‘giants’ that any ‘standing’ I’d do would be such a stunted version, given my current domestic arrangements.
Besides the mental sparring matches with my writer frienemies, I did pushups; I got up to a thousand a day on my fingertips. My shredded pecs got big enough I probably needed a bra.
Time passed in a crawl.
Chapter 4
Then one morning – seven years, three days and nineteen hours into my sentence – I had a visitor. I was shackled up, my manacles connected to my ankle cuffs by a dangling vertical chain, and escorted to a private visiting room. It was the first time I’d had to wear the bracelets in a while, as I’d been in general population for years without a court date or any need to interact with someone outside the penal system. The chains weighed heavy on me, but the novelty of entertaining a guest outshone any inconvenience.
“Hello, Markus,” my visitor said, extending her well-manicured hand.
I shook with her awkwardly, having to reach out with both manacled mitts. My chains jingled, and she made a face at the noise.
She had wavy blonde hair cut page-boy style, and wore high-end cologne I found myself sniffing greedily. A skinny little sparrow of a woman, with thin bird’s legs extending from beneath the skirt of her tailored charcoal-grey business suit. Her face was a little bony, and her nose a tiny beak. As she was the first woman I’d seen since coming to prison, her presence was quite invigorating.
“My name is Elaine Hubbard,” she chirped, “and I’m getting ready to have you released.”
My mind raced but I was suddenly numb as if I’d been immersed in ice. I couldn’t accept the reality of her words. “Say that again, please.”
“You’re going free, Markus,” she said, seeming to enjoy whatever was happening on my face.
I looked around the circumference of the room seeing the paint worn away at shoulder height from all the men that had paced its confines before me, imagining how much despair these specific sweaty greasy walls had witnessed; how many dashed hopes and betrayed trusts. I’d never had much luck with lawyers before, and was skeptical of her words to say the least.
“You’d best explain,” I said. “And I hope to God you’re not fucking with me.”
“Have you ever heard of DNA evidence?” she asked. “It’s a relatively new technology. They’ve been breaking cold cases with it for a while now. It’s solving a lot of crimes, putting a lot of perpetrators behind bars that thought they’d get away with it forever.”
I jangled my shackles, the noise almost sounding musical. “That’s quite reassuring. It soothes me; it’ll make me feel all safe in my warm comfy bed tonight.”
She chuckled. “It’s also freed a lot of innocent people, too. People like you, Markus.”
My heart was beating hard. She continued talking but I couldn’t understand a word she said.
‘Freedom,’ a voice whispered in the back of my brain – I shook my head at it. “So what made you take this on? What made you think I didn’t do it?”
“Your brother,” Elaine said, a wistful expression crossing her face. “Karl was a good man.”
“You said was. You’ll be rephrasing that, fast.” I was standing for some reason, and the screw on duty was suddenly in the room with us. I felt him hovering behind my shoulder ready to drop me hard and nasty.
Elaine waved him out as if she was dismissing a dog, but like any pro he waited until my butt was planted back in my seat before leaving.
“Was,” I repeated.
Elaine nodded. “Apparently Karl started dealing drugs, and he was killed in a shootout with a Stagger Bay police officer. They found a handgun and a large quantity of marijuana in his possession. The officer was cleared.”
“That makes me feel much better, it being deemed justified. But why are you still on it? Seems to me your debt would die with him, you don’t owe me a thing.”
“You’re his family, and I know he’d want me to,” she said as if by rote. “We’d already been working on our investigation for a while when he died, so I thought it best to finish it.
“And I have finished your part at least; you’ll be going free as soon as I’m done filing the paperwork.” She appeared pleased with herself.
I figured she just might have a right to be but ignored that, groping further – a ship-killing iceberg loomed beneath the placid surface of her words. “Karl was helping you on an investigation? Into what?”
“Well, it occurred to Karl that, since he knew you were innocent, the real killer had to still be out there. For the past seven years he’s been playing detective, putting in quite a lot of legwork on it I might add. I myself have only been involved for the past three years, since I moved to Stagger Bay and met Karl.
“Then I got a hold of this DNA thing and had an independent lab in the Bay Area run the tests,” Elaine continued. “Yours didn’t match the samples from the crime scene, and the rest is history.”
“What did Karl find out? About the real killer, I mean?”
“Nothing he ever shared with me,” she said hurriedly. “You know, you’re entitled to $100 a day for your false imprisonment. That comes to about a quarter of a million dollars.”
“Great,” I said, cracking a smile.
“Don’t count on it anytime soon,” Elaine said. “The check would come out of Stagger Bay’s general budget. That much money could break the county, and they’re fighting the payout.”
“I guess we can’t have it too easy, can we?”
Elaine stood, we reprised our awkward handshake around my cuffs; then she was gone. And as quick as that, with no formality at all, I was free.
Chapter 5
I was scared spitless of my homecoming, the entire long bus ride back to Stagger Bay. Angela was dead and now Karl as well. Sam’s lack of communication made it plain he wanted nothing to do with me, and last time I’d been here most of the town stood in line to show what they thought of me.
Wife gone, house gone, possessions gone, reputation gone. No job and no money in my pockets besides a puny handful of gate dollars. My prospects were glowing.
I’d done my time up in Del Norte County, so the bus brought me into Stagger Bay from the northern end. New housing crowded the outskirts of town that hadn’t been there when I went up: palatial McMansions looking like they’d be more at home in Beverly Hills, or in Silicon Valley housing the dot.com moguls. A lot of active construction sites, mainly right on the coast line.
It was just after dawn when the bus entered town, and I looked across the Bay at the Pulp Mill – it was the third largest such mill in the world, supplying jobs to a lot of people. The last time I’d been here, its twin stacks had vomited a foul effluvia 24/7 that could knock the nose right off your face if the wind was right.
Now both stacks were idle, no smoke coming from either of them. Squinting from my distant bus-borne vantage, I saw no sign of activity in the plant itself, and its huge multi-acre parking lot was empty.
The Greyhound swung down Fourth Street past a short row of chain fast food franchises and came up on what passed for a bus terminal in Stagger Bay: a one room building the size of a big city newsstand.
A short kid was leaning against a beat-up white ‘70s Lincoln Continental as the Greyhound chuffed into the terminal. Spiky red hair, bright blue eyes with a bony jutting chin, and wide shoulders with big meaty hands hanging at the end of long arms: the spitting image of his uncle – and of his father too I suppose.
I had no luggage to wait on, so I walked right up with my heart pounding.
“Sam?” I asked.
He nodded blank-faced and hip bumped erect off the car in one fluid motion. The way his shoulders rolled as he ape-shambled to the driver’s side door was like watching a home movie of me and Karl at that that age.
Sam climbed in without so much as looking at me. I got in my side with equal enthusiasm. The seats were
