Shutter Island(54)

“You were a ballbuster overseas, weren’t you?”

“I was a battalion sergeant with a bunch of kids under my command. Half of ’em died without ever getting laid. You don’t ’nice’ your way to respect, you fucking scare it into ’em.”

“Yes, Sergeant. Damn straight.” Chuck snapped a salute at him. “Even with the power out, you recall that this is a fort we’re trying to infiltrate, don’t you?”

“It did not slip my mind, no.”

“Any ideas?”

“Nope.”

“You think they have a moat? That’d be something.”

“Maybe some vats of hot oil up on the battlements.”

“Archers,” Chuck said. “If they have archers, Teddy…”

“And us without our chain mail.”

They stepped over a fallen tree, the ground soggy and slick with wet leaves. Through the shredded vegetation ahead of them, they could see the fort, its great gray walls, see the tracks from the jeeps that had been going back and forth all morning.

“That guard had a point,” Chuck said.

“How so?”

“Now that Rachel’s been found, our authority here—such as it was—is pretty much nonexistent. We get caught, boss, there’s no way we’ll be able to come up with a logical explanation.”

Teddy felt the riot of discarded, shredded green in the back of his eyes. He felt exhausted, a bit hazy. Four hours of drug-induced, nightmare-ridden sleep last night was all he’d had. The drizzle pattered the top of his hat, collected in the brim. His brain buzzed, almost imperceptibly, but constantly. If the ferry came today—and he doubted it would—one part of him wanted to just hop on it and go. Get the fuck off this rock. But without something to show for this trip, whether that was evidence for Senator Hurly or Laeddis’s death certificate, he’d be returning a failure. Still borderline-suicidal, but with the added weight to his conscience that he’d done nothing to effect change.

He flipped open his notebook. “Those rock piles Rachel left us yesterday. This is the broken code.” He handed the notebook to Chuck.

Chuck cupped a hand around it, kept it close to his chest. “So, he’s here.”

“He’s here.”

“Patient Sixty-seven, you think?”

“Be my guess.”

Teddy stopped by an outcropping in the middle of a muddy slope. “You can go back, Chuck. You don’t have to be involved in this.”

Chuck looked up at him and flapped the notebook against his hand. “We’re marshals, Teddy. What do marshals always do?”

Teddy smiled. “We go through the doors.”

“First,” Chuck said. “We go through the doors first. We don’t wait for some city doughnut cops to back us up if time’s a-wasting. We go through that fucking door.”

“Yes, we do.”

“Well, all right, then,” Chuck said and handed the notebook back to him and they continued toward the fort.



ONE LOOK AT it from up close, nothing separating them but a stand of trees and a short field, and Chuck said what Teddy was thinking: “We’re fucked.”

The Cyclone fence that normally surrounded it had been blown out of the ground in sections. Parts of it lay flat on the ground, others had been flung to the far tree line, and the rest sagged in various states of uselessness.

Armed guards roamed the perimeter, though. Several of them did steady circuits in jeeps. A contingent of orderlies picked up the debris around the exterior and another group of them set to work on a thick tree that had downed itself against the wall. There was no moat, but there was only one door, a small red one of dimpled iron set in the center of the wall. Guards stood sentry up on the battlements, rifles held to their shoulders and chests. The few small window squares cut into the stone were barred. There were no patients outside the door, manacled or not. Just guards and orderlies in equal measure.

Teddy saw two of the roof guards step to the side, saw several orderlies step up to the edge of the battlements and call out to those on the ground to stand clear. They wrestled half a tree to the edge of the roof and then pushed and pulled it until it teetered there. Then they disappeared, getting behind it and pushing, and the half-tree rammed forward another couple of feet and then tipped and men shouted as it sped down the wall and then crashed to the ground. The orderlies came back up to the edge of the battlements and looked down at their handiwork and shook hands and clapped shoulders.

“There’s got to be a duct of some sort, right?” Chuck said. “Maybe to dump water or waste out into the sea? We could go in that way.”

Teddy shook his head. “Why bother? We’re just going to walk right in.”

“Oh, like Rachel walked out of Ward B? I get it. Take some of that invisible powder she had. Good idea.”

Chuck frowned at him and Teddy touched the collar of his rain slicker. “We’re not dressed like marshals, Chuck. Know what I mean?”

Chuck looked back at the orderlies working the perimeter and watched one come out through the iron door with a cup of coffee in his hand, the steam rising through the drizzle in small snakes of smoke.

“Amen,” he said. “Amen, brother.”



THEY SMOKED CIGARETTES and talked gibberish to each other as they walked down the road toward the fort.