Lee Goldberg - Ring of Knives

But as soon as she was gone, the yelled-at aide put the earbuds back in, and another cranked the volume on Maury back up. The two flabby men started to argue over a Rubik's Cube. The quacking woman kept quacking. The maze man kept laughing. And the massive, piranha-jawed Ojibwe kept standing on the table in tattooed, cross-eyed silence.

"Jesus Christ," Matt said again, and reached for more trash.

# # # # # #

His two hours in Module One passed with excruciating slowness, mainly because nothing changed but the TV talk shows. While wiping crusted food off the tables, Matt noticed a weekly calendar pinned to a bulletin board. It stated that in this module, the two hours between three and five o'clock should be spent on cooperative games, adaptive therapy, and cognitive exercises. Instead, it was filled with gangster rap and the televised blare of thrown chairs, insults, and skeezy wife-swapping discussions.

Nice to see our tax dollars at work, Matt thought.

In all that time, the Ojibwe never moved a muscle.

# # # # # #

By five o'clock, Matt had a throbbing headache, and his nerves felt raw and jangly. He was just picking up a final cigarette butt when he noticed movement to his left.

"Excuse me? Sir?"

He turned his head. The too-skinny teen was standing tentatively in the entryway to the women's dorm, her arms crossed tightly over her flat chest. Her hair was a pixieish shock of blond so pale that it was almost white, and her kohled eyes were smudged with tears.

"Sir," she said in a quavering voice, "have you seen Maloria?"

"I thought she was back with you," Matt said.

"She was, but now…" The girl looked nervously at the aides behind him, then stepped in closer, whispering. "Look, you seem like an okay guy, all right? I need… I need some help. I don't belong here ."

"Sure," Matt said, feeling bad for the kid. "Sure."

"No, really . These people are all crazy! But I'm not. My folks put me here because they couldn't deal with my wild talents."

"Your…"

"Wild talents. Like, I can move things with thoughts? And disrupt electrical systems."

"Okay," Matt said.

"I can ." The girl's eyes hardened stubbornly. She looked past him. "See that glass of water? On the table? Watch this…" She lowered her chin and glared at it.

Matt turned to watch the glass. Having seen an aide slowly sipping from it, he strongly doubted that it held water. But he watched it do nothing for a few seconds before looking back at the girl.

Her chin was trembling, her eyes bright with tears. "It works better on electrical systems," she said.

"Sure," Matt said. "Look, why don't you find Maloria?"

"That's what I was trying to do, but…" The girl's voice dried up, and her eyes got big. Matt turned to see the earbudded aide stand up suddenly, glance around with hooded eyes, then saunter towards the girl, thumbs hooked into the front of his pants.

Immediately the girl spun away-right into Maloria, who'd come up behind her.

Seeing Maloria, the aide did an about-face, scratched the back of his head casually, and flopped back onto the couch.

With a parting glare, Maloria took the girl back to the dorm.

Matt massaged the bridge of his nose. His headache was getting worse.

Maloria returned a minute later, still staring down the aide, who pretended not to notice. She crossed to Matt, tapped him on the shoulder. "C'mon, now. I take you to Dindren."

He gathered his bucket and mop and followed her outside and across the quad towards the Admin Building.

"I thought we were going to Module Two."

"We are, but first we gotta stop in the Control Room, make sure that Hirotachi's on break."

"Control Room…?"

"You know-like where the monitors at for all the surveillance cameras, right? Control Room."

"Oh. Right." Matt hadn't even noticed the cameras. He changed the topic. "I talked a minute to that girl," he said, "the blonde…"

"Yeah, Annica. She crazy as the rest. Once I take you to Control, I gotta go back quick, else the aides'll be fuckin' with her."

"I got that. But what happens to her when you leave and the night shift takes over?"

"That ain't my problem."

# # # # # #

To get into Admin, Maloria led him through a back door that led to the facility's kitchen.

"All kinda nasty get cooked up in here," Maloria said as Matt looked around.

The kitchen had clearly seen better days. In his brief transit, Matt counted at least four thumb-sized roaches exploring the stove and cabinets. He also noticed that while there was no smoke alarm in sight, the kitchen was well equipped with cutlery: four large wooden grids held dozens of serrated steak knives and cleavers, as well as two huge butcher's knives that were at least twelve inches long.

What the hell? Matt didn't know much about mental health, but he doubted that the residents were getting sirloin every night. So why was the kitchen outfitted like an Outback Steakhouse?

Even weirder, from a ceiling rack hung a row of headless spatulas and meat forks with missing tines, as well as an unconnected extension cord and an odd set of cuffs.

Curious, Matt reached out and touched the cuffs as he walked by. They seemed to be wooden wrist braces, five inches thick, covered in leather buckles. Each one had a deep groove cut into the wood, but their purpose wasn't clear.

"What're these?" he asked Maloria.

"Unless you the Board of Health," she said, not looking back, "keep ya damn hands to yourself."

With that, she shoved through two swinging double doors, leading Matt out of the kitchen and into a large hallway. "Hold on." Maloria stopped suddenly, peering ahead at a half-open door marked "Control." "Gotta see if someone's in there, first. Shouldn't be, since it's my post tonight, but you never know where them skanks is hookin' up." She took him by the elbow. "So here: you go clean the FA's office while I find out what up." And she hurriedly pushed Matt through a door marked "Facility Administrator."

It was an office that probably counted as fancy in this place: a window looking out onto the quad, a heavy oak desk (with a blotter, no less), a leather chair, a brass lamp, some cherry bookshelves full of books on mental health and team leadership techniques.

That is, it would have looked fancy if the chair hadn't been knocked over and papers strewn all over the floor. Behind the chair, a large cork bulletin board covered in lists and photographs had been knocked off its left screw and hung diagonally from the right.

Apparently, the only things that hadn't been trashed were three tribal masks hung on the wall opposite the door. They looked Ojibwe to Matt. Two were deer masks and had long, tapering snouts and antlers. The third was a triangle of tanned leather, with a single eye slit in the center, and at the bottom tip, a serrated cluster of shark's teeth. The mask gave Matt a queasy feeling. He forced himself to look away from it, to focus on the surrounding mess.

Matt gathered up a handful of papers and laid them on the desk. Under the papers were pieces of shattered glass and a broken picture frame. He picked that up, too. In it was a photo of a smiling, bookish man with bifocals and a silver beard, flanked on either side by two girls of about ten and thirteen, giving bracey smiles.

Matt dropped the broken glass into a garbage bag and set the picture on the stacked papers he'd put on the desk-then took it off again. The top sheet had caught his eye. He picked it up, held it under the light.

It was a form marked Incident Report . It had been dated five days earlier in bright blue ink, and under Reporter a hand had written in hasty, scrawled cursive, Thomas Sterns, FA . Under Incident , it said