Every 27
Minutes CATEGORY: SA ----------------------------------------------------------------------- I didn't know how much longer I could stay still. He'd been sitting there in an odd-legged folding chair for almost an hour now, and already his jacket had hit the floor. The silence in the hallway was only aggravated by the dry, static hum of the harsh florescent lights overhead, and I knew the noise was like an insect he couldn't swat away. So he had to make a comfortable, familiar noise now and then - shuffling his shoes against the concrete floor and cracking his knuckles. He sighed noisily and lit a cigarette. He'd find it difficult to summon up enough oxygen in this place for nicotine to be satisfying, and he'd probably already discovered that the coffee in the warden's office tasted like fluid that needed to be drained and replaced by a skilled mechanic. I had sat where he was before, on the other side of the bars. But that was a long time ago. "My name's Brad Secorri, if you give a shit." I heard the lighter flare, the quick hiss of butane. "Your lawyer - Wells. He dumped your case. It's mine now." Pause. "You want a cigarette?" The guy in the next cell, Mairt, popped the bars with the rubber sole of his prison-issue Keds. "I wanna cigarette." Secorri laughed in an exhale of smoke. "Sure, bud, soon as you need a lawyer, huh?" "Fuck you," Mairt spat, coming closer to the bars. The warden standing a few feet from Secorri only had to step to the left once before Mairt sat down, fast. Secorri laughed under his breath, flicking ashes at the floor. That was all I could see out the corner of my eye - his worn but expensive shoe dusted with ashes next to his briefcase. He stooped down to pick something up and I moved my eyes when I saw his hand, feigning sleep or death. Wells had given it three shots before he got pissed off at me for not talking. I estimated that Secorri would give it even fewer shots than that. By his voice, he was younger, less tenacious, less eager-to-please. "So..." Papers shuffled in the file. "I gotta say. You feds. Jeeee-zus. Thick- ass file and 95 percent of it is bullshit, you know that? I bet you John Wayne Gacy didn't have a file this thick, and he had thirteen dead boys foulin' up his crawlspace." He dragged quickly and almost wheezed. "You go by Fox? Mulder? Which? Man, your mom's a nice lady and all, but what was she thinking? What in the *fuck* kinda name is Fox? That's a last name. That's a pretty girl in a bar. An animal in the woods, man. That's not you." "He don't talk," Mairt said sullenly. "And he ain't sleepin', fool. He don't sleep." "He don't talk, he don't sleep," Secorri muttered. "Grady...he doesn't talk at all?" The warden stepped closer. "Hadn't heard him say anything in awhile. Not since they gassed Bossert, three weeks ago. Maybe a week before that." "Wish they could all be so quiet, huh?" The warden and Secorri laughed together briefly, and Mairt swore under his breath. The lighter flicked again and the warden moved down the hall. "Bossert. Bossert and his three little dead girls. Bet you and him got along *great*, huh? Lots to talk about." "Don't joke, man," Mairt threatened. "That shit ain't funny." "I'll never get over this moral code with you guys. It's okay to kill people, but you kill a kid, you rape a kid, and it's just not safe to bend down and tie your shoes, is it? We all got limits, I guess." Secorri chuckled to himself. "Heard you and Bossert got into it, Fox. That's why you get to see Mairt's sweet self every morning." It was getting harder and harder to not move. Bossert. I tried my damnedest to not respond. But the minute he knew what he did to his three little girls made the blood between my ears boil, that was all he talked about, day and night. I heard their screams like I'd been there, forced to watch. I woke up from a nap one day, three days before they led him to the chamber, with the sonovabitch's finger hooked in my mouth. "You got a pretty mouth, *Fox*. You got a mouth like a woman's." They executed all of him, save for the finger. I hadn't spoken since. After that, Bossert had been pretty quiet, too, even before they put Mairt between us. "You know, Fox...Mulder...Special Agent pain-in-my-ass...I wouldn't talk to Wells either. Wells is a prick." He dropped the smoked butt and ground it under his heel. "But you don't talk to me, and they'll say I'm a prick, too. We can't have that." I turned slightly to look at him then. I wasn't sure at first if he noticed it. Mom was predictable in these things. She'd hired Wells because of his seeming sincerity, his soft doctor-with-bad-news voice, and when Wells dumped it, she'd hired Secorri because of his open, honest face, with the hairline that was retreating from his forehead like a whipped army. She'd bring a woman in here next, if I knew her. "I'm gonna have to play this like your mom wants it if you don't talk to me. Her mom, too - Maggie. They're not like you. They care." The file landed on top of his jacket on the floor, and I turned my head back again, laying there on my side with my eyes barely open. He lit another cigarette and the smoke was still in the stagnant air. "We did just have another month to get this together. You're lucky Wells dumped you. That `we'll get you out of here' b.s. he was spouting at you? That's just what it was. No way you're getting out, but we got a good case for, maybe, and I'm not signing off in blood here, but a pardon. I appealed and bought you another three months, maybe four --" I sat up then, and the bright sting of circulation pulled my face down towards my hands. I took a breathe, and realized I'd forgotten how to talk. My words came out in an impotent whisper. "No appeals." I found my voice then. "I said no fucking appeals!" He tried not to be surprised that I spoke, but he didn't catch it in time and sat back. He just stared at me for a minute and turned to the warden. "I said Fox Mulder's cell, didn't I? No chance this is Gary Gilmour sitting in here, is there?" The warden laughed and Secorri turned back to me. "Special agent Martyr. Hehheh. Now I get it. Your assistant director said that. I didn't know if that was one of those Freudian slips or a joke, or what. Heh heh, Fox Martyr." I wasn't laughing. "It's just too damn bad if you don't want an appeal." Secorri was angry now, showing the kind of aggravation that Wells hadn't displayed until visit number three. "‘Cause you got one, simple as that. There's no way in hell we're gonna get you off, but with the next four, five months, I can put together a case. Not an insanity plea or anything, though I'm starting to re-think *that*...but make a good case that you had reason to believe that your partner was in danger. Worse-case scenario, you'll just be taken off the Row and put in a cell downstairs with some other charismatic individual like Mairt here, or best-case, they'll move you to a facility, middle-grade security, and there's a chance you'd be out in thirteen if they upgrade you to life." Thirteen years. I'd be past fifty by then. "‘Thank you, Mr. Secorri. Just immense bundles of gratitude, Mr. Secorri,'" he said mockingly. "You're welcome, you stupid bastard. Since you got a little time here now, I got the judge to let you have a few things." He put two paper bags, thin enough to pass through the bars, into the cell. "One has some books in it, and the other one has a CD player. Your mom tried to find out what kind of music you liked from one of your friends, but it turned out you didn't have any." "Not anymore." I winced when I realized I'd said it out loud and not just to myself. Secorri ignored the slip. "She just got a few of them from your apartment. There's a headset in there...Mairt don't strike me as a Tom Waits fan." His laugh turned into a hacking cough that echoed through the corridor, and he buried his mouth in his hand until it subsided. "I'm trying to get you some visitation rights on Wednesdays, and the judge is receptive. Meanwhile, if there's anything you need to tell your mom or anyone you want to write to, I can pass it along or get you some stamps or whatever, but you're gonna have to think of it now. I don't know how long it's gonna be until I get back out here. Later on in the week maybe." I held to the edge of the bed. If I cried here, my fate was sealed. If Mairt didn't kill me, then the guy on the other side would. "Tell my mom I --" I licked my lips. "Tell her I chose the lethal injection." I looked up then, blinking against the harsh light on my raw eyes. "And cancel the appeal." I think if client-lawyer protocol hadn't overridden his temper at that moment, he would've hit me. Square in the face. I didn't look away. He opened his briefcase with two loud clicks of the clasps, almost pinching his fingers in them as he tossed my file inside and slammed it shut. "You're a stupid bastard. A stupid, fucking bastard. I'm talking *life* here. I'm talking getting *out*, eventually." "I don't care," I said evenly. "Why don't you file for a change of venue to Baltimore and we'll see how quick you get me that appeal, huh?" He put his jacket back on and glared at me, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose with his knuckle. There was a smear of sweat on the lens. Words couldn't express that kind of disbelieving disgust, so he motioned to the warden, never taking his eyes off me, and marched down the hall, a jumble of ambiguous obscenities under his breath. "I wouldn't mind living," Mairt said, out of the blue. I pressed my hands into my ears. "Will you shut the fuck up?" "Your family's rich, huh?" He slunk through his cell, back and forth, all day. Pacing from one wall to the other, then switching lengths and doing it again. "I seen Secorri in here before, with the big guys, you know. The ones with money." Even through my hands I could hear him. I remembered the CD player. At least it would be good for *something*. I plugged my ears with the headset, grabbed a disk, any disk, to put in it and turned it all the way up. Anything to drown the talking. I don't think I even heard the music. But the whiskey-stained voice still got to me, penetrating the loud, constant dialogue of my thinking. "A love like ours...is best measured when it's down." I couldn't get away from it, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how *desperately* I wanted these memories out of my head. They got brighter though. I'd been here a year and I could *swear* they were more vivid now than they were when I was living them. "...and I never need an umbrella, cause there's always one around..." Get out of my head, please. Get her out of my head. It had been raining for almost a week. The roads were a slick black glass under tires that spun themselves still against the asphalt and never seemed to take us anywhere. Even the inside of my apartment was wet now, with me tracking in and out at odd hours. The carpet by the door was snarled with mud, and without the sun to go by, I never knew if it was day or night when I checked around me. Cases could make three days into one, if we were lucky, and one day into three if we weren't careful. It was that kind of week. She was in and out, too, busting in with information, leads, dinner - some show of partnership in lieu of hello, some innocuous-but-loaded statement instead of a sanity check. I don't think either of us had a chance to even come in and dry off much. What did we talk about then? I can't remember the case. Seems like that would stand out in some symbolic way, but it doesn't. I wasn't even sure if what I heard in my head as our discussion was what we really said or did. It changed with time. I was sitting at the table, doped on Sudafed with the congestion pooling in my chest from the cold. She walked in, and I tried to remember what day it was. "My car just went dead in the parking lot," she'd said raggedly, dropping a bag on the table in front of me. She shook her umbrella, and the spray of cold water startled me. "I barely got it into an actual parking place before it just stopped. There's Chinese in the bag." I had smiled halfway, or maybe that was just how I remembered it. "I'm seeing double. Which one of you is Scully?" She sunk down into the chair. "You've been asleep face down on the table all afternoon? Mulder, you need to *rest*. You need to actually go to bed -- well, the couch anyway, and get some sleep. You're going to kill your back if you just slump in a chair and sleep on your face. It's not good for you." "This stuff'll wear off in an hour or two," I'd told her. "Write me a prescription for one of those antibiotic shots, Doctor." "You need more than a general practitioner," she teased. "We need a neurosurgeon and someone who's good with electricity and a scalpel." I'd groaned into the table top, queasy over the smell of food. "I'd take you up on it," I mumbled. "What?" I'd raised my face. "I said, I'd take you up on --" The phone rang. I wished now that I could remember who called, or what it was about. It needed to be known, to someone, for my own curiosity. Someone we were after. The prison had dulled that part of my brain that never forgot *anything*, or at least, that part that had never failed to fabricate something bizarre in the place of an understood truth. That sounded like something she would think. (Don't cry.) Mairt would kill me, in a minute. I don't know where he kept it, and I didn't want to know, but he had a knife. But I remember...can't remember the case, but I remember... "They've got him, Mulder." "Then let's go pick him up. We got the warrant, we got the--" "You're not going anywhere," she said firmly. Doctor's orders. "I do need your car. Where's your keys?" They were in my pocket. Objecting was useless. "The search warrant's in the glove box. I got it this morning, and a couple of target copies." "Good. Thank you." She grabbed the keys, pulled her hood up, grabbed the limp, wet umbrella again. "Don't go *anywhere*, Mulder." She was taking my car, so how could I? "If you need help --" "I won't. Okay? Rest. Try to sleep." I laughed at that then. I don't know why. I think it was the Sudafed talking. "I mean it." "I know, I know." And that was it. I tried to embellish it, but the truth was, there was no goodbye, no nothing. She wasn't my girl, there wasn't some heartfelt exchange of I Love You and no lingering stare or meaningful anything in the exchange. We were just doing what it was we did. With more time, more life...it would've been different. That was what I tried to tell myself. Not that it mattered now. I thought I'd dozed off. Time wasn't the most trustworthy thing at that moment, but I'd only phased out for a few seconds, and was knocked clear out of my medicated fog by the...the crush of metal, the squeal of tires, a stuck horn. The cacophony of a dozen neighbors at once panicking to see what had happened out in the parking lot. The elevator wasn't fast enough. It wouldn't open up. They were all rushing down to see. I couldn't make out anything from my window. I put my gun between my jeans and my stomach with one hand on it as I half-ran, half-stumbled down the stairs. In a minute I knew...I *thought* I knew -- what had happened. My car. It was my car. Red hair peeked out from under the rain hood, the neck at a unnatural angle to the rest of her body behind the wheel. It was hard to see through the rain. Hard to understand. Scully? I screamed her name over and over. The car was a mess, of metal and -- the door was all crushed in and I couldn't open it. That was when the two guys bailed out of the van. The van that, by the looks of the front end, had smacked into my car, had smacked into Scully. It hadn't dawned on me at all that she was dead. All those close calls had numbed us to that. There was an assumption after awhile that we were hard to kill. I'd get to her in a minute, I told myself, and jumped out of the way of the van the two men had jumped from as it spun out of control with no driver less than a foot away from me. I turned around, wondering if I was hit or not. It was that close. Government plates. GS and a number. GS, Government Service. White, unmarked van. The two guys were sitting in the puddles, looking astonished. They were dressed in black, from head to toe. With nondescript faces. And guns, strapped to their sides. They'd come to where I lived, to perform a hit. To make it look like an accident when they lost control of the van -- the van they'd so conveniently bailed from, unhurt. It was supposed to be me in the car, wasn't it? I don't know if I asked them that before I put my hand through the mostly shattered glass of the driver's side window and felt for a pulse, asking her if she was okay. I put my hand on her throat, and felt only something soft and wet. And bone. Bone through skin. Her neck was broken. I don't think I asked them who they were, or even paused to accuse them. I thought I knew exactly what had happened. I thought vengeance, and I emptied my clip. I emptied my clip into two homicide cops from Baltimore who had come to serve a warrant and extradite a man who lived on the floor above mine back to Maryland, on narcotics charges, counterfeiting and four counts of first-degree murder. I killed two cops. Scully had backed out, not seeing them. They were coming there to bust down doors. It's not like they were gonna have their fucking headlights on and -- they tried to stop. There were skids on the pavement from their tires, but they hydroplaned and smacked right into her. I killed two cops who died there in puddles of blood, not knowing what in the hell was going on, who in retrospect watch their own chests dissipate into bullet wounds right in front of me. I couldn't stop firing. I couldn't stop, and they were screaming out. All I saw was two men, sent to kill me, who finally succeeding in taking my partner from me after several failed attempts. Vengeance and retribution and black, black grief all converged. They died, and they didn't even know why. Their families...my god, their kids, their moms, their fellow officers, their WIVES, all stood murdered before me in that courtroom. Baleful, weeping, enraged eyes burning through me. I plead guilty, which the lawyer said would only get me life, not the death penalty. As if I were trying to get out of the inevitable. As if I were ... Like I wanted to get up there and argue for my own life. Another common, cold- blood killer who, after breaking the law, would finagle to not have the law break me. I purposely held my remorse in check. I *made* that jury hate me. I did a good job. And Secorri had the nerve to come in here, and tell me he could take the charges down, and spare me. Spare me of *what*, exactly? What was he going to say? Argue in my defense that a combination of rightful paranoia and fucking Sudafed had been responsible for those two deaths? A venue change to Baltimore. That's what I needed. Two of their own dead, one of their most notorious murderers and drug dealers now still at large because he'd been tipped off by the gunfire out in the parking lot. They'd carry me on their shoulders to the bed. They'd inject me themselves. And Scully was dead. As if I wanted to sit in prison and remember her face, remember her voice, pondering how our lives might have been different, how circumstances might've changed. Sitting there everyday...thinking if it had been two minutes sooner. I rewrite the dialogue, I edit the scene. I figure if I'd kept her there for two minutes longer or the call had come two minutes earlier... All those years, I thought my dreams fell on deaf ears, my suspicions were just my own, and I was alone in the universe. In some way, proud of being alone, mistaken in thinking that she was just as alone, and it was only proximity that made her by any definition close to me. And now those dreams do fall on deaf ears. Now my suspicions are my own. And I am alone. This...is what it meant. All that time, I hadn't *really* known what it felt to be alone, to wake up in the middle of the night and reach for someone who wasn't there. They told me the verdict, and I dialed her number. It was what I would've done if she was alive, wasn't it? Who else was there to tell? What else was there to say? What did it matter now? Every 27 minutes...a murder happens in the U.S. of A. That was the official statistic. And I had given them two more lives to add to that statement. My 27 minutes ran out a long time ago. I pulled the headphones out of my ears. I tested the strength of the headphone cable between my hands, tugging hard in both directions. Fairly durable, and really too long, so there was enough. It didn't give. I glanced up over my head at the duct work along the ceiling in the cell, measuring out the distance from my head to the ceiling, from the bed to the floor. I thought of her face as I tied a knot around my neck that wouldn't slip. ----------------------------------------------------------------- The FBI's Uniform Crime Report in 1996, in its crime clock segment, did state that a murder occurs in this country every 27 minutes. The lyrics to the Tom Waits song are from "Strange Weather." Thanks to Cindi and Lori for their Beta chores. :) |