“You don’t look like the people that normally come out here, that’s all.”
“What do they look like?”
“Weirdos.”
“I’m weird on the inside.”
“Your daughter said you were interested in the place, but didn’t elaborate.”
Jessie hadn’t told Hinst that I was working on a case, or that I was an ex-cop. That kind of information normally put people on the defensive. Better for Hinst to think that I was some local yokel looking to kill an afternoon. I smiled loosely.
“I always heard stories about this place, figured it was time to come out, and take a look.” I took out my trusty pack of gum, and offered him a stick. Hinst’s eyes told me that he wanted a piece, yet he shook his head. Still didn’t trust me. “I mentioned it to my daughter, and she went online and found your website. You know how kids are.”
“Don’t have any kids. Where do you want to start?”
“Your call.”
“Follow me. We’ll go to Building A first. That was where they kept the real crazies. Keep your mutt on a short leash. I don’t want him biting me in the ass.”
We crossed the courtyard to Building A. Hinst walked with a slight hitch, and seemed to favor his left leg. It looked painful, yet didn’t seem to slow him down.
Hinst entered the building, and I followed. We walked down a short hall, and passed a number of windowless cubicles. The ground floor was carpeted with flaking paint that blossomed from the walls and ceiling like rose petals. Hinst produced a flashlight, and pointed its beam at a stairwell in front of us. With Hansel-and-Gretel-like caution, someone had tied the end of a spool of purple yarn to the bannister. The thin purple line unspooled up the flight of stairs and into vast darkness on the next floor.
“Whoever used the yarn was probably coming in here for the first time,” Hinst explained. “They didn’t want to get lost. You don’t want to get lost in here.”
“No, sir,” I said.
Hinst started up the stairs. “This place used to be a small city. Had its own power plant, fire station, hospital, movie theater, even its own bakery. World unto itself.”
“How many patients?” I asked.
“At its heyday, about five thousand. This building held the bad ones.”
“Bad in what way?” I asked.
Hinst squinted over his shoulder at me. “This building housed the criminally insane, the guys that were never getting let back into society. We had blood drinkers and cannibals and people that if you let out on the street, they’d kill every single person in sight until you hauled them back in. It was a horror show.”
“Did you ever work in this building?”
“Yup. Got out of the Marines in ‘72 and took a job here working security. Stayed until they shut the place down.”
We had reached the top of the stairs. Still talking, Hinst trailed off to my left and went down another hallway. I followed him, feeling my skin tingle. I had finally found someone who could answer my questions.
Hinst entered a room and shut off his flashlight. Sunlight streamed in from a dozen barred windows, revealing a massive kitchen with canopies of an exhaust fan system that stretched across the ceiling like the wings of a giant aluminum bird.
“This was where the grub was fixed,” Hinst explained. “Next door was the dining room. It was sort of funny. When we brought the crazies in here and fed them, they calmed down, just like in the army.”
Our next stop was the sleeping quarters. The room was large and low-ceilinged to the point of feeling claustrophobic. A number of metal beds had been piled up in the corners, their rusted box springs hanging out like innards.
“What about in here?” I said.
“Nothing happened here,” Hinst grunted.
He started to leave. I sensed that he didn’t enjoy being in this space. On the other side of the room was a wall covered with drawings done in black ink. The drawings were grotesque; in one, a man was swallowing a woman whole, with her feet dangling from his gaping mouth. In another, a zombie warrior held a sword dripping with blood in one hand, a decapitated head in the other. I crossed the room for a better look.
“That’s just some shit somebody drew,” Hinst said.
“An inmate?” I asked.
Hinst didn’t reply, which only confirmed my suspicion. I got up close to the wall. The drawings were definitely the product of a sick mind.
“You gonna spend all day in here?” Hinst asked impatiently.
I ignored him and moved down the wall, soaking in every image. Drawings told you a lot about a person, and the emotions swirling inside of them. The artist responsible for these images had gone over to the dark side a long time ago.
At the end of the wall, I stopped. Staring back at me was a drawing of a giant. The giant held a man by the throat, and was squeezing him so hard that the man’s eyeballs were exploding out of his skull. The giant looked like Lonnie.
I turned around to ask Hinst a question, and found him gone. I crossed the room and went into the hallway. Hinst was leaning against a wall, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He tried to light it with a paper match, only to drop the packet of matches to the floor.
Picking the matches up, I lit his cigarette.
“Thanks,” he said, taking a deep drag.
I rested my hand on his arm. Hinst looked like he’d seen a ghost. Or worse, a roomful of ghosts. He lifted his eyes from the floor to look at me.
“Tell me what happened in there,” I said.
CHAPTER 41
Nothing,” Hinst said.
I tightened my grip on his arm. “In the other room there’s a drawing on the wall of a giant, and he’s killing a man with his bare hands. That’s Lonnie, isn’t it?”
Hinst’s head snapped. “You know about Lonnie?”
“Yes. I’m chasing him.”
“Jesus Christ. I thought for sure someone would have killed him by now.”
Hinst took another drag on his cigarette, went to the barred window at the hallway’s end, stared out at the courtyard. “I used to think that I’d never stop having nightmares about Vietnam. Then I came to work here, and had new ones.”
“How did Lonnie end up here?”
Hinst looked at me, saw something in my face that made him reach for his pack. He offered me one. I hadn’t smoked in years, yet I took the cigarette anyway, and filled my lungs with smoke.
“Lonnie got sent here as a kid,” Hinst said. “Mother and two sisters raised him. He was a giant, and he was also retarded. When he got a little older, he started to hump one of his sisters, so his mom made him live in the basement. I guess that changed him.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, one day he came upstairs when his mother and sisters were eating dinner. Had a sledgehammer in his hand. He bludgeoned his mother and one of his sisters to death. The other sister got away and called the police. They arrested him, and sent him here. Lonnie was thirteen.
“I remember the day they brought Lonnie in. They wanted to put him in a juvenile detention center, only Lonnie was too big. He was six foot six inches tall, and weighed a hundred sixty pounds. Boy was nothing but skin and bones.”
