Exact Revenge Read online

  She fumbled with her purse and dropped it onto the bricks.

  “Dizzy,” she muttered.

  Frank scooped up the purse and tugged her to the green door. He punched in the code and half carried her up the stairs with one arm around her waist and the other holding her arm. They got to her door and he spilled the purse out on the step under the small carriage lamp. The brass key gleamed up at him. He bent down, holding her still, and scooped it up from the mess-one-handed-without bothering to pick up the rest. He jiggled the key and the door flew open.

  Frank caught her over his shoulder and carried her in, where he laid her facedown on the big sleigh bed. He went back to the front door and with trembling fingers scooped up the contents of the purse while he scanned the common area. It was empty. He heard a loud group coming up the stairs as he pulled the door shut tight and bolted the lock.

  When he returned to the bedroom, he wore a massive grin. His heart pounded as he stripped off his clothes. Lexis wore a skirt, and she swatted feebly at his hands as he unzipped it and slid it off over her shoes. He liked the shoes, dark high-heeled pumps, and he preferred that they stay on.

  From his own pile of clothes, he removed a switchblade knife that snapped open with enough force to leave the knuckles on two fingers numb. He eased the blade up under her silk blouse and slid it up the length of her bony spine, exposing her back and pausing only to slice through the band of her bra.

  Her head was sideways with her hair draped over her face. She began to blow it away so she could breathe, and Frank slipped his fingers underneath it, sweeping it aside and earning a smile from her.

  “Raymond,” she said.

  His own smile distorted slightly, but stayed big. He kissed the back of her neck, breathing into her ear, letting the stubble on his chin raise a strawberry on her skin.

  “It’s me, baby,” he said.

  “Frank?” she said, her body going rigid. Her breathing quickened and she shook her head no.

  “Shh,” he said.

  His fingers worked their way under the band of her dark red underwear. He slit through the silky material, exposing the round moon of her bottom to his thick probing fingers.

  “Everything’s going to be okay now, baby,” he said in a husky whisper. “It’s Frank, and he’s gonna take care of you, just like he used to…”

  BOOK TWO. ESCAPE

  But then he recoiled at the idea of such an infamous death and swiftly passed from despair to a burning thirst for life and freedom.

  THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO

  17

  MOVING DAY. I look up at the slate gray sky and blink. Snowflakes spiral down and melt on my cheeks. The sergeant of the Special Housing Unit at Great Meadow steps behind me and whacks his baton across the lower part of my spine. I go down in a heap of rattling chains. The others laugh, glad to finally be rid of me, but they shuffle their feet away from my mouth. I’ve heard the guards say more than once that a human bite is much more unsanitary than even a dog’s.

  “So long, asshole,” the sergeant says.

  Two guards lift me up by the arms and drag me across the icy pavement into the snowcapped blue van bearing a yellow state seal. My wrists are handcuffed. The lock on the cuffs is covered with a metal black box to prevent me from picking it open. The box has a padlock of its own with a chain that has been wrapped around my waist. My legs are manacled together just above the ankles.

  The two guards sit behind me where I can’t see them. A transportation sergeant sits down in the front next to the driver. They can’t chain me to the floor. That would be illegal, and if they roll the van and I die in the burning vehicle, none of them will get their state pensions.

  I have been promised a trip straight to the box at wherever it is I’m going, so I don’t plan to cause any trouble. They call me crazy, but I’m not so crazy. Isolation, or Special Housing, does more than keep me from fantasizing about the life I once had. I know from stories what it means to be in a maximum-security prison. In the regular prison population, a man doesn’t stay a man for very long. I’ve been in the system for just over eighteen years and that’s never happened to me.

  The snow keeps coming and I doze off. Somewhere in a crazy dream about my dad and Black Turtle and Frank digging up boxes of gold coins in the quarry, I am awakened by the van coming to a stop. I hear the shriek of a huge metal door grinding open, but by the time I come to my senses, we are inside a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Out the other window, a forty-foot concrete wall glows under the halogen lamps mounted on the guard tower. The massive steel door slams shut behind us and the chain-link gates in front of the van creak open to let us out of the holding area.

  They shove me outside, into the flood of lights and the cold. A raucous screeching fills the air. Thousands of desperate croaking voices in an ocean of agony. I look up and think for a moment that this is hell. The sky is alive, a pulsating flow of black vermin scurrying across an indigo plain. Crows. Thousands upon thousands of them.

  Another cackle attracts my attention. It’s human. A guard in a wool cap with a face of blue razor stubble and an angry yellow smile pokes me in the stomach with his baton.

  “Tough guy, huh?” he says.

  I let my face go flat and I look into his eyes.

  “Ooh, you’re real bad,” he says. “I’m scared.”

  Then he cackles again and shoves me toward the entrance to a five-story stone building. Cellblocks with rectangular windows barred by rusty steel.

  The stone above and around the entrance is distinct from the building that reaches into the distance on either side. Around the entrance, the rough-cut blocks are tall and narrow with popped-out horizontal stones and narrow portals. This bluntly decorative stonework rises above the roofline of the cellblocks. As I pass under the gothic peak of the door, I am struck by its similarity to the tower of a church.

  The guard pushes me into an elevator. Now there are two of them, standing opposite me. Glowering. The bluebearded one slaps his baton against the palm of his hand. Long narrow fingers with pointy nails. The skin pale and the knuckles sprouting dark hair. I know his kind. The kid who got spit on in high school. Now he can push around murderers and thugs, the worst of the worst. Now he’s a badass. That’s what he pretends.

  The elevator stops, and I am jabbed in the kidney on my way out. A sergeant looks up from his desk.

  “Sit down,” he says, and I sit.

  “Welcome to Auburn.”

  I gag on my own saliva.

  Auburn Prison. Seven miles from the Tudor cottage on Skaneateles Lake. There is a restaurant outside these walls where I used to eat. Balloons, it’s called. Good Italian food in the shadow of the west wall. A point of conversation for diners. Good for a laugh. There is a Dunkin’ Donuts in this town. Veal Francesco at Michael’s Restaurant. Dadabos Pizza. A movie theater. Curley’s, where the guards all drink after work. Places woven into the fabric on the fringes of my old storybook life.

  That explains the crows. Hundreds of thousands descend on the tiny city of Auburn each winter. A plague of biblical proportions. Some say the crows are a curse on the forefathers’ greed for choosing to have the state’s first prison in 1812 instead of accepting the offer to become the state’s capital. Some say they are lured by the warmth of a microclimate created by the unique combination of concrete, lights, and the outlet of Owasco Lake.

  I suck in air, the precursor to a sob, but I bottle it up. My head begins to throb.

  The sergeant looks hard at me.

  “Aww,” Bluebeard says, “she’s crying, Sarge. She’s not happy with her new home.”

  “You can start over here, White,” the sergeant says, ignoring Bluebeard and the fact that my eyes are now on my shoes. “If you can live by the rules, you’ll be out of SHU in three months. If you fuck up, you’ll stay here. We’ll start you out on the regular food. If you fuck up, you’ll get the loaf. It’s the shittiest-tasting slice of crap ever made, but no one ever died from it. That and water.
Fuck up again and, well, sometimes we have trouble with the fuse box for the lights in these cells. You choose…”

  A chair scrapes the floor, and the sergeant’s footsteps move toward the door. It closes and I get a whack from Bluebeard across my shoulder blades.

  “Up, asshole,” he says.

  They put on latex gloves. They strip me down and search my rear. Bluebeard whispers to me, calling me his girl, his razor stubble chafing my ear. My eyes water and I close them tight. This part is worse when you fight it. I know.

  They make me shower, then give me a new set of clothes. Forest green.

  Bluebeard leads me into the top of D block and the other guard uses his keys to open a box on the wall. Home to five levers. Two of them are covered with a red sleeve that tells the guard they belong to the cells of prisoners without recreation. The other guard pulls down the lever on the end and I hear a cell door begin to hum. I am shoved into a tank, a self-contained unit of five steel cells. My cell door clanks open.

  From the darkness beyond the crosshatched steel bars of the cell next to mine appears the pale shape of a face. An old man with tufts of white hair and a hooked nose that he pokes through the bars. Two glowing blue eyes magnified by owlish glasses. Small growths of crud are attached to their whites, encroaching on the irises. He says nothing, but his lower lip disappears behind a crooked row of teeth. It might be a smile. Maybe he’s a bug. A nut. Something about these eyes is very different.

  Bluebeard shoves me into my cell. His kick barely grazes my backside, and I don’t bother to even look back at him. I stand over the bowl and relieve myself, then I crawl onto the bunk and curl into a ball, trying hard not to think about how close I am to home.

  18

  IT WAS A SUNNY SPRING DAY, so bright the towering buildings of Manhattan seemed almost clean. Sunday. The streets free from the weekday clutter. Lexis looked out of the long dark glass of the window and saw empty parking spaces along Park Avenue in front of their building. Home for the past ten years, ever since Frank somehow worked his way into a casino partnership in Atlantic City. Allen was hunched over his Game Boy, his dark hair hanging straight down in front of his face, his thumbs working the controls with fevered excitement. Frank was on his cell phone, going over his last-minute bets for the basketball games that afternoon.

  Their limousine cruised down Fifth Avenue and eased to a stop in front of Rockefeller Plaza. The party planner was waiting in a tuxedo with narrow shoulders. Frank referred to him as “the fairy,” but insisted they use him because he had planned the same kind of confirmation party for the governor’s nephew. There were others waiting too. The caterer. The florist. The business manager for the band.

  Lexis hustled Allen inside, still bent over his Game Boy, while Frank opened the trunk of their Mercedes limo and began dispersing banded stacks of money. Cash was king. That’s what Frank always said, and when Lexis stepped inside the Rainbow Room on the top floor she couldn’t help feeling that in a way it was. Gold and silver balloons, bundled into columns, rose to the ceiling. The center of every table bloomed with a four-foot-high flower arrangement of white flowers, lilies, roses, orchids, and gardenias. Over the head table loomed a gold football goalpost. At each place was an NFL football personalized for the guests and signed by Joe Namath, who would be joining them at the head table. Cash was king.

  Allen looked up from his Game Boy.

  “Wow.”

  He ran to his own place at the head table and rolled the football between his hands.

  “It says, ‘Congratulations to my good friend Allen Francis,’” he said, looking up at her with his hazel brown eyes and blinking.

  “That’s exciting,” Lexis said.

  “Why did Dad have to tell him Allen Francis?”

  “Your father is very proud of you, Allen. This party cost him a lot of money, so please don’t act spoiled.”

  “I’m not spoiled,” he said with a frown. “Here. Catch a pass, Mom.”

  Allen threw a spiral across the room. Lexis made a breadbasket. The ball hit her in the chest and bounced out to the floor.

  “Ha. Never throw a pass to a woman. How about this place?” Frank said in his loud low voice as he stepped into the room, arms spread wide, gut spilling out of his tuxedo jacket. “I had mine in the VFW hall. Throw me that other ball.”

  Frank had grown steadily bigger over the past fourteen years so that he now weighed close to three hundred pounds. Lexis was pretty certain that the more of himself there was, the more he liked it. He still started every morning with a ten-minute gaze into the bathroom mirror, stretching back his lips to examine his teeth and toying with the thick curly locks that had recently gone gray at the temples. Allen took another ball from the table and threw a whistling spiral across the room to Frank. The ball smacked loudly into Frank’s hands but he held on.

  “See that?”

  Lexis dusted off the front of her dress and adjusted her two-karat diamond earrings. Frank tossed the ball back and took a long velvet box out of his coat pocket.

  “I got this for you,” he said, handing it to her.

  “Thank you,” she said. She had stopped telling him that she didn’t want any more jewelry years ago. It was a diamond necklace highlighted by a five-karat teardrop pendant.

  “Thank you, Frank.”

  “Hey,” he said, hugging her to him, then letting her go as she pushed away. “I’m not just a great father, you know.”

  Lexis forced a smile.

  The band began to play and the room soon filled up. Other big men in tuxedos with red ties and cummerbunds. Women with screechy voices, Brooklyn accents, high hair, and high heels. Frank’s business associates. Low-level politicians. Bookies. Judges. Some of Lexis’s friends from the board of the Guggenheim.

  Lexis turned from her friend Marge to hear Frank greeting his old friend Bob Rangle. Rangle wore a perfectly tailored black suit with a gray silk tie. His long hands were clutched together and carefully manicured. He’d grown a neat thin mustache, maybe to make up for the gleaming baldness that shone through the long strands of hair swept over the top of his head. His frame was still straight, tall, and angular, and he seemed to have become infected with the same disease that caused his wife to walk with an arch in her back and her chin in the air.

  “Sorry Dani couldn’t be here,” Rangle said, referring to his twelve-year-old daughter. “She had a sleepover. It’s hard enough to get Katie to a function on Sunday afternoon, but when I told her the governor was coming…”

  Beside him stood Katie Vanderhorn, his tall wife. Old-money New York. Still pretty with her long auburn hair despite the heavy makeup, crow’s feet, and a nose that was so straight surgery wasn’t even a question.

  “I just read his book,” she said, “otherwise, I promise you I wouldn’t be that interested.”

  “Is that friend of yours from Merrill Lynch, Michael Blum, coming, do you know?” Frank asked.

  “He said he’d try, Frank,” Rangle said, looking at his gold Piaget Emperador.

  “You’d think having the governor here says something,” Frank said.

  “In the world of finance, relationships are important,” Rangle said, squinting his close-set dark eyes at two loud men hugging and slapping each other’s back.

  “There’s Joe Namath over there,” Frank said, pointing.

  The Rangles’ faces went blank.

  “You should try the cold lobster,” Lexis said, motioning toward the ice sculpture of a football player rising up in the middle of the hors d’oeuvre table.

  “Thank you, dear,” Katie said, and off they went.

  “God, he’s a flaming asshole,” Frank said. “But if I can get that financing…

  “Where is he?” he continued, looking at his watch and then the door.

  “Isn’t he always late?” Lexis asked.

  “The troopers should be here by now, though,” Frank said, looking around. “Some of his people.”

  Just then, a tall, professorial-looking ma
n with gray hair and gold-rimmed glasses walked in wearing a blue suit and yellow tie. His name was Cornell Ricks, the deputy director of the Thruway Authority and Frank’s liaison to the governor’s office. Ricks saw Frank and approached him with open arms, giving Frank an awkward hug and a stiff pat on the back.

  “Frank, congratulations,” he said. “Lexis, you too. I know you’re both very proud. I’m sorry the governor can’t make it. He sends his deepest regrets, but his wife isn’t feeling well at all.”

  Ricks took Frank by the arm, lowered his voice, and said, “He’s very concerned, and he was glad that a family man like you would understand.”

  Frank’s mouth was clamped tight and his face began to turn color. Finally, he took a deep breath and let it out through a small space between his lips.

  Lexis stepped back and said, “I’ll go tell them we can sit down.”

  She turned quickly away so she didn’t have to hear. The waiters had already filled the glasses at each table with red wine. Lexis stopped at a place by the wall and looked around before she picked up a glass and emptied it.

  It warmed her empty stomach and she felt it quickly run up her center and calm her brain. She felt better already, and then she saw her boy across the room. The day she had him it looked like neither of them would make it, but now the photographer was lining him up next to Joe Namath, the two of them with their hands on the same football. Allen’s face was radiant. She sighed and emptied another wineglass. Her life wasn’t so bad.

  Really, it wasn’t.

  19

  WHEN I WAKE, a thin light is seeping in from the dirty window across from my cell. A new start. As soon as I don’t cooperate, they’ll cover the front of my cell with a steel partition and I’ll live again in the darkness. I listen to the sound of my own breathing. In a way, the darkness is better. Then I can’t see how small my world really is. I will wait until tonight, though, before I do anything bad. Bluebeard is on the three to eleven shift and I will save my spit, a thick wad of flaxen goo, for his face especially.