The Simple Truth by David Baldacci
a local lawyer? Come on, they don’t have any proof of this. They can’t hurt us.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know what was in the letter from the Army. You don’t know what new information Fiske or Rider might have found out in the interim. And Rider’s been practicing law for thirty years. He wouldn’t have filed something he thought was frivolous, not with the damn Supreme Court. And maybe you’re not aware of this, but Supreme Court clerks aren’t exactly dummies. Fiske didn’t drive all the way down there because he thought Harms was a lunatic. From what you told me, the contents of the letters were very specific on what happened in that stockade.”
“They were,” Rayfield conceded.
“So there you are. But that’s not the biggest hole in all this. Remember, Harms isn’t a jailhouse lawyer. He’s never filed anything else in court. If Fiske checks out your claim, he’ll find out you lied. And when Fiske does that — and I have to believe he will — then everything blows up.”
“It’s not like I had a lot of time to think up a plan,” Ray-field said hotly.
“I’m not saying otherwise. But by lying to him, you just made him a big liability. And we have yet another problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Everything Harms said in his appeal happens to be true. Did you forget that? The truth is funny. You start looking here and there and all of a sudden the wall of lies starts to topple over. Guess where it’s going to land? Do you really want to take that chance? Because when that wall comes down, the only place you’re going to be retiring to is Fort Jackson. And this time on the other side of the prison cell door. That sound good to you, Frank?”
Rayfield took a weary breath and checked his watch.
“Shit, I’d take Nam over this any day.”
“I guess we all got a little too comfortable. Well, it’s time to earn your money, Frank. You and Tremaine just get it done. And while you’re taking care of business, remember this: We all either survive this together, or we all go down together.”
* * *
Thirty minutes later, after his debriefing by Rayfield’s assistant, Michael left the prison building and walked in the light rain to his car. What a sucker he’d been. He felt like tearing up the appeal papers, but he wouldn’t. Maybe he’d put them back into the process. Still, he felt sorry for Rufus Harms. All those years in prison had taken their toll. As Michael pulled out of the parking lot, he had no way of knowing that most of his radiator fluid had been collected in a bucket and poured into the nearby woods.
Five minutes later he looked on in dismay as the steam poured out from the hood of his car. He got out, gingerly raised the hood and then jumped back as a cloud of steam momentarily engulfed him. Swearing angrily, he looked around: not a car or human in sight. He thought for a moment. He could walk back to the prison, use the phone and call a towing service. As if on cue, the rain picked up in intensity.
As he looked up ahead of him, his spirits brightened. A van was approaching from the direction of the prison. He waved his arms to flag it down. As he did so he looked back at the car, steam still pouring out. Funny — he had just had it serviced in preparation for the trip. As he looked back at the van, his heart started to beat rapidly. He looked around, and then turned and sprinted away from the van. It sped up and quickly overtook him, blocking his way. He was about to race into the woods when the window came down and a gun was pointed at him.
“Get in,” Victor Tremaine ordered.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was Saturday afternoon when Sara Evans drove to Michael’s apartment and looked at the cars parked on the street. His Honda wasn’t there. He had called in sick on Friday, something she had never known him to do before. She had called his apartment, but he hadn’t answered the phone. She parked, went in the building and knocked on his door. There was no answer. She didn’t have a key. She went around to the rear of the building and climbed up the fire escape. She looked in the window of his small kitchen. Nothing. She tried the door, but it was locked. She drove back to the Court, her worries increased tenfold. Michael was not sick, she knew that. All this had something to do with the papers she had seen in his briefcase, she was sure of it. She silently prayed that he was not in over his head. That he was safe, and would be back to work on Monday.
She went back to work for the rest of the day and then had a late dinner with some of the other clerks at a restaurant near Union Station. They all wanted to talk shop, except for Sara. Usually a devoted fan of this ritual, she simply could not get into the conversations. At one point she wanted to run screaming from the room, sick of the endless strategizing, predictions, case selections, the subtlest nuances analyzed to death; mushroom clouds from mere mushrooms.
Later that night she lingered on the rear deck of her home. Then she made up her mind and took her boat out for a late-night sail on the river. She counted the stars, made funny pictures from them in her mind. She thought of Michael’s offer of marriage and the reasons she had refused it. Her colleagues would be amazed that she had. It would be a brilliant match, they would say. They would have a wonderful, dynamic life together, with the almost absolute certainty that their children would be highly intelligent, ambitious and athletically gifted. Sara herself had been a scholarship lacrosse player in college, although Michael was the better athlete of the two.
She wondered whom he would ultimately marry. Or if he even would. Her rejection might cause him to remain a bachelor the rest of his life. As she sailed along, she had to smile. She was giving herself far too much credit. In a year’s time, Michael would be off doing something incredibly fantastic. She would be lucky if he even remembered who she was five years from now.
As she docked her boat and wrapped the sails, she stopped for a moment to catch one last breeze off the water before she headed back to the house. Barely a twenty-minute non-rush-hour trip due north would deliver her to the most powerful city on earth, to her place with the most awe-inspiring legal minds of her time. And yet all she really wanted to do right now was snuggle under her blanket with the lights off and pretend she never had to go back there. Reasonably ambitious all her life, she suddenly had no drive to accomplish anything else of note in her professional life.
It was like she had used up all her energy in getting to this point. Marriage and being a mom? Was that what she wanted? She had no siblings and had been pretty spoiled growing up. She wasn’t used to being around kids all that much, but something pulled at her in this direction. Something very strong. But even so, she wasn’t sure. And shouldn’t she be by now?
As she went inside, undressed and climbed into bed, she realized that having a family required one thing to start: finding someone to love. She had just turned down one opportunity to do so with a truly exceptional man. Would another chance come along? Did she want a man in her life right now? Still, sometimes one shot was all you got. One shot. That was her last thought before falling asleep.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was Monday and John Fiske sat at his desk, digesting yet another arrest report on one of his clients. By now he was extremely adept at this process. He was only halfway through the report and he could already tell the sort of deal the guy could expect to get. Well, it was nice being good at something.
The knock on his office door startled him. His right hand slid open the top drawer of his desk. Inside was a 9mm, a leftover from his cop days. His clientele were not the most trustworthy. So while he would represent them zealously, he was not naive enough to turn his back on them either. Some of his clients had shown up at his door drugged or drunk, with a grudge against him for some perceived wrong. Thus, his spirits were lifted considerably by the feel of hard steel against his palm.
“Come on in, door’s unlocked.”
The uniformed police officer who stepped through the doorway brought a smile to Fiske’s lips, and he closed his desk drawer. “Hey, Billy, how you doing?”
“I’ve been better, John,” Officer Billy Hawkins said.
As Hawkins came forward and sat down, Fiske saw the multicolored bruises on his friend’s face. “What the hell happened to you?”
Hawkins touched one of the bruises. “Guy went nuts at a bar the other night, popped me a couple of good ones.” He added quickly, “That’s not why I’m here, John.”
Fiske knew Hawkins to be a good-natured sort who didn’t let the constant pressures of his job overwhelm him. He was always as reliable and serious about his job as he was casual and friendly off duty.
Hawkins glanced nervously at Fiske.
“It’s not anything with Bonnie or the kids, is it?” Fiske asked.
“It’s not about my family, John.”
“Is that right?” As he looked into Hawkins’s troubled eyes, Fiske’s gut clenched.
“Damn, John, you know how much we hated going around to the next of kin, and we didn’t even know them.”
Fiske slowly stood up, his mouth instantly dry. “Next of kin? Oh my God, not my mom? My dad?”
“No, John, it’s not them.”
“Just tell me what the hell you need to tell me, Billy.”
Hawkins licked his lips and then started speaking quickly. “We got a call from the police up in D.C.”
Fiske looked confused for an instant. “D.C.?” As soon as he said it, his body froze. “Mike?”
Hawkins nodded.
“Was it a car accident?”
“No accident.” Hawkins paused for a moment and cleared his throat. “It was a homicide, John. Looks like a robbery gone bad. They found his car in an alley. Bad part of town, I understand.”
Fiske let this horrific news sink in for a long minute. As a cop and now a lawyer, he had seen the results of many murders on other people, other families. This was new territory. “You haven’t told my dad, have you?” he said quietly.
Hawkins shook his head. “Figured you’d want to do that. And what with your momma the way she is.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Fiske said.
His thoughts were interrupted by Hawkins’s next words.
“The detective in charge has requested an ID from next of kin, John.”
As a police officer, how many times had Fiske told a grieving parent that same thing?
“I’ll go on up.”
“I’m so sorry, John.”
“I know, Billy, I know.”
After Hawkins had left, Fiske walked over to the photo of him and his brother and picked it up. His hands were shaking. It was not possible, what Hawkins had just told him. He had survived two gunshot wounds and spent nearly a month in the hospital, his mother and his little brother next to him for much of that time. If John Fiske could survive that, if he could be alive right now, how could his brother be dead? He put the photo back down. He tried to move to get his coat, but his legs were frozen. He just stood there.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Rufus Harms slowly opened his eyes. The room was dim, shadowy. However, he was accustomed to seeing without benefit of light, becoming, over the years, an expert of sorts. The years in prison had also boosted the acuity of his hearing such that he could almost hear someone thinking. You did both a lot in prison: listening and thinking.
He shifted slowly on his hospital bed. His arms and legs were still in restraints. He knew there was a guard right outside the door to his room. Rufus had seen him several times now, as people had come and gone from his room. The guard was not a cop; he was in fatigues, and he was armed. Regular Army or maybe reserves, Harms couldn’t be sure. He took a shallow breath. Over the course of the last two days, Harms had listened to the doctors checking him. He had not suffered a heart attack, although apparently he had come close. He couldn’t remember what the doctors had called it, but his heartbeat had been irregular enough for him to stay in intensive care awhile.
He thought back to his last hour at Fort Jackson. He wondered if Michael Fiske had even made it out of the prison before they killed him. Ironically, Rufus’s near heart attack had saved his life. At least he was out of Fort Jackson. For now. But when his condition improved, they would send him back. And then he would die. Unless they killed him in here first.
He had scrutinized each of the doctors and nurses attending him. Anyone administering drugs to him was given special attention. He was confident that, if he thought himself in danger, he could rip the sides of the hospital bed off. For now, all he could do was get his strength back, wait, watch, and hope. If he could not gain his freedom through the court system, then he would obtain it another way. He was not going back to Fort Jackson. Not while he was still breathing.
For the next two hours he watched people come and go. Every time the door to his room opened, he would look at the guard outside. A young kid, looking very self-important in his uniform and wearing his gun. Two guards had flown with him on the helicopter, but neither was the one posted outside now. Perhaps they were doing a rotation. When the door opened, the guard would nod and smile at the person entering or leaving, especially if the person happened to be young and female. When the guard had occasionally looked into the room, Rufus had seen two emotions in his eyes: hatred and fear. That was good. That meant he had a chance. Both could lead to the one thing Rufus desperately needed the guard to commit: a mistake.
Leaving a single guard, they must think him pretty well incapacitated, Rufus figured; only he wasn’t. The monitors with their numbers and jumpy lines meant nothing to him. They were metal-cased buzzards waiting for him to fade before moving in. But he could feel his strength returning; that was something tangible. He curled and uncurled his hands in anticipation of being able eventually to fully move his arms.
Two hours later he heard the door swing inward, and then the light came on. The nurse carried a metal clipboard and smiled at him as she checked his monitor. She was in her mid-forties, he guessed. Pretty, with a full figure. Looking at her wide hips, he figured she had been through several childbirths.
“You’re doing better today,” she said when she noticed him watching her.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
She stared at him openmouthed. “You better believe a lot of people in this place would love to have that kind of prognosis.”
“Where exactly am I?”
“Roanoke, Virginia.”
“Never been to Roanoke.”
“It’s a pretty town.”
“Not as pretty as you,” said Rufus with an embarrassed smile, the words having slipped through his lips. He had not been this close to a woman in almost three decades. The last woman he had ever seen in person was his mother, weeping at his side as they carried him off to serve his life sentence. She had died within the week. Something exploded in her brain, his brother had told him. But he knew his mother had died from a broken heart.
His nose wrinkled up as the scent touched it. It seemed out of place in a hospital. At first, Harms did not realize that he was simply smelling the nurse’s scent, a mixture of slight perfume, moisturizing lotion and woman. Damn. What else had he forgotten about living a real life? A tear started to tremble at the corner of his right eye as he thought this.
She looked down at him, her eyebrows raised, a hand on one hip. “They told me to be careful around you.”
He looked at her. “I’d never hurt you, ma’am.” His tone was solemn, sincere. She saw the tear barely clinging to his eye. She didn’t really know what to say next.
“Can’t you put on that chart that I’m dying or something?”
“Are you crazy? I can’t do that. Don’t you want to get better?”
“Soon as I do, I go right back to Fort Jackson.”
“Not a nice place, I take it.”
“I been in the same cell there for over twenty years. Kind of nice seeing something else for a change. Not much to do there except count your heartbeats and stare at the concrete.”
She looked surprised. “Twenty years? How old are you?”
Rufus thought for a moment. “I don’t know exactly, to tell you the truth. Not over fifty.”
“Come on, you don’t know how old you are?” He eyed her steadily. “The only cons who keep a calendar are the ones getting out someday. I’m serving a life sentence, ma’am. Ain’t never getting out. What’s it matter how old I am?” He said this so matter-of-factly that the nurse felt her cheeks flush.
“Oh.” Her voice quavered. “I guess I see your point.”
He shifted his body slightly. The shackles pinged against the metal sides of the bed. She drew back.
“Can you call somebody for me, ma’am?”
“Who? Your wife?”
“I don’t got no wife. My brother. He don’t know where I am. Wanted to let him know.”
“I think I have to check with the guard first.”
Rufus looked past her. “That little boy out there? What’s he
“You don’t know that. You don’t know what was in the letter from the Army. You don’t know what new information Fiske or Rider might have found out in the interim. And Rider’s been practicing law for thirty years. He wouldn’t have filed something he thought was frivolous, not with the damn Supreme Court. And maybe you’re not aware of this, but Supreme Court clerks aren’t exactly dummies. Fiske didn’t drive all the way down there because he thought Harms was a lunatic. From what you told me, the contents of the letters were very specific on what happened in that stockade.”
“They were,” Rayfield conceded.
“So there you are. But that’s not the biggest hole in all this. Remember, Harms isn’t a jailhouse lawyer. He’s never filed anything else in court. If Fiske checks out your claim, he’ll find out you lied. And when Fiske does that — and I have to believe he will — then everything blows up.”
“It’s not like I had a lot of time to think up a plan,” Ray-field said hotly.
“I’m not saying otherwise. But by lying to him, you just made him a big liability. And we have yet another problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Everything Harms said in his appeal happens to be true. Did you forget that? The truth is funny. You start looking here and there and all of a sudden the wall of lies starts to topple over. Guess where it’s going to land? Do you really want to take that chance? Because when that wall comes down, the only place you’re going to be retiring to is Fort Jackson. And this time on the other side of the prison cell door. That sound good to you, Frank?”
Rayfield took a weary breath and checked his watch.
“Shit, I’d take Nam over this any day.”
“I guess we all got a little too comfortable. Well, it’s time to earn your money, Frank. You and Tremaine just get it done. And while you’re taking care of business, remember this: We all either survive this together, or we all go down together.”
* * *
Thirty minutes later, after his debriefing by Rayfield’s assistant, Michael left the prison building and walked in the light rain to his car. What a sucker he’d been. He felt like tearing up the appeal papers, but he wouldn’t. Maybe he’d put them back into the process. Still, he felt sorry for Rufus Harms. All those years in prison had taken their toll. As Michael pulled out of the parking lot, he had no way of knowing that most of his radiator fluid had been collected in a bucket and poured into the nearby woods.
Five minutes later he looked on in dismay as the steam poured out from the hood of his car. He got out, gingerly raised the hood and then jumped back as a cloud of steam momentarily engulfed him. Swearing angrily, he looked around: not a car or human in sight. He thought for a moment. He could walk back to the prison, use the phone and call a towing service. As if on cue, the rain picked up in intensity.
As he looked up ahead of him, his spirits brightened. A van was approaching from the direction of the prison. He waved his arms to flag it down. As he did so he looked back at the car, steam still pouring out. Funny — he had just had it serviced in preparation for the trip. As he looked back at the van, his heart started to beat rapidly. He looked around, and then turned and sprinted away from the van. It sped up and quickly overtook him, blocking his way. He was about to race into the woods when the window came down and a gun was pointed at him.
“Get in,” Victor Tremaine ordered.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was Saturday afternoon when Sara Evans drove to Michael’s apartment and looked at the cars parked on the street. His Honda wasn’t there. He had called in sick on Friday, something she had never known him to do before. She had called his apartment, but he hadn’t answered the phone. She parked, went in the building and knocked on his door. There was no answer. She didn’t have a key. She went around to the rear of the building and climbed up the fire escape. She looked in the window of his small kitchen. Nothing. She tried the door, but it was locked. She drove back to the Court, her worries increased tenfold. Michael was not sick, she knew that. All this had something to do with the papers she had seen in his briefcase, she was sure of it. She silently prayed that he was not in over his head. That he was safe, and would be back to work on Monday.
She went back to work for the rest of the day and then had a late dinner with some of the other clerks at a restaurant near Union Station. They all wanted to talk shop, except for Sara. Usually a devoted fan of this ritual, she simply could not get into the conversations. At one point she wanted to run screaming from the room, sick of the endless strategizing, predictions, case selections, the subtlest nuances analyzed to death; mushroom clouds from mere mushrooms.
Later that night she lingered on the rear deck of her home. Then she made up her mind and took her boat out for a late-night sail on the river. She counted the stars, made funny pictures from them in her mind. She thought of Michael’s offer of marriage and the reasons she had refused it. Her colleagues would be amazed that she had. It would be a brilliant match, they would say. They would have a wonderful, dynamic life together, with the almost absolute certainty that their children would be highly intelligent, ambitious and athletically gifted. Sara herself had been a scholarship lacrosse player in college, although Michael was the better athlete of the two.
She wondered whom he would ultimately marry. Or if he even would. Her rejection might cause him to remain a bachelor the rest of his life. As she sailed along, she had to smile. She was giving herself far too much credit. In a year’s time, Michael would be off doing something incredibly fantastic. She would be lucky if he even remembered who she was five years from now.
As she docked her boat and wrapped the sails, she stopped for a moment to catch one last breeze off the water before she headed back to the house. Barely a twenty-minute non-rush-hour trip due north would deliver her to the most powerful city on earth, to her place with the most awe-inspiring legal minds of her time. And yet all she really wanted to do right now was snuggle under her blanket with the lights off and pretend she never had to go back there. Reasonably ambitious all her life, she suddenly had no drive to accomplish anything else of note in her professional life.
It was like she had used up all her energy in getting to this point. Marriage and being a mom? Was that what she wanted? She had no siblings and had been pretty spoiled growing up. She wasn’t used to being around kids all that much, but something pulled at her in this direction. Something very strong. But even so, she wasn’t sure. And shouldn’t she be by now?
As she went inside, undressed and climbed into bed, she realized that having a family required one thing to start: finding someone to love. She had just turned down one opportunity to do so with a truly exceptional man. Would another chance come along? Did she want a man in her life right now? Still, sometimes one shot was all you got. One shot. That was her last thought before falling asleep.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was Monday and John Fiske sat at his desk, digesting yet another arrest report on one of his clients. By now he was extremely adept at this process. He was only halfway through the report and he could already tell the sort of deal the guy could expect to get. Well, it was nice being good at something.
The knock on his office door startled him. His right hand slid open the top drawer of his desk. Inside was a 9mm, a leftover from his cop days. His clientele were not the most trustworthy. So while he would represent them zealously, he was not naive enough to turn his back on them either. Some of his clients had shown up at his door drugged or drunk, with a grudge against him for some perceived wrong. Thus, his spirits were lifted considerably by the feel of hard steel against his palm.
“Come on in, door’s unlocked.”
The uniformed police officer who stepped through the doorway brought a smile to Fiske’s lips, and he closed his desk drawer. “Hey, Billy, how you doing?”
“I’ve been better, John,” Officer Billy Hawkins said.
As Hawkins came forward and sat down, Fiske saw the multicolored bruises on his friend’s face. “What the hell happened to you?”
Hawkins touched one of the bruises. “Guy went nuts at a bar the other night, popped me a couple of good ones.” He added quickly, “That’s not why I’m here, John.”
Fiske knew Hawkins to be a good-natured sort who didn’t let the constant pressures of his job overwhelm him. He was always as reliable and serious about his job as he was casual and friendly off duty.
Hawkins glanced nervously at Fiske.
“It’s not anything with Bonnie or the kids, is it?” Fiske asked.
“It’s not about my family, John.”
“Is that right?” As he looked into Hawkins’s troubled eyes, Fiske’s gut clenched.
“Damn, John, you know how much we hated going around to the next of kin, and we didn’t even know them.”
Fiske slowly stood up, his mouth instantly dry. “Next of kin? Oh my God, not my mom? My dad?”
“No, John, it’s not them.”
“Just tell me what the hell you need to tell me, Billy.”
Hawkins licked his lips and then started speaking quickly. “We got a call from the police up in D.C.”
Fiske looked confused for an instant. “D.C.?” As soon as he said it, his body froze. “Mike?”
Hawkins nodded.
“Was it a car accident?”
“No accident.” Hawkins paused for a moment and cleared his throat. “It was a homicide, John. Looks like a robbery gone bad. They found his car in an alley. Bad part of town, I understand.”
Fiske let this horrific news sink in for a long minute. As a cop and now a lawyer, he had seen the results of many murders on other people, other families. This was new territory. “You haven’t told my dad, have you?” he said quietly.
Hawkins shook his head. “Figured you’d want to do that. And what with your momma the way she is.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Fiske said.
His thoughts were interrupted by Hawkins’s next words.
“The detective in charge has requested an ID from next of kin, John.”
As a police officer, how many times had Fiske told a grieving parent that same thing?
“I’ll go on up.”
“I’m so sorry, John.”
“I know, Billy, I know.”
After Hawkins had left, Fiske walked over to the photo of him and his brother and picked it up. His hands were shaking. It was not possible, what Hawkins had just told him. He had survived two gunshot wounds and spent nearly a month in the hospital, his mother and his little brother next to him for much of that time. If John Fiske could survive that, if he could be alive right now, how could his brother be dead? He put the photo back down. He tried to move to get his coat, but his legs were frozen. He just stood there.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Rufus Harms slowly opened his eyes. The room was dim, shadowy. However, he was accustomed to seeing without benefit of light, becoming, over the years, an expert of sorts. The years in prison had also boosted the acuity of his hearing such that he could almost hear someone thinking. You did both a lot in prison: listening and thinking.
He shifted slowly on his hospital bed. His arms and legs were still in restraints. He knew there was a guard right outside the door to his room. Rufus had seen him several times now, as people had come and gone from his room. The guard was not a cop; he was in fatigues, and he was armed. Regular Army or maybe reserves, Harms couldn’t be sure. He took a shallow breath. Over the course of the last two days, Harms had listened to the doctors checking him. He had not suffered a heart attack, although apparently he had come close. He couldn’t remember what the doctors had called it, but his heartbeat had been irregular enough for him to stay in intensive care awhile.
He thought back to his last hour at Fort Jackson. He wondered if Michael Fiske had even made it out of the prison before they killed him. Ironically, Rufus’s near heart attack had saved his life. At least he was out of Fort Jackson. For now. But when his condition improved, they would send him back. And then he would die. Unless they killed him in here first.
He had scrutinized each of the doctors and nurses attending him. Anyone administering drugs to him was given special attention. He was confident that, if he thought himself in danger, he could rip the sides of the hospital bed off. For now, all he could do was get his strength back, wait, watch, and hope. If he could not gain his freedom through the court system, then he would obtain it another way. He was not going back to Fort Jackson. Not while he was still breathing.
For the next two hours he watched people come and go. Every time the door to his room opened, he would look at the guard outside. A young kid, looking very self-important in his uniform and wearing his gun. Two guards had flown with him on the helicopter, but neither was the one posted outside now. Perhaps they were doing a rotation. When the door opened, the guard would nod and smile at the person entering or leaving, especially if the person happened to be young and female. When the guard had occasionally looked into the room, Rufus had seen two emotions in his eyes: hatred and fear. That was good. That meant he had a chance. Both could lead to the one thing Rufus desperately needed the guard to commit: a mistake.
Leaving a single guard, they must think him pretty well incapacitated, Rufus figured; only he wasn’t. The monitors with their numbers and jumpy lines meant nothing to him. They were metal-cased buzzards waiting for him to fade before moving in. But he could feel his strength returning; that was something tangible. He curled and uncurled his hands in anticipation of being able eventually to fully move his arms.
Two hours later he heard the door swing inward, and then the light came on. The nurse carried a metal clipboard and smiled at him as she checked his monitor. She was in her mid-forties, he guessed. Pretty, with a full figure. Looking at her wide hips, he figured she had been through several childbirths.
“You’re doing better today,” she said when she noticed him watching her.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
She stared at him openmouthed. “You better believe a lot of people in this place would love to have that kind of prognosis.”
“Where exactly am I?”
“Roanoke, Virginia.”
“Never been to Roanoke.”
“It’s a pretty town.”
“Not as pretty as you,” said Rufus with an embarrassed smile, the words having slipped through his lips. He had not been this close to a woman in almost three decades. The last woman he had ever seen in person was his mother, weeping at his side as they carried him off to serve his life sentence. She had died within the week. Something exploded in her brain, his brother had told him. But he knew his mother had died from a broken heart.
His nose wrinkled up as the scent touched it. It seemed out of place in a hospital. At first, Harms did not realize that he was simply smelling the nurse’s scent, a mixture of slight perfume, moisturizing lotion and woman. Damn. What else had he forgotten about living a real life? A tear started to tremble at the corner of his right eye as he thought this.
She looked down at him, her eyebrows raised, a hand on one hip. “They told me to be careful around you.”
He looked at her. “I’d never hurt you, ma’am.” His tone was solemn, sincere. She saw the tear barely clinging to his eye. She didn’t really know what to say next.
“Can’t you put on that chart that I’m dying or something?”
“Are you crazy? I can’t do that. Don’t you want to get better?”
“Soon as I do, I go right back to Fort Jackson.”
“Not a nice place, I take it.”
“I been in the same cell there for over twenty years. Kind of nice seeing something else for a change. Not much to do there except count your heartbeats and stare at the concrete.”
She looked surprised. “Twenty years? How old are you?”
Rufus thought for a moment. “I don’t know exactly, to tell you the truth. Not over fifty.”
“Come on, you don’t know how old you are?” He eyed her steadily. “The only cons who keep a calendar are the ones getting out someday. I’m serving a life sentence, ma’am. Ain’t never getting out. What’s it matter how old I am?” He said this so matter-of-factly that the nurse felt her cheeks flush.
“Oh.” Her voice quavered. “I guess I see your point.”
He shifted his body slightly. The shackles pinged against the metal sides of the bed. She drew back.
“Can you call somebody for me, ma’am?”
“Who? Your wife?”
“I don’t got no wife. My brother. He don’t know where I am. Wanted to let him know.”
“I think I have to check with the guard first.”
Rufus looked past her. “That little boy out there? What’s he