Manny Oretremos stood by the door of his cell in the appropriate position and waited for the guard to approach. He was perspiring already; there didn’t seem to be a moment in the day when he wasn’t cold and clammy. He wanted to straighten his shoulders and pretend to himself that he was ready and willing—more than willing, in fact. Instead, he wiped his hands on the sides of his pants and settled for keeping his breathing regular and his mind blank.
“Ready, Oretremos?” the guard asked.
John Cameron stood in the center of his outdoor cage. This was the closest he ever got to any other inmate, and their energy flowed around him. Some stretched, some jogged in place, some ignored him, some stared. He was aware of the correction officers guiding each convict into place and the metal locks snapping shut.
Over the weeks he had had the opportunity to watch these inmates, to become familiar with their routines and their mannerisms. In a place where individuality was taken away with your personal effects when you arrived, every one of those men fought to get it back in any way he could and at any cost.
Cameron was never in the same cage: his position and that of the men around him changed depending on the guards’ shifts. Today he was in the center of the yard. The cages were at least three deep on each side of the exit. On his right, a young Latino man was hunched against the chill. He stood quite close to the metal mesh and stared at the concrete floor.
He was nervous—Cameron had noticed him on other occasions—and he couldn’t wait to get back indoors. In fact, he always seemed profoundly relieved when the guards came to collect him to escort him back to his cell.
Cameron understood fear, and the boy seemed even more terrified than usual this time. It was the slightest movement; he caught it almost by chance: the boy had made the sign of the cross. At the same time a call had sounded out in the yard, and, as one, all the inmates stepped right up to the cage wall that put them closest to Cameron.
The second yell ripped the silence, and he felt more than saw that every man around him was reaching back like a pitcher before a hard throw.
Cameron locked eyes with the Latino kid; he alone hadn’t moved. Manny Oretremos stood frozen where he was, in his right hand a two-inch vial filled to the brim with sodium hypochlorite—bleach—in a concentrated form strong enough to disintegrate skin on contact.
Cameron took one stride up to the wall nearest Manny—the long side of his cage—while around the two inmates the yard exploded in a hell of sounds. The guards hollered as they rushed through the maze of cages, the inmates shouted at Manny to throw, and above all was the sound of the tinkling, crashing, and hissing of the vials dropping like rain around Cameron.
He heard the first warning shots of the guards, and all the inmates dropped to the ground, but Cameron knew that the safest place for him to be was standing right by the side closest to the kid. His amber eyes held the boy still, only a few feet between them. Vials hit the roof of the cage; some shattered on impact, glass shards and their contents dripping onto the ground; others rolled and fell through the gaps in the bars. Something bounced and broke on his shoulder, and he shrugged off his jacket, pain like a bee sting through his orange coveralls. Cameron never broke eye contact.
Pale green drops of the solution fell from the top of the cage and fizzed on the concrete. The guards reached the door of Cameron’s cage, fumbling with the lock, yelling instructions as they beckoned him out—no one going inside—and the alarm sounded high and wide.
Cameron walked the stretch to the door as the last of the sodium hypochlorite trickled down from the ceiling mesh. As soon as he was over the threshold, two guards clasped him above the elbows, their touch curiously hesitant as they ushered him toward the exit from the yard. He turned: every inmate in every cage was lying flat on the concrete, watching him, dead eyes following him as he went past, except for the Latino boy, who was still standing—guards shouting their orders at him—until he finally lay down and the glass vial rolled away from his hand.
Inside the now-empty cage Cameron’s Department of Corrections jacket rested in a heap as the scent of bleach reached every corner of the yard and the crackle of the guards’ radios was the only sound.
“I want to know how,” Will Thomas said, trying to keep calm. “I want to know how, and who, and when.” The deputy warden of the King County Justice Complex had been briefed about the event in the yard. The warden himself was on his way back from a conference.
The supervisors of each wing of KCJC, including D wing, where John Cameron resided, were assembled in his office; the guards who had been present in the yard stood at the back; the doctor on duty hovered by the door.