She left the map on the table and went back to bed. Wrapped in her comforter, lights off, she wondered what John Cameron dreamt about.
One person had nightmares for sure, and she’d get to spend more time with him soon. Somebody’s coming.
Chapter 33
All day the chaos of sounds shunted against the concrete walls of KCJC; at 4:00 a.m. the relative silence was almost eerie. In a densely populated wing it was never completely quiet, as the dozens of incarcerated men turned and twisted on their cots, coughed, and occasionally called out. Nevertheless, for a handful of hours—always too few and always too quickly gone—a person could almost pretend to be somewhere else and sometimes believe it.
A guard was walking down the gangway, and his steps were unusually soft. John Cameron recognized the man before he reached his cell. Miller, B., doing his best to be stealthy as he approached at a time when no one else stirred in D Wing.
Miller reached Cameron’s door and looked inside. After their eyes met, and he was quite sure Cameron was awake, the lock-release clicked open.
Cameron’s interactions with the guards had been a marvel of nonverbal communication, polite distance on one side and watchful wariness on the other. All the same, a visit in the middle of the night was neither expected nor welcome, especially since Miller had done his darnedest to tiptoe around so that the whole wing wouldn’t start the ritual banging on the bars.
Cameron stood up and slipped on the regulation black leather sneakers with Velcro straps; he remained standing near the back of the rectangular cell, facing the door and watching Miller with neither hostility nor concern.
Miller was waiting for him to make a decision. They were going someplace. He either would go or he wouldn’t. Simple as that.
Miller stepped back, and Cameron joined him on the gangway; the lights were low and whoever saw them thought, quite rightly, that the best thing to do was to keep quiet and let the two men pass without fuss or bother. Should it then transpire that Cameron had been taken aside to be told what’s what by a friendly group of correction officers, well, that was just the way things went sometimes.
They reached the first set of doors that would lead them out of D Wing, and the locks clicked open for them. It was a pleasant surprise that the building would allow its entries and exits to operate in ticks and snaps at night while the daytime was all about clanging metal.
KCJC was deep into the night shift, and the corridors belonged to the wall-mounted cameras and the convex mirrors. Somewhere in the concrete structure careful eyes followed the men’s progress along the pale green corridor, so bright after the dim cells.
After a left turn and a third set of doors—two prison officers staring as they went past—they left behind the blueprint of KCJC, such as it was in Cameron’s mind, and stepped into uncharted territory.
Cameron and Miller walked companionably side by side as if a 4:00 a.m. stroll was part of the routine, but Cameron was well aware that the guard measured his every step and breath, and if he so much as sneezed, a squad of COs in riot gear would materialize in a nanosecond. Aside from the irritation of being physically bound by those walls, he found it sort of funny.
Cameron had no intention of giving them the opportunity to throw on their full-face corrections helmets and stampede out of their rec room. He was curious and unafraid, but if trouble was about to tap him on the shoulder, he would return it threefold and gold-plated. Weeks earlier, as he was becoming familiar with the lay of the land and the people who, at least temporarily, would be part of his daily life, Cameron had observed B. Miller and read him the way a doctor holds up an X-ray against the light. He was experienced and older than most of his colleagues, and what he lacked in fitness and strength, he made up for in common sense. He slightly favored his left foot, ate too much red meat on the weekends, and tonight his back was acting up.
Cameron would not start a fight, but he could end one, and he knew—as someone might know how to gift-wrap a present—that from where he stood, he could break Miller’s neck in two seconds, should it become necessary.
Many years ago, reflections on death and killing would have been noted down in a different color ink from the other thoughts that coursed through him. For a long time now, though, they were the same color and font as everything else, and John Cameron no more noticed them than he would a consideration on the weather.
The corridor opened into a hexagonal foyer with a door that looked different from the others. Another officer was waiting for them, and he gave Miller a dark bundle.
He nodded and extended his arm toward Cameron: he was holding out a heavily lined denim winter coat, Department of Corrections issue. Cameron’s previous coat had been left on the pitted floor of the outdoor cage on the day of the bleach attack, and he had not received another: he had not needed one, because he had not been outside since it had rained bleach.