Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

Now that Schillinger had clearly made his presence known inside the cabin and on the video, it was time for me to lose my weapon. To add emphasis (and drama), I slid back the chamber of the Remington 1187 four distinct times, forcing out four unspent shells. It was an important move losing that shotgun. But it was definitely not in my best interest to continue being the aggressor. It was important for them to think I was the victim.

The heavy shells made a thumping sound on the floor. I handed the shotgun over, stock first, to a shocked Tommy Walsh. He looked at me like my brain had suddenly oozed out of my face through my nostrils. I bent over, picked up each shell, one by one, and put them in the pocket of my black jeans.

“Sorry about the greeting, boys,” I said. “But I had to make sure it was safe.”

Wash appeared to be tongue-tied.

Schillinger appeared to have gone mute.

But then Tommy let the surrendered shotgun fall to the floor. He grabbed me, turned me around, threw me face first against the bookshelf, knocking the brass lamp over. A half-dozen or so books cascaded to the floor.

He held on to me, his thick forearm around my neck.

“Wait,” Pelton said. “Let’s hear what he’s got to say.”

I felt the pain shoot up my back and down my neck between the shoulder blades. Tommy had twisted my arms behind my back. He pressed them up, palms out. I took as deep a breath as I could with my constricted diaphragm, tried to stem the pain, tried to stay calm, clearheaded. It was my one and only shot.

“I say we off the motherfucker now,” Tommy said. “I say we kill him, take the video and our chances.”

“We need him alive,” Wash said.

Schillinger took a few steps forward. “You mean you’re nothing without your fall guy,” he said. Exactly what I wanted him to say. Precisely. That was the good-luck part of the proceedings. But there was the bad-luck part, too: Schillinger reached into his trench coat, came out with his own.9mm Glock. “I agree with Tommy,” he went on. “I say we kill him while we still have the chance. That’s the only reason I agreed to come up here in the first place. To see that the Keeper bites the big one.”

Schillinger handed the pistol over to Tommy, who then jammed the weapon against my temple. I heard the distinct sound of the hammer being thumbed back. My eyes watered, my heart skipped a beat and verged on stopping altogether.

But then Pelton screamed. “I said no!”

There was an explosion, and I felt my body freeze. Tommy broke his grip on me and dropped down flat and lifeless to the cabin floor. I turned fast and saw Pelton with a pistol in his hand, and I saw right away that it was a fancy chrome-plated.38 with an eight-inch barrel and a walnut grip, and there was a thin trace of smoke rising up from the barrel.

Pelton raised the weapon, aimed it at the back of Schillinger’s head. He cocked the hammer a second time, and Schillinger dropped the Glock. When I kicked the Glock away toward the other end of the room, it smeared the puddle of dark red blood that gushed out of the exit wound in Tommy’s head.

“Now,” Pelton said, “we listen to what he’s got to say. Got it? Then we decide what to do with him.”

Schillinger slowly backed away. It was hard to make out his face in the dim light. On the television, Cassandra was on her knees, straddling Wash like a horse while he lay on his back and pulled her long hair back like a rein. Her mouth opened painfully wide, I could clearly see the pain and strain on her face. But then I could see something else on the film too. Something I never would have guessed. Schillinger stood on the edge of the bed, very near the prone Wash. At first, what I saw didn’t register. At first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. But then I knew I couldn’t deny it. There was no denying it whatsoever. In the video, Wash let go of Cassandra and flipped over on the bed onto all fours. Schillinger was on him from behind doing something I had seen happen to him once before at Attica; only this time, he wasn’t screaming or trying to get away.

In all the craziness, both Schillinger and Pelton must have forgotten about the video, because together they turned and looked at the screen.

“Jesus H. Christmas,” Schillinger said.

“What difference does it make what he knows?” Pelton said. “All you want is your name back. Am I right, Keeper? You just want out of this mess.”

“Something like that,” I said. “But first, I want to settle the score.”

“I GAVE YOU A chance to get out of this with a slap on the wrist,” Pelton said, standing near the cabin door, the chrome-plated.38 in hand, eyes on both me and Schillinger. “And I would have compensated you nicely for your troubles.”

I gazed at the screen. Schillinger’s head was hanging back in ecstasy while he worked on Pelton, faster now, the flesh on his white butt cheeks trembling as Cassandra sat back on the bed and stared at the floor.

“Maybe all of this could have been avoided,” I said. The hole in Tommy Walsh’s head was still gushing dark red blood.

“Sure,” Pelton said.

“Pelton would have killed you anyway,” Schillinger said.

“You shut up,” Pelton snapped, waving the gun at his head. “I never wanted anybody killed nor have I killed anyone…of importance, that is.”

“You’re forgetting about Vasquez.”

“Not my doing, Detective Schillinger.”

“Let me guess,” I said, shifting my eyes from the naked bodies on the television screen to the fully clothed bodies in the dimly lit cabin. “I’m sure it never once dawned on you, Wash, that if I took the blame for the escape, I would also be accused of running the drug racket that was about to hit the press once your partners managed to pull off their separate back-stabbings.”

“It wasn’t supposed to work that way, Keeper,” Pelton said. “I never counted on Mike Norman and,” nodding at Schillinger, “my good friend Marty here betraying me.”

“I just want what I have coming,” Schillinger said, looking directly at Pelton and the barrel of that.38.

“So what happened, Wash?” I said. “Let’s see. I’ll bet as soon as I left Mike’s office on Tuesday he got this bright idea and gave you a call and offered you a sale you couldn’t refuse? A few thousand dollars in exchange for evidence that could put Keeper Marconi away and make it look like he’d been perpetrating the drug racket inside Green Haven, maybe even make it look like I was the one who helped Vasquez escape. After all, I signed the orders allowing him outside the prison grounds, and no matter what, I was the one who approached Mike with illegally obtained evidence.”

“In essence,” Wash Pelton said, cocking his head, “that’s what happened.”

“I guess it’s true,” I said, “that I initiated the whole thing through Mike-created a window of opportunity for you. You might even say I could be hating Mike right now, cursing his soul. But, you know what, I’m convinced the poor pathetic bastard must have called you out of desperation, to make a quick buck. In my heart I can’t believe that he would have done anything to hurt me. Not really. And you might have given him a few bucks and his bad conscience might have been a lot easier to handle with a wallet of cash pressed against his backside. But maybe, just maybe, you’d had enough of paying people off.”

“After a while,” Pelton said, the.38 still steady in his hand, “people thought of me as Fleet Bank .”

“You’d already paid Logan and Mastriano to keep their mouths shut,” I said, catching the rapid, wet finish of Schillinger’s act with Pelton on the screen. “And this is after you paid off A. J. Royale for performing an unnecessary root canal on Vasquez. And you had to pay off Doctor Fleischer for putting Mastriano into a fake coma to gain public sentiment and, at the same time, make me look like the bad guy, the insensitive warden. Because all wardens are insensitive tyrants, am I right? You must have figured that you could either take care of Norman with a payoff or have him killed.”