Shirley Murphy - The Cat, The Devil, The Last Escape

“I have to do something. Becky and Sammie and I have our whole lives ahead of us. I don’t want to watch from behind this damned wall as Sammie grows up. I want my life back.”

Lee waited.

“If he is convicted, if he does do his time out there, there has to be some way I can get into the joint.” Morgan looked helplessly at Lee. “I know it’s impossible, but . . . Maybe I could get out through the train gate, where that guy got crushed. Maybe I could do a better job of it than he did.”

“And what if you screw up? End up crushed, like him?”

Morgan slowed, looked at Lee a long time. “In here, I might as well be dead. In here, I’m nothing to Becky and Sammie. I can’t work to support them, can’t hold them and love them except in public at the exact place and time of day the prison says I can.”

They had circled the exercise yard, had started around again when Morgan said, “If I did find a way to break out, if I got all the way out there, they wouldn’t ship me back right away? I am a federal prisoner, wouldn’t they hold me, maybe right there in T.I. for a few days, while they did the paperwork?”

Lee looked hard at Morgan. “They might not ship you back at all. It would be cheaper to keep you there.” He shrugged. “Maybe T.I. Why not?”

“Then how do I do it? How do I get out, avoid the feds long enough to hop a freight or hitchhike, get on out to L.A.?”

Lee glanced up at the wall.

“I sure can’t go over that baby,” Morgan said, laughing sourly. “Thirty, forty feet. And the guards. Even if there was a way over, I wouldn’t last two seconds, with those rifles trained on me.”

“Maybe,” Lee said. “Maybe there’s a way. Come on,” he said, heading across the big yard.

Sitting with their backs to the concrete barrier, Lee laid out the plan. He showed Morgan the dimples in the concrete. He watched Morgan glance up, as Lee himself had done, looking toward the towers that couldn’t be seen from that position. He watched Morgan’s expression change to disbelief and then to excitement, and Lee’s own blood surged. They could do this. They could get out of there, in a way that no one had ever done, before.

Maybe something was pushing him, maybe not. This was what he meant to do and to hell with his short sentence. Beside him, Morgan began to smile. “Sammie was right,” he said.

“Right about what?”

“That you’d come here to Atlanta and save me,” Morgan said. “That you’d get me out of this cage.”

27

L EE SAT ACROSSthe visiting room as far away from Morgan and Becky as he could get, holding Sammie on his lap hoping she couldn’t hear Morgan’s pitch as he laid out their escape plan to Becky. Though the child would know soon enough, he thought wryly. If she hadn’t already dreamed of what they meant to do. Dreamed it, but had kept it from her mother?

Or had she dreamed of the outcome of their venture? But if she’d done that, now she’d be either tearful and grieving for Morgan or wildly excited that they would soon be free. She wouldn’t be the quiet little girl sitting snuggled and uncertain in his lap, leaning against him, her small hand in his.

There were only a few other visitors in the room. Lee watched a lean young prisoner and his pillow-shaped wife, their smear-faced toddler fussing and crying as they passed him back and forth between them. Neither they nor the other three couples seemed to be listening to Morgan’s soft, urgent voice.

Lee knew Becky would try to stop them, try to tear their plan apart. He watched her scowl grow deeper until suddenly she lit into Morgan, her whisper, even from across the room, as virulent as a snake’s hiss.

He didn’t like to see the two of them at odds but, more to the point, they needed Becky’s help, needed help on the outside to make this work. As the two battled it out, their angry whispers drowned by the fussy baby, Lee hoped no one could hear. If any rumor of a planned escape was passed on to a guard, he and Morgan would be separated, confined to their cells, maybe one of them sent to another prison, and that would end their plan.

Now, though Sammie still sat quietly turning the pages of her book, her whole being was focused on her parents’ whispered battle. Soon she laid down her book, pressed closer against Lee, her body rigid and still. Across the room, Becky grabbed Morgan by the shoulders, her fingers digging in. Lee rose, setting Sammie back in the chair. “Stay there, stay quiet.” But before he could cross the room Becky was up, moving toward him, backing him away from the others into a corner. Her whisper was like a wasp sting.

“What have you been telling him? What crazy ideas have you been feeding Morgan? No one can do what you’re planning.” Her dark eyes flashed, her anger a force that made Lee step back. “This will get him killed. Morgan was a patsy once. I won’t let him do this, this isn’t going to happen.”

Lee was shocked by the degree of her rage. “You won’t let him do this?” he whispered. “What right have you to let him do anything! Morgan is the one who’s in prison, not you. He’s the one who was framed, not you. He wants a new trial. There’s no chance without new, solid evidence.” He wanted to shake her, he had drawn close, the others were looking now; without the bawling baby they’d hear every word. “This is the only way I know to get new evidence,” he breathed.

He leaned over, racked by a fit of coughing, then faced her again. “Maybe Natalie Hooper will talk to your lawyer the way he thinks. And maybe she won’t.” He glanced across at Sammie, sitting rigid in the chair, her fists clenched.

“The best way to get real evidence,” Lee said softly, “is from Falon himself. Find out where he hid the money. Tell the bureau so they can retrieve it.” He swallowed back another cough. “The best way is to make him talk. And you won’t let Morgan do this?”

“He’ll get himself killed trying to escape. What good is that? You might not care if the guards shoot him, but I do. And even if you did get out,” she breathed, “even if you made it all the way to California without being picked up, which isn’t likely—even if you did turn yourselves in at Terminal Island and they kept you a few days, the minute you try to hustle Falon, he’ll kill Morgan. Don’t you understand how vicious Falon is?” Her jaw was clenched, her lips a thin line, her dark eyes huge with anger and pain. “What kind of scam is this, Fontana? What do you care if Morgan gets a new trial? Just because we’re related doesn’t mean I can trust you or that Morgan can. Leave him alone. Keep your nose out of our business.”

“I can do that,” Lee said quietly. “I can tell him the plan’s no good, that we’ll have to scratch it, and he’ll back off. He knows he can’t get out of here alone without help, without a partner. We trash the plan, and you’ll go right on visiting him here until he’s an old man. You two can sit on the couch holding hands, you can watch him grow bitter, watch him turn into an empty shell with nothing inside but rage. And watch yourself do the same. And Sammie will grow up seeing her father for an hour at a time, a few days a week at best, right here in this visiting room with iron bars at the windows. If you stop him from trying,” Lee said, “you’ll never sleep well again. You’ll never sleep with Morgan again, never hold him close at night.”

Beneath the anger, Becky’s look had gone naked and still.

“This is a pretty visiting room, isn’t it, Becky? The nice furniture and clean walls, the expensive carpeting, the plants along the window. And the rest of the prison is just as pretty and clean, it smells just as nice, and is just as comfortable and safe. We’re all just loving brothers in here, behind these bars and walls.”