe this has to do with the inscrutable methods of Warden Wagner. Ann leads him into a steamy entry hall that smells of sour laundry.

“Hi, Todd,” Ann says to the sweating, cannonball-shaped guard who's intercepted them.

“Ma'am,” Todd replies. Then he turns to Ethan. “Assume the position,” he says in a bored voice.

“Pardon?” Ethan says.

“Pat-downs are standard procedure,” Ann says. “Just like at the airport.”

Ethan spreads his feet modestly and puts out his arms. The guard frisks his upper torso then goes down on one knee and slides his hands up and down a pants leg, which makes Ethan feel like he's crossing a divide. What's next—a strip search, a delousing shower, incarceration in a cell? The thought of being stuck in here makes his bladder go weak and he must count out the seconds until the guard is done with his other leg. Fortunately there's a men's room a step away.

“Okay,” says Todd. As the guard backs off, he eyes Ethan critically.

“Excuse me,” says Ethan and steps toward the lavatory.

“Hold up, pal,” says the guard.

But Ethan is already pushing into the restroom . . . where a linebacker-size man in a black suit blocks his rush to the urinal. The man's small eyes pretend not to see Ethan as they maneuver around each other.
Oh, hello,
Ethan is about to say, thinking he might have seen him before—wait, was it last night in the hotel lobby? But the man is out the door.

“Sorry,” Ethan tells Ann upon exiting the bathroom. “It was an emergency.”

“Inside this institution,” Ann interrupts, not happy at all, “you will need to pay attention to the rules. When somebody orders you to halt,
you
halt.”

“Oh. Okay,” Ethan says.

“Let's go.”

Ann brings Ethan into what could be a college seminar room set up with tables and chairs. There's even a blackboard, though Ethan imagines that it's for announcements not lessons. The only classroom anomaly is the steel mesh shielding the windows on the
inside
.

“Our waiting area,” Ann explains. “Have a seat. The PA will announce when Don Aldridge is brought up.”

“Thanks,” Ethan tells her.

“Thank the warden. Don wasn't going to take your visit, but the warden convinced him.”

This strikes Ethan. “Why would the warden do that?”

Ann frowns like Ethan's examining the teeth of a gift horse.

“I know, he has his ways,” says Ethan.

Ann's expression softens. She considers one of the meshed windows. “Just don't let Don get you involved in anything,” she whispers. “Prisoners can do that.” In an even quieter voice she adds, “And mind what I said about your conversation being monitored.”

“Sure,” Ethan says. Now he's feeling even more anxious about meeting Zoe's father. What, if he ever knew, did he hope to accomplish by coming here? Ah, yes. Closure. Or was it something more.
Transcendence?
Whatever it is seems beyond quantification.

Ann touches Ethan's arm. “No ashes today?”

“Pardon?”

“You didn't bring the urn.”

“There didn't seem to be any point.”

“You might could have shown it to Don through the glass. Maybe that would have helped.”

CHAPTER 53

Pompano Beach

“Down!” Jessica shouts and yanks Skittles' leash, too hard. The dog yelps.

Turning from the cash machine, Jessica sees Skittles topple backward. She sees, above the dog on a palm trunk, a lizard with an orange wattle—Skittles' new obsession. She had only been treeing it.

“Crap,” Jessica says and kneels to smooth her fur. “Sorry, girl.”

But Skittles won't look at her. Skittles is a rescue dog with an unknown history of traumas and Jessica has never been mean to her before.

Jessica returns to the cash machine. She needs to calm herself but can't. She's been careless: this is her seventh withdrawal from her account in as many days. At least she's used multiple ATMs. Folding the bills into her jeans she scans the street, not for pickpockets but for the two men Hector Ramirez warned her about. Any moment Mutt and Jeff might cruise up behind her in their black SUV. If the agents went so far as to interrogate Don in prison, then they'll surely be tracing her bank activity, which may be why they haven't locked her account yet. To them, she
is
public enemy number one and they'll be mapping her cash stops—standard procedure for tracking terrorists, Jessica remembers from drone school. Investigators follow the money like a bread-crumb trail.

A few blocks of fast walking calms Jessica a little, and brings her to their next destination—a Winn-Dixie, where Jessica leashes Skittles to a bumper post near the automatic doors. “Stay,” she tells Skittles, who looks up at her as though punished.

Inside the store Jessica cruises the aisles for generic Wheaties and Alpo. But she's distracted. Since deciphering Hector's letter, she's been stumbling toward a realization. It's that Daugherty and Pyle are on a case that has grown bigger than just trying to return a shaky ex – drone driver to the security of a VA hospital. A cross-country FBI chase means she
is
on someone's most-wanted list. And she can begin to guess why—public approval is the toughest part of maintaining the war on terror. When the news came out that al-Yarisi was alive, Jessica became a bigger loose end than ever—a potential whistleblower.

And, in truth, Jessica is tempted to talk to someone again about the strike, about the young women she killed, the ghosts of her dreams—the collateral damage as everyone else would call them if their deaths were disclosed. Yet to have told her father in prison is one thing, but to be the source of a report on
Sixty Minutes
or in the
New York Times
—Jessica doesn't think so. She has, despite everything, her loyalties still: to the Air Force, to Voigt, to the ideal of what she thought she'd become when she enlisted—a person keeping the world safe. Even if she had been mistaken, she can't fight back in that way. The only ears that will ever hear this story belong to Skittles.

In the freezer aisle Jessica examines a quart of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, but it costs too much. She needs to be frugal. She needs to make no new ATM blips on Daugherty and Pyle's radar. Maybe she'll be able to fly under it by stretching out her waitressing tips. Maybe her new boss will let her cash her paychecks at the restaurant and she can avoid the banks.

Outside the store, blinking in the day's glare, she goes to where she tied up Skittles and drops her bags. Jessica is imagining how, jumping for a lizard, the dog unhooked herself. “Hell,” Jessica tells the parking lot as she scans it for her loose companion. “Skittles!” she shouts. “Here, girl!”

Her stomach becomes a knot. She runs between the parked cars, looking beneath them with her stomach pressing the burning pavement, hoping to spot Skittles' legs skittering past. But nothing. Jessica gets up and, brushing herself, slowly turns around. “Skittles!” she calls in a commanding tone. A white SUV pulls up alongside her.

“You aren't looking for the dog that was tied up out front?” the woman asks. “I saw some boys teasing her. But they're gone.
Teenagers
,” she says sympathetically and drives on.

There's a commotion on Route 1, the six-lane highway next to the Winn-Dixie, and Jessica finds herself sprinting through the parking lot. A car almost hits her as she crosses to the blocked left lane, where a man is dragging something golden onto the landscaped median. Jessica pushes the man hard and he trips backward onto the grass.

“What the hell are you doing!” he yells.

Jessica kneels beside Skittles. The dog's eyes are open and she doesn't seem to have a scratch. Jessica smoothes her fur but feels only a stillness.

“I was doing the speed limit,” the man says. “Your damn dog ran right out in front of me.”

Jessica's eyes are level with his vehicle's dented plastic bumper.

“She didn't suffer. She was already dead when I tried to move her.”

Jessica is breathing so quickly she sees stars. “No. You
can't
be dead,” Jessica says. Or has she shouted?

CHAPTER 54

Seminole City

Finally the PA crackles out an announcement. It's in Sufi or Mandarin or some indecipherable version of English, but because Ethan is the only visitor in the waiting area, he can guess at what's been said. “Donald Alan Aldridge up” maybe.

It's been forty minutes since Ann deposited him here and sitting on a flat-bottomed chair has deadened his legs. He stands and shuffles his prickling feet toward the check-in desk. Behind it, Todd puts down a paperback of Grisham's
A Time to Kill
and reviews some papers on a clipboard.

“Ethan Winter?” he asks, and Ethan nods. “ID,” he says, as though Ethan might have changed persona since his frisking. Ethan digs out his driver's license. After barely a glance, Todd flicks his chin at a corridor. “Booth six,” he says.

Ethan's feet move sluggishly but soon he finds that what he's entered is not a corridor. It's a room, narrow and deep, that contains on one of its long flanks a row of adjoining booths. These, he observes as he walks by the first, abut windows that look into a parallel universe. What comes to his mind are the glassed-in exhibits of a zoo house—an inhuman comparison that sickens him slightly. Lowering his eyes Ethan counts his way past the carrels until, at the sixth, he finds himself staring at a one-legged stool bolted there to the floor. Then Ethan lifts his gaze.

The first impression Don Aldridge gives Ethan comes from his wrestler's body, from the big arms folded atop the belly of his collarless prison shirt. Uneasily Ethan's gaze rises to the man's wide, textured face, his crooked nose, his eyes' broken blood vessels. His presence, even separated as they are, makes Ethan feel insubstantial—an impression not helped by Ethan's reflection in the partition glass. It is ghostly, gangly, thin necked. A nothing in a logoed polo shirt.

“Mr. Aldridge?” Ethan says, not sure he has the right man, for he sees nothing of Zoe in the prisoner. “I hope you don't mind me coming?” he says, very quietly.

Aldridge gestures for his visitor to pick up the phone. But Ethan's situational incompetence has emptied his brain. He is wordless.

“So, you knew my little Zozo,” Aldridge eventually says.

Ethan nods, surprised that Aldridge has heard why he has come. But then he recalls that Aldridge had at first refused his visit. The warden must have convinced the prisoner by mentioning what it would be about. Ethan considers for a moment why such an effort was put into making this meeting happen. Is it supposed to have a rehabilitative influence? In any event, Ethan is relieved of the need to explain himself.

“Zoe and I were close,” Ethan says.

Aldridge, narrowing his eyes, becomes a TV father giving his daughter's date the once-over. But his institutional shirt, his slicked-back hair, his unevenly shaven cheeks quickly destroy the impression. Aldridge is the kind of man Ethan would be more likely to observe panhandling around Zuccotti Park. “Weren't you her fiancé?” Aldridge asks, pronouncing
fiancé
's last syllable as
see
.

Ethan could simply answer with a yes. And he would, if not for Zoe's invisible presence. “No. We just lived together awhile.”

Aldridge nods. “That's good. I'm glad she had someone.”

Ethan would like to be equally consoling but the void of Zoe's immeasurable absence reopens. If he's come here to regain a sense of being with Zoe by being with her father, it is not working.

Aldridge takes up the slack. “The last time I saw Zo she wasn't five months old. So of course she don't remember me.”

For a heartbeat Aldridge's relaxed grammar brings Zoe back to Ethan. He must force himself to remember that she is not in the present tense. “She knew about you toward the end,” he says, imagining that Aldridge might find it comforting to know that he was not an absolute unknown.

“She knew her father was a con? I'd have liked her to imagine me something better.”

“No, I only meant that she found out recently . . .” And here come the complications. “She found out only last year that her grandparents weren't her biological parents. That they adopted her. So she knew she had a father somewhere. That's all I meant.”

Aldridge, holding the handset in the crook of his beefy neck, leans his forearms on the counter before him. His canted face comes closer to the glass separating them. “What do you mean ‘found out recent'? You telling me Leston never spoke to her about her real parents? About me and Suzie?”

It is Ethan's arrogance to forget that people who might never have heard of algorithms can use them to make leaps of reasoning. Now he must explain what Aldridge has deduced. “Just before he died, Dr. Leston gave me documents and newspaper clippings that told some of the story.”

“Uh-huh,” says Aldridge, measuring Ethan with a squint. “Kind of sounds like you were scheming with old Leston behind Zoe's back.”

Ethan tries to explain himself. “Zoe and I were living apart by then.”

“Wait. Now let me get this right. You had broke up with Zozo, and Doc Leston
still
gave you these secret papers. You really were his bitch, weren't you?” Aldridge's tone is more descriptive than insulting.

“No,”
Ethan says. “I just don't think he had anyone else to give them to. I guess he expected me to help Zoe through all the stuff she might learn about.”

“Yeah,” says Aldridge. “Doc was always trying to keep me out of the picture. Did it to his dying day, did he? So how'd the old bastard kick anyway?”

“Cancer,” Ethan says. But he worries that Aldridge might catch him being evasive again. “He had cancer but opted out.”

“Opted out? You mean, like, he ate a bullet?”

“He took pills.”

“Right,” Aldridge says. “And his old lady? She still breathing?”

“Dementia,” Ethan says, considering how much truth to reveal.

“Too bad. Met her a couple of times. I don't think she hated me. Bottom line on her was she always followed her husband. Except about getting Suzie an abortion.”

“He gave his wife the same pills he took.”

Aldridge doesn't look surprised. “He did that kind of crap. Make life and death decisions for everyone. It's probably why I'm in here now. If he'd of let me be with Suzie and Zozo that might have kept me straight.”

Ethan can't imagine that Aldridge believes this to be anything more than a comforting myth. But how many of those would Ethan create if he were locked up? How many has he already created . . . about himself and Zoe?

“I have your daughter's ashes,” Ethan says, coming to the crux of why he is here. “What would you like me to do with them?”

Aldridge doesn't give the matter any thought. His eyebrows knit into a horizontal line. “That's up to you, Winter. I didn't know her. And you're a decent guy, right?”

Ethan shrugs.

“Well, you're not a drug dealer or murderer, are you?”

“I work in banking,” Ethan says.

“That's almost as bad,” Aldridge says, and Ethan can't tell if he's joking. “I'll bet that's what must have impressed old Doc Leston.”

“I suppose.”

“What did he expect . . . that after he suicided himself you would take care of his little girl?”

“Maybe,” Ethan says.

“So what went wrong? I heard how Zozo died. Drowned in a bathtub. Well, I guarantee nobody drowns by accident in a tub unless they're high. And nobody gets that high in a bathtub unless they're trying to drown.”

“I don't know,” Ethan says. Aldridge is arriving at a conclusion Ethan has already made: he wasn't there for Zoe when she needed him the most.

“Want to know how Zozo's mother died?” Aldridge asks, almost barks. His face is reddening like he's working up a rage.

“Car crash,” Ethan answers tersely, trying to put some distance between himself and Aldridge's emotions.

“Ain't half the story.” Aldridge looks away. When he faces Ethan again his eyes are bleary, not enraged but damp. “Maybe we got more in common than you think. But I can't talk anymore now.”

“All right.”

Aldridge stands but doesn't yet hang up his phone. “I'm glad you came,” he says, and his lips tick to form both a smile and a frown. The familiarity of the expression troubles Ethan. He is seeing, finally, a little of Zoe in her dad. “You have her mouth,” he says. “Zo's.”

“Think so?” Don Aldridge's,
Zoe's
, grin deepens.

“When she was upset, she smiled like you do.”

“Christ.”
Aldridge exhales like he's been stomach punched. “Winter, you got to do something for me. Come see me again. I got stuff to tell you. But not now,” he says, hanging up the phone.