“Get in the closet,” Philip tells his son.
Adam turns to me. We hug deep and hard.
“Find him,” Adam says to me. “Find my godson.”
Philip tosses him a few candy bars along with restraints I might have used to tie him up. I don’t know if someone will buy that or not, but with luck, he won’t be found until later tonight—and by his father. Philip closes the closet door and locks it with his key. He picks up the Glock and presses the button on the hand grip, ejecting the magazine. I know that this Glock can hold fifteen rounds, but without an autoloader, arming it is slow. You have to insert ammunition one bullet at a time into the top of the magazine, making sure the rounded side is forward. Philip throws in six or seven bullets and then slams the magazine back into the handle.
He hands me the weapon.
“Don’t use it,” he says, “especially not on me.”
I manage a smile.
“You ready?” he asks.
I feel the adrenaline kick in. “Let’s do this.”
*
Philip Mackenzie is one of those guys who exude confidence and strength. When he walks, he walks big and with purpose. His strides are long. His head is high. I try to keep up with him, the brim of Adam’s cap pulled low enough to provide a modicum of disguise but not so low as to be conspicuous. We stop at an elevator.
“Press the down button,” Philip tells me.
I do as he asks.
“There’s a camera in the elevator. Flash the gun a little in there. Threaten me with it. Be subtle, but make sure the gun is visible.”
“Okay.”
“When I get back here, there will be questions. The more they can see I felt in mortal danger, the easier it’ll be.”
The elevator dings and the doors slide open. Empty.
“Got it,” I say as we step in. I have the gun in the pocket of the trench coat. It feels so playact-y, as though I’m threatening him with my finger. I take the gun out and keep it close to my side but in line with the camera overhead. I clear my throat and mutter something about not making any false moves. I sound like a bad episode of TV. Philip doesn’t react. He doesn’t throw his hands up or panic, which, I agree, adds to the realism of my “threat.”
When the elevator stops on the ground level, I put the gun back in my pocket. Philip hurries out of the elevator. I rush to keep up with him.
“Just keep walking,” Philip says to me in a low voice. “Don’t stop, don’t make eye contact. Stay a little bit behind me and on the right. I’ll block security’s line of vision.”
I nod. Up ahead I see a metal detector. I almost freeze, but then I realize it is only checking people incoming, not outgoing. No one is really paying attention to who is exiting except in the most cursory way, but then again this is the administrative branch. Inmates are never in here. There is only one guard. From a distance he looks young and bored and reminds me of a stoned hall monitor in a high school.
We are ten yards away. Philip steps on without hesitation. I try to slow down or speed up, gauging what angle would keep my face blocked by Philip’s big shoulders. As we get closer, as the young guard spots the warden barreling toward him, he throws his feet down and stands. He looks first at the warden, then at me.
Something crosses his face.
We are so close to that damn door.
I realize with something approaching dread that I still have the gun in my hand. My hand is in my pocket. Without conscious thought, my grip on the weapon tightens. I slide my finger onto the trigger.
Would I shoot? Would I really shoot this guy to escape?
Philip nods to the guard as we pass him, his face firm. I manage to make a nodding motion too, figuring that Adam might do that.
“Have a good day, Warden,” the guard says.
“You too, son.”
We are at the exit now. Philip presses hard against the bar, pushing the doors open.
Two seconds later, we are out of the building and on our way to his car.
*
Ted “Curly” Weston sat in the break room with his head in his hands. He couldn’t stop shaking.
Oh God, what had he done?
Messed up. Messed up big-time. He’d known better, hadn’t he? He’d tried to live his life on the straight and narrow. “A solid day’s work for a solid day’s pay.” That’s what his father had always said. His father worked as a butcher in a huge meatpacking plant. He woke up at three in the morning and spent his day in refrigeration and dragged himself home in time to eat dinner and go to sleep because he had to wake up the next day at three in the morning to get to work. That was his life until he keeled over and died at the age of fifty-nine of a heart attack.
Still, Ted had lived on the up-and-up for the most part. Did he take some graft in here? Sure. Everyone did. Everything in life is graft when you think about it. That’s life, man. We are all scamming one another. Ted had been better about it. He wasn’t a pig, but with the crap wages they pay you, you’re expected to skim to make up the difference. To supplement your earnings. That’s the American way. You can’t live on what Walmart pays you. Walmart knows that. But they also know the government will make up the difference with food stamps and Medicare or whatever. So yeah, maybe this is all self-justification, but when someone asks him to keep an eye on a prisoner, like he’d done over the years with Burroughs, or when a family wants to give him a tip—that was how Teddy viewed it, like a gratuity—to sneak a relative some sort of comfort item, well, why the hell not? If he said no, the next guy would say yes. It was expected. Everyone does it. It makes the world go round. You don’t rock the boat.
But Ted had never hurt anybody.
That was important to note here. He may have turned his back when these animals wanted to clobber one another. Why the hell not? They’d find a way to clobber one another anyway. One time Ted had gotten in the middle of one of those scrums and an inmate who looked like a walking venereal disease had scratched him deeply with his fingernail. His fingernail! Damn wound got infected. Ted had to take antibiotics for like two months.
He should have stayed away from Ross Sumner.
Yeah, the money had been big and real. Yeah, he didn’t so much need a “better life”—he had a pretty great one, really—but man, to just get above that pile of bills that were smothering him, drowning him, just to be able to float above those bills, just to go through a few days and not worry about money, maybe have enough to take Edna out to a nice dinner—was that too much to ask? Really?
Ted searched for a donut on the table, but there were none. Damn. Some jackass had brought croissants instead. Croissants. Ever try to eat a croissant and not get the crumbs all over you? Impossible. Yet that was the thing now. They were French, someone said. They were cultured and classy.
Are you kidding me?
Two of his fellow correctional officers, Moronski and O’Reilly, stuffed croissants in their pie holes, the flakes sputtering out of their mouths like out of a wood chipper, as they argued over best bosom point-of-view on Instagram. Moronski favored “deep cleavage” while O’Reilly was waxing poetic on the “side boob” shot.
Oh yeah, Ted thought. The croissants add a touch of class.
“Hey, Ted, you got an opinion on this?”