23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(9)

The older woman stopped pressing buttons with her thumbs. Then, slowly, she put her BlackBerry on the table next to her. Smiling, she reached out one hand. “Augie Bellows,” she said. “I’m your warden.”

Crap, Caxton thought. She’d made a bad mistake. She had to try, though, anyway. “You should know I’m a model prisoner when I’m not being attacked. I have a background in law enforcement and I—”

“I know exactly who you are,” the warden said. She smiled brightly. “And you should know not to expect any special treatment because you used to be a cop. Many of us here on the staff feel that cops gone bad are the worst kind of prisoner, honestly. You were entrusted to know the difference between right and wrong, and you did a bad thing anyway. How could we possibly take anything you say seriously, ever again?”

“If you look at my record, you’ll see I’ve cooperated fully at all times. I’ve never started trouble and I’ve done everything that was asked of me,” Caxton said.

Bellows shrugged as if to say it didn’t matter. That it couldn’t possibly matter. “We’ll move your things for you. No need to pack. Of course, there are severe restrictions on personal items in AdSeg, so most of your personal belongings will be confiscated. You won’t need any makeup or hair care products in special housing, anyway. Now, if things go as I hope they will, you and I will never have to meet again until it’s time to send you home. If I were you, I would do everything in my power to make sure we don’t.”

“Are you doing this to me because I was a cop—or because I’m gay?” Caxton demanded.

The warden gave her a prolonged, searching look. “It’s because you’re in my way. That’s all. You’re a minor obstacle in the road of my life.”

Then she rose and picked up her folding chair, then went to the door and knocked on it. The door opened and she went out without another word. And that was that. Caxton was doomed to spend the rest of her time in the prison in the worst hell they could create. There was nothing she could do about it. She felt invisible doors slamming shut all around her.

“Wait there,” Harelip said. “Do not move. Someone will be along to escort you shortly.”

Caxton did what she was told.

Except.

Warden Bellows had left her BlackBerry sitting on the table.

Caxton had been a cop. Cops were nosy. They couldn’t help it—it was how they solved crimes, and how, sometimes, they stayed alive. She felt a compelling need to look at the handheld device. She could almost, but not quite, make out the screen from where she stood. She took a step sideways.

Harelip leaned forward again like a dog on a chain.

Caxton held up her hands in surrender. And took another step sideways. When no one burst into the room to restrain or beat her, she stopped in place and looked down. On the screen of the BlackBerry she could see a fragment of a chat transcript. Warden Bellows must have been chatting with someone the whole time she was sentencing Caxton to her new fate. Caxton had no reason to care about the warden’s personal correspondence, really, but there was one thread that jumped out at her.


ABell: It feels like forever. I can’t wait to get started.

DamaNoctis: It shalln’t be long. Patience, I say to ye. ’Tis worth the wait.

ABell: I hope so. I’m risking a

That was all she had a chance to read before Harelip stomped across the room and grabbed the thing off the table. “Get the hell back, bitch, or I will f*ck you up,” she screamed in Caxton’s face, knocking Caxton backward until she fell to the floor.

A few minutes later a detail of COs came to walk her to her new cell. They at least gave her a brand-new jumpsuit so she wouldn’t have to show up in her underwear.





5.

The special housing unit at SCI-Marcy was constructed in a circle around a central guard post two levels high. The cells all faced the glass post and were all identical—narrow rectangles, eight feet wide by sixteen deep, each with a toilet at the back and a solid steel door at the front. The doors were three inches thick and padded on the inside. Each had a small square window set in it at head height and underneath that a narrow sliding panel, a “bean slot,” where the guards could hand in food at mealtimes. There was no separate cafeteria for the women in the SHU. They ate in their cells. They did most things in their cells: they stayed inside of them for twenty-three hours out of every day.

Three types of prisoner were kept in the SHU. There were AdSeg cases, like Caxton—the most violent or the craziest inmates in the prison, who were deemed a danger to others. Secondly were the protective custody prisoners, who were a danger to themselves. Either they’d pissed off some particularly vengeful gang, or turned evidence against other prisoners, or had committed some crime so heinous that the general population hated them enough to want them dead. There were only two child molesters in SCI-Marcy, but they were both in protective custody. Two-thirds of the women in the prison were mothers, separated by the law and circumstance from the children they loved. Being so far from their kids made some of them crazy. Some of them liked to prove they were still good mothers by attacking baby-rapers on sight.