Broken Prey

“He can hear me . . .” He looked at Lighter. “Did you send Charlie out to kill people?” Down the hall, Taylor was still slapping the glass, and two or three other inmates had started again.
    “You’d like to know, but you can go fuck yourself,” Lighter said, not taking his eyes off Sloan. To Sloan: “You were the guy who came to my house and talked to my mother while I was gone.”
    Sloan nodded. “How’s Mom?”
    “The old bitch is dead,” Lighter said. “Good riddance. I thought maybe you were dead, too. If I knew you’d come here, I would have told Charlie to carve your name around this Rice guy’s asshole. A big Sloan right around his asshole while he was going in and out. That’d be pretty good, huh? One asshole for another asshole . . .” And now he reached out and slapped the glass.
    “Can you . . .”
    “I can’t fuckin’ anything,” Lighter said, eyes snapping over to Lucas. “Get the fuck away from me. I want a lawyer.” Back to Sloan: “I’d like an hour with you.”
    Sloan stepped close to the glass: “I wish I could give it to you. I wish I could get one fuckin’ minute alone with you. I’d put a fuckin’ bullet right in your fuckin’ brain, and then I’d spit on your fuckin’ body.”
    Lighter recoiled, looked at Hart: “He can’t talk to me like that. I want a fuckin’ lawyer . . .”
    “Ah, for Christ’s sake,” Hart said.
    Lucas: “Let’s go. We’re done.”
    As they got to the outer door, Hart slowed and looked back down the hall and said, “Goddamnit.”
    “What?”
    “They call them the Big Three. You didn’t even talk to Chase—but Charlie did.”
    Lucas looked back down the hall: the glass slapping continued and Taylor was still screaming, but the screams had gone incoherent and his voice was beginning to break. They sounded, Lucas thought, not unlike what happens when a kid throws a rock in a monkey cage. “Two minutes,” Lucas said, stepping back down the hall. “Let’s give him two minutes.”
     
    LAWRENCE W. CHASE was so thin he might be anorexic. His cheek bones pushed through his skin, his hands trembled. “Don’t call me Larry, ’cause that’s not my name. My name is Lawrence.”
    Sloan: “Okay, Lawrence.”
    Chase said through the open glass, “You gotta get me out of here.”
    “Can’t do that,” Sloan said.
    And Chase started to weep as he stood in front of the window. “I can’t stay here. I ask them to put me at Stillwater, but they won’t do it. I ask them to let me work, but they won’t do that, either. I ask them to kill me, and they say they can’t. They won’t even let me kill myself. There are cameras in my room.”
    Hart said, “We don’t want you to hurt yourself, Lawrence. Maybe you’ll get better.”
    “There’s nothing wrong with me, except that I’m in here.”
    “You killed nine people, Lawrence,” Hart said. “Nine that we know of. You hunted them down and shot them.”
    “They were . . . I was being . . . Paleolithic. I was just . . .”
    “Lawrence . . .”
    “I don’t want to argue,” he whimpered. “I just want you to kill me clean.” To Lucas: “I haven’t seen the sky in two years.”
    “Shouldn’t have killed those people.”
    “I had to; don’t you see? You get out there, the Paleolithic rises up in you. Man is a hunter. I hunted. You must know that—you’re a cop. You hunt people.”
    Lucas had to look away: “If you can help us, maybe you could look out the window.”
    A sly look crossed over Chase’s face: “Biggie said he was going to get extra desserts all week. Could I look out the window and get extra desserts?”
    Hart nodded. “But that’s all. We’ll take you down tomorrow where you can see out.”
    Chase started to weep again. His eyes reddened as the tears leaked out, and against his pale skin they looked like the eyes on a white rabbit, all pink and shot through with blood. He finally wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands and said, “I don’t know what I can tell you, but I’ll help if I can.”
    “Did you talk to Charlie Pope about kidnapping women? About keeping them?” Lucas asked.
    And suddenly, everything about Chase seemed to tighten, and his face flooded with color. “I told him what they said I done. I didn’t ask him to do it.”
    “What do you think about it . . . what he’s doing?”
    “Taylor says he’s doing the Lord’s work.”
    “But Taylor’s full of shit,” Lucas snapped. “What we