Carrie Vaughn - Kitty's Greatest Hits

No one else bothered him as he picked up his tray and went to an empty table at the far end of the cafeteria. Prison guards stood at the doorways, watching. Cormac didn’t pay them any more attention than he did to his fellow prisoners. There was no point to it.

He hadn’t been trying to earn a reputation over the last few months, but he seemed to have one anyway. No one else sat with him; the others gave him plenty of room. He didn’t talk, didn’t try to make friends. That cold stare was enough to keep trouble away. So he ate greasy chicken and mashed potatoes with watery gravy in silence.

He didn’t want to think too hard about it, but keeping stock of his surroundings was too much a habit to quit: noting where the people around him were, how they carried themselves, where the exits were, what dangers lay in wait. The hunter’s instincts. He should have been grateful—those instincts were keeping him safe here. But they also made him edgy. Maybe it was the feeling of being trapped, that he couldn’t go anywhere in this place without being watched, without the chance that one of those uniformed, frozen-faced guards might decide to take him down for no reason at all. He hadn’t seen open sky in weeks. Even the yard was ringed with concrete and barbed wire.

He set down his fork and flattened his hand on the table, just for a moment, until the tension went away. He was doing all right. He just had to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

And he had to get rid of the tightness in his spine that said someone was watching him. That something around here was just a little bit … off.

The inmates told ghost stories.

“There’s a warden fifty years ago who hung himself,” the guy in the next cell, Moe, was saying. “Can you believe that? A warden. Hung himself on the top floor. That knocking sound? That’s him. Walking around.”

“Shut up, ” hollered another inmate in another cell.

“You’ve heard it,” Moe insisted.

“It’s pipes. It’s old fucking pipes,” Cormac’s cellmate Frank said.

“You know the story, you know it’s true.”

The pipes acted up once a week or so, and every time Moe had to talk about the ghost of the warden who hanged himself. Cormac thought it was just the pipes.

Trouble was, inmates told lots of stories, and something here wasn’t right. That tingling at the back of his neck made him reach for a gun on his belt. Easy enough to brush it off, to tell Moe to shut up. But something dripped off the walls here. Of course a prison was going to be tense, all these angry guys penned up together.

But Cormac knew what was really out there. A prison filled with ghosts wasn’t the worst of it.

“I’m going to beat you if you don’t shut it!”

“I’m just telling you. I’m warning you!”

This would go on for another minute before Moe finally shut up. Wasn’t anything anyone could do about it.

Cormac pressed his pillow over his ear and tried to think himself away from this place. To a meadow up in Grand County, miles from anywhere. Tucked on the side of a valley, east facing so it got the first sun of the morning. Green grass, tall trees, blue sky, and a creek running down the middle of it. His father had taken him hunting there when he was a kid, and he never forgot it. Camping, waking up before dawn when a layer of mist clung to the grass. Drinking strong coffee heated over a campfire. He went back there, when he needed to get out of his own head.

The nameplate sitting on the desk read “Dr. Ronald Olson.” Cormac sat in the not-so-comfortable chair across the desk from an unassuming man in an oxford shirt and corduroy jacket. He even had glasses. He was maybe in his fifties, and his hair was thinning. He looked soft rather than weathered. Cormac classified him as prey.

“How are you doing today?” Olson asked.

Cormac shrugged. This was just another hoop to jump through. Play nice for the camp counselor. He doubted the guy could tell him anything about himself he didn’t already know. Both his parents had died violently when he was young, his whole life had been filled with violence, he’d fallen back on violence as a solution to every problem, and that was what landed him here.

He didn’t know if Olson expected him to try to manipulate him, play some kind of mental hide-and-seek, Hannibal Lector–style. Cormac didn’t want to work that hard for so little payoff. But Olson was free to think Cormac was a puzzle he could pick apart and solve.

“How are you adjusting?”

“It’s just a place,” Cormac said, shrugging again. “One day at a time.”

“Any problems? Anything you’d like to talk about? It can be a shock, going from the outside to this.”

Cormac smiled and looked away. “Am I supposed to get pissed off because I can’t run out to McDonald’s and get a hamburger? That’s a waste of energy.”

“That’s an admirable stoicism. Are you sure you aren’t in denial? That can be dangerous as well.”

Cormac had a feeling the two of them looked at dangerous in completely different ways. He resisted an urge to glance at the clock, to see how much time they had left. He hadn’t asked for this—the guy had gotten hold of Cormac’s file and decided he must be crazy.

“I figure I keep my head down and get out of here just as quick as I can.”

“Goal oriented. That’s good.”

Now Cormac wondered if the guy was for real. He shifted, leaning forward just a little. “There’s one thing you could maybe tell me about.”

“Go on.”

“You hear many ghost stories around here? Do guys come in here telling about … things. Noises, spooky stuff.”

Olson’s smile seemed condescending. “I suppose every prison has its share of ghost stories. Some inmates have active imaginations.”

“There seem to be a lot of them around here. Like the guys have passed them down over the years. They say some warden hanged himself and now his ghost walks around, that a serial killer came in slitting inmates’ throats, that sort of thing.”

“You believe that?”

“The one about the warden? No. Not that one.”

“But you believe … something.”

“People tell stories because there may be something to some of it.” He wasn’t trying to rattle the guy; wasn’t sure much would rattle a prison therapist. That wasn’t a game Cormac wanted to start. But there had to be something to the constant chill that had settled in his spine.

Olson leaned forward to study a page in an open folder, Cormac’s file, as if he hadn’t already memorized it and was working from a script.

“In your deposition, you claimed your victim wasn’t human,” he said.

“I didn’t say that. I said she wasn’t all human.”

“Then what else was she?” He didn’t ask like someone who was really interested in the answer. He asked like a psychologist who expected his patient to say something damning. Hell, how much more damned could he be?

“It’s hard to explain,” he said.

“You think something like that is going on here? Something that’s hard to explain?”

This isn’t about me, Cormac wanted to yell at the guy. But he settled back, didn’t look away, didn’t give an inch. “Maybe it’s just being in jail.”

“I just have a couple of more questions for you. Your parents both passed away when you were quite young. What do you remember about them?”

Cormac stared at the guy, his expression unchanging. “I don’t remember anything.”

Of course Olson didn’t believe him; Cormac hadn’t expected him to. They stared at each other, waiting for the other to break.

Olson glanced at his watch and said, “I think that’s enough for today. Until next week, then.” He smiled kindly. A guard took Cormac back to his cell.