Gregg Hurwitz: The Tower

Mills had escaped a high-security mental institution two years after he was committed. He'd become a serial rapist in his brief stint in the outside world, committing five rapes in the seven days he was free.

He would break into single women's homes during the day and hide until they came home from work and went to sleep. Sneaking to their beds, he would pounce on them, quickly pressing duct tape over their mouths and eyes. Once he had their heads adequately fixed to the beds, he would undress the women slowly and stare at their naked bodies. Then, from his heavy perch upon their chests, he'd begin to masturbate. Finally he'd unleash himself on their bodies, hurling himself into them and thrashing until he was relieved.

Six of the women had severe bite wounds on their breasts and faces; one victim had even died mid-act (the forensic pathologist concluded), when Mills had ripped out her larynx with his teeth.

The day he was captured, Mills had fled a rape scene after he'd heard sirens approaching. He'd run several miles over rough terrain with tree branches cutting his arms and cheeks. Sweat ran into his cuts and his eyes, and he'd begun to bellow with pain. A frightened farmer, believing there was a wild animal on the loose, had called the police.

The police tracked Mills to a church in the hills, and they positioned themselves outside, peering through binoculars to fix his location.

Inside, the sun bled harshly through the stained-glass windows, casting distorted images across the pews. Mills sat on the stairs leading to the altar, holding his head in his hands, dust floating about him in the multicolored air. When he raised his head, the light ran madly across his unshaven face.

The police burst in from their silent vigil, shattering windows and breaking down doors. Mills stood on the stairs and screamed, a terrified, primal roar, his face distorted as spittle flowed over the brink of his bottom lip, spilling onto his bristled chin. Before verbal contact could be established, a scared rookie sank two tranquilizer darts into Mills's upper chest. Mills woke up on Level Three.

Another personality in the Tower was Cyprus Fraker, a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard from Alabama. His Klan chapter had grown to be influential at a local political level and, eventually, he was indicted on charges of embezzlement.

Cyprus was less immediately dangerous than the other inmates, but he wound up in the Tower because at Maingate he'd led the Aryan Fist organization, which had been responsible for several prison assassinations. The officials thought it better to separate him from his followers and his outside contacts, so they had placed him in the Tower. Racial violence at the prison had abated as a consequence.

Cyprus lived in Unit 9B, where, in his underwear, he would sit for hours, tilted back on his bed, singing country songs. He managed to catch a number of water rats that made their way into the Tower, and he snapped their necks and hung them by their tails from the ceiling bars. Whenever the Hatch was opened, they would twirl in the air like wind chimes.

When Cyprus had first moved to his unit, Spade, the powerful black prisoner in Unit 10B, urinated through the floor bars into his open mouth every time he fell asleep.

"You stupid fuckin' nigger. I ought to lynch your sorry ass. You're a fuckin' gorilla."

"Yes," Spade smiled back, "but who's the one with a mouthful of piss, 'Bama boy?"

Eventually, at the command of the guards, Spade had toned down his urinary assaults in exchange for more Sketch Duty.

Claude Rivers lived right above Allander, in Unit 11A. After a killing spree in 1992, Claude had come home, decapitated his mother, and lived quietly in the apartment with her head impaled on a coat tree. He'd kept her corpse in the bedroom, using it to fulfill his sexual needs. He was captured after neighbors complained about the smell emanating from his apartment.

In the Tower, Claude spent his time sleeping. Balding, his gut protruding from beneath his shirt, his skin greasy and red, he looked more like a seedy hotel manager than an accomplished killer. Allander had heard stories about him back at Maingate, and was amazed that someone with such an egregious appearance could have committed that most challenging of crimes.

Spade lived in Unit 10B, across the hole from Allander. Like the pairs of prisoners on each level, they were both locked together and apart in their tight circle. Spade stood a solid six foot four, two-forty, and he was as bald as an eight ball. He was still known by his street tag, which he carried with him like a weapon. None of the prisoners knew his real name.

Through a rigorous routine of exercises during his eight years at Maingate and the Tower, Spade had maintained his muscle from his gangster days. In the late-night hours, Allander watched through the thick air as Spade contorted his frame, twisting backward and upside down.

Spade alone could reach through the bars that composed the ceilings of the cells. He did pull-ups on them until one day Jonsten Evers gleefully overturned his bed on top of Spade's hands, which peeked through his floor. Spade was stuck dangling five inches above the ground, swaying painfully back and forth. Jonsten had giggled hysterically during the thirty minutes the guards took to respond to Spade's roars. It was very hard to hear what went on in the Tower from certain areas of the roof (one of the flaws of its design), and this, in addition to the guards' general contempt for the prisoners, accounted for the slow response time when mishaps did occur.

After the tops of his fingers scabbed over, Spade stood on his bed for hours, his hand extended through Jonsten's floor bars. Jonsten, still under the sway of his heady delirium, played with Spade's hand at first. He taunted it with strokes, jerking back his hand as Spade's snapped shut like a Venus's-flytrap. He would spit on the hand, pinch the back of it-even try to step on it and pin it wriggling to the floor. Spade's hand responded so quickly, however, that it avoided much of the punishment from above.

"On the street, you'd be my little bitch," Spade growled at Jonsten through the bars. "I'd own you. These metal bars protect you from the beast. Just a couple feet between us. If I could touch you, I'd rip you apart with my hands and teeth. Rip you apart. Come on, just reach down. Reach on down and touch my hand."

Jonsten tittered nervously, his high-pitched laugh echoing through the elevator shaft.

"But we're not. We're not on the street. You can't touch me. I'm up here and you're down. You're down on Level Ten." He giggled as he writhed about the floor, singing ecstatically. His halting song came in tortuously rhymed couplets: "On the street a wild killer he made. But in the Tower, Spade finds himself caged."

As Spade persisted in his efforts, Jonsten's hyper-delirious mood was replaced with concern, then fear, then despair. He began to obsess about the hand's minuscule intrusion into his world. He stopped playing with it, then touching it at all, and soon he withdrew to his bed and refused to leave.

"Spade, I didn't mean it. With the bed. The bed. The bed that tipped over. I'm sorry."

But Spade said nothing, and day after day, he stood on the bed with his hand extended patiently through the bars.

Jonsten began screaming and moaning in anguish, but he was generally ignored. This was nothing new in the Tower. "The hand. Make it go away. Away, hand! Away, Spade's hand. I'll bite it. I'll bite it off."

He never really slept anymore, existing instead in that bitter dream world that lies between sleep and waking. He squirmed in his bed, his disheveled hair flipping from side to side. "The hand! Don't! It's reaching for me. It's coming for me."

A chorus of shouts answered him. "Shut the hell up, Jonsten. Or I'll come for you. And I'm worse than some fucking hand."