The wind moaned through the shattered wing window of an old Plymouth and tiny living things rustled inside.
Something else rustled behind him. He turned and it was Kit Bradenton, clad only in absurd yellow underpants, his poet's pot hanging over the waistband like an avalanche held in suspended animation. Bradenton walked toward him over the heaped remains of Detroit rolling iron. A leafspring pierced through his foot like crucifixion, but the wound was bloodless. Bradenton's navel was a black eye.
The dark man snapped his fingers and Bradenton was gone.
He grinned and walked back to the Buick. Laid his forehead against the slope of roof on the passenger's side. Time passed. At some length he straightened, still grinning. He knew.
He slipped behind the wheel of the Buick, and pumped the gas a couple of times to prime up the carburetor. The motor purred into life and the needle on the gas gauge swung over to F. He pulled out and drove around the side of the gas station, his headlight beams for a moment catching another pair of emeralds, cat's eyes glistening warily from the tall grass by the Conoco station's Ladies Room door. In the cat's mouth was the small limp body of a mouse. At the sight of his grinning, moonlike face peering down at it from the driver's side window, the cat dropped its morsel and ran. Flagg laughed aloud, heartily, the laugh of a man with nothing on his mind but lots of good things. Where the Conoco's tarmac became highway, he turned right and began to run south.
Chapter 32
Someone had left the door open between Maximum Security and the cellblock beyond it; the steel-walled length of corridor acted as a natural amplifier, blowing up the steady, monotonous hollering that had been going on all morning to monster size, making it echo and re-echo until Lloyd Henreid thought that, between the cries and the very natural fear that he felt, he would go utterly and completely bugshit.
"Mother," the hoarse, echoing cry came. "Mootherr! "
Lloyd was sitting crosslegged on the floor of his cell. Both of his hands were slimed with blood; he looked like a man who has drawn on a pair of red gloves. The light blue cotton shirt of his prison uniform was smeared with blood because he kept wiping his hands dry on it in order to get a better purchase. It was ten o'clock in the morning, June 29. Around seven this morning he had noticed that the front right leg of his bunk was loose, and since then he had been trying to unthread the bolts that held it to the floor and to the underside of the bedframe. He was trying to do this with only his fingers for tools, and he had actually gotten five of the six bolts. As a result his fingers now looked like a spongy mess of raw hamburger. The sixth bolt was the one that had turned out to be the bitch-kitty, but he was beginning to think he might actually get it. Beyond that, he hadn't allowed himself to think. The only way to keep back brute panic was not to think.
"Mootherr -"
He leaped to his feet, drops of blood from his wounded, throbbing fingers splattering on the floor, and shoved his face out into the corridor as far as he could, eyes bulging furiously, hands gripping the bars.
"Shut up, cock-knocker! " he screamed. "Shut up, ya drivin me fuckin batshit! "
There was a long pause. Lloyd savored the silence as he had once savored a piping hot Quarter Pounder with Cheese from McD's. Silence is golden, he had always thought that was a stupid saying, but it sure had its points.
"MOOOOTHERRRR -" The voice came drifting up at the steel throat of the holding cells again, as mournful as a foghorn.
"Jesus," Lloyd muttered. "Holy Jesus. SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP, YA FUCKIN DIMWIT! "
"MOOOOOOOTHERRRRRRRRRR -"
Lloyd turned back to the leg of his bunk and attacked it savagely, wishing again that there was something in the cell to pry with, trying to ignore the throbbing in his fingers and the panic in his mind. He tried to remember exactly when he had seen his lawyer last-things like that grew hazy very soon in Lloyd's mind, which retained a chronology of past events about as well as a sieve retains water. Three days ago. Yes. The day after that prick Mathers had socked him in the balls. Two guards had taken him down to the conference room again and Shockley was still on the door and Shockley had greeted him: Why, here's the wise-ass pusbag, what's the story, pusbag, got anything smart to say? And then Shockley had opened his mouth and sneezed right into Lloyd's face, spraying him with thick spit. There's some cold germs for you, pusbag, everybody else has got one from the warden on down, and I believe in share the wealth. In America even scummy douchebags like you should be able to catch a cold. Then they had taken him in, and Devins had looked like a man who is trying to conceal some pretty good news lest it should turn out to be bad news, after all. The judge who was supposed to hear Lloyd's case was flat on his back with the flu. Two other judges were also ill, either with the flu that was going around or with something else, so the remaining benchwarmers were swamped. Maybe they could get a postponement. Keep your fingers crossed, the lawyer had said. When would we know? Lloyd had asked. Probably not until the last minute, Devins had replied. I'll let you know, don't worry. But Lloyd hadn't seen him since then and now, thinking, back on it, he remembered that the lawyer had had a runny nose himself and-
"OwwwoooJesus! "
He slipped the fingers of his right hand into his mouth and tasted blood. But that frigging bolt had given a little bit, and that meant he was going to get it for sure. Even the mother-shouter down there at the end of the hall could no longer bother him … at least not so badly. He was going to get it. After that he would just have to wait and see what happened. He sat with his fingers in his mouth, giving them a rest. When this was done, he'd rip his shirt into strips and bandage them.
"Mother? "
"I know what you can do with your mother," Lloyd muttered.
That night, after he had talked to Devins for the last time, they had begun taking sick prisoners out, carrying them out, not to put too fine a point on it, because they weren't taking anyone that wasn't already far gone. The man in the cell on Lloyd's right, Trask, had pointed out that most of the guards sounded pretty snotty themselves. Maybe we can get something outta this, Trask said. What? Lloyd had asked. I dunno, Trask said. He was a skinny man with a long bloodhound face who was in Maximum Security while awaiting trial on charges of armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Postponements, he said. I dunno.
Trask had six joints under the thin mattress of his bunk, and he gave four of them to one of the screws who still seemed okay to tell him what was going on outside. The guard said people were leaving Phoenix, bound for anyplace. There was a lot of sickness, and people were croaking faster than a horse could trot. The government said a vaccine was going to be available soon, but most people seemed to think that was crap. A lot of the radio stations from California were broadcasting really terrible things about martial law, army blockades, home-boys with automatic weapons on the rampage, and rumors of people dying by the tens of thousands. The guard said he wouldn't be surprised to find out that the longhaired comsymp pervos had done it by putting something into the water.
The guard said he was feeling fine himself, but he was going to get the Christ out just as soon as his shift was over. He had heard the army was going to roadblock US 17 and I-10 and US 80 by tomorrow morning, and he was going to load up his wife and kid and all the food he could get his hands on and stay up in the mountains until it all blew over. He had a cabin up there, the guard said, and if anyone tried to get within thirty yards of it, he would put a bullet in his head.
The next morning Trask had a runny nose and said he felt feverish. He had been nearly gibbering with panic, Lloyd remembered as he sucked his fingers. Trask had yelled at every guard who passed to get him the fuck out before he got really sick or something. The guards never even looked at him, or at any of the other prisoners, who were now as restless as underfed lions in the zoo. That was when Lloyd started to feel scared. Usually there were as many as twenty different screws on the floor at any given time. So how come he had seen only four or five different faces on the other side of the bars?
That day, the twenty-seventh, Lloyd had begun eating only half of the meals that were thrust through the bars at him, and saving the other half-precious little-under his bunk mattress.
Yesterday Trask had gone into sudden convulsions. His face had turned as black as the ace of spades and he had died. Lloyd had looked longingly at Trask's half-eaten lunch, but he had no way to reach it. Yesterday afternoon there had still been a few guards on the floor, but they weren't carrying anyone down to the infirmary anymore, no matter how sick. Maybe they were dying down in the infirmary, too, and the warden decided to stop wasting the effort. No one came to remove Trask's body.
Lloyd napped late yesterday afternoon. When he woke, the Maximum Security corridors were empty. No supper had been served. Now the place really did sound like the lion house at the zoo. Lloyd wasn't imaginative enough to wonder how much more savage it would have sounded if Maximum Security had been filled to its capacity. He had no idea how many were still alive and lively enough to yell for their supper, but the echoes made it sound like more. All Lloyd knew for sure was that Trask was gathering flies on his right, and the cell on his left was empty. The former occupant, a young jive-talking black guy who had tried to mug an old lady and had killed her instead, had been taken to the infirmary days back. Across the way he could see two empty cells and the dangling feet of a man who was in for killing his wife and his brother-in-law during a penny Pokeno game. The Pokeno Killer, as he had been called, had apparently opted out with his belt, or if they had taken that, his own pair of pants.