28
Melissa is the only rabbit I know (as though I know any other rabbits) who will play fetch. Which she does, endlessly. Her mouth doesn’t open real wide, since of course she’s a rodent, but she’d found a spool of thread—one of those little ones they sell in airports—and brought that to me a couple of hundred times, chasing after it as I rolled it away. After she’d entertained us both with this game for almost an entire hour on Sunday morning, she sat on my feet and calmly munched an apple (dead, raw, organic) while I read the paper. She was turning out to be good company.
I tucked her into her hutch, gathered my gear, and headed out to the SMU pool (indoor again). I swam a mile, and then did some lunges and squats to resurrect my Thigh Recovery Program. I’d forgotten about it in all the fuss. I wanted to be at my physical, mental, and spiritual peak by the time I arrived at the pokey that afternoon for my visit with Gordon Pryne.
Every fourth Sunday at my church is devoted entirely to singing, so the spiritual peak part was no problem. The service that morning was a lung-buster. I was dripping with the Holy Spirit by the time I got out of there.
I’m starting to get comfortable with jails, which worries me. So when I entered the Lew Sterrett Justice Center in downtown Dallas, I knew what to do. The procedure is all about suspicion. Guilty until proven innocent. Show your ID to prove you’re actually you. Allow your personal effects to be examined to prove you’re not smuggling anything in. Pass through a metal detector to prove you’re not packing. Give your name to the receptionist and show your ID again—as though you could somehow have transformed into someone else during that ten-foot walk down the linoleum. And finally, wait for your escort because you cannot possibly be trusted to wander around unobserved.
The whole thing happens under the cold stare of armed guards who study you like you’re about to hijack the place. And who can blame them, with what the world’s come to? Suspicion is our one remaining buttress against the forces of evil among us. The human ones, anyway. That’s a sad fact.
Enrique Martinez met me in the holding area and walked me into the bowels of Lew Sterrett. I couldn’t help but notice how deep-set his brown eyes were, and the ambling, easy way he walked as he led the way. He looked good from behind in those jeans he was wearing.
The visitor room is just like all the other rooms in correctional facilities. Drab, damaged, and stinky, like an old banana. It’s one long, divided space, with bulletproof glass running down the middle to segregate the land of the free from home of the captured. Tables run along the window line, with little booth-walls dividing the spaces. Chairs are lined up in front of speakers that allow for communication across the divide. Martinez motioned me to a booth and pulled out a chair for me.
Pryne came into the room on the other side of the glass, shackled at the hands and feet. He shuffled and limped, supported almost entirely by two guards who held him by the arms and slid him along between them on stocking feet.
Crystal meth is like anti-Botox. It ages you like no amount of Dust-Bowl hardship can. The mug-shot photo I’d seen of Pryne had been taken less than six years before, after the Chavez rape. He’d looked his age then, maybe even a few years younger. The man who sat down in the chair opposite me looked seventy, at least. His face was scabbed and pocked, his eyes yellowed and hollow, and the dark circles under his eyes ran halfway down cheeks that had cracked and dried up like the floor of a dead riverbed. The wild brown hair was matted and filthy I could smell his stink through the speaker-hole.
Without looking at me, he picked up the phone.
I picked mine up and waited, wishing I’d brought along some hand-sanitizer gel.
He mumbled through the line, his voice scratchy, like he hadn’t used it in a while. “Will you tell them to leave me alone?” His expression was sheepish, obsequious. It was hard to believe this was the same man who had lunged at the mirror and howled at me in the interrogation room.
“Tell who? The police?”
His hands shook violently, his face screwed up, and he began coughing and heaving, doubling himself over his knees for a minute.
The coughing stopped and he asked it again. “Will you tell them to leave me alone?”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking me, Mr. Pryne.”
“They’re watching me,” he said. “All the time.” He yawned, showing me a mouthful of brown, rotting teeth. “They won’t let me sleep.”
“Who?” I asked. “Who is watching you?”
“They got eyes on me. Inside my head.”
If I hadn’t seen what I’d seen on that interrogation video, I’d have talked to him a second, patronized him just enough to assure him I’d deliver his message to the intruders in his head, and then walked down the hall and asked the sergeant on duty to take him to a Parkland shrink for evaluation. In another setting, he would have been just a run-of-the-mill psychotic drug addict who needed a script for 500 milligrams of Seroquel and seventy-two hours of observation.
As it was, I said, “Do you know who they are?”
“You know who they are,” he spat. “I don’t care to know. Don’t matter no more. Not to me.” He called me a name I won’t repeat.
“Mr. Pryne,” I said firmly, reflexively whipping out a set of well-oiled clinical skills, “if you want me to help you, you’ll need to speak to me respectfully.”
He ducked his head like a beaten animal and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “No offense.”
“I don’t know who they are,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re a liar,” he said quietly.
Martinez started to interject, but I held up a hand to stop him.
“What makes you think I’m lying?” I asked.
“I know all about you. Liar. Lyin’ scheming…” There was that word again. “Everyone knows how women lie. Trying to trap you and trick you and keep you down. Thinkin’ they’re better’n you.”
“Mr. Pryne, I thought we agreed you would speak to me respectfully. One more outburst and I walk out of here and never come back. Understood?”
He ducked his head again and shuddered.
“What makes you think I know who they are?” I asked.
“You was at the lake, wasn’t you?”
“What lake?”
“The lake. Where the spirits are.”
I felt the room get cold. I looked over at Martinez, whose eyebrows had come together, his expression sharp, alert. His hand had moved to his holster.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Pryne,” I said.
“You’re a liar,” he said again.
He was right, of course. I knew exactly what he was talking about.
“What do they want with you, Mr. Pryne? Why won’t they leave you alone?”
“You tell me. You’re the one knows ’em.”
“I don’t know any spirits, Mr. Pryne.”
He cursed at me and spat at the window, aiming a big wad of contempt right at my face.
I pushed back my chair and stood up. “I told you I’d leave, Mr. Pryne. I meant it.”
I picked up my bag and motioned for Martinez to follow me.
Pryne started screaming. “Don’t you walk away from me, you…” I sighed, wishing he’d choose another word. “You think you’re better’n me?” he yelled. “That I ain’t worth saving? I never killed nobody! Ask the rats! They’ll tell you. Ask the rats!”
He stood up and screamed obscenities at me until the guards on his side of the world caught him from behind, slamming his face down on the tabletop to subdue him. He was still screaming when we walked out of the room, the eyes of the other visitors and prisoners following us silently as we left.
Neither of us said a word as we walked down the hall to the exit. It wasn’t until we were standing outside in the cold sunshine that Martinez said, “Coffee?”
We walked around the block and found a coffeehouse. I ordered the largest possible serving of Earl Grey with cream and sugar. Martinez had a small coffee, black. Though it was cold outside, we both headed for a sidewalk table. I wanted to breathe some air and feel the sun on my face.
“You okay?” he asked after we sat down.
I nodded and took a sip of my tea. Too hot.
“You?”
He nodded. “Any idea what that was about?”
I shrugged. “What do you think?”
He shrugged back. “Beats me.”
I took the top off my tea to let it cool, releasing a wisp of steam into the crisp afternoon.
I think we both knew that something was going on with Gordon Pryne. Something more than a psychotic break. I’d felt the evil in the room, that ominous and now alarmingly familiar feeling I get when Peter Terry comes around. I suspected Martinez had felt it too. He’s sensitive that way like I am. But I sure didn’t want to be the one to bring it up.
Martinez saved me the trouble.
“You feel the room get cold?”
I nodded.
“Like Jackson and McKnight said.”
“And Yaya,” I said.
“God rest her soul.” He crossed himself. “Same thing happened when I saw him yesterday.”
“The room got cold?”
He nodded. “Kept talking about someone watching him.”
We waited for a bus to rumble past us.
“He’s in terrible shape,” I said.
“Yep.”
“It’s the meth,” I said. “Dries people up from the inside.”
“Wicked drug. No doubt about that.” He took a drink of his coffee and looked up. Jet contrails had crisscrossed a big X in the bright blue sky over the city.
“Who do you think’s watching him?” he asked finally. He leveled his eyes at me. “He seems to think you know.”
I looked back at him. “I’m not sure.”
“But you have a theory.”
My turn to nod. “I do.”
“Want to let me in on it?”
“Do you have a copy of the tape at your office?”
“The interrogation tape? Sure.”
I scooted my chair back and stood up. “Let’s go.”
One perk of the job is that chaplains get real offices, not just cubicles. For privacy, I guess. Martinez’s office is not unlike mine. He has more books than he knows what to do with. His desk is tidy, the pending business of the day stacked in neat little piles. His coffeemaker is a spotless stainless steel number, extra coffee cups sitting beside it, along with a variety of sweeteners. The coffee cups were clean and unstained, unlike every other vessel I’d seen in this building. A crucifix hung on one wall. Photographs of children were everywhere, a dozen or so little versions of himself, framed and propped up where he could see them. Three kids appeared as a group more often than any of the others—two beautiful dark-skinned, brown-eyed boys, and a little pig-tailed girl, who was always between them. I wondered if any of the children were his. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might be married. He didn’t wear a ring.
He reached onto one of his shelves and pulled out the tape, then walked me down the hall to a conference room and shut the door behind us. He put the tape in and turned on the TV.
I picked up the remote and fast-forwarded to the end, starting the video where the howling began, letting it roll with the sound off. We sat back and watched again as Jackson and Martinez backed away from Pryne, who threw himself against his chains and collapsed. We waited a few more minutes as the officers scrambled to get the situation under control.
“We’re almost there,” I said.
We watched together as Pryne was strapped to the gurney and rolled out of the room.
And then the screen went black.
“What happened?” I said.
“I guess that’s the end.”
“No, there was more. The tape rolled for another ten minutes or so. What happened to the rest of it?”
“They probably stopped the copy as Pryne left the room. The interview was over at that point. Why?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. I thought I’d seen something at the end of the video.”
“Want me to call A-V and see if they still have the original?”
“That would be great.”
He stepped out and made the phone call, returning a minute later with a fresh cup of coffee. I was still nursing my tea.
“No dice. They erased it already.”
I sighed. It was probably just as well.
“What happened at the lake?” he asked.
I looked at him, trying to decide whether to trust him. Not that he wasn’t a trustworthy person—he didn’t have that vibe about him at all. I mean, whether to trust him with my own vulnerability. Whether to expose the weird reality I’d found myself in the middle of or, alternatively, to lie through my teeth and maintain some reasonable facade of normalcy.
I opted for a toned down version of the truth, telling him about the day two summers ago when I’d met Peter Terry at Barton Springs in Austin, and about selected bits of the chaos that had followed.
“You think this guy’s the one watching Gordon Pryne?” Martinez asked me.
“Put it this way,” I said. “I think Gordon Pryne thinks Peter Terry is watching him. And somehow Gordon Pryne got wind that I’ve met him.”
He took a sip of his coffee. “This is some creepy stuff.”
I nodded. “And where’s Yaya when we need her?”
He smiled. “Talking to St. Jude. I told you.”
“Well, she’d better talk fast,” I said. “’Cause the way this is going, we’re going to need the help.”
An airplane roared overhead. As we watched the plane bank to the right over downtown, I noticed the contrails had faded above us and the X had dissipated into the afternoon sky.
“What did you say he’s in charge of?” I asked.
“Lost causes.”
I raised my paper cup and we toasted. “To St. Jude.”