I Will Find You(28)

But Ted had never hurt anybody.

That was important to note here. He may have turned his back when these animals wanted to clobber one another. Why the hell not? They’d find a way to clobber one another anyway. One time Ted had gotten in the middle of one of those scrums and an inmate who looked like a walking venereal disease had scratched him deeply with his fingernail. His fingernail! Damn wound got infected. Ted had to take antibiotics for like two months.

He should have stayed away from Ross Sumner.

Yeah, the money had been big and real. Yeah, he didn’t so much need a “better life”—he had a pretty great one, really—but man, to just get above that pile of bills that were smothering him, drowning him, just to be able to float above those bills, just to go through a few days and not worry about money, maybe have enough to take Edna out to a nice dinner—was that too much to ask? Really?

Ted searched for a donut on the table, but there were none. Damn. Some jackass had brought croissants instead. Croissants. Ever try to eat a croissant and not get the crumbs all over you? Impossible. Yet that was the thing now. They were French, someone said. They were cultured and classy.

Are you kidding me?

Two of his fellow correctional officers, Moronski and O’Reilly, stuffed croissants in their pie holes, the flakes sputtering out of their mouths like out of a wood chipper, as they argued over best bosom point-of-view on Instagram. Moronski favored “deep cleavage” while O’Reilly was waxing poetic on the “side boob” shot.

Oh yeah, Ted thought. The croissants add a touch of class.

“Hey, Ted, you got an opinion on this?”

Ted ignored them. He stared down at the pastry and debated taking a bite. He started to reach out for one, but his hands were shaking.

“You okay?” O’Reilly asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“We heard about what happened,” Moronski said. “Can’t believe Burroughs would try something like that. You do something to piss him off?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Not sure why you’d take him to the infirmary without letting Kelsey know.”

“I buzzed him,” Ted lied, “but he didn’t reply.”

“Still. Why not wait?”

“Burroughs looked bad to me,” Ted said. “I didn’t want him dying on us.”

Moronski said, “Leave him alone, O’Reilly.”

“What? I was just asking.”

Enough, Ted thought. The big question: What was Burroughs telling the warden right now? Probably his version of the truth—that Ted had been the one with the shiv, not him. But so what? Who’d believe a baby-killer like Burroughs over Ted Weston? And O’Reilly’s questions notwithstanding, his fellow guards would back him. Even Carlos, who seemed pretty shook up when he came upon the scene last night, would fall into line. No one in here makes waves. No one in here is going to buck the system or side with an inmate.

So why didn’t Ted feel safe?

He had to think about his next move. The first thing was, put it behind him. Get to work. Act like it was no big deal.

But my God, what had Ted almost done?

True, Sumner had backed him into a corner, had really blackmailed him into it, but suppose if Ted had been “successful,” he would have killed a man. Murdered a fellow human being. That’s the part he still couldn’t get over. He, Ted Weston, had tried to kill a man. Part of him wondered whether he had subconsciously sabotaged himself, that it wasn’t so much that Burroughs had been quick or good at self-defense, but rather that Ted, no matter what else was true, knew that he could not go through with it. He thought about that now. Suppose the blade had hit home. Suppose he had punctured Burroughs’s heart and watched the man’s life leave his body.

Ted was in a panic now. But if he had gone through with it, if he had succeeded, would he be any better off?

He grabbed a cup of coffee and scarfed it down like an aardvark on an anthill. He checked the clock. Time to start his shift. He headed out of the break room.

Ted Weston was starting up the stairwell, fear still coursing through every vein in his body, when something outside the caged window caught his eye. He stopped short and hard, as if some giant hand had grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him back.

What the…?

The window looked out over the executive parking lot. The bigwigs parked there. The correctional officers, like Ted, had to park way out back and take a shuttle to their respective wings. But that wasn’t what bothered him right now. Ted squinted and looked again. The warden had been pretty specific: He was going to spend hours, if not the entire day, with Burroughs.

Yeah, okay, whatever.

So why was the warden getting into his car?

And who was the guy with him?

Ted felt something cold slide down his spine. He couldn’t say why. In many ways, this was no big deal. Ted watched the warden get in on the driver’s side. The guy with him—some guy in a hat and trench coat—got in on the passenger side.

So if the warden was heading out, where the hell was David Burroughs? Ted had his radio. There had been no call about a prisoner pickup. So maybe the warden had put him in solitary. No, if that had been done, they would have been informed. So maybe the warden left Burroughs with someone else, an underling, to interrogate him further.

But Ted knew it was none of those things. He felt it in his bones. Something was wrong here. Something big.