Sanctuary (16 page)

BRADEY’S DINER WAS
a hole in the wall three blocks from the biker bar, nearly empty when Keith and I got there at ten fifteen that night. We sat in an isolated corner booth with two cups of coffee, having assured a waitress in an orange dress that we wanted nothing else. Nothing at all.

“You kneed him in the groin?” Keith asked. “You couldn’t have just grabbed the note and run?”

“And risk him coming after me?”

“Not likely in a place like that. Besides, you did what was asked. The man’s job was done. He’d have no reason to come after you.”

“He was a pervert.”

Keith couldn’t quite suppress his grin. “You really can handle yourself, can’t you?”

I shrugged. “I suppose, if I have to.”

“Just keep in mind that we aren’t in this to teach perverts a lesson. We do what we need to do and nothing more that might draw attention to ourselves. That includes physically assaulting a pervert. We have more immediate concerns, right?”

“Right.”

“Although I can’t say I blame you. Let me see it.”

I checked the restaurant, saw that the waitress was clear across the joint gabbing with a cook, and pulled out the bear’s note. It was on lined yellow paper, same as the first note, folded over eight times.

Keith opened it carefully and smoothed it out on the blue Formica table. We sat side by side, staring at Sicko’s third message:

Good girl.

Nausea swept through my gut. The idea of being anybody’s good girl jerked me back to the days when I had stooped far too low to please others and suffered abuse at their hands. For a moment I lingered on those two words, terrified that I was being drawn back into a similar place.

It had started with Cyrus Kauffman, who pulled me into the world of drugs and tried to kill me when I refused to prostitute myself to make good on a debt. Danny had saved me from that, but what if Sicko was about to resurrect my old self?

We all have memories of darker days pushed back into the corners of our minds, but mine were sucked up to the surface with those two words.
Good girl.

Keith slid his hand over the note. “You okay?”

I nodded.

He put his hand on mine. “Look, sometimes things look bad, but we get through them. The truth is, you’re a free person. You could probably fold up shop and go on the run now…​never look back. It would probably be your safest course of action. Frankly, half of me thinks that’s just what you should do.”

“Then you don’t know me.”

“Actually, I’m getting to know you better. That’s what I’m saying. You could do it, but you won’t because you love a man that society has all but thrown away.”

A knot gathered in my throat. I nodded.

“So you’re doing this for love. Me, I’m sitting here for far less noble reasons. Self-preservation. The fact is, my own past is catching up to me.”

“By making an enemy in Randell.” I looked across the diner again. We were alone now except for one old couple on the far side.

He nodded. “But I did the right thing. I put him behind bars for the right reason, and now it’s coming back on me. You try to do the right thing and sometimes you pay a price.”

“You could walk away.”

Keith lifted his hand from mine. “I’ve been telling myself that all afternoon, but the truth is, I can’t any more than you can. If Randell’s working with someone who can do this to you, they can do it me.
Are
doing it to me. This goes deeper than either of us can guess. They could probably find a way to reach out and crush me anytime they wanted. We’re in this together, period. Okay?”

He was trying to ease my mind, and after my little episode with Bear, I needed him to.

“Okay. You should know that what Danny did, he did with a noble heart. He hurt some people, but only those who deserved it. No different from what you did.”

“Maybe.”

“No, not maybe. He confessed and now he’s paying a price. But to be honest, I love him even more for it.”

“Then remember that. You’re doing this for him. The truth is, no one else can help him now.”

I dipped my head, pinched the edge of the yellow paper, and slid it out from under Keith’s hand. Sicko’s note stared up at me.

There was no salutation, no name. Only the blatant assurance that whoever had written the note had all of the strings in his fingers and was eager to pull the ones that would end Danny’s life.

Keith turned the note over, then flipped it back. “That’s it.”

“Saturday? We’re supposed to just sit around for two days?”

“Keep it down.”

“I danced with that pervert for this? Why didn’t he just say this in his first note?”

“Because that’s the way it works. He playing with our minds, knowing that you would react exactly the way you are. So don’t.”

“We can’t just do nothing! Something’s not right.”

“Nothing’s right! That’s the whole point.”

“We’ve got to find out what’s happening to Danny. I can’t just sit on my hands for two days.”

“Slow down. That’s exactly what he’ll expect.”

“What?”

“You doing something crazy. Going to the cops. Finding an attorney. Trying to contact the warden—anything and everything he’s said not to. If we do that this guy’s going to carry through.”

“So, what? We’re just his puppets now?”

“No.” Seeing the waitress headed their way, Keith folded the note and slipped it into his pocket. “Hold on.”

The smiling server with stringy mud-blonde hair held out the pot. “Need a freshen-up?” She smiled wide, bearing front teeth that should have been put in braces when she was younger.

“No, thank you,” Keith said.

She faced me. “How about you?”

“Nope.” I sounded snappy, I know, but I was at the end of myself. It struck me as her face fell at my retort that Keith was right. This was exactly what Sicko wanted. But could I help it? I didn’t think so.

In fact, if it were only me I’d probably run into the bathroom, lock the stall, and have a good cry.

“No, thank you,” I said, as she walked away. She flashed a faint smile over her shoulder.

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s fine. I’m not suggesting we do nothing.”

“Then what?”

“We have two days to think. To research. To try to figure something out. Then we go do what he says. Other than that, we go dark.”

“Dark.”

“He’s watching. We don’t react the way he expects us to. In fact, we do the opposite. We don’t break his protocol, but we don’t panic.”

I understood immediately. “Play his game.”

“Play his game. Try to shake him.”

“Make him second-guess us.”

“That’s right. We go about our lives as if nothing’s happened. We get a beer, we shop, we go to work…do you work?”

“No. And my routine is pretty simple.”

“Fine. We assume he’s listening to our phone calls, so we don’t talk on the phone. Only outside, in a park, on the beach, out of earshot. But we don’t act concerned or panicked.”

“Seems like a pretty weak play.”

“It’s a start. It’ll at least make him wonder. More importantly, it gives us some control—and trust me, honey, we need some.”

I took a sip of coffee, black, the only way I can force the stuff down. One cup and I’d be up all night, but I doubted I’d do much sleeping anyway. The next forty-eight hours were going to be screaming torture—Sicko’s whole point. Still, the thought of doing nothing without knowing what was going on with Danny was going to double me in half. I’d have to visit my therapist.

“Okay.”

“Trust me, it will drive him nuts. Take consolation in that.”

“Nuts,” I said, nodding. “We’ll drive him nuts.”

“Bananas.”

“Bananas.”

But all I wanted to do at that point was find Sicko and shove a gun down his throat.

SATURDAY

TWO DAYS COULD
be a lifetime: this is what Danny already knew but learned once more as he hung from the wall in the bowels of Basal. The human body was an incredibly durable vessel: this is what he had learned too many times in Bosnia and never wanted to learn again.

When the body was subjected to an overload of pain, it tended to spare the mind prolonged duress by shutting down. Unconscious, it does not shiver uncontrollably or feel pain or scream. Danny was comforted only by the thought that he’d likely spent at least half of his time in that oblivious state before his body rebooted in darkness and flared with agony.

Conscious, he also had to live with his thoughts and his emotions, which flogged him just as relentlessly. Strapped to the wall, he was acutely aware that his thoughts and emotions, though only temporal things, could affect as much pain in him as harm to the body could. Through the years he had willed himself to live in simple consciousness, stripped of the thoughts and emotions that dragged him into suffering. The brief periods of time in which he succeeded filled him with peace and clarity.

He’d often wondered if such a place of clarity was the closest thing to heaven to be found on earth. Finding it this time proved more difficult than before because of his incessant fear for Renee’s safety and his empathy for Peter’s circumstance.

Some advocated surrender as the path to peace, but Danny had always known that his mind was too strong to surrender to anything. Instead he controlled it with raw determination and willpower, a process that sometimes worked better than others.

He’d once been taken captive by the Serbian Christians in Bosnia and, because he was suspected of numerous infiltrations into their strongholds, was questioned over a two-week period before he managed to escape. Their interrogation methods had become increasingly forceful. It was the first time he’d been forced to endure tremendous amounts of carefully directed pain.

Marshall Pape’s version of hell did not match that torture, but the pain of deep meditation was severe enough that a boy like Peter would likely never survive a second encounter.

And wasn’t that the purpose of the warden’s sanctuary? To scare the wayward straight by subjecting them to the threat of extreme punishment?

Doing his best to ignore the pain in his nerves, his thoughts, and the torment inflicted by his emotion, Danny sought the stillness beyond, peering into the darkness, searching for awareness of God’s love and beauty in his own spirit. It wasn’t easy to find.

Bostich did not come with water as promised. No one did. No one came at all. The promise of water was only a hope deferred to make the heart sick, one little twist of the knife to increase his suffering. Without any food or water, his body might have shut down completely had they not come for him after forty-eight hours.

When Bostich and Mitchell did come, they came with a hose, which they used to wash him down while he still hung on the wall. He sucked in as much of the water as he could.

They finally released him from his restraints, a process that heaped pain upon pain, then stood back as he collapsed in a heap.

“Get yourself together. We’ll be back.”

Bostich left a neat pile of folded clothes on the table and left Danny to recover, this time with the light on. It took him an hour to get to his feet, work out enough of the aches in his joints to dress, and compose himself.

“I’d like to see the warden,” he said when they returned.

“Well, you’re in luck, ’cause he wants to see you too.”

Several minutes later, Danny sat in the same chair he’d first used outside the warden’s office, waiting for an audience. The clock on the wall read 7:26. Saturday evening, if he guessed correctly. He’d been at Basal for a mere six days that overshadowed his entire three years at Ironwood.

And yet he wasn’t disheartened. His resolve had not been compromised. He was only glad that he and not Peter had endured deep meditation.

As for his own reward, he expected to be presented with an opportunity to determine what the warden might or might not know about Renee. If his suspicions were confirmed, Danny would set his mind on discovering a way to warn her. Confined as he was by both prison and his resolution never to resort to violence, his options would be limited, but there were always options.

There had to be; Renee was all that mattered to him now. Renee and, to a lesser extent, Peter, the boy who was as innocent as she herself once had been—Renee and Peter and those trampled underfoot by society’s failures.

And yet his determination to defend the weak had proven pointless once before. No man had the right to exercise ultimate judgment over another man, certainly not the way Danny had.

He could not save Peter by killing Pape.

Nor could he sit by while Peter suffered.

Two compulsions in conflict. The disparity threatened to fracture his mind. Something was askew in his worldview.

The warden’s door swung open and Pape’s familiar form emerged, smiling. “There you are. All cleaned up and ready to join a more reasonable world, I trust.”

Danny got to his feet slowly. The pain in his joints had already begun to fade, but he knew it would return with a vengeance after a night’s sleep.

“Need some help?”

“No thank you. I’ll manage.”

The notion that he was more pathetic than noble whispered through his mind. What kind of weakness would prompt a man to say “No, thank you” to a man like Pape in a moment like this?

“Please come in.”

Danny entered the office and sat. The warden picked up a black pen and tapped it on a form before him. For a few long moments he watched Danny, expressionless.

“You’re a strong man, I’ll give you that. Unfortunately, it only means I have to work harder to get through to you. It’s only my job, you must realize that.”

Danny was here for Renee’s sake, not his own, so he kept his mouth shut.

“I’m sure you feel that my methods are extreme. That’s understandable. But as I pointed out in the dining hall, they are no more extreme than other methods condoned by your God.”

After another moment of silence the warden continued.

“Although I admire your mental strength, I need you to respond so that I can determine your progress. Is that fair?”

The man seemed more gentle somehow. Amenable even.

“I’ll do my best.”

“Good. Then you
do
understand that harsher methods than mine were at one time condoned, even embraced, by good people.”

“I can see how you draw that conclusion, yes.”

“But you disagree with them…”

“It’s not my place to judge your treatment of me. I accept that I’m your prisoner.”

“I’m not referring to my treatment of you. I was thinking more of the others.”

“Meaning whom?”

“Meaning Peter, for example.”

“We both know that Peter’s innocent.”

“Must we really go through this again? Innocent of what? Rape? And is rape more or less deviant than other expressions of deviant behavior? Everyone is guilty of some infraction of the law, Danny. Everyone breaks the law. It’s my job to correct those deviants, once and for all. Murderers, for example.”

The warden studied him with knowing eyes.

“You know about murder, don’t you?” He tapped his pen on the surface of the desk. “Why did you kill them, Danny?”

“Kill who?”

“Please, I know you killed more than the two men you confessed to as a part of your plea bargain. The question is, why? There’s no clear motivation cited.”

“I was foolish enough to think I could change the world.”

“By what? Setting a few of the wayward straight?”

“As I said—”

“Then we’re the same, aren’t we? You see people in need and you rush to their defense. I see society in need and I rush to its defense. In a way I admire you for attempting to do outside the law what society has failed to do within that law. Isn’t that why you killed?”

“A few years ago, I would have agreed.”

“But not now?”

“No.”

The man watched him for a long moment, then stood and approached the family portraits on the wall, hands behind his back.

“Maybe it would help if you understood my own motivation.” He nodded at the picture of himself with his wife, his daughter, and his son. The daughter was perhaps fifteen, a younger reflection of her mother apart from her hair, which was straighter than the wife’s fluffy curls. Both had bright blue eyes, the same sharp nose, rosy cheeks, and small mouths. Both were beautiful and wore red dresses.

The son looked more like his mother than the warden as well. He wore a crew cut and was perhaps two years younger than his sister.

Pape pointed to his daughter. “This is Emily. She was fourteen when this picture was taken. Nate, my son, was eleven. Everyone says they both look like my wife, Betty. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Very similar, yes.”

The warden glowed with pride. Nothing about his pleasure seemed remotely disingenuous. Reconciling Marshall Pape the warden with Marshall Pape the loving father might prove difficult for many, but Danny had seen a thousand hardened soldiers in Bosnia who fought out of love of their families, he being chief among them.

Marshall Pape was first of all a human being, in the same way that the inmates under his thumb were. Really, none of them was a monster. They were all just trying to make sense of their world in this subculture called prison.

“They’re now six years older,” Pape said. “Emily’s studying medicine at UCLA, Nate’s the starting quarterback on his high school football team, quite a player at only seventeen.” He faced Danny, still smiling. “Perhaps one day you’ll father a child, Danny. I can assure you, there’s nothing more rewarding than watching a child grow through the years. Nothing.”

There was a heaviness in the warden’s voice that forecasted the frown that slowly overtook his face. He looked at the photograph again.

“But who am I kidding? Those are only my dreams. Unfortunately, I’ll never see Nate or Emily grow up. In truth, this is the last picture taken of them before they were killed. Ten days after we sat for this photograph, actually.”

Danny recoiled at the revelation.

Marshall Pape faced him. “They were both at a convenience store in Santa Monica when a paroled felon named Jake Williams came in with only drugs and money on his mind. The store owner had a gun, and in the ensuing face-off, Nate was killed by the felon. Emily was accidently hit in the head by a bullet from the storekeeper’s handgun. They both died at the scene.”

The warden had suddenly and dramatically become a victim along with his children. Danny could not ignore his empathy for the man.

“I’m sorry. I can’t imagine how you must have felt.”

“The store owner received a two-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter. The felon was killed. My wife suffered a mental breakdown and left me a year later. She still blames my son’s and daughter’s deaths on me. Do you know why?”

“Because you are a warden, responsible for keeping people like Jake behind bars.”

Pape forced a smile. “Very good. It’s a stretch, don’t you think? But she had a point, Danny.” He held up two fingers. “Jake Williams had
two
previous convictions for robbery. He did his time in one of those monster factories only to be paroled, unchanged at his core. So you see, the system failed my son, and weak gun laws failed my daughter.” His eyes were glassy, misted with tears. “Now both are dead.”

“I am so sorry, sir. I’m truly terribly sorry.”

“I lost my children, I lost my wife. I also lost my sister, Celine, who was murdered before all of this,” Pape continued. “I knew then that God was sending me a message, and I took an oath. Never again would I oversee deviants without helping them accept their failure in the very core of their being. Never again would a single soul under my supervision rejoin society without first being completely changed from the inside out. Three years later, I became the first warden of Basal.”

This was Marshall Pape’s religion, to help deviants become new men, transformed by the renewing of their minds, a noble pursuit to say the least. He was just going about it wrong.

“I can understand your ambition,” Danny said.

“Yes, I suppose you could. Is that why you killed? To help men see the light?”

“Yes.” And then he said something he was sure the warden couldn’t know. “My mother and my two sisters were raped and killed in Bosnia.”

The warden’s eyes held on him, wide. “Then you do understand.”

“God’s love and grace are the path to healing. Not condemnation or punishment.”

“Then your world is full of naïve idealism,” Pape said. “Grace is only a word that masks a new kind of law. Like I told you before, true grace doesn’t even exist. He who offers it still demands adherence to some kind of behavior. A new law. There is no free ride. And breaking the law always comes at a cost. There must remain the very real threat of punishment and torture. I’m surprised you don’t seem to understand that, being a priest.”

Danny remained silent. The warden’s argument, however uniquely put, represented the conundrum that faced all religions and institutions that sought to modify behavior for greater good. From Pape’s perspective, Basal made perfect sense.

“In the end the quality of life is always about some kind of law. You would think I’d be agreeable to a man gunning down the murderer of my son and daughter before he had the chance to kill them, wouldn’t you?” the warden said.

They were on dangerous ground; Pape was describing Danny.

“But you would be wrong,” Pape continued. “That would be illegal. The law is in place as it stands for good reason, tested by centuries of trial and error. I lost my family because both a well-meaning man and a felon deviated from the law. The law, my friend. No one must break the law. Ever. Everything I do at Basal is geared toward this one end. You may not like my ways, but I do it for the millions of Nates and Emilys who only want to go to the convenience store for an ice-cream sandwich. I am their protector.”

He returned to his chair, eased himself down, and sighed. “But you, Danny, you would break the law to save an innocent boy like my son, wouldn’t you?”