The Orion Plan (19 page)

“The rest of what?”

Curtis flung the bin against the wall. Joe's personal hygiene items scattered across the floor. “Don't play games with me, motherfucker! You're gonna tell me you don't have a watch? A rich fucking doctor like you?”

Joe belatedly figured it out. The bin was supposed to hold any possessions that the inmates were allowed to bring into the jail—books, watches, that kind of thing. And because Joe had no possessions whatsoever, his container was almost empty. But explaining all this to Curtis was going to be difficult. The guy didn't seem to be in a receptive mood.

Taking a deep breath, Joe looked him in the eye. “I told you, I'm not a doctor anymore. I don't own a watch. I don't own anything. I was living in the park before they—”

“You lying
shit!
” Curtis grabbed the front of Joe's T-shirt and bunched it in his fist. “I know you have a watch and it's probably a goddamn Rolex! Now where the fuck did you hide it?”

He shoved Joe backward, pinning him to the cinder-block wall. Curtis's fist pushed against his chest, the knuckles digging into his breastbone. Joe could feel its pressure on his heart. He stared in terror at the man's bloodshot eyes and saliva-flecked lips, and in that moment he realized that Curtis wasn't simply angry. The man was mentally disturbed. He was liable to do anything.

Joe considered yelling for help but then thought better of it. The guards wouldn't even hear him, much less come to his rescue. His only hope was to talk his way out of this, and that wasn't much hope at all.

Curtis leaned in closer, his face just a couple of inches away. His breath smelled like vomit. “You're fucked, Doc. You know that, right?”

“Listen, I—”

“I can do anything I want to you, and no one's gonna stop me.” He pressed harder against Joe's chest. “You got no friends in this place and a whole lot of enemies.”

Joe shook his head. He couldn't talk, couldn't breathe. He thought of the poison in his blood, the neurotoxin that made him attack Officer Patton, but he couldn't feel it inside him now. There was nothing but static in his head, and he was so dizzy he couldn't see straight.

Then a loud, high-pitched buzzer sounded. The noise came from the corridor and echoed against the walls of every cell. It lasted for four or five seconds before abruptly cutting off. Then a chorus of other sounds arose from D block: men laughing and cursing and shuffling out of their cells. Above it all, Joe heard a guard's voice: “Line up! Chow time! Everybody get in line!”

Curtis waited a moment, his brow creased. Then he let go of Joe's shirt.

Joe slumped to the mattress, breathing fast, his head still full of static. He raised his arms again, expecting a parting blow from Curtis, but the man just looked down at him.

“Don't get too comfortable, Doc. We'll do this later, after chow. You can count on it.”

Then he stepped out of the cell and joined Daryl in the corridor.

*   *   *

The food was horrible, just as Joe had expected. Two cold gray hamburger patties lay on the left side of his tray, each on a slice of stale white bread doused with ketchup. On the right side was a mound of limp string beans in a gelatinous fluid. The best part of the meal was the fruit drink in the plastic cup. It was so watered down it had no taste at all.

Joe sat by himself at one of the long tables in the prison cafeteria. The room was noisy and crowded with hundreds of inmates, but they all kept their distance from Joe, as if he had something contagious. When one of the prisoners headed for his table, the others shouted at him until the guy went elsewhere. At one point Joe looked up from his tray and scanned the room, looking for Curtis and Daryl, but he couldn't find them. There were too many tables and too many people standing in the way. After a while he gave up and returned to staring at his dinner. He had no intention of eating it, but at least it gave him something to look at.

He felt another wave of nausea. He'd now gone more than eighteen hours without a drink and his withdrawal symptoms were escalating. He had to grip the edge of the table to stop his hands from shaking. His headache was so bad it felt like cluster bombs were exploding behind his eyes, and every few seconds he felt a sickening surge of vertigo. He tightened his grip on the table as the world came unglued and the room spun around him.

But the worst symptom of all was the self-pity. Joe couldn't understand how things had gone so wrong. When he saw the satellite for the first time, just the night before last, he'd thought it was a godsend, an honest-to-goodness gift from heaven. But instead it had made his life infinitely worse. It was so unfair he actually started to cry. This was a very stupid thing to do in a prison cafeteria, but he couldn't stop himself.

He shook his head.
Jesus, don't be an idiot! They're all looking at you!
But the tears kept coming. He was thinking of his Yankees jacket, which the cops had stripped off him shortly after his arrest. Although the police were supposed to keep track of his belongings, at some point during the journey from Dyckman Street to Rikers they'd left his jacket behind. It was an old, filthy thing that stank to high heaven, and now it probably lay in a trash can somewhere. But it had been precious to Joe.

His wife had given him that jacket on their first anniversary. At the time Joe had been in medical school in Alabama, but he and Karen had already decided to move north, and the Yankees jacket was a symbol of their new life, their future. Joe had applied for residencies at several hospitals in New York, and Karen had started looking for nursing positions in the city. It would've been easier to get jobs in Alabama, but that wasn't an option for Joe. He was determined to put as much distance as possible between himself and his family.

The Grahams of Bullock County were white trash, pure and simple. Joe's father was a drunk, and so were all of his uncles and cousins. His mother had run off with an Amway salesman when Joe was just five, then drank herself to death when he was seven. Joe himself had started drinking in high school and by the age of eighteen he was as bad as the rest of them. But just before graduation he nearly died in a car wreck, and while he lay in the hospital he resolved to clean up his act. He realized he didn't have to be a stupid drunk all his life; instead, he could be like one of the doctors who'd just saved him. So he enrolled at the University of Alabama and set off on the long, hard road to medical school. His father thought it was a crazy idea and refused to pay for anything, but that was all right with Joe. As soon as he finished school and had that M.D. in hand he was going to get the hell out of Alabama and never look back.

Although Karen had enjoyed a happier childhood and a less dysfunctional family—her parents were decent, hardworking folks—she supported her husband. If the decision had been up to her, she might've preferred to stay in Birmingham or Tuscaloosa, but she was willing to make the sacrifice. That was the message behind the Yankees jacket:
I know how important this is to you. I'll do anything to make you happy.
It was a beautiful gift, a wonderfully loving gesture. Thinking about it still brought tears to Joe's eyes, despite all the not-so-beautiful things that happened later.

He was still crying and clutching the edge of the table when someone threw a hamburger patty at him. He felt the thing bounce off the back of his neck and saw it land on the floor. Ketchup splattered over his T-shirt and the gauze bandage on his head. A roar of laughter erupted from the tables behind him, but he didn't turn around. He just sat very still and tried to stop crying.

There was only one sure way to do it. Joe closed his eyes and recalled the last two years of his marriage. He tried to harden his heart by remembering their arguments, how he and Karen had fought over money and sex and where Annabelle should go to school. He pictured the screaming matches in their living room, in the car, in front of their daughter. He remembered their silences too, the days and weeks when they'd avoided each other by working long hours and rearranging their schedules, making sure they were never home at the same time. And, last, he remembered how Karen had betrayed him, how she'd slept with his boss, the chief of surgery at St. Luke's. He pictured her on the night when she admitted the affair, speaking slowly and calmly, with that cold, unrepentant look on her face.

Joe stopped crying. His nausea and dizziness also eased a little. The pictures in his head were literally sobering. He let go of the table and rested his hands in his lap. He stared at the food on his tray.

Another hamburger patty hit him in the shoulder. This time he saw the person who threw it, a burly Latino guy with gaudy tattoos on his arms. The guy yelled something in Spanish and the other inmates at his table laughed in response, but Joe ignored them. He kept his eyes on his tray. He stared at it so intently that after a couple of minutes the food no longer repelled him. The hamburgers were just slabs of protein and fat. And he needed the nutrients to survive in this place.

He picked up one of the patties and forced it into his mouth. Then he started to chew.

*   *   *

After dinner Joe didn't go back to his cell. Instead, he paced up and down cellblock D's corridor, always staying within sight of the guard station. Calling it a “station” was a bit of a stretch; it was just a steel-walled booth at the end of the corridor, next to the barred gate that was the cellblock's entrance. The booth had a window made of protective glass, and through it Joe saw a pair of correction officers reclining in their swivel chairs and staring at the video feeds from the jail's security cameras. They looked like they were bored out of their minds.

The cells in D block were still open, and there were at least a hundred inmates in the corridor. Some of them wandered back and forth, like Joe, but most clustered near their cells in groups of three or four, either talking in low voices or shouting insults at each other. Joe threaded his way through the crowd, following the red line that ran down the middle of the corridor. He swiveled his head as he walked, looking in all directions. At any moment he expected Curtis and Daryl to pop up behind him and shove him into one of the cells. If they did it quickly enough the guards might not notice. And the cells had no security cameras.

Joe glanced at the clock on the wall: 8:56
P.M.
He'd already gone up and down the corridor a dozen times, and there was still more than an hour to go before lights-out. His stomach churned and his head pounded. At nine o'clock he stopped to catch his breath, but the inmates standing nearby glared at him, so he moved on. He walked past the guard station again, then turned around at the barred gate and proceeded in the opposite direction.

Don't stop now. Just keep going for one more hour. Then you can go back to your cell and the guards will close all the doors and you'll be safe till morning.

Joe knew he shouldn't make eye contact with the other inmates, so he focused his attention on the two guards, scrutinizing them every time he passed their station. One was middle-aged and heavy and prematurely gray, the other young and thin and pimply. They wore black uniforms and carried nightsticks and handcuffs on their belts, but no guns. They were clearly no match for a hundred angry prisoners, and now Joe understood why the correction officers rarely ventured from their station—they were badly outnumbered. If there was a riot, the guards could lock down the jail and call for reinforcements, but until help arrived the inmates could do whatever they wanted.

As Joe approached the station once again at 9:08
P.M.
the middle-aged guard rose from his swivel chair. He exited the booth through a door at the back and reappeared a few seconds later on the other side of the barred gate. The younger guard buzzed the gate open, allowing his gray-haired partner to step into the cellblock. Judging from the tired look on the older guard's face, Joe assumed he was close to the end of his shift. He was probably getting ready for lights-out, making a final inspection of D block before herding the inmates back to their cells. As the guard marched down the corridor he removed the nightstick from his belt and held it ready. The name on his uniform, Joe noticed, was
BILLINGS
. Then, to Joe's great surprise, Officer Billings pointed the nightstick at him.

“
You, Joseph Graham!
” The guard's voice was stunningly loud. “
Turn and face the wall
!”

Joe was too alarmed to move.
What did I do?

“Are you
deaf
?” The guard raised the nightstick a little higher, preparing to swing. “
Face the wall and put your hands behind your head!
”

Swallowing hard, Joe turned to the wall and raised his hands. They were trembling again, but after a few seconds he managed to lace his fingers together behind his head. The other inmates in the corridor watched with amusement. Several imitated him, shaking their hands spastically.

Officer Billings frisked him. Joe was at a loss, his mind racing. He turned his head and tried to catch the guard's eye. “What … what's going—”

“Shut the fuck up! If you say one more word, I'll bash your fucking head in!”
He slapped Joe's hips and legs, checking for anything tucked into his sweatpants. Then the guard leaned close enough to whisper something in Joe's ear. “I got a message for you. From Frank Patton.”

It took Joe a second to realize who Billings was talking about—Officer Patton, the big redheaded cop from Inwood. “What? What does—”

“You ruptured his spleen, you stupid fuck. When you hit him with the nightstick.” Billings punctuated the sentence by jabbing his own nightstick into Joe's back. “And Frank Patton happens to be my brother-in-law.”

The jab was painful but not excruciating. Billings couldn't hit him hard in front of the security cameras in the corridor. But Joe knew the punishment was just beginning. He should've seen this coming. Patton had said many times that he had friends at Rikers.