The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 Read online

  On the street, we snuck glances at the young women coming to visit their husbands and boyfriends. They wore painted-on jeans and shirts with plunging necklines, and if a group of us happened to catch an eyeful, we weren’t above a murmured joke about conjugal visits. Other times we saw older women, who we guessed were the mothers of inmates, in floral-print dresses and hats piled with elaborate confections of silk, wool, and felt. Sometimes we saw strangers in sweatpants and T-shirts, and we imagined that they dressed modestly so as not to make the prisoners feel shabby.

  On summer weekends we hosted a parade of cars with license plates from Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, and as far away as Wisconsin. We were grateful for the business, but we weren’t prepared to handle the busload of suited and gowned seniors from a charismatic church in Missouri, who arrived without fanfare and stayed for three days to minister in the prison. Nor were we prepared for the hundred-odd carousing attendees of the Corrections Officers Convention, whose location was changed to our town with little notice. We were not prepared for the mothers and wives who lodged in our attics and spare bedrooms, whose footsteps creaked above our heads when they were unable to sleep, who sobbed into our guest pillows, who filled our houses with their grief.

  Oh, to hell with that, some of us said. We were decent people, faithful to our wives and husbands. We tithed and donated sweaters and jeans to the Salvation Army. We flew the flag from our porches and took it inside when it rained. We visited Helen Bree, whose heart was failing, which marooned her indoors most of the time. Were these things not proof of our largesse, our essential goodness?

  On a trip to Helen Bree’s house, Pastor Kimble and the church vocal quartet sat with her to watch a nature documentary. It concerned a fish that attached itself to a shark’s skin and lived off scraps by cleaning the shark’s teeth. They left after the first commercial break, which in retrospect was a shame. Some of us would have liked to learn how those fish managed to avoid being eaten.

  When Grace Chilton gave birth to a boy three months prematurely, Pastor Kimble collected donations to help with the family’s hospital bills. By that time most of the town had reconnected their satellite TVs, so it was no great burden to pitch in a twenty for little Anthony’s medical fund. During those months it wasn’t uncommon to see Robert Chilton walking around ashen-faced with worry, until he took a job as a prison guard.

  Those of us who worked as guards wondered whether he had it in him. We’d developed something of an edge, a hyperalertness that was lacking in gentle Robert. Corvus paid well enough, we couldn’t complain there. But just being in that place chiseled away at our composure. The smell of sweat permeated the building. It was worse after lights-out, as if the concrete walls and floor had absorbed the stench all day only to release it all night long. Sometimes we’d catch a group of prisoners staring at us, and flowers of ice would bloom in our chests. Never for a second could we forget they would kill us, given the chance.

  That was a hard notion to shed after work, when the same dozen or so of us gathered at Barry’s for drinks before going home to our families. We made overtures to the Corvus people, the more senior guards, but they never joined us. You could tell by looking that they never would. We became body-language experts, sizing up everyone we met. We instinctively looked for the half-closed fist hanging at someone’s side, a slight bunch in the shoulders, tense little pulses in the jaw and temple. Even a clean-cut prisoner like Howard Albright—White Bright, other inmates called him—all downcast eyes and mumbled Yessirs, set our hearts racing if he shuffled by too close or approached from behind. We couldn’t turn it off, that hypervigilance. The best we could do was manage it.

  There was another issue brewing, one that we mostly didn’t talk about: the town was nearly all white, and the inmates were nearly all not. Likewise, many of the visitors were black or Hispanic, and their skin announced them as citizens of Chicago, or Joliet, or Plano, or any of the other towns up north from which we siphoned and warehoused young men. It was Isaiah Bloom who first spoke about it, at a town meeting where a revitalization of the town square was under debate.

  Bloom was tall and rangy, perpetually sunburned, with sandy blond hair and a chinstrap beard. “You know how I feel about this prison,” he said, quietly enough so that we had to strain to hear him from the back of the hall. He put his hands—large, gnarled mitts—on the podium, his pale eyes casting about for a sympathetic face. “And I know a lot of you don’t feel the same. But this money—it’s not rightly ours.”

  It turned out that the census counted every prisoner as one of us—two thousand extra unemployed men. Our swollen ranks earned us more federal dollars. To hear Isaiah Bloom explain it, we were the beneficiaries of a cruel trick played on poor blacks and Latinos. It was true that among many of us, a mental shorthand had developed: if we saw white strangers, we assumed they were police, or lawyers, or with Corvus. If they weren’t white, we assumed they were visiting an incarcerated friend or family member. This mental routing, this either/or, was so fast and seemed so natural that its profound weirdness didn’t really register with us until Bloom went on to point it out. It wasn’t clear whether these kinds of thoughts had always been with us or we’d been tainted by the prison’s arrival.

  The prison was segregated, too. Out in the yard, surrounded by towers with riflemen silhouetted against the sky, inmates broke into racialized clusters. Gang fights erupted in brief but frequent bursts, like chamber musicians tuning their instruments before the commencement of some terrible overture. Even unaffiliated prisoners got caught up. During one of these fights, another inmate punctured Howard Albright’s thigh with a sharpened toothbrush before we pulled him to safety.

  “I mean, Christ,” said Kyle Rouse, three beers deep at Barry’s. “Puerto Rican, Mexican, what’s the difference?”

  Robert Chilton looked as uncomfortable as some of us felt, but with Kyle paying for round after round, we said nothing. With his clear, open face and Cupid’s bow mouth, Robert looked much younger than the dozen or so of us, despite being a few years older. We could only imagine how he must have looked to the prisoners.

  “I heard that Corvus is looking to build another facility,” said Kyle, who labored under the impression that he’d purchased our ears along with our drinks. “They’re closing some place in Indiana and shipping everyone here.”

  “Eh,” said Herman Floss, curled over his drink at the next table over. “Put a bullet in each of their heads and be done with it.”

  There were times when we all came to feel that way. A few weeks later, a prisoner known as Skinny Charles flung a slurry of fluids at Kyle, who ducked the missile but still wound up with foul-smelling flecks spattered across his shoulder. It took three of us to hold Kyle back—carefully, so as not to get any stains on us—while all of C block laughed and hollered.

  We rousted everyone after that. We shoved inmates against the walls chest-first, kicked their legs apart, and patted them down. Flicked open personal switchblades and Leathermen and ripped through mattresses. We left boot prints on pictures of their families. We tore apart their cells, looking for contraband, and boy, did we find it: razor blades, screwdrivers, shivs. Plastic bottles of pruno fermenting in toilet bowls. An exquisitely detailed portfolio of hand-drawn pornography. A tattoo gun cobbled from a Bic pen, an eraser, the motor from an electric toothbrush, and a length of guitar string for the needle. In Howard Albright’s cell, shears and actual needles. We marveled at their stupidity: how could they have imagined they could keep anything from us, some of whom had built those very cells? So no—whatever it might have meant for the town, we guards were not looking forward to another thousand Skinny Charleses coming in.

  “He knows what he did,” said Skinny, when questioned about the attempted sliming of Kyle Rouse. “That motherfucker’s gonna get got.”

  In three cells on C block, we found knotted condoms filled with brittle rocks. In Skinny’s cell we discovered an empty condom with traces of powder, which the lab confirmed was co
caine. As soon as that news came through, he couldn’t stop talking.

  “What the fuck?” said Kyle, when he happened into the changing room as two guards rummaged through his locker.

  There was nothing in his locker, but word went out that Kyle was being watched. He stopped going to Barry’s for a few months. When we patrolled the upper tier of cellblocks with him, we could feel CentCom watching us through the compound eye of cameras, noting whose cells we lingered at, how long it took us to complete a loop. We’d always watched out for each other—maintaining sightlines with fellow guards was crucial to making sure you were covered—but now we watched each other.

  Early one morning, while the prison slept, our supervisor tacked the following month’s schedule to the locker room’s corkboard and announced extra shifts. We didn’t know it at the time, but Kyle had been in custody for hours, and his pickup—one of the models built at the plant, a lifetime ago—had been impounded by Corvus’s investigators, after they’d found a dozen condoms filled with rock cocaine in its glovebox. But we didn’t know that yet. We finished dressing and signed our names in the empty boxes, grateful for the overtime. Once we’d divided up Kyle’s hours, we secured our batons to our belts, stepped out onto the tier, and threw the power switch, flooding the prison with light.

  While it was probably no comfort to his wife and young son, it was a small mercy that Kyle got sent to a facility a few hours north. In the months he’d been selling drugs in the prison, passing them between a visiting gang contact and a crew inside, he’d begun to adulterate the shipments, diluting them so much that he’d earned the enmity of casual users and addicts alike. It wasn’t hard to find inmates willing to testify against Kyle, and he wound up pleading out for eight years. Some of us heard rumors that Sheila knew about his dealing the whole time, but we were in no mood to cast aspersions.

  In hindsight, we’d felt it building all through the end of that year. The gen pop had been on edge since the drugs dried up, though the occasional shipment managed to slip in. All it took was one sign of disrespect—cutting in line, a walk-by shoulder check—and though none of us knew what the exact offense was, the prison cafeteria exploded at dinner a week after Thanksgiving. A scrum of men tackled two lone prisoners, bringing them to the ground with a flurry of little jabs. They dispersed, leaving growing blots of red on the chest of each twitching victim.

  At that, the cafeteria broke into waves of scrambling bodies. Most of the inmates flattened themselves against the wall. Others bellowed as they kicked and punched and choked each other. Skinny Charles took a tray to the jaw and went sprawling. Howard Albright fell backward and skittered into a corner, arms braced over his head. Prisoners pinned one another to the ground and pummeled away.

  The adrenaline hit like a shock wave, made our eyeballs throb. Someone’s tear-gas canister struck the floor with a dull metallic thunk. We shouted and swore as we rushed to seal our helmets, the canister belching smoke. Prisoners stopped fighting and fell to their knees, wheezing. We waded into the thick of it, bleary-eyed, the sound of our own rasping breath deafening in our helmets. Images swam through the haze—an outstretched hand, a face twisted in pain. Fear deformed every thought in our heads. We unsheathed our batons and laid waste to anything in a blue jumpsuit. We let the full force of our rage find expression at the end of those clubs. We split open scalps, made men spit teeth.

  A quarter-hour later, when the last inmate had been carted off to the medical wing, we received word that both stabbing victims would live. Robert Chilton was in the infirmary, scrubbing off blood with soap and saline. A trace of gas lingered in the air, sour in our throats. Our hands trembled. But there was no time to consider what had happened. A caged light bulb above the cafeteria door flashed red, and the lockdown alarm rang.

  One of the inmates lapsed into a coma and stayed under for weeks. When he awoke, he couldn’t walk or talk, and the right side of his face was slack. Robert Chilton quit that day. By then he looked as if he hadn’t slept in forever. The inmate was transferred to a state hospital soon afterward, where someone could help him eat and bathe.

  After that, a parade of lawyers came through. Groups of them came and went in shifts, day after day, men in discount suits carrying thick file folders, conferring with inmates in low voices so we couldn’t overhear. A kind of submarine pressure began to fill the prison walls. We felt fragile and exposed, ignorant of what was happening up on the surface, afraid that depth charges could detonate at any moment.

  No one remembers which guard announced we were one inmate short. But we all remember the jolt at finding out it was Howard Albright. His cell empty, except for the scraps of prisoner’s blues tucked beneath his mattress. Later on, it came out that he’d stitched together a jacket and slacks from chalk-dyed jumpsuits and walked out the front gates with a forged lanyard. We watched it over and over on video, Albright passing through the checkpoint with four other men in suits. Just another lawyer. The state police had set up roadblocks as far north as Bloomington. They needn’t have bothered. Deputy Ken Dufresne followed Albright’s footprints in the new snow. Footprints that led, with almost comical traceability, to the Blooms’ neighboring farm.

  Over the next two weeks, a clique of professionally coiffed men and women descended upon our town. They shot bleak snowscapes that framed the prison building and the Bloom farmhouse, which was quarantined by yellow tape, and they said grave things into cameras: how Albright had broken into the Blooms’ garage, how young Joshua Bloom had interrupted Albright as he tried to hotwire the Blooms’ truck. In somber tones they recounted the struggle in which Albright fatally stabbed Joshua, only to be killed moments later by a blast from Isaiah Bloom’s shotgun. We turned off our televisions and let our newspapers molder on our porches. We didn’t need to be told who the Blooms were, or who we were, for that matter.

  The week before Christmas we held a memorial service at church. Neither Isaiah nor Annalee Bloom attended. Pastor Kimble did his best, but most of us barely heard a word. We were sick with grief for the two of them, but they wanted nothing to do with us. They’d spoken to no one, refused every interview, rebuffed even the pastor. They made private arrangements for their son’s body, and some months later left for Pennsylvania.

  It was those killings that put us on the map, but not in the way we’d expected. For years afterward, our town couldn’t be mentioned without them. When people moved away, their new neighbors would bring it up as soon as they found out where the movers had come from. When we traveled across the state for our children’s cross-country meets and wrestling championships, fellow parents would squint through pained smiles when we told them where we lived. Huh, they’d say. That’s the prison town, isn’t it? The shopping malls and processing plants we’d hoped for never materialized. Instead, once a respectful amount of time had passed, Corvus quietly purchased the Blooms’ farm and started building an expansion.

  The cohort of guards who survived the cafeteria melee began drinking nightly at Barry’s. They didn’t talk about it, but they’d all been changed by what happened. Certain vivid thoughts boiled up with greater and greater frequency. They’d be sitting at dinner with their families when the images surfaced, uninvited. They couldn’t look at their children without flashing on batons striking their skulls, the thwock they’d make ringing out in their own heads. That summer the group of them took turns building decks around the pools in each other’s yards. Amid the camaraderie and coolers of beer on those long weekend afternoons, it occurred to more than one that his hammer had the same heft as his club.

  Everyone thought the warden would resign after the killings, but instead he gave a pep talk and promised to support the guards, whether that meant more training, more staff, or better weapons. There was a new generation of tasers coming to market that promised to “revolutionize compliance management.” Another flurry of media attention fell on us during the DOC inquiry, once a dozen inmates’ lawyers raised hell. But after a few days of anemic coverage, the story disapp
eared. The inquiry faded, too. All eyes turned overseas, where news had leaked that American forces were operating a vast network of secret prisons across the globe. To the town’s great relief, we were forgotten.

  From the looks of things, the town is back to normal. The Cineplex has reopened, and the manicured lawns and flower boxes along the thoroughfare are flush with color. The smell of fresh asphalt cuts the air. Not a single building in our modest downtown remains empty. And all the while, everything outside of town decays. The state teeters on the edge of bankruptcy. We hear rumors of cutbacks and shutdowns—schools, hospitals, fire departments, police. Everything but the prisons, those marvelous engines that run on damaged men. We should feel lucky.

  Our parents’ faces have become our own. Maybe, for all their talk about the permanence of the plant, they knew all along just how precarious our arrangement was. The plant offered a good job, but there was risk there, too. Every so often, someone got caught in the gears.

  Over drinks at Barry’s, Ed McConnell brought news of the Chiltons, who had moved away after Robert quit. Little Anthony—healthy and strong, according to McConnell—had started school, and Grace had found work as a teacher again. Robert was working as an undertaker’s assistant after being unemployed for the better part of a year. “Hell of a way to earn a living,” said McConnell.

  Yeah, we said. But then again, what isn’t?

  NICK MAMATAS

  Thy Shiny Car in the Night

  FROM Long Island Noir