Bio-Justice Page 15

  Danny was beginning to feel a deep affection for Maggie but it got jumbled up with a confusing perception that flipped back and forth in his mind. One moment, he felt distanced towards his aged companion—he found himself following the lines of her face, the wrinkles, the white roots of her dyed hair, reminders of all that inspired an asexual feeling he had in the presence of older women—the next he felt a tenderness towards her that he only recognized in himself when he was with a cherished lover. Danny was especially attracted to Maggie’s large brown eyes which reflected intelligence, warmth and kindness. There was also a spirit Danny felt in the energy that came from her which he had not recognized before, not even with Sonya. He imagined Maggie as a young woman and found himself entertaining a whimsy, a lovely reverie, only to be snapped back into reality at the sight of her life-worn features.

  The food was delicious. Maggie had made sure that all of her skills came to bear to make it so. She had prepared everything with attention paid to the smallest detail. For a while, they didn’t talk much for they allowed themselves time to just savor the meal. Maggie delighted at Danny’s moans of pleasure when he took a mouthful of the chicken.

  When the real conversation began, they had finished the main course and were starting on a store-bought carrot cake, served with coffee and tea. Maggie decided to be candid first, speaking about her married life.

  “James was not a perfect husband but then I was not the perfect wife.”

  “He cheated?”

  “Oh, no! James was too timid for that. But he was a truly good man and I was very comfortable with him.”

  “Did you grieve for a long time?”

  “I didn’t have time to,” she said.

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Things happened.”

  “Like what?”

  Maggie put her hands on the table, almost as if to steady herself. “I found out I had breast cancer fourteen months after James died.”

  Danny responded cautiously. “But you survived.”

  “Yes, I survived. But I had to have a double mastectomy.”

  Maggie looked at Danny. She didn’t know why she felt the need to tell him. It was all over now. He would find an excuse to leave and never come back. Why? Why did she want to scare him away. He was such good company.

  “I’m sorry,” Danny said.

  “Who am I kidding? It’s not like my dating life took a drastic dip.”

  “I know it must have been hard for you to tell me about that.”

  “I’m so sorry. Here you were, invited to a festive holiday dinner and you got more information than you ever wanted to hear from a crazy neighbor. I’m sorry. It was thoughtless of me. Listen, if you ran out of here, I wouldn’t blame you. I’d probably do the same thing.”

  Danny slowly reached across the table and covered Maggie’s hand. “We all have things we’re ashamed of and shouldn’t be.”

  Maggie reflexively withdrew her hand and looked into Danny’s eyes until she connected with the light there.

  “May I ask you something that’s absolutely none of my business?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “The other night you said that you hoped Sonya would grow up to be someone like me when she got older. And you said you were almost like high school sweethearts…”

  Danny laughed as if snared in a trap of his own making. “You don’t miss a thing, do you?”

  “No, I don’t,” she said. “Are you going to hold that against me?”

  “Maggie,” Danny started, “do you watch the news?”

  “Of course. Almost every night.”

  “I was convicted of a crime and I received a sentence of thirty years to life.”

  Maggie’s hand drifted up to her mouth. Her eyes shifted back and forth, and then widened. “You went through Bio-Justice…”

  Danny couldn’t look Maggie in the face any longer. And now it was Maggie who covered Danny’s hand with hers. “Thirty years to life. That’s pretty serious. What did you do?”

  He looked up again. “I was convicted for the murder of a police officer. But I didn’t do it. My partner did. I dropped my gun and had my hands up when it happened.”

  “I see,” Maggie said. “And how old are you really?”

  Danny swallowed. “I was twenty-four when I was convicted. I would have turned twenty-six last month.”

  Maggie stared at Danny and didn’t speak for a long while. She looked stunned as if she were asking her eyes to verify what her ears had just heard.

  “I know if I hadn’t gone along with my partner, Taggart the officer would still be alive. I’ve got to live with that. But I’m no murderer. Maggie, I want you to believe that.”

  “I do,” she said. “I truly do.”

  “That means so much to me,” he said.

  The room became quiet, the kind of quiet where the desperate need of the human heart demands to be heard.

  “Danny—would you kiss me?”

  Danny moved his chair closer, held Maggie’s face in his hands and pressed his lips to hers. Their lips parted and then pressed together again and again, each time lingering a little longer. Finally, Maggie held her head back, her eyes closed, as if savoring the taste of a fine wine. When she opened her eyes, her smile failed her and her lips trembled.

  “It’s been so long,” she said, “but I don’t want your pity.”

  Danny grasped her hand and rose, leading her from the table and across the living room. When he reached the doorway of her bedroom, his eyes searched hers for approval, and then they passed the threshold.

  “I don’t think you want to make love to me,” she said. “I’m not like I was.”

  “That doesn’t matter to me,” Danny said.

  “No. I couldn’t bear to see your face looking at me.”

  “Trust me, Maggie,” he said softly.

  Maggie’s mouth twisted into a frightened, doubtful grimace, the last sign of resistance. She stepped back from Danny and slowly started to undress. As she removed her blouse and her skirt, she folded each and placed them neatly on a nearby chair.

  “Old habits die hard,” Maggie said, smiling.

  When she faced him in her brassiere, Maggie searched Danny’s eyes begging him not to betray her faith. She slowly removed some foam pads from inside her brassiere and then reached around and unclasped the hooks. She let the bra fall to the floor and deliberately let her arms fall to her sides so he could see her torso unobstructed. Danny saw the expansive scar tissue where her breasts used to be. Her wide hips undulated up to her waist, and from there, above her navel, there was just the flatness of her flesh covering her breast bone. The nipples were gone.

  Maggie could see the depth of anguish Danny had for her but no pity. A tear betrayed her and cut down her cheek.

  “Take off your panties,” he said.

  Maggie obeyed and stood before him to be judged. Danny began to undress himself and when he was naked, he led Maggie to her bed, pulled open her covers, laid her on her back and kissed her on the lips, her neck and her breast.

  “Danny,” Maggie whispered.

  Danny’s eyes cracked open. “Hi,” he said, noticing Maggie had wrapped herself in a robe. “What time is it?”

  “Six-twenty.” He could see she was anxious. “Danny, would you mind leaving?”

  “Did I do something?”

  “No. It’s me,” she said. “I just need to be alone.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “No,” she said, bending forward to kiss him tenderly, “I’m not mad. But you have a woman who you love.”

  “I guess I kind of screwed up,” Danny sighed, sitting up.

  “Danny,” Maggie said. “I loved last night. I will probably replay each moment over and over in my mind. But now it’s time for you to go.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Steven Harrier entered the darkened meeting room and turned on the light. “Come in,” he said, “I want to show you something.”

  Senator Harley Jakes follo
wed Harrier and stopped in the center of the room where an architectural model stood under a crystalline plexiglass dome. The model presented a campus of monolithic buildings erected in rows of utilitarian efficiency which gleamed under the flood lamps positioned over the dome. With the exception of a few watchtowers, the sleek buildings suggested a modern university or an expansive medical facility from a utopian future.

  “Model 9 is the prototype set for New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and Houston. Groundbreaking is to begin twenty-nine months from today. Later, smaller facilities based on our Model 7 will follow in San Francisco, St. Louis, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Detroit and Atlanta.”

  “And this is Model 9?” the Senator asked.

  “Yes,” Harrier said. “It will hold sixteen thousand inmates. Each facility will have a separate female unit. Since the number of violent criminals will be drastically reduced as a result of Premium Sentencing, we expect the ratio of male to female inmates to skew slightly higher—roughly eighty percent male to twenty percent female. With less violent inmates, we anticipate our overhead costs—building maintenance, security, overtime for guards—will be significantly reduced.” Harrier smiled. “It’ll be like running a Holiday Inn, except you won’t have to worry about weekday vacancies.”

  “What about the killers ineligible for Premium Sentencing? Won’t you need to maintain high security for them?”

  “They’ll be separated from the main populations,” Harrier replied. “And since they’ll be individually housed, they can be controlled by the same methods that are employed on the elderly with dementia, and the mentally ill. We’ll have drug administration procedures. We’ll also have gas vents in each cell to administer correctional sedation if necessary.”

  “Very impressive,” Jakes said. “But why not stay in the current federal and state facilities? Then you’re only paying for improvement costs which must represent a fraction of what I’m looking at here.”

  “That would be perfectly acceptable if I wanted to work for the government like you, Senator. However, I’m a capitalist. I believe profit is the engine that drives everything. Profit, or money comes from control, and control comes from independence. And I cannot be independent when I have regulation-driven bureaucrats telling me how I can use government property.”

  “And what are the profit projections for American Correctional?” Jakes asked as casually as he could.

  Harrier let the question hang in the air until it dissipated like the trace echo of a clanged bell.

  “I trust your campaign received the resources needed?”

  “Steven, I was in no way—”

  “Everybody wins, Senator. Everybody wins.”

  Kelty’s assistant drew blood into the last vial, labeled it and put it with the five others. She removed the needle and pressed the entry point with a cotton ball, then held it in place with a strip of adhesive tape. Then she left the room, taking the vials away.

  Danny started to roll his cuffs down when Kelty entered the room.

  “You need to take our requests seriously, Mr. Fierro. I called you over three weeks ago.”

  “Last time I heard, I have the right to turn down a request,” he said.

  “Do you enjoy being belligerent, Mr. Fierro?”

  “As much as I enjoy playing pin cushion for you, Doctor.”

  “All we are asking is that you be a little more cooperative. Yes?”

  “You got your blood,” Danny said curtly.

  It had been almost three months since Danny made his way to the split in the road where he first encountered Pete. That day had been dark and overcast but still warm due to an extended Indian summer. By contrast, today the sharp, stubborn chill of December was like a slap in the face. Danny wore a woolen hat and overcoat but still his eyes watered and his nose was tipped red and raw. He no longer had the craving for the serum Pete tried to get him hooked on. Still, he stopped to look down the side road towards the shuttered print shop where Vic Carbona had made his terrible sacrifice. He wondered whether Vic had been given a proper burial after the police were alerted to the location of his desecrated body. Somehow he doubted it.

  The street was still strewn with a few aimless figures but it seemed to be at night when the area was overrun with them, these abandoned processees, out of their seed money (probably used up too quickly in a series of serum fixes), not like the familiar victims of poverty or homelessness who normally ambled along the streets, but almost like a kind of vermin, cordoned off from sight, allowed to fester and aggregate, before they degenerated into toxic health and death.

  And then Danny saw him—Pete walking quickly away from him down the street, cutting across an empty lot to enter an immense factory building, made of brick and steel and concrete, closed like the others, a hulking behemoth structurally intact but layered with rust and ruin.

  Danny walked quickly to catch up to Pete, for what purpose he was not sure. There were answers Pete could lead him to, answers he needed to know existed. And so he kept walking, until he arrived at the steel plated door Pete had used to enter.

  Opening the door slowly, Danny stepped inside.

  At first, he thought there was some swarming of insects, a massive buzzing in some gigantic hive he had violated. Then Danny’s ears started to discern the sounds as human. It was the low droning sounds of human misery. Then came the collective smell, sour and acrid. As Danny cleared a front reception area, he came upon a door—more of a portal—that opened wide, until the entirety of his vision was immersed in a dark panoramic scene that shocked him.

  There must have been at least a hundred men writhing on the floor like snakes being burned under a magnifying glass—with their worn, tattered clothes, their dirt-crusted faces, the twist of their squeamish legs—making that horrific droning sound with their mouths stretched wide and helpless.

  “I could kill you right now,” Pete said, his gun once again finding a home pressed to Danny’s head, “and throw you into that pitiful heap over there.”

  “Is that what happens to your customers?” Danny asked.

  Pete pulled the gun back but kept it fixed on Danny. “Eventually.”

  “And you don’t tell them?”

  “Why should I?” Pete said.

  “Do you know what you’re doing to these men?”

  “I sold heroin when I was fourteen. You’re not making me cry, pal.”

  “Where do you get this shit?”

  “Again with the questions. You want to meet him? Come on. Today’s your lucky day. He happens to be here.”

  Danny looked surprised as Pete pointed him forward with his gun.

  “This way. It may be the last meet and greet you ever have.”

  Pete led Danny down a long corridor away from the main factory floor. The suffering human noise was still in his ears but it dwindled to an unsettling hum as they distanced themselves further away. At the end of the corridor, Pete opened the door to a room and motioned for Danny to enter. The room was small with faded off-white paint on the cracked walls, acting as a canvas for wide swaths of angry and profane graffiti. The windows were covered with dirty linen cloth. The space was empty of furnishings other than a wide folding table and two folding chairs. On the table was a ledger and on the floor stacked against the walls were cases of product. A tall, slender man in his thirties with wire-framed glasses, a wrinkled dress shirt with an olive green tie, and a face that possessed qualities both feral and sophisticated, stood waiting, his eyes following Danny until Pete addressed him.

  “This is the guy I was telling you about a few weeks ago. He’s back with the same questions.”

  The man stepped closer while Pete kept his gun trained on Danny.

  “You’ve got questions? Ask away.”

  “For starters, who the fuck are you?”

  “Call me…Jonas Pasteur. Yes, I should like that very much.”

  “Where did you get this shit you’re pushing?”

  Pasteur looked at Pete. “My, he is inquisitive, isn
’t he?”

  “Where?” Danny repeated.

  “I make it,” Pasteur said.

  “But that doesn’t make sense,” Danny argued. “How could you—”

  Danny’s eye was on Pasteur’s right hand which was inching towards the gun in the waistband of his khaki pants.

  “It’s pretty obvious—that old chestnut of an economic theory: supply and demand. I simply realized that with all the Bio-Justice dreck being released to the streets, there would be a demand for this sort of product, a niche if you will. So I decided to fill it.”

  Pete laughed, letting his arm lower just enough.

  “Why, you’re just a regular entrepreneur,” Danny said derisively.

  “Now that you put it that way—” Pasteur said, his fingertips now touching the butt of his gun.

  Like he was wielding an axe, Danny chopped down on Pete’s arm so the grip loosened. Grabbing the gun, Danny pointed it at Pasteur, then Pete, retreating backwards out of the room. He fled, firing several shots behind him, the bullets ricocheting off the walls of the corridor as he sprinted on his tired legs towards his escape.

  Outside, Danny ran until he couldn’t feel his legs anymore. His lungs fought to capture enough oxygen to keep him going. By the time he reached the juncture leading to Hodge Memorial, Danny had thrown the gun into some shrubs and saw no one behind him giving chase.

  He stopped running but walked briskly the rest of the way home, turning around every few steps to make sure no one was trailing him. The line between self-preservation and paranoia was getting razor thin.

  Back in his room, Danny waited to hear if there were footsteps. When none came, he set his alarm and fell back on his bed. He felt his eyes close and when he thought just a moment had passed, he awoke hours later in a shadowy light to the sound of the ringing alarm.

  Dr. Felice Bennett watched the soup line from a short distance. It had gotten to the point where she picked up immediately who was a Premium Sentencing processee and who had fallen into destitute homelessness by the more traditional means of hard luck, unemployment, alcohol, drug abuse or mental illness.