He looked too greasy.
'So what do you want to see Trent for?
You a fan or a relative?'
'I'm his cousin.'
'Yeah. Uh-huh.' The man continued to stare at Joe suspiciously. Joe wondered how many people snuck into this place to talk to the many serial kil ers housed here out of some perverse hero worship or to get interviews for newspapers. He wondered how many had come to see
Damon Trent. Stil, there was more behind the fat orderly's stare. The man acted as if he knew something. The doors slid open and they stepped out into a dimly lit hal.
'Here we are. He's right down this hal way.'
A row of fluorescent lights flickered eerily in the empty hal way that led to Trent's room, casting swift shadows that chased each other across the institutional green wal s. Joseph stepped out of the elevator and his nostrils flared with the aroma of insanity and disease, urine, feces, blood, sweat, and medication. Moans and screams, giggles and mad cackles seemed to come at him from al directions. He could hear someone shouting at the top of his lungs to tel Jesus he was here while someone else laughed uncontrol ably in response and stil another person hurled a foul stream of invectives at him. Joe felt his anxiety increasing, as the wal s of the madhouse seemed to close in on him.
This is where I'l wind up if I don't cure this thing, he thought.
'So why did you decide to come visit yooour… cousin after al this time?'
'None of your fucking business,' Joe replied, tiring of the little man and his innuendoes. They stopped outside two large double doors that were locked with a keypad. A sign on the door read
SEXUAL OFFENDER MAXIMUM SECURITY WARD. To the left of the doors an enormous black guard sat behind a desk reading a magazine.
'Yeah, fuck you too. Empty your pockets. We've got to make sure you ain't got no drugs or weapons on you.'
The guard rose up from behind the desk and began patting Joe down without so much as an introduction.
The huge black corrections officer was even larger than Joe. He stood nearly six foot eight and had to be over three hundred pounds. Hard, blueblack muscle rippled beneath his uniform, which seemed to be struggling to contain his Herculean mass. His head was shaved as if to accentuate the scars on it, no doubt the result of street fights. Joe didn't want to imagine what it would take to bring down a man that size. Even without the Glock. 40 on the guard's waist and the Monadnock PR24 baton dangling from his hip, he would have been a handful. He was an inmate's worst nightmare. The star of many a prison rape nightmare. His biceps looked like smal hams. He had obviously made good use of the workout equipment the patients were probably too heavily medicated to appreciate. He slid his hands from Joe's shoulders down to his ankles and then up between his thighs, even grabbing at his crotch. Joe passively submitted to the rough and invasive search before being al owed into the patient's ward. The guard turned al of Joe's pockets inside out, withdrew his wal et and keys, and placed them in a manila envelope. Then he sauntered back over to his desk and hit a button that unlocked the doors.
'You can pick up this stuff on the way out,' he said, kicking his feet back up on the desk and going back to reading the sports magazine. The orderly pushed open the double doors and they entered the asylum. Joe could hear his own breaths and heartbeat as if amplified through a speaker.
The Sexual Offender Maximum Security
Ward was nothing like the prison Joe had been expecting. Al the doors stood open except a few where the patients had no doubt been confined for transgressions against whatever rules regulated life here. The rest wandered the hal s gibbering to themselves or gleeful y relaying their crimes to other inmates, comparing atrocities in breathless whispers, their lusts undisguised, eyes aflame with passion like old men reliving lost youth. Some sat hol ow-eyed in chairs or on floors, perhaps staring backward at the childhood abuses that had first broken them and led them to destroy others.
'Most of these freaks here are child molesters and serial rapists. We don't get that many kil ers here. The state likes to see the kil ers go to death row. It makes the citizenry feel safer, you know what I'm sayin'? They don't like the idea that a kil er might someday walk up out of this place because some fool doctor declares him sane, only to cut somebody else up. If they're locked up for life or taking that lethal injection then no one has to worry about that. Me, I'd worry more about the child molesters they're letting out of this place every day. There's no curing them. They al wind up right back here again and those are the guys that create the kil ers. Most every kil er that's ever been in here was raped as a child.'
Joe remained silent.
'Yeah, your cousin is kind of a celebrity around here. He's the most famous kil er we've got.'
Joe was relieved when they final y stopped in front of one locked door and the orderly pointed at it and grinned.
'Wel, here he is.'
Adrenaline spurted into his bloodstream and quickened his pulse as he approached the bul etproof window, and stared in at the pudgy little man sitting on the single bed in a dingy straitjacket. The guard opened the door and ushered him inside. Joe hesitated, noticeably shaken.
'You've got fifteen minutes. I'l be right outside this door, watching. If you need help or want to leave early, just wave. Do not touch the patient. If you attempt to pass anything to the patient you wil be removed and arrested.'
'Thanks.' Joe hadn't taken his eyes off Damon once. He shuffled inside the musty, claustrophobic little room and it was like stepping through a time machine. Al the old emotions came flooding down upon him in one great avalanche that pounded the air from his lungs and weakened his knees. Al the fear, the pain, the confusion, and then the murderous rage. The rage grew and grew until it obliterated al else and dragged the abused child this demon had violated back to the surface. Joe flexed his muscles and rol ed his massive shoulders as if to remind himself that he was no longer a child. He was a man now… a very large and formidable man. A superpredator. The guard closed and locked the door behind him and Joe winced.
Damon Trent hadn't changed much since the last time Joe had seen him, grinning at him from across the courtroom at his murder trial more than a decade ago.
Then, he had stil seemed like some misguided delinquent. Everyone except
Joe had found it difficult reconciling the awkward fat kid with the murders he was accused of, but the evidence had been irrefutable. Damon was found 'not guilty by reason of mental defect' of six counts of first-degree murder after less than an hour of deliberation, then sentenced to this maximum security mental facility when state psychiatrists agreed that he suffered from psychotic delusions that impaired his ability to distinguish right from- wrong. The years spent locked in his six-foot-bysix-foot cel, staring at the antique white wal s, baring his soul to a procession of disinterested shrinks, ingesting antipsychotics with his morning orange juice, didn't seem to have altered him much, but instead had settled and hardened his features. What was once baby fat was now elephantine rol s that smothered his neck and torso in layers of superfluous flesh.
His face was likewise round and pudgy and erupting with the same acne that had been there at the age of nineteen.
His oily hair was stil long and feathered back like the heavy-metal geek he'd been in high school. Nicotine- stained teeth gave his smile a monstrous gargoyle aspect. Stil, he looked far too out of shape to be dangerous, like an oversized toddler. But Joe knew better. Shivers crawled under his skin as
Damon's piggish little eyes gleamed out at him with a terrible cunning, fol owing Joe as he entered the room and took a seat opposite him. The sadistic pederast's thick cheeks pul ed back into a cherubic dimpled smile, hideous for its ironic resemblance to his chosen prey: young children. When he spoke, his voice squeaked as if he were stil in the hormonal chaos of puberty.
'Welcome back.'
'Fuck you, Damon.'
'Okay. So if you aren't a fan then what brings you here?'
'You know who I am and you obviously know why I'm here.'
'To kil me? How do you intend to do that with me locked up in here? That is, without trading places with me? I assure you, this is no place for a predator.' Damon winked at him.
