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Fighting Chance(6)

By:Jane Haddam


This, Petrak was sure, made absolutely no sense.

Dr. Loftus was fussing around with her tote bag. She came up with an enormous set of keys and jangled them triumphantly.

“There we go,” she said. “Now, come on out with me, and I’ll get you there in no time flat. You don’t want to be late for Martha Handling. The way that woman works, you want to be early. She’d have no compunction at all at starting things before she said she would just so she wouldn’t have to listen to you. It’s the privatization, you understand. It’s like what we talked about in class.”

Petrak did remember something about “privatization,” but it was vague, and things were moving very fast. Dr. Loftus was marching into the large open space that led to the front doors. She was moving fast, much faster than Petrak would have expected somebody that old to move.

The alarm bells were going off in his head, and so was a little voice telling him he was being irrational.

Dr. Loftus pushed open the door to the outside. Petrak raced after her. He got to the door to the outside just before it would have snicked closed.

“Dr. Loftus,” he said.

She was marching on resolutely. He was having trouble keeping up.

“Dr. Loftus,” he tried a second time.

She pressed her key ring, and the lights on a car a half block away blinked.

“Listen,” she said. “This is important. Never say ‘illegal immigrant.’”

They reached the car whose lights had been blinking. It was a new car, shiny and silver. Dr. Loftus unlocked it with the remote.

“Of course,” she said, “I’m sure Martha Handling says ‘illegal immigrant.’ It’s the kind of person she is. She’s the kind of person who’s ruining this country and everything it ought to stand for.”

“Please,” Petrak said.

Most of the time these days, he could think in English, but he wasn’t thinking in English now. The little woman was just marching into the distance at warp speed, and he couldn’t stop her; he couldn’t even explain himself.

She popped open the passenger-side door and told him to get in.

He got in. He tried desperately to think of what to do next. He imagined Stefan sitting in that jail in the jumpsuit thing he’d had on for visiting hours yesterday. Petrak had no idea why, but he still felt absolutely certain that if Dr. Loftus came along, she would ruin everything.

She locked the doors around them, and Petrak realized that the car was a Prius.

4

Mark Granby owed his job to two unshakable realities.

The first was the fact that he was willing to do whatever it took to get the job done, and if “whatever it took” meant something illegal more often than not, he was willing to live with it. That was a decision he had made when he first left Drexel University at the height of the 2008 recession. Everybody you talked to gave the same stupid spiel about striving for excellence and commitment to purpose and blah blah blah crap crap crap. Mark had never understood what any of it meant, and he was pretty sure the recruiters didn’t understand it either. They gave the rap because they wanted to look good if anybody asked about your interview, but what they were really thinking was that this was Drexel, not Penn, and all the real talent was across town.

Mark Granby was a realist. He knew he would never have been able to get into an Ivy League school, even a tenth-rate Ivy League school like Penn. He wasn’t some kind of supergenius, and he really didn’t come from money.

“I don’t come from money. I come from New Jersey,” was what he’d said to the recruiter from Administrative Solutions of America when he went in to talk to him, and as soon as he’d said it, he realized he was going to get the job.

The other reality was something Mark only guessed during his interview, but he’d confirmed it later. Administrative Solutions liked to pretend it was an enormous company, a corporate giant with operations spanning the globe, but it wasn’t really that big, and it wasn’t at all “well regarded.”

As far as Mark could tell, nobody who knew what Administrative Solutions really did wanted to have any part of it. It had taken him only a couple of months on the job to stop telling people the truth about what he did. Then he asked his wife, Bethany, to do the same, and found out she’d been doing it all along.

“I think it just sounds wrong,” she’d told him at the time. “I mean, private prisons. How can there be private prisons?”

Mark hadn’t bothered to give her the spiel he learned in orientation: The prisons weren’t really private. They were Pennsylvania prisons. It was only the administration of the prisons that was private. It was a private sector solution to a public sector problem. Administrative Solutions could run a prison much more cheaply than the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania could. For one thing, it didn’t have to pay public sector benefits to guards and administrators.