Green River Rising

  ‘That’s pretty toxic if you take too many,’ she said.

  Coley cackled. ‘I don’t know ’bout you, Doctah, but I all for that toxic shit. One less cracker take a razor to my throat is one mo’ cracker to the good.’

  He threw the tablets into the box. For Devlin dumping a load of neuroleptic drugs on people ignorant of their effects went against the grain of her training. But she remembered the screams of the burning guard.

  ‘I guess we can worry about the lawsuits later,’ she said.

  Her hand fell on a carton of powerful laxatives. She showed the box to Coley.

  He grinned. ‘That’s th’ idea.’

  After that Devlin found herself adding some diuretics, anti-hypertensives and a sprinkling of digoxin. When the box was half-full Coley gave the massed pharmaceuticals a stir and topped it up with a few handfuls of syringes and needles.

  ‘Anything to keep ’em busy,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Devlin held the swing doors open and Coley carried the box out into the corridor. She followed him past the entrance to the ward. The ward was quiet. They walked through a stout wooden door held open with a wedge and past the TV room and bathrooms. They stopped at the first of two heavy duty doors that blocked the corridor. This one was made of plate steel and had a peep slot at head height. Coley held the drug box under one arm while he took out his keys and unlocked the door. Beyond was the guard’s room, the doctor’s office used by Bahr which contained old medical records and which Klein and Coley rarely used, and a small shabby room for visitors – lawyers and relatives. They came to the second door – this one a steel-barred gate – and Coley unlocked that too. At the end of the corridor they turned a corner and passed through into a porched hallway where two studded wooden doors opened onto the yard.

  The doors were pushed ajar but not locked. Only the duty CO had the keys to this, the only entrance to the infirmary. It was usually only locked down at night and Sung had left it open. Sung – she’d remembered his name. She wasn’t a racist after all.

  ‘What happened to Sung?’ she asked.

  ‘Last I saw he was carrying a guy with smoke comin’ off him towards the main gate.’

  ‘Was Galindez with him?’

  ‘Just Sung.’ Coley handed her the drug box. ‘Stay outta sight,’ he said. ‘Anyone sees a woman in here they really have a reason to kick the door down.’

  Devlin felt a sudden panic. She squashed it down with a joke.

  ‘Ten thousand years without a fuck,’ she said.

  Coley looked at her. ‘What’s that?’

  Devlin said, ‘I worked out that if you added together all the time all the inmates had gone without a woman it’d come to about ten thousand years.’

  ‘Believe it,’ said Coley. ‘Lotsa blue balls out there. Lotsa sour testosterone. Like sweet milk gone to the bad.’

  Devlin found Coley’s analogy rather vile. She stood back behind the doors as Coley pulled one of them open. She peered through the crack between the hinges. The sky above the east wall was black. From above the main gates a pair of searchlight beams prowled the yard. The cellblocks appeared to be in total darkness. Coley clicked a switch on the wall and a light came on above the doors on the outside wall. The proximity of the light made the yard and cellblocks even less visible.

  ‘Give me the goodie box,’ said Coley.

  She handed him the box of drugs and Coley disappeared outside. Devlin went back to the crack in the door. At the foot of the steps to the infirmary Coley came into view and set the box down.

  ‘Hey, Coley!’

  The voice rang out from the darkness beyond the porch light. Devlin couldn’t see who the voice belonged to. Coley straightened up from the box and squinted into the yard. Without haste he started to walk backwards up the infirmary steps.

  ‘Hey, Coley, where y’at, man? Hang about!’

  Coley didn’t stop but still didn’t hurry, didn’t show panic or fear. He pointed at the box.

  ‘They’s some real good shit fo’ y’all yonder,’ shouted Coley into the dark. ‘Benzos, barbs, codeine. All I got. You boys go enjoy yourselves.’

  He turned to mount the last two steps.

  A figure erupted from the penumbra.

  Devlin yelled, ‘Coley!’

  The figure sprang up the steps holding a monkey wrench twelve inches long. Coley swivelled, as cool as he was huge, and lashed his foot into the man’s throat. As the man flipped backwards down the steps the wrench span from his fist at the apex of the arc swinging for Coley’s head. Coley ducked the flying steel which hit the studded door and clattered to the stone flags of the porch. Coley paused for balance and skipped up the last step. A second man emerged from Coley’s blind side and threw his arms round Coley’s legs. Coley, struggling to stay upright, wrapped one hand round the assailant’s neck and dug his other into his pocket. He ripped out his key ring and threw a desperate glance at Devlin. As he toppled over like a massive, stunted oak he flung the keys inside the hallway.

  ‘Lock the doors!’ he bellowed. ‘Get inside!’

  Devlin found herself moving, without any concrete decisions to guide her actions, through a whirlwind of intensely sharp perceptions. Shouts and a stampede of running feet. A loud grunt as Coley crashed into the right-hand door and tumbled onto the flagstones. The dazzle of the porch light. Spectral figures milling in the gloom beyond. Gleaming on the floor: the bunch of keys. Beyond them: the bright steel of the wrench. Devlin stepped over the keys and grabbed the wrench with both hands. She heard someone scream.

  ‘Leave him alone, you cocksuckers.’

  The man’s head swam into sight at her feet, his eyes glazed with fear as he stared at something rising above her head. Her legs were well spaced, slightly bent, rooted. Like splitting winter logs on her father’s ranch. Another loud grunt, this time from her own chest. A violent shock wave ran up her wrists, her arms, and jolted her spine. Beyond the shock wave: a distant sense of fragmentation, a brittle, muted crumbling. Not at all like the crisp snap of a splitting log.

  She heard someone say, ‘Jesus.’

  Other shouts echoed that she didn’t register. A meaty arm encircled her waist and dragged her through the doors, flung her into the hallway. She turned, panting. Coley was heaving the big doors shut. A face appeared in the narrowing gap. Coley’s left fist shot through the gap and socked the face out of sight. As the face disappeared Devlin saw two huge men, giants, bearded, tattooed, monstrous, lumbering towards them up the steps. She hurled her weight against the door with Coley. The doors closed. A simple, fragile latch, a century old and not even a lock, rattled into place.

  ‘The bolt!’ wheezed Coley.

  The doors juddered as the weight of the giants ran into them. The screws holding the latch in place squealed from the wood, the iron buckled. The doors bulged inwards for a second. Coley braced his weight against them. The doors settled shut again. A pause.

  ‘The bolt!’

  A long flat oblong bolt sat on the right-hand door at chest height. Devlin grabbed the iron knob fixed to the bolt and pulled. The bolt didn’t budge. Unused, maybe for decades, it was rusted into its moorings. Devlin’s eyes flashed to the two iron hasps fixed to the inner edge of each door. From outside she heard the bellow of the two charging giants. Coley leapt away from the door and snatched the keys from the floor.

  ‘Come on!’ he screamed.

  Instead of following him Devlin found herself stepping forward. Her hands threaded the handle of the monkey wrench through the two iron hasps. As she stepped back there was a crash as over five hundred pounds of psychopathic flesh and bone smashed into the far side. The doors bulged mightily. The wrench screeched against the ancient iron hasps, and trembled for an endless, motionless instant, as it took the kinetic energy into itself and dumped it in the entropy pool. The instant passed and the doors groaned back into place. Coley ran past Devlin and battered at the knob of the sliding bolt with the heel of his hand.

  ‘Move, you fucka.’


  The bolt creaked forward a quarter inch. The iron was marked with gritty orange rust. Coley hammered again. As the rusted sections jerked apart the bolt moved easily on clean iron.

  Through the door they heard a thin voice scream:

  ‘Break that fucker down now!’

  Coley nodded towards the wrench. Devlin understood and grabbed the head of the wrench.

  ‘You pull and I’ll push,’ said Coley.

  An approaching bellow, two voices, from outside.

  ‘Now!’

  As Devlin slid the wrench free Coley shot home the bolt. The flat iron bar was longer than the wrench and seated itself in four widely spaced hasps, two to each door. When the giants rammed them a third time the doors barely bulged at all.

  Loud blasphemies, muffled by the thick wood, filtered through from the porch.

  Coley rested his hands on his thighs and bent forward, breathing heavily. He looked up at Devlin with his bulging, hooded eyes.

  ‘Thought I tol’ you to lock yourself inside,’ he said.

  The bolting of the door had opened the floodgates in Devlin’s neuroendocrine system. She felt like shitting, vomiting, fainting and laughing all at the same time. A spasm of trembling shook her from head to toe. She shook the spasm off.

  ‘Fuck you, Coley.’

  Coley straightened up. ‘You’d left me outside I’d be nice and dead. Now I got to worry ’bout takin’ care of you and all these goddamn sick muthas.’

  ‘Get me a pack of cigarettes and I’ll take care of myself,’ she said.

  Coley glanced at the wrench in her hand. ‘You know some-thin’, Doctah?’

  Devlin shook her head.

  ‘You are a bad muthafucka.’

  Devlin’s pelvic floor muscles clenched in a feeling that bordered on the sexual and she blushed deeply. To her intellect the thought seemed ridiculous: but her guts told her that she’d just received the greatest compliment of her life.

  She looked down at the wrench. Its jaws were clotted with hair and blood. Not like splitting a log at all.

  ‘Best hang onto that,’ said Coley. ‘You pretty handy with it.’

  ‘Hey Coley!’ There was a tapping on the doors. ‘Frogman!’

  ‘Stand back there,’ said Coley.

  Coley threw a switch and the hallway and corridor became black as night. Devlin stepped across the hall and stood back behind the corner of the corridor to the CO’s office. Coley slid open a panel in the door and stood to one side, his back to the door. Illuminated by the light above the porch a face Devlin didn’t recognise appeared, peering blindly into the dark within. For a moment Devlin was taken aback: the face was that of a boy, literally a scrawny boy with an eighth of an inch of stubble covering his shaved skull. He looked like he should be wearing orange robes and banging cymbals.

  ‘You hear me, Frog?’ said the boy.

  Coley didn’t answer.

  ‘You got you a lady in there with you?’

  ‘No,’ said Coley. ‘I got me a pretty white boy from A lets me go down on him.’

  ‘You lyin’ to me, Frog? That ain’t nice.’

  ‘He got a bigger dick than you have.’

  ‘Listen, Frog, we ain’t got nothin’ ’gainst you personal. We just want the faggots.’

  ‘Only faggots round here is you and me. You want me to show you a good time you jest come back tomorrow.’

  ‘You know who I mean, Frog. The Aids fuckers. They gotta go, man. I promised Nev Agry. Shit, we doin’ ’em a favour, you know that.’

  ‘Kiss my ass.’

  ‘Listen, you can go. You got my word. Your boy too. We just want the Aids guys.’

  The voice, the face, were so innocent, so angelic, that Devlin could almost believe him. An angel asking permission to execute the sick. She shivered and squeezed hard on the steel handle of the wrench.

  ‘Kiss my ass,’ repeated Coley.

  The face in the peephole twisted into a grimace of frustrated rage. ‘You know we comin’ in there, one way or th’other. Warden don’t give a shit, man. Screws all gone. We took the whole fucken joint down in twenty fucken minutes. You think you can keep us out of this little shithole?’

  There was a silence. Devlin could hear Coley breathing in the dark. The angel suddenly grinned. She wondered if he could hear her heartbeat. She knew he couldn’t see her, yet he seemed to be looking straight into her eyes.

  ‘I’m talkin’ to you now, Missy.’

  Devlin turned away from the eyes that couldn’t see her.

  ‘Doctor Devlin, right?’

  The sound of her own name echoing in the dark sent a glut of fear through her stomach.

  ‘Ain’t never fucked me no doctor before. My boys neither, but they’ll be linin’ up behind me.’

  Devlin put one hand on the wall for support. The bright eyes still seemed locked onto hers.

  ‘I’m gonna make you all a promise though, cause I know you and me already got somethin’ special goin’. See, I’m gonna fuck you in the ass. But my boys, I’m only gonna let them fuck you in the mouth or the pussy. You got mah word of honour. You see, Doctor Devlin, I want you all t’ stay nice an’ tight, just for me.’

  Coley slammed the peephole shut. For a moment there was a murmuring outside, then a shuffle of feet, then silence.

  Devlin felt numb. She leaned her forehead against the wall. Everything she’d heard had registered and then vanished into some sealed neural tract where it wouldn’t bother her. The only thought she had was to tell Coley to open the slot in the door again so she could ask the angel how Klein was. She suddenly felt an overwhelming anxiety on his behalf. He’d only had twenty-four hours to go and he was trapped in the main prison. She felt Coley’s hand on her shoulder.

  ‘He hasn’t got any enemies, has he?’ she said.

  Coley looked puzzled. ‘Who?’

  ‘Klein.’

  For a moment Coley’s eyes crinkled at the edges as he looked at her face and saw whatever was written there. Then he smiled gently.

  ‘Ever’one likes Klein,’ he said. ‘Nobody got no reason to come down on him. Nobody at all. He’ll be safe, you hear me?’

  Devlin nodded. Coley reached in his pocket and handed her a paper towel. She realised that her face was wet with tears.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She wiped her face with the towel. ‘I was just worried about him.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Coley.

  Devlin looked at him. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  ‘What fo’?’

  ‘For not making me feel like an asshole.’

  ‘Man, you too bad to be an asshole,’ he said.

  Devlin smiled.

  ‘Grauerholz’ll be back,’ said Coley. ‘We’d best get ready.’

  Coley squeezed her shoulder and lumbered away down the corridor. Devlin blew her nose on the paper towel and shoved it in her pocket. Then she followed him back through the steel-barred gateway that had never looked so fragile before.

  TWENTY-TWO

  RAY KLEIN DRAGGED Claudine along the second tier walkway of D block and down the spiral staircase. Klein inhaled quick, sharp breaths through flared nostrils, as if the atmosphere were thinned of oxygen. His muscles trembled, yet his mind was very cool, his movements cleanly driven by he knew not what. A word offered itself. Outrage. Total outrage. He realised he had never known what it meant before. Not really. Not even when the detectives had come to the hospital and told him he was being charged with rape.

  Agry was going to kill the Aids guys where they lay, helpless in their beds.

  Again: outrage. Klein felt no anger that he was aware of. He was beyond it, taken out of rage by the simple extremity of Agry’s plan. Klein thought he had known this place. Thought he had known its bestiality, its baseness. He had even felt himself a part of that baseness, had listened to the screams of the wounded man and wished him dead just to spare himself the inconvenience of hearing the noise. But the infirmary was a sacred space. They could kill each other, they could tort
ure the paedophiles, white could slaughter black and black could slaughter Latino and Latino could slaughter white until Klein was the last man left alive in the cellblocks but the infirmary was holy ground. Without the infirmary there was nothing. Without the infirmary even the flickering shadows cast upon the subterranean wall of the cavern disappeared.

  They reached ground tier. Behind him Claudine was still crying. Klein stopped and turned on her.

  ‘I need to know what the fuck this is about, Claude,’ he said.

  Claude cowered behind Claudine’s tears. She shook her head.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Klein shoved her backwards into the wall. He lifted his arm and she raised her hands to her face in fear. Klein knocked the hands down. He held her face still and scrubbed his shirt sleeve across her mouth, wiping away her red lipstick. She looked at him.

  ‘I’m talking to you, Claude,’ said Klein. ‘I know Claudine’s kept you alive but this isn’t the time to shit me. I won’t say anything to Nev that could hurt you, but I need to know what the fuck is going on.’

  Claude blinked away the tears in his eyes and, for a while at least, Claudine too. He swallowed and nodded.

  ‘Okay,’ said Klein. ‘Nev must know he can’t win this. The whole thing is suicide. He’ll spend the rest of his fucking life in seg.’

  ‘It’s my fault,’ said Claude.

  ‘Fuck your guilt,’ said Klein.

  He sighed, reined himself in. Claude was shrewd but he wasn’t a rocket scientist. As he blinked his big brown eyes at him Klein realised that Claude, trapped at the centre of a mad war, was more bewildered than any of them. More gently Klein said, ‘Just tell me what you know.’

  ‘Nev wanted me back. I’d known he was that crazy about me I wouldn’ve agreed to go back to B.’

  ‘Agreed to who?’

  Claude looked away without answering. Klein shook him.