Episodul 139 · Past Midnight

The ground floor was worse. In the east wing the steam was so thick that the emergency lamps were only orange smudges, and the walls were sweating. Someone had broken the window in the guards’ room. Someone else had opened the main gate of the wing from the inside, and the guard saw who, and for a moment refused to believe it. It was one of the young guards from the day shift, who had stayed late for overtime. He stood by the open gate with the keys still in his hand and the cold air coming in around him, and he was smiling at the inmates running past him into the yard, glad to see them go.

The guard sat the older guard down against the wall by the stairs. The older guard went on counting, quietly now, under his breath.

He was straightening up when the man from cell nine came out of the steam.

He was still in his socks. His knuckles had stopped bleeding and started again. He did not look at the guard. He looked at the older guard’s belt, at the ring of keys lying on the tiles beside his hip.

— They’re not all open, he said. He sounded hurt by it, like a child who had been promised something.

The guard stepped between them. Nineteen years, and he had never had to use the baton on a man who could not feel it. He knew it the moment he did. He struck the thigh, hard, the place that drops a man. The man looked down at his leg the way you look at someone who has bumped into you on a bus, and took the guard by the belt with both hands.

He was strong the way the doors had been weak. The guard’s heels left the floor, and then he was being carried backward down the corridor, away from the stairs, into the steam. The baton was gone. The lamps went past in orange smudges. Hands tore at his own key ring now. The leather held.

He doesn’t feel it. Then it won’t be pain that stops him.

The east end was coming at his back, the wet wall, the heat thickening with every step. The guard did the thing he had not been able to do for twelve years. He let his knees go.

He dropped straight down, all his weight at once, the bad knee folding under him without a word of complaint, and the man, still lifting, still pulling at a belt that was suddenly below him, went over the top of him and hit the tiles on his face.

The guard stayed on his knees. He had time to think that it should have hurt. He had time to put his hand over the keys.

Then the floor shifted.

It was not an earthquake. The guard had felt an earthquake once, as a child. This was slower. The whole east end of the corridor sank a hand’s width, with a sound like a long breath let out, and a crack ran across the ceiling from one wall to the other. Somewhere at the end of the wing, stone ground against stone.

The man from cell nine scrambled up and was gone into the steam, toward the gate. The guard was still on his knees, under the crack, when a piece of the ceiling came loose above him.

He did not see it fall. He felt a hand grab his shoulder and pull him back, hard, and something big hit the floor where he had been standing and broke apart in a cloud of dust. He landed hard on the tiles. When the dust cleared, the man from the last cell was standing over him.

His door was open. The guard never found out who had opened it, or whether it had opened at all, or whether the wall around it had simply let go. The man had his coat over his shoulders, the one from the van. There was dust in his hair. He did not look frightened. He did not look excited either. He looked like someone whose name had finally been called.

— Are you hurt? he asked.

— No.

— Good.

He held out his hand. The guard took it without thinking and let himself be pulled up. The man’s palm was dry and warm.

— I’d like my chair, the man said.

The guard stared at him.

— What?

— The chair. The one in storage. I’d like it back, if you don’t mind.

Around them the wing was coming apart. Men were running past them toward the open gate. Somewhere outside, the alarm had finally started, thin and late, too late to matter. And the man from the last cell stood in the middle of all of it and asked for his chair, politely, as if it were a small thing.

Later he would tell himself that he had been in shock, that he had been grateful, that a man who has just been pulled out from under a falling ceiling does not think clearly. All of that was true. But it was also true that the man had asked him in a way that made it seem like the most reasonable thing in the world. As if they had agreed on it long ago, and the guard had only forgotten.

The storage room was at the end of the administration corridor. The door was still locked. The guard opened it with his own key. The man waited outside, without coming in, as if the room were not his to enter. The guard found the chair in the corner, behind a shelf of confiscated belts, and brought it out.

The man took it and held it for a moment in both hands, folded, the way a man holds something that was promised to him a long time ago. Then he tucked it under his arm.

— Thank you.

The man spoke before the guard could.

— A mechanic will come asking about me. Maybe not today. But he’ll come.

He said it without any doubt.

— When he does, tell him my offer still stands. He knows which one.

— What offer?

The man only smiled, a little, and turned away.

The guard followed him out into the yard. He told himself it was to see which way the man went. He had a baton on his belt, a whistle in his pocket and nineteen years of knowing what to do with a prisoner walking toward a hole in a wall. The east wall of the yard was gone. Not all of it, but a stretch as long as a bus had come down, right where the strip of melted snow had been, and the stones lay in a heap in the dark, steaming. Through the gap the guard could see the field behind the prison, white and empty, and the lights of the road beyond it. The inmates who had run out were already scattered across the snow, black dots going in every direction.

The man did not run. He walked across the yard at an ordinary pace, with the chair under his arm, past the young guard who still stood smiling by the gate. He climbed over the heap of stones carefully, the way a man climbs over a fence on his way to go fishing, and on the other side he did not look back. The guard watched him until he was only one more dark shape on the snow. Then he lost him.

He stood alone in the yard. The steam rose around him from the fallen stones. His knee did not hurt. His hands were warm.

He knew he should go back inside. The older guard was still sitting by the stairs, counting. There were men to find, calls to make, a report to write. He knew all of that.

He did not move away from the wall.

The phone rang at twenty to six.

Soles had it in his hand before the second ring, out of a habit he had not had a year ago. In the dark beside him, Krista did not move, but he knew from her breathing that she was awake. She had always been awake before him. He had stopped wondering about it.

— He’s out, the investigator said.

He did not say who. He did not need to.

— When?

— Around midnight. I want you to see something before they clean it up. I’ll be at your gate in twenty minutes.

He hung up without waiting for an answer, the way he did when he already knew what the answer would be.

Soles sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in his hand. The house was cold. Through the window, the street was blue with snow and the lamps were still on. His hand went on its own toward the nightstand drawer and stopped on the handle. It stayed there. In the garden, Phenom lifted his head beside his plant, as if he had heard something he knew.

— Go, Krista said into the pillow. Take your scarf. The gray one.

He took the gray one. He did not open the drawer.