All bruises and bad feelings, I showed up the next day at the Billings Courthouse ready for a show. It didn’t happen.
All across the feeds, Jack’s attorney had described their case. They were going for insanity. They had statements of several psychiatrists to prove their point. One of their doctors had modified himself to be eight feet tall. Not that it would have made much difference. Jack had spent nearly ten million dollars to look like the star of an old horror movie. Who wouldn’t be inclined to think he was nuts?
Instead, Jack pleaded guilty.
It dawned on me the prosecution was smarter than they looked: they’d plea-bargained with him. The trial was over before it began. I couldn’t figure it out. With the public sympathy and the money, Jack could have gotten a complete acquittal. Hell, he could have ended up suing the State of Montana for libel and won.
Once he had entered his plea, the prosecutor, a hard-looking woman named Warburg, recommended the standard sentence of not more than ten years and not less than seven. The defense agreed. Agreed. Now I was really confused.
Jack saw me on the way out of the courtroom. He ignored me. I didn’t try to talk to him. I’m not sure why. Certainly, it didn’t make National Data any happier. Instead, I interviewed the several disgruntled psychiatrists who would have been substantially well paid to get on the stand had the defense not caved. It wasn’t a total loss. I managed to cause an argument between the Dean of Harvard Law School and the Grid Systems Legal Affairs Correspondent. It made good coverage and when the Dean took a swing at the Correspondent I was there with the National Data cams. It made me think of Sam. The Dean hit like a girl.
Jack was transported to Montana State Prison at Deer Lodge by the end of August. I spent a day or so setting up small segments for National Data and then the contract was finished. I didn’t see Sam again. I suppose he took his little floatplane back to some tiny lake deep in the heart of Beck-Lewis.
For one reason or another, I didn’t go back to New York right away. Instead, I caught a plane over to Forsyth.
Full Moon Tours operated out of an old and nearly abandoned strip mall. Wolf Pack Observation was only one of its many tourist packages. I wandered around in the office, checked out the brochures, the posters and the rough log walls and the soundproofed ceiling. Fishing trips, hiking trips, elk hunts-all in Beck-Lewis. I wondered if Sam knew about these people.
A pretty young woman with perky breasts worked the counter. She smiled radiantly at me and I smiled back. It wasn’t hard to smile at her; she reminded me of Gina.
“Can I help you, sir?”
“Not really. I just stopped in. What about this one?” The brochure had a close-up picture of Jack and his wolves on the cover.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she apologized. “We don’t do that tour anymore.”
“Really?” I asked. “How come?”
“It was too hard to protect the clients from the wolves.” She looked at the brochure. “I’m sure we’ll offer something like it next year. We just have to get the bugs out of it.”
“Ah.” I nodded and left.
Deer Lodge was three hundred and fifty miles away and I suppose somewhere in my mind I was always planning to get there. Not that a detour to Forsyth would necessarily indicate that. I had no reason to go. Jack had nothing left I could use. The contract with National Data was over. Still, a few days later I stopped at the Montana State Prison. It had been a week since Jack had been brought here. I found Jack in the prison hospital.
I met Jack in the day room. He had the orange wrist brace of a possible violent offender, universal in this sort of facility. A sort of motion-activated tazer. I had done a story about brace abuse two years before. The guards at Riker’s Island had developed the nasty habit of tuning the braces down for inmates they didn’t like. Men were forced to stand like statues to keep from getting tazed.
Jack was sitting in an old plastic chair watching the trees outside. He turned slightly as I approached him.
I sat down beside him and looked at him. They had shaved him and the pigment of his skin was blotchy. His blue eyes were rimmed with red and he was gaunt and haggard and his hands shook. “You look like hell.”
He laughed shortly. “They tried to drug me the first couple of days I was here because I’m so much stronger than the other inmates. But the modifications interfered and messed me up. Now, I wear this.” He held up the brace. He turned back to the window.
I let the silence go on for a bit. “I wasn’t sure you would see me.”
He shrugged. “Why not? What could you do to me now?”
I ignored that. “You’re not a wolf anymore.”
“I was never a wolf.”
“Yes you were.”
He looked at me.
I spread my hands. “Not in shape, of course. But you had left people behind. You didn’t start coming back to civilization until I threatened you. Until you had something to lose.”
He watched me a moment, then looked back outside. “Autumn’s coming.”
“It does that.”
He grunted and didn’t speak.
Finally, I asked: “Why did you do it?”
“What?”
“Kill Bernard.”
Jack held up his hands. “What else could I do? He killed Raksha’s pup. Raksha would have killed him if I hadn’t killed him first. Then, she would have been destroyed. Better me than her.” He turned back to the window.
“You could have gotten off completely,” I said. “Did you know that?”
He shrugged.
“Was it Warburg’s idea?” I looked around the room, the antiseptic white and beige of the walls. Outside were the guards and the exercise field and the cells. “You can appeal. You can say you were given inadequate counsel. You were given inadequate counsel. That’s absolutely true. She should never have taken the deal. You could have been on your way back to Beck-Lewis that afternoon.”
“It wasn’t Warburg’s idea,” he said softly. “It was mine. All of this was my fault.” He looked up at me for a long time, shook his head and turned away.
And I understood.
I looked out the window. The weather had become clear and the late summer light had changed character and taken on the soft golden glow of approaching autumn. The air looked cool, a sheath of velvet pleasantly covering a cold knife.
Jack looked outside. In one of those rare and perfect telepathic moments between human beings, I knew what he was seeing. Through one of the many cams that hovered over the pack, or through the eyes of a tourist, or a naturalist or just somebody who wanted to touch her, was Raksha. Now the center of a hungry and ever-growing crowd, the elk gone, the grass trampled, playing as best she can with the now almost-grown pups, then joining with the rest of the pack, howling against the coming snow.
“Winters,” Jack said at last. “Winters are hard.”
At the Money - RICHARD WADHOLM
New writer Richard Wadholm lives in Seattle, and is at work on a novel set in the universe of the story that follows. He’s made several sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and his story “Green Tea,” set in the same milieu, appeared in our Seventeenth Annual Collection.
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