John Connolly - The Unquiet

Aimee Price had clearly pulled some strings to get me access to Andy Kellog. Visitor clearances could sometimes take up to six weeks. Then again, Price was entitled to see her client whenever she chose, and I wasn’t exactly unknown to the prison authorities. I had visited the preacher Faulkner when he was incarcerated at Thomaston, an encounter that had been memorable for all the wrong reasons, but this was my first time at the new facility.

It wasn’t a complete surprise, therefore, to see a familiar figure standing beside Price when I eventually cleared security and entered the body of the prison: Joe Long, the colonel of the guards. He hadn’t changed much since last we’d met. He was still big, still taciturn, and still radiated the kind of authority that kept a thousand criminals on the right side of respectful. His uniform was starched and pressed, and everything that was supposed to gleam did so spectacularly. There was a little more gray in his mustache than before, but I decided not to point that out. Beneath his gruff exterior, I sensed there was a sensitive child just waiting to be hugged. I didn’t want to hurt his feeling, singular.

“Back again,” he said, in a tone that suggested I was forever bothering him by knocking on the door at all hours of the day and night, demanding that I be let in to play with the other kids.

“Can’t stay away from men in jails,” I said.

“Yeah, we get a lot of that here,” he replied.

That Joe Long. What a kidder. If he was any drier, he’d have been Arizona.

“I like the new place,” I said. “It’s institutional, but homey. I can see your hand at work in the decor: the institutional grays, the stone, the wire. It all just screams you.”

He allowed his gaze to linger on me for just a moment or two longer than was strictly necessary, then turned smartly on his heel and told us to follow him. Aimee Price fell into step beside me, and a second guard named Woodbury brought up the rear.

“You just have friends everywhere, don’t you?” she said.

“If I ever end up in here as a guest, I’m hoping he’ll look out for me.”

“Yeah, good luck with that. You ever find yourself in that much trouble, make a shank.”

Our footsteps echoed along the corridor. Now there was noise: unseen men talking and shouting, steel doors opening and closing, the distant sound of radios and TVs. That was the thing about prisons: inside, they were never quiet, not even at night. It was never possible to be anything but acutely aware of the men incarcerated around you. It was worse in the dark, after lights out, when the nature of the sound changed. It was then that the loneliness and desperation of their situation would hit prisoners, and the snores and wheezes would be interspersed with the cries of men enduring nightmares and the weeping of those who had not yet learned to accommodate themselves to the prospect of years in such a place, or who would never reach that accommodation. Tween had once told me that during his longest stretch inside-two years of a three-year B amp;E sentence-he did not get a single undisturbed night’s sleep. It was that, he said, that wore him down. The irony was that, when he was released, he was unable to sleep either, unaccustomed as he was to the comparative silence of the city.

“They’re transferring Andy from the Supermax to a noncontact room for our meeting,” said Aimee. “It’s not ideal, and you won’t get any sense of the Max for yourself, but it’s the best that I could do. Andy is still considered a risk to himself and others.”

Price excused herself to use the bathroom before we sat down with Kellog. That left just me and Joe Long. Woodbury kept his distance, content to stare at the floor and the walls.

“Been a while since we’ve seen you,” said Long. “What is it, two, three years?”

“You sound almost regretful.”

“Yeah, almost.” Long straightened his tie, carefully brushing away some flecks of lint that had had the temerity to affix themselves to him. “You ever hear tell what happened to that preacher Faulkner?” he asked. “They say he just plain disappeared.”

“That’s the rumor.”

Long finished with his tie, examined me from behind his glasses, and stroked his mustache thoughtfully.

“Strange that he never showed up again,” he continued. “Hard for a man like that just to vanish, what with so many people looking for him. Kind of makes you wonder if they’re looking in the wrong direction. Up, so to speak, instead of down. Above ground instead of below.”

“I guess we’ll never know,” I said.

“Guess not. Probably for the best. The preacher would be no loss, but the law’s the law. Man could find himself behind bars for something like that, and that wouldn’t be a good place for him to be.”

If Long was expecting me to break down and confess something, he was disappointed.

“Yeah, I hear it hasn’t been good for Andy Kellog,” I said. “He seems to be having problems adjusting.”

“Andy Kellog has a lot of problems. Some of them he makes for himself.”

“Can’t help macing him in the middle of the night and tying him naked to a chair. I think someone in this place missed his vocation. There we are, spending taxpayers’ money flying bad guys to Egypt and Saudi Arabia to be softened up, when we could just put them on a Trailways bus and send them here.”

For the first time, there was a flicker of emotion on Long’s face.

“It’s used for restraint,” he said, “not torture.”

He said it very softly, almost as if he didn’t believe what he was saying enough to enunciate it loudly.

“It’s torture if it drives a man crazy,” I replied.

Long opened his mouth to say something else, but before he could speak, Aimee Price reappeared.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s see him.”

The door across from us was opened by Woodbury, and we entered a room divided in two by a thick pane of Plexiglas. A series of booths, each with its own speaker system, allowed a degree of privacy to those visiting, although it wasn’t required that morning. Only one prisoner stood on the opposite side of the glass, two guards hovering stony-faced behind him. He wore an orange jumpsuit and a collar-and-tie arrangement of chains that kept his hands cuffed and his legs manacled. He was shorter than I was, and unlike a lot of men in prison, he didn’t seem to have put on any excess weight because of the diet and the lack of exercise. Instead, the jumpsuit seemed too big for him, the sleeves hanging down almost to the second line of knuckles on each hand. He had pale skin and fine black hair, cut unevenly so that the fringe sloped downward from left to right across his forehead. His eyes were set deep in his skull, overshadowed by a narrow but swollen brow. His nose had been broken more than once and had set crookedly. His mouth was small, the lips very thin. His lower jaw trembled, as though he were on the verge of tears. When he saw Aimee, he smiled widely. One of his front teeth was missing. The others were gray with plaque.

He sat when we sat and leaned into the speaker before him. “How you doing, Miss Price?” he said.

“Good, Andy. And you?”

He nodded repeatedly but said nothing, as though she were still speaking and he were still listening. Up close, I could see bruising beneath his eye and over his left cheekbone. His right ear was scarred, and dried blood was mixed with wax in the entrance to the canal.

“I’m doing okay,” he replied, eventually.

“You been in any trouble?”

“Uh-uh. I been taking my meds, like you asked me to, and I tell the guards if I’m not feeling good.”

“Do they listen?”

He swallowed and seemed about to look over his shoulder at the men behind him. Aimee caught the movement and addressed the two guards.