Green River Rising

He took Abbott’s arm. Behind them a cheer arose as a splintering and rending of wood and metal announced the last hurrah of the hospital doors. The tears swam back into Klein’s eyes, blurring his vision. He didn’t want to see it. He wouldn’t. He didn’t turn back to watch. There were two more serious obstacles for Grauerholz to get through, the steel gate and the steel door in the corridor. Without anyone to resist them it was just a matter of time.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Klein. ‘Let’s go!’

  He pulled Abbott back through the sallyport and into the black and gasoline-stinking hell of the block, only now, as he reeled down the walkway without using the flash, Klein could hear and see another hell, where the screams of the damned rent his ears and the voices were of his people dying on their blood and piss-soaked mattresses. A roll call of names: Vinnie Lopez. Reuben Wilson. Dale Reiner. Earl Coley. The Frogman. The Frog. Stumbling blindly onward Klein felt stinging liquid tumble from his eyes. The Frogman. Klein realised that in some childlike portion of his heart he did not believe that the Frogman could die. The Frogman would live forever. Klein heard his own name shouted out – ‘Klein!’ – but it did not belong on the roll call. Images swam into his mind, of the Frog penetrated with knives and dying. ‘Klein!’ And Klein couldn’t help him. Or the others either. ‘Klein!’ He couldn’t be there for any of them. He fended off their ghosts. Klein can’t be there, guys. He would be but he can’t. He can’t, fuck you. Let him be.

  ‘. . . Devlin!’

  Klein froze. Devlin didn’t belong on the roll call either. She was drinking a cold beer and watching the Lakers thrash the Knicks, counting the cartons of Winstons she would take from Klein. He realised that the voice wasn’t in his head. Latino accent. Angry. He turned.

  ‘Whatsa matter, Klein, you fucken deaf, man?’

  A pale, moustached face shouted at him through the bars. Victor Galindez. Sergeant. Klein collected himself and walked over to the cell door.

  ‘Galindez?’ said Klein.

  ‘You heard about Grauerholz?’ asked Galindez.

  ‘They just broke the infirmary door down,’ said Klein.

  He saw Galindez noting the stains on his face. Klein, embarrassed, scrubbed a shirtsleeve across his eyes. ‘Smoke,’ he said, by way of excuse. ‘Nothing I can do for them.’

  ‘I was trying to tell you,’ said Galindez. ‘Doctor Devlin is there too.’

  Klein’s mind went blank. ‘She’s at home watching the Lakers,’ he said, blandly.

  ‘She came back,’ said Galindez. ‘I took her back. She had something she wanted to show you and Coley.’

  This time Klein took it in. And suddenly he felt cool. Everything that had happened in the last few hours dropped away from him. The craziness and the fear, the shame, the guilt, the grief. All of it. His mind was clear.

  ‘Devlin’s in the infirmary,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  Klein switched the flash on and shone it on Galindez. Galindez blinked and turned away. His uniform was scorched and filthy. His face was badly bruised, his eyes bloodshot. Klein wanted to think him a liar but Galindez had risked his life to save men who would have laughed while they cut his throat. He was telling the truth.

  ‘They say you opened these cages. In the fire.’

  Galindez did not reply. Klein’s light beam fell on something sitting on the stool in Galindez’s cell. Klein thought he knew what it was, but he didn’t believe it.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  And then he believed it. Before Galindez could answer, Klein believed what he saw. And in the instant of his believing he heard inside his skull the strangely sonorous voice of Henry Abbott saying: ‘Through The Green River.’ And Klein at last understood. Through The Green River.

  ‘It’s a head,’ replied Galindez without looking at the stool. ‘Special company just for me.’

  ‘Come on out of there,’ said Klein, quietly. He slid the door of the cell open.

  Galindez hesitated. ‘They’ll kill me.’

  ‘You released the blacks. You’ll be the first screw to die anyway.’

  Klein stepped into the cell. The head on the stool had been crudely severed from a black inmate that Klein could not recognise. He pulled a blanket from the bed. ‘How long’ve you been in here with this thing?’ Klein draped the blanket over the head.

  ‘I don’t know, maybe eight hours.’

  Klein rummaged around in the rear of the cell. He pulled out a damp, crumpled set of prison blues, shirt and pants. He held them out to Galindez.

  ‘Time you got changed,’ said Klein.

  Galindez took the clothes. His eyes narrowed. ‘We’re going somewhere?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Klein. ‘We’re taking a walk through the Green River.’

  Galindez looked bewildered. ‘What?’

  Klein turned and looked at Henry Abbott, standing mute in the gloom on the other side of the bars. This time, in Abbott’s eyes, Klein could see the glimmer again.

  Of distant stars.

  ‘They are many and we are few,’ said Klein.

  Without speaking Abbott nodded, once, and as he held that infinite gaze Klein’s spine tingled and he felt something tighten in his throat. Something awesome and fierce. For a moment he couldn’t go on. He swallowed.

  ‘Klein?’ said Galindez. ‘What do you mean?’

  Klein said: ‘There’s only one amongst us knows the River.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  JULIETTE DEVLIN FOLLOWED Earl Coley in silence as he trudged up the steps to the second floor. She expected him to go into Travis Ward but instead he pulled out his ring of keys and unlocked a door set back in an alcove at one end of the corridor. The door was stiff and Coley used his shoulder to shove it open. It clearly hadn’t been used in a long time. Coley switched on a light. Leading upwards was a cobwebbed staircase.

  ‘Come on,’ said Coley.

  She climbed up the stairs behind him, wondering what he had in mind. At the top Coley switched on a second set of lights. Beyond a grilled iron door was a disused ward built under the eaves of the roof. Two rows of five cast iron bedsteads faced each other under the bare lightbulbs. Coley unlocked the gate and stepped through.

  ‘I’ve never been up here before,’ said Devlin. There were no windows in the ward and it had an eerie atmosphere that brought gooseflesh out on her forearms.

  ‘Ain’t been used since World War Two,’ said Coley. ‘Me and Klein were thinking of opening it up again, things got any worse downstairs, the crowdin’ I mean. But they’s bad vibes here.’

  ‘I can feel them. What was it used for?’

  ‘This where they used to keep the boobies. I mean them that went insane, guys with syphilis of the brain, all that shit.’

  ‘God,’ said Devlin.

  Coley walked towards a door at the far end. Devlin followed him. By nature and training she didn’t suffer from squeamishness, but this place definitely retained some bad spirits. She saw that some of the beds were equipped with mouldering leather straps.

  ‘I’s told they did exper’ments here too. Lobotomies. Injected guys with insulin and malaria and snakeroot and Jesus knows what. They just sto’ies passed on down or that true?’

  ‘It’s true. In their time they were all reasonable ideas.’

  ‘I guess. We still got a coupla straitjackets back here somewheres.’

  She followed him through the door into a drab office containing a scarred table, a broken chair and a set of green metal filing cabinets. From a row of hooks on one wall hung two yellowed straitjackets. Devlin pulled one of the filing drawers open. It was crammed with cardboard folders, many lightly coated with green mould. On another day she would have been fascinated to find them. They had to contain enough material for a paper or two. But she couldn’t see anything in the room that was any use to them now, unless Coley hoped to persuade Grauerholz into a straitjacket.

  ‘Why have you brought me here?’ asked Devlin.

  Coley closed the filing drawer, grabbed the
cabinet in both arms and levered it away from the wall. Behind it was a small door without any lock or handle. A thin steel cable ran from a hole in the back of the cabinet through another hole drilled in the door. Coley stuck the tip of a key into the crack at the edge of the door and pulled the door open. A black void gaped inside. On the inside of the door were two heavy bolts. He looked up at Devlin.

  ‘This my secret. One time sixty year back the boobies went ape and killed a doctor and two trusties right where we standin’. Took ’em limb from limb. That’s when they realise they put this office at the wrong end of the ward.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Devlin. ‘I thought I was going to be the first doctor in history to die in here.’

  ‘They cut this do’ so they could hide, it evah happen again. You can bolt it from th’ inside.’

  Devlin laughed. ‘You don’t expect me to go in there?’

  ‘This deal ain’t no joke, Doctah Devlin. Grau’holz be back, an’ he will get in.’

  Devlin had thought about Hector Grauerholz on the way up. She had never met him but she had read his file. She knew what he had done, what he was capable of. He’d interested her as a case because the psychiatric and social court reports were unanimous in finding his personal background to be strikingly normal, completely free of the usual indicators of sociopathology. He came from a stable, affectionate, blue-collar family of modest means without a felony conviction between them. There was no suggestion of childhood abuse. No evidence of organic brain damage or mental disorder. Hector should’ve married the girl next door. Instead he’d started killing people. His florid criminality had just appeared, full blown and without any antecedents. In this sense he was an affront to science as well as to the law. Damnit, he had no right to be that bad. Devlin had once asked permission to interview him, and Hobbes had agreed, but Grauerholz had refused to meet her. Perhaps now she would have her chance.

  ‘You be safe in here,’ went on Coley. ‘Look.’

  He reached through the door and switched on a light. Inside were roof trusses and beams, a mattress, a number of cardboard boxes. In the boxes light glinted from the tops of canned foods.

  ‘I fix this up myself,’ said Coley, ‘’bout fifteen year since. Word went round that they was gonna close this ole shithole down and move us all to a new facility. I reckoned me to hole up in here say three, fo’ week till ever’one gone, ever’one, then come out and sneak ovah the wall.’

  ‘You think it would’ve worked?’

  Coley stared through the door at his secret. ‘Doctah, I ain’t seen the sun come over the horizon in twenty-three year. Was a time I saw it ever’day, winter and summer, rain or shine. Now that sixty-foot wall always in my way. I ain’t seen a tree or a field of cotton or a blade of grass since them doors closed behind me.’

  He turned to look at her. Her heart squeezed inside her chest.

  ‘You dream ’bout bein’ free, you believe anythin’ ’ll work.’

  ‘I won’t go in there,’ said Devlin.

  ‘Listen, Doctah, you a woman. You know what that mean? They rape yo’ ass for forty-eight hours straight then pass you on to they buddies. They stick they dicks into blood and mush and think it’s Christmas. Maybe you dead by then, don’t matter, they keep on fuckin’ anyway. ’Cause you a woman.’

  Devlin’s insides squirmed and she couldn’t help flinching. Graphic pictures flashed through her mind.

  ‘Sorry, Doctah Devlin, but that’s the way it is.’

  Devlin forced the pictures away. She glanced into Coley’s den.

  ‘There’s only two people in this building can walk properly. That’s you and me,’ she said. ‘And you and me are going to keep those bastards out.’

  Coley stared at her without speaking.

  ‘Okay, Coley.’ Devlin held out her hand. ‘Give me the keys.’

  Coley relaxed visibly. He unhooked two keys from his ring and put them in her hand.

  ‘If they get through the third door downstairs I’ll come up here and hide. Until then I’m with you. Deal?’

  Coley read the resolution in her face. He nodded.

  ‘And there’s something else,’ she said. ‘I want you to drop this “Doctah Devlin” shit. Makes me feel like Scarlett O’fucking Hara. It’s “Devlin”, okay?’

  Coley grinned. ‘Klein don’t know it yet, but you gonna break his balls, Devlin.’

  ‘Fuck you, Coley.’

  From the ward outside came a voice.

  ‘Frog? You in there?’

  Coley stood up. The door opened and Reuben Wilson leaned against the jamb. His voice was deep, rich, and he had watchful eyes that took in Devlin’s body with a glance and held her with a frank gaze. He was slim with wide shoulders and a hard-looking jaw that was just a little too big for his face. Devlin had never spoken to him. Sweat ran down his throat and into the shallow cleft between his pecs at the neck of his shirt. As soon as she realised she found him attractive Devlin blushed and had to look away. Wilson glanced from Devlin to Coley to the hole in the wall.

  ‘What’s goin’ on?’ asked Wilson.

  Coley bent down and switched off the light in the hidden den.

  ‘You just mind yo’ business, nigger,’ said Coley. ‘What you doin’ up here?’

  ‘Buncha crackers outside smashing the doors down.’

  ‘Grauerholz,’ said Coley. ‘We already told him to kiss our dirty black ass.’ He looked at Devlin. ‘Our white ass too.’

  Devlin blushed again, this time with pride.

  ‘Way I see it,’ said Wilson, ‘Agry sent ’em for me.’ He glanced at Devlin as if he were embarrassed for her to hear this. ‘You open the doors I’ll turn myself over. Reckon Agry wants me alive, for a while anyways. No sense you all gettin’ hurt.’

  ‘I tol’ you you a pussy, Wilson,’ said Coley. ‘Now I know you an asshole too, and a high and mighty asshole at that. The crackers’re here to kill the Aids guys.’

  Wilson’s face remained impassive but in his eyes was a brief struggle to comprehend. ‘Why?’

  ‘Shit, you the politician,’ said Coley. ‘All ’at matters is they come to harm my people. They just gotta come through me first.’ He paused. ‘They know Devlin here’s with us too.’

  Wilson looked at her. His mouth twisted sourly. She felt stupid.

  ‘That’s bad,’ said Wilson.

  ‘Wasn’t fo’ her they’d already be cuttin’ yo’ pecker off to take back to Agry,’ said Coley. ‘Saved my old ass too. She’s a muthafucka, man.’

  Wilson smiled at her and Devlin went weird inside.

  ‘Always pleased to meet a motherfucker,’ said Wilson.

  He held out his hand and Devlin walked over and shook it.

  ‘Reuben Wilson,’ he said.

  ‘Juliette Devlin.’ She paused, uncertain, then said, ‘I saw you take out Chester Burnett in five at the Superdome.’

  Wilson blinked in astonishment. ‘New Orleans?’

  ‘Must be ten years ago. I had twenty bucks on Burnett to go the distance.’

  Wilson smiled with pleasure. ‘I apologise.’

  ‘That’s okay. The time you lost the split decision to Pentangeli I had money on him too.’

  From behind her back came a chortle of wheezy laughter from Coley. Wilson pretended not to hear it and drew his shoulders back.

  ‘I had a broken bone in my hand hadn’t healed proper,’ he said.

  ‘The fourth metacarpal,’ said Devlin. ‘That’s why I bet Pentangeli.’

  ‘Goddamn,’ murmured Wilson.

  Coley walked over and stopped by Wilson in the doorway. ‘See what I mean? Tonight she bettin’ you can’t get your pussy ass into gear to he’p us keep out the crackers. Trouble is she can’t find no one to back you.’

  Coley strode off down the ward. Wilson caught Devlin looking at him, supporting himself against the jamb. He stood upright and coughed. Devlin realised she was about half an inch taller than him. For some reason it made her feel awkward.

  ‘You like to bet
outsiders then,’ said Wilson.

  ‘A sure thing’s no fun,’ replied Devlin. ‘That’s why I never backed you.’

  Wilson put a hand on his stomach. Devlin knew from Klein what had happened to him in solitary. ‘Well I sure ain’t a sure thing no more.’

  Devlin walked past him and through the door.

  ‘I’d better go call my bookie then.’

  Devlin left the doors to the old mental ward unlocked in case she did have to make her way back up there. She checked that she still had the keys to lock them in her pocket. As she and Wilson went downstairs a sound started, getting progressively louder, of a great hollow thud that echoed dully through the heavy air. They found Coley downstairs in the dispensary. On the bench were two wide rolls of adhesive tape.

  ‘Strap him up,’ said Coley. ‘If I do it I’ll have to listen to him fussin’ and cryin’.’ Coley put on a mocking, high-pitched whimper: ‘Careful there, Frog, I’m a-hurtin’.’

  ‘Hey, Coley,’ said Wilson darkly.

  Coley winked at her. ‘Maybe for you he act like a man.’

  Coley busied himself unlocking a cupboard. Devlin looked at Wilson and hesitated. There was a brief moment of embarrassment between them, then Devlin slipped into doctor mode.

  ‘Take your shirt off,’ she said.

  The thick scar bisecting Wilson’s abdomen was ugly, maybe all the more so because the rest of him looked terrific. She had him lift his arms above his head and took the rolls of tape and bound them round his torso from just below his nipples to just above his hips. She wasn’t sure just how much physical support the strapping would really give to Wilson’s healing muscles, but psychologically it would make him feel a lot more secure. As she wrapped the last loop of tape round his waist her belly bumped into his cock. Wilson had a burgeoning erection.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said.

  She looked up at him. He wasn’t making a big deal of it or trying to hit on her. He was just being coolly respectful.

  ‘No problem,’ she said.

  Devlin felt momentarily turned on. She thought about Klein and how he’d pushed her against the wall and the thought turned her on some more. Two first-class hard-ons in one day was more luck than she’d had in a long time. Without her making a big deal of it either she let Wilson’s cock rest against her while she completed the taping. A vague ethical doubt flitted across her mind, but Wilson wasn’t her patient and anyhow it wasn’t like she had his cock in her mouth. She wondered, as she’d wondered before, if she would ever have enjoyed sin quite as much as she did if her mother and father had not been such devout Catholics. When she finished the roll of tape she stepped back.