Until Mann slid her hand into her pocket and pulled out the folded card that housed her room key, she didn’t know what city she was in. New York City, it turned out. A Hilton.
“No, thank you,” Mann said, then signed the check, leaving a 20 percent tip. She then stepped outside for some air.
The sun was beginning to set, and the air was muggy and hot. Mann realized she was standing directly across from Ground Zero. Construction continued on the so-called Freedom Tower. The last time Mann had been to lower Manhattan, the site was still just a big, depressing hole in the ground.
She stepped back inside and took the elevator to the fourteenth floor, which, according to the folded card, was where she’d find her room. Mann always traveled light. Never take anything you’re not fully prepared to leave behind.
At Penn Station she bought a ticket on an Acela bound for 30th Street Station, Philadelphia. Mann thought about Charlie Hardie for much of the ride down. Had he figured out the prison yet? Or had he been beaten to death upon his arrival? Of course not. Not her Charlie. The man was unkillable, right?
She hadn’t thought about him in a long while. Not actively, anyway. Seeing him in the flesh, though, brought all those old bad feelings back. She tried not to show it, but he seemed to sense it anyway. The pure cold hate. Much as Mann tried to rationalize it away, the truth was…he had derailed her life. Utterly, completely. She thought that seeing him in that tiny little interrogation room, and knowing what fate had in store for him, would bring her some peace.
It did not.
In dreary, humid Philadelphia, Mann picked up the SUV she’d rented using her smartphone and followed 76 up to Route 611 and out to the suburbs of Montgomery County. The address had been written on the back of the folded hotel card.
The house was modest for this neighborhood, which was good. Nobody would be driving by and gawking at it. A split-level. Some tree cover, bushes, a wooden fence in need of paint. Mann parked the SUV across the street and swept the area with her eyes. The family allegedly had some guardian angels in the FBI looking over them—but as far as Mann could tell, the house was utterly exposed. Nobody on the perimeter. No sophisticated alarm systems. No one even doing drive-bys.
She removed the smartphone from her pocket and had her hand on the door handle when she heard a noise.
Behind her—
Then a form, stumbling out of the bushes.
Mann’s body tensed up. Had she missed someone? Was the FBI out there? Not that it mattered, because she could flash any number of phony credentials that would ease her passage from the scene. But she would be highly disappointed in herself if she’d missed something like that.
The form darted past the SUV and into the street, casting furtive glances to the left, then the right, before jogging toward the house.
Mann squinted.
It was Charlie Hardie.
The junior version of him, anyway.
What was a young man doing out at this hour, stumbling around in the darkness outside his own house?
After a few more seconds of observation Mann had figured it out. The boy had been drinking. Look at him, how uneasy he is on his feet. He must have sneaked past Mom to go pound beers with his asshole friends somewhere in the wilds of Montgomery County. Absent father, single mother—textbook rebellion move.
She was half tempted to jump out of the SUV and tackle the boy, right there on his front lawn, put the tip of a pen under his chin and tell him it was a knife and that she was going to cut his head off. Would he act like his father and try to punch her in the eye? Would he have a wisecrack? Would she see any of the father in the son?
It was tempting.
So incredibly tempting.
But she had other work to do. The night was just beginning.
—Jack Henry Abbott,
THE MASK.
It was much, much worse than Hardie could have imagined.
Picture your head removed from its body and imprisoned elsewhere, some cramped little metal box where the air stinks like sour breath and nothing can touch the skin of your face, not even your own fingertips.
This was a new low. Hardie’s new life was smaller and more pathetic than he ever thought possible.
The first itch was a novelty. Hardie thought it wasn’t so bad; okay, he could take it, it was just an itch. He could just will it away. But the itch refused to quit. You take for granted how easy it is to cure something like an itch. You do it almost unconsciously. Your nose itches, your hand flies up to your face, you take care of it. Not inside the mask. The itch was free to last as long as it wanted, because nobody could stop it. The itch continued, and grew more powerful, emboldened by the lawless space inside the stinking, hot, confining mask. Even though he knew it would do no good, Hardie’s fingers scratched at the outside of the mask. He tried working his fingers under his mask, but they couldn’t reach up high enough to scratch the itch.
(Was it a day?)
(Two days, maybe?)
(Please let it be at least two days.)
Sleep was no escape. The moment you calmed your brain down enough to drift away, the sirens were blaring again, and the bright lights were flashing so you couldn’t see anything, let alone the guards, who were forcing your back against the bars so they could take off the mask and photograph your squinty, tired, itchy face. And by the time you remembered to scratch your face they were making you put the mask back on again. Then the screaming sirens faded and the lights were cut and you’d go back to not falling asleep.
Twice a day the masks were temporarily removed for feeding. The first time, Hardie didn’t even eat. He scratched at his face furiously until he saw blood on the tips of his fingers. The second time, he noted that the same old breakfast was still being served, despite the Prisonmaster’s promise to do something about it. Dry, biscuitlike lumps and a thin, tasteless paste that was probably intended to be some sort of oatmeal substitute. Good to see his short tenure as warden had absolutely
Then the mask went back on again, and you started counting down the time until the next head count or meal, because anything was better than wearing this heavy, choking, soul-killing mask…
And just when Hardie thought the situation couldn’t be any more insufferable, the mask started to play a little slide show.
* * *
When the image of the house appeared, Hardie thought he was hallucinating. No amount of blinking would erase it, though. He realized there was a screen inside the mask, like there was in the View-Master he had when he was a kid. A tiny personal movie screen floating a few inches in front of his eyeballs.
Showing him a house—a split-level, shrouded in darkness and vaguely familiar. But he couldn’t place it. Was this some home he’d guarded at some point? Why were they showing this to him?
Without warning the floating image disappeared…
…only to be replaced by an image of the same house shown from a different angle. The cement path leading
