What You Don't Know(66)
“No worries,” she says, handing over her bag and lifting up her arms, so he can wave a metal detector up and down her body, searching for whatever it is people might try to sneak into a prison. She scratches the loose bun on the top of her head while her arms are up, and the guard catches the movement.
“Can you let your hair down, please?” he asks, eyeballing her head carefully, as if she might be hiding a shank in the coils of hair.
“Sure,” she says, but less enthusiastically than before. She’d wanted to keep her hair up, so she’d look severe, older, not with it all tumbled around her shoulders. She pulls the pins out and the guard sticks his gloved hands right into her hair, digging around and massaging her scalp, running his fingers along the backs of her ears, pulling the ends. He sniffs, he might be smelling her hair, although she’s probably being paranoid.
“You look familiar,” the guard says, staring. “Have we met before?”
“I write for the Denver Post,” she says, a little self-conscious, but still pleased he knows her. “You’ve probably seen my photo printed there.”
“Yeah,” he says, not sounding convinced. “Except I don’t read the paper.”
“Is it usually like this?” she asks the guard when he brings her into a room split in two by a glass partition. There’s a small desk on each side, and a plastic chair. An old rotary phone mounted on the wall, just the receiver. She thought Seever would be right in front of her, so she could smell his breath, see the network of wrinkles under his eyes, but he’ll only be a voice in her ear, a man on the opposite side of the smeary screen. “With visitors, I mean?”
“No, not usually,” the guard says, his hands on his hips. “Most prisoners get to see their guests in the common room.”
“But not Seever.” Not a question, not exactly.
“Nope, not him. He’s had some—problems in the past.”
“What happened?”
The guard gives her a pitying look. I’ll spare you the details, that look says. It’s not a story fit for young ladies.
“Seever’s old and fat, but he’s quick. Slippery. He ain’t allowed to see anyone anymore, not unless they’re on the opposite side of some bulletproof.” The guard smiles, shows off a mouthful of dentures that look more like alligator teeth. “Because he’s still dangerous.”
*
Seever is so different that it’s almost like meeting a stranger. She remembers one time, when they were alone in the restaurant and she stripped down to a rubber apron and yellow gloves that ran up to her elbows, and slowly washed the dishes in the big basin sink, and when Seever came around the corner and saw her there, suds dripping down her bare breasts, he made a choking noise, and his face had turned very red. This fat old man sitting across from her, his wrists chained together and then looped around the legs of the desk, he can’t possibly be Jacky Seever, who wouldn’t let her take that apron off when he fucked her, so it made a watery squeaking noise as they moved against each other.
He knocks on the glass with his fist, points at the phone. She picks it up, presses it against her ear. It’s slick in her hands, smells like rubbing alcohol.
“Sammie,” he says. She closes her eyes, thinks of his voice traveling into the mouthpiece, down into the wires and cords and then spilling directly into her ear. She almost puts the phone down and walks out, but then she thinks of Weber, of his smug face and his interview with Simms’s mother, and how she has nothing to write, nothing at all, not without this. “It’s me, Sammie. Jacky.”
She never called him Jacky. Oh, plenty of other people called him that, he insisted on it, he liked to be on a first-name basis with everyone, but she’d always called him Seever.
“Oh,” she says, opening her eyes. “Hey.”
She can hear him breathing through the phone, see the rise and fall of his chest, but the two things seem somehow disconnected, separate. Like a video recording when the audio is off, just a bit, not enough to matter but still annoying.
“It’s good to see you,” Seever says. “God, you look exactly the same as you did fifteen years ago.”
“You don’t,” she says, and Seever laughs. Not the big belly laugh he used to have, but a soft, wet chuckle.
“Yeah, that’s what I’ve been told.” His tongue pokes out, bright-pink, sweeps over his bottom lip. “Why’d you come all the way out here, Sammie? You’ve been an approved visitor for a long time, you never showed up before.”
Have someone else go out, she’d told Corbin years before, because she was getting everything she needed from Hoskins, he told her everything Seever said in the interview rooms, and Corbin had tried to send another reporter, but Seever had refused to talk to anyone except her. But she wouldn’t go, the thought of seeing him made her physically ill, she didn’t think she’d be able to stomach it. It would’ve been an exclusive; Seever had never talked with anyone else from the media, and maybe that’s why Sammie had ended up on the chopping block, because she’d refused to play along. But she was here now, wasn’t she? They’d finally gotten her in, Corbin would get the story he’d wanted so long ago.
“Have you heard about the murders in Denver?” she asks, picking up her pencil and tapping it against the desk. A few sheets of paper and a pencil was all the guard would let her bring in. She hates writing in pencil.