Buried Biker (24 page)

The approach was by the book, designed to show discipline and intimidate the inmates. The second part, at least, worked. I didn’t know about Cappy, but I was thoroughly intimidated. Maybe the team was reasonably well trained and professional. Then they would try to minimize any damage done to anyone.

When everyone was in the dayroom and the desk pushed out of the way, the lieutenant stepped up to the cell door again.

“I’m ordering you to face the back of the cell and put your hands on your head, fingers interlaced.”

Cappy crossed his arms in front of his chest, a mulish expression on his face. I stepped up against the wall and complied. Facing the back of the cell, I couldn’t see anything. The position would protect my eyes and nose a bit from a direct hit with the pepper spray, but the skin on my back crawled.

“If you refuse to follow orders, you will be forcibly removed from the cell. Do you understand?”

So far they were acting professionally, giving him every opportunity to avoid a showdown.

Cappy was beyond the point where he could be reasonable. I heard him move, and, without moving my feet or hands, glanced over my shoulder.

He spit through the bars at the lieutenant.

Great. Make them mad. Smart move.

“Keep looking at the back wall,” the lieutenant warned me. I snapped my head back around, took a deep breath, and closed my eyes.

I heard a whooshing sound and the caustic scent of pepper spray filled the air. Although my eyes were closed and I tried to hold my breath, I felt burning in my nose and throat.

The cell door clicked open. Cappy screamed. The cell filled with flailing bodies. Five officers, each assigned to a body part. Head, left arm, right arm, left leg, right leg. One of them would be carrying restraints.

I stood unmoving, trying to keep my balance as somebody knocked into my feet.

Cappy continued to scream, partially blocking out the commands to “cease resisting and lay flat on the floor.”

He was still struggling and screaming when they picked him up and carried him out of the cell.

Someone came up behind me. “I’m going to put you in restraints. Don’t resist.” It was a woman’s voice.
They had a woman on their cell extraction team?
Some of the best CO’s I known had been women, so I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise. And they tried to have at least one small person on the team. A small person could move around easier in the limited space of a cell and was often the one who handled the restraints.

I didn’t resist as she took one of my hands and maneuvered it behind me, turning the palm out, and locked a cuff on the wrist, tighter than necessary. The other hand followed. Then she knelt and snapped a leg cuff around each ankle. I didn’t turn to look, but I knew there was at least one other another person behind me ready to intervene if I tried to kick or something.

She grabbed my arm and turned me around.

Cappy was still struggling as they strapped him into the restraint chair, a spit shield strapped over his face. The cameraman was sweeping back and forth between him and me.

Someone else took my other arm and the two CO’s guided me out of the cell. My eyes were watering, and I was having trouble seeing. I almost tripped over the plastic shield which had been discarded right outside the cell door.

I’d lost my shower shoes somewhere along the line. The concrete floor was cold on my bare feet. I shivered.

“Put this one in a chair, too?” one of the team, his face invisible behind the face shield on his helmet, asked the lieutenant.

Please, no.
“I’m cooperating,” I said. I wiped my eyes as best I could on the shoulder of my jumpsuit. The non-absorbent fabric felt scratchy.

Cappy’s screams were muted by the spit shield they’d put over his face. He struggled against the chair’s straps as they were tightened.

The lieutenant looked at me. “Are you gonna comply with orders?”

“Yes, sir.” My voice was raspy, and I coughed.

“Just hold him here until we get the other one down to medical,” he said. “He’ll need to be looked at, too.”

“But do you want him in the chair?”

Much to my relief, the lieutenant shook his head. “He’s been compliant. I think he’ll be all right shackled up like that.”

The hallway door to the cellblock slid open, and several members of the team left, pushing Cappy ahead of them on the restraint chair. His screams echoed down the hall.

I tried to wipe my eyes again. “There’s a wet T-shirt on the end of my bunk,” I said to the woman who was still holding my arm. “Do you think you could wipe my face with it?”

She looked at the lieutenant, who nodded and came over to hold the arm she released. She came back with the shirt and held it up to my face. It didn’t completely relief the burning, but it felt a lot better.

“You been through this before, I take it?” the lieutenant asked me.

“A few times. I got a knack of having cell buddies who decide they’re gonna make an issue of something stupid.”

“You spend a lot of time locked up?”

I shrugged. “Twenty years. So far.” I was looking at a lot more than that now.

Chapter 14

A F
EW
H
OURS
L
ATER
, I was back in the cell, alone. The nurse did the best he could washing out my eyes and checking my breathing. I could still feel the burning, especially in my throat and lungs, but he assured me there was no lasting damage done. My wrists were bruised and sore where the cuffs had been clamped down too tightly, but there wasn’t much to be done for that.

While I had been gone, someone had packed up Cappy’s things and moved them. I sat on one of the bottom bunks and pulled out my charging papers to read them again. The words made my chest tighten up again. Rehashing this was just going to drive me even crazier. I needed something to distract me.

I folded the papers, put them down and went to door. “Hey, CO!” I called.

Although he didn’t move, his response was instantaneous. “What?”

“Can you get me something to read?”

He stirred. “Not right now. When I go on break, I’ll see if I can stop by the library and get you a book. What d’ya want?”

Smart guy. He realized that an inmate who is reading is going to be easier to handle. Calmer, less likely to be a behavior problem, and not as inclined to think up more problematic ways to pass the time.

I said, “I don’t care. History, maybe. Or a novel. But make it a long one.”

“Okay. I got a newspaper here. You wanna look at that for now?”

“Yes, please.”

He swung his feet off the desk and opened a drawer. Pulling out a newspaper, he came over and handed it through the bars, careful to stay far enough back that I couldn’t have grabbed him if I’d wanted to.

I took it. “Thanks.”

The front page had a big picture of the bridge construction site. The story underneath took up most of the bottom of the page. The headline read, “Body Uncovered at Construction Site.”

I had a pretty good idea whose body it was.

The article, written by one Carissa Daniles, described how a Transportation Construction Inspector had shown up for work and discovered the site didn’t meet specifications. She was quoted as saying that the silt snakes that controlled erosion were misaligned and the drainage was all wrong, and that construction could not continue until it was fixed.

According to the article, the foreman insisted that his workers had left the site as the inspector had approved it just the afternoon before when they quit work, but he had no practical choice but to comply with the TCI’s instructions. At that point, several day workers, who would not be paid while the work was stopped, became angry and left the site.

Under the inspector’s supervision, the remaining workers, including a heavy equipment operator, set about moving the silt snakes and resloping the site.

As the backhoe removed soil from a pile, buried bits of cloth became visible. The foreman waved the backhoe off and grabbed a shovel. A little digging uncovered a human arm.

The construction site became a crime scene.

The body, a white male in his thirties, had not yet been identified. The cause of death appeared to be blunt force trauma, but official results would not be released until after an autopsy. The police were investigating—no surprise there. At press time the police were seeking several “people of interest,” including the workers who had left the site.

Although the article didn’t say so, I must have been a “person of interest.” And they’d found me.

I read the entire paper, including the classified ads. It distracted me a bit, and I could fight down the panic in my chest.

Ever since my release from prison, I’d lived with the constant possibility that I’d be returning to prison. It was part of the parole experience, especially for anyone convicted of a violent crime. No matter how hard I tried to comply with the parole restrictions and follow the rules, I had to admit being locked up again was coming as no real surprise. Had I really expected to be able to live for the next twenty years or so without being sent back to prison? A very depressing thought, but I had to admit it was highly unlikely.

Of course, if I was honest with myself, I’d have to admit I’d been taking a few unwise chances in the past few days.

The CO brought me back a mega novel by Ken Follett that I hadn’t read yet. I took it gratefully and wrapped myself in my blanket, settling in to read. Anything to take my mind off my less than promising situation. And Kelly. Who I would probably never see again in this lifetime.

Even after the official lights out, I could see pretty well by the security light, and I read until I fell asleep.

Breakfast came early. It was those rehydrated dried egg squares again. Not bad, but not enough to fill me. The CO supervised the inmate kitchen worker closely, and when they came around to collect the tray, I put down the book and asked, “You got a newspaper I can look at?”

The CO looked at me, then grinned. “Wanna see yourself on the front page, do you?”

I was afraid of that.

“We only get the one paper for the whole unit,” he said as he handed it to me. “So don’t go doing the Sudoku or the crossword on the newspaper,” he said. “If you want to do them, trace them and leave the one in the paper so other people can do them, too.”

“I don’t got any paper,” I pointed out. “Or anything to write with. But I’ll be careful with the paper. I just want to read it.”

He grinned again. “Lousy picture of you, I got to say.”

I thought it was going to be the mug shot from my booking, but Carissa had resurrected the picture of me being hauled in last week, all bruised up and looking like a total maniac.
Thoughtful of her, that was.

She recapped my original conviction. Then she went into Kelly’s rape, although she once again primly noted the
Rothsburg Register
policy about victims of sexual assaults, so referred to her as “the victim.” The article said I’d originally been a suspect in that but been cleared by DNA evidence. That was news to me. Now, she said, I had been arrested for the murder of the alleged assailant, and speculated on the relationships among me, “the victim,” and Razorback, who she identified as Harvey McGillian.

Since I already had one murder conviction and this charge was premeditated first degree murder with aggravating circumstances, the state’s attorney was contemplating filing the paperwork to make it a capital case.

Great.
Although I was well aware of the possibility of a death sentence, and it was mentioned in the charging papers, reading about it in a newspaper in connection with my name sent a chill down my spine.

Remembering how everybody at work had seen the last article, I figured they would all see this one, too.

So what? I tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter, I didn’t care what they thought anyhow. But I did. It had been the first time in my life I’d had a “normal” job. With a potential future.

Kelly probably wouldn’t have much to say about me at work, and nobody else would be likely to ask unless she brought it up. She’d probably be mad. Or worse, now that I seemed to be on a fast track back to prison, she’d pity me.