I shrugged. “No way to know,” I said. “I certainly don’t have any evidence that they were, but I’m going to keep an eye on them. Patterson was away at a pretty convenient time.”
“But how can you wait patiently for Skipper and those other officers to fall after what they’ve done to you?”
“True justice is often too slow to suit me, but it is sure. I also know that injustice is temporary, but justice is for eternity. If I worried about all of the injustice in the world, I wouldn’t be any good to anybody.”
She looked at me like she wasn’t convinced.
“You can’t live the way Skipper’s living for very long,” I said. “Besides, his treatment of inmates has gotten out on the compound. All this will come back to haunt him.”
When we finished talking, I hugged her then stood and walked to the door.
“John,” she said just before I opened the door.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you,” I said.
“Thanks for saving my life,” she said. “It belongs to you now.”
I smiled at her, opened the door, and walked out. I stumbled down the hallway feeling intoxicated, the irony of the situation not lost on me. What she had offered, what I most wanted, was neither hers to give nor mine to take.
Chapter 48
“So my uncle was killed by that nurse because they loved the same man?” Laura asked.
We were driving east on I-10 into Tallahassee on Saturday afternoon. Mom’s condition was stable, and she was being sent home to wait-wait for a kidney and undergo a transplant or wait to die. All she could do now was wait. And she wanted to be home to do that.
“I’m not sure I’m comfortable calling it love,” I said. “But they were both, ah, involved with the same man.”
“And he was married?”
“The inmate? Yes.”
“So, he’s in prison, and he’s still having a whole hell of a lot more sex than I am,” she said. “What’s wrong with this world?”
“Indeed,” I said.
“Maybe that will change soon.” She smiled broadly.
“I know it will,” I said. “He’s dead.”
She punched me in the arm. “Watch it. I don’t know, though. He may have sex in hell.”
“Some might say he already has.”
She shivered slightly.
We rode in silence for a while. The traffic on I-10 seemed slower than usual. Gone were the FSU flags flapping from antennas that would return with the rush of the fall. I was in the slow lane with the cruise control set on sixty. We were in no hurry. We were in Dad’s Explorer-his contribution to Mom’s recovery.
“He was such a creep,” Laura said.
“Who?”
“Uncle Russ. I used to hate going to his house. Of course, we didn’t very much. Mom hated him, too. Now he’s made her rich beyond belief.”
“Family,” I said and shook my head.
“Yeah.” She leaned up and turned on the radio, sat back and listened for a moment, and then leaned up and turned it off.
“What about us?” she asked. “Where do we stand? Where do we go from here?”
I was silent. Contemplating. “Forward, I think.”
“Could you be a little more specific?” she asked with a smile.
“Not and be honest,” I said.
“And you couldn’t lie?”
“Not and be a Boy Scout.”
She shook her head. “You’re not a Boy Scout,” she said. “Saint, maybe, but no Boy Scout.”
I shrugged.
“It’s a tough world for an honest man,” she said.
“I’m finding that out,” I said and continued driving forward.
Chapter 49
The following Monday morning, I was standing at the gate looking in his direction when he was killed. Thick clouds had rolled in during the early morning hours replacing the sunny skies of the weekend, the gray day matching the buildings of the institution. In the sally port, Merrill Monroe was busy stabbing trash bags with an iron rod on the back of a flatbed truck. His graceful, fluid motions made him look as if God had created him to stab trash bags. However, God had created him with such strength and beauty that everything he did seemed as if he had been created to do it.
Seeing me at the gate when he had nearly completed his search of the trash, he said, “Somebody say somethin’ ’bout me bein’ a spearchucker . . .” He held up the spear. “I’s show him why we called that.”
“Of that I have no doubt,” I said-and was about to ask how he got this choice assignment, for I had never seen him doing it be-fore-when, in the strongest sense of déjà vu, I froze in midsentence. In stunned silence, I watched as Merrill unsuccessfully attempted to withdraw the spear from the trash bag he had just punctured in the center of the truck. On his second attempt, Merrill snatched the spear free, sending it flying through the air. It struck the fence nearest me, splattering blood on steel and concrete.
Merrill looked at me, slowly shaking his head in disbelief, as the officer in the control room buzzed me through the two gates that separated us. I rushed into the vehicle sally port as in a recurring nightmare and, climbing onto the back of the truck, joined Merrill in a small pool of blood seeping outward from the bag.
“I being set up?” he asked, slightly out of breath, his coal-black face glistening like silk in the sun under a fine sheen of sweat.
I shook my head. For I knew what we were about to discover in the fated green bag.
“I trace the wrong person?” he asked.
“No. Jones was a killer. Strickland, too. They just weren’t the only ones,” I said as I bent over to finish ripping open the bag. Plastic slipped from my grip, and warm blood bathed my fingers as I split open the bag to reveal the lifeless, bloody body of Matthew Skipper. His vacant blue eyes were filled with far more peace in death than they ever had in life.
I looked back at Merrill. His facial expression was a complex mixture-weary of the violence and bloodshed in general, yet deeply satisfied at this violence and bloodshed in particular.
“Inmates?” he asked.
“Probably,” I said.
“Jacobson got out of confinement last Thursday.”
I looked down toward the compound. Beyond the medical and security personnel running toward us, a small group of inmates had gathered in front of the medical building. There in the midst of them, straining to see like the others, was Jacobson, a wide grin seeping across his face like blood from an open wound.
“That look like poetic justice to me,” Merrill whispered as officers and medical staff began flooding the sally port. “What’s it look like to you?”
“Divine justice,” I said and then bowed my head and said a silent prayer for Ike Johnson, Matthew Skipper,
