The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  “If you’re not gone in the next ten seconds, I’m calling 911,” I said.

  He grinned at me, a big platinum orthodontically enhanced grin. “I’m not a stranger,” he said. “I’m a friend you haven’t met yet.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Why don’t we just cut to the chase—you give me the pamphlets, I politely refuse to talk to you, and then I close the door and throw them in the trash.”

  He held out his hand. “I’m Tom.”

  “You’re leaving,” I corrected.

  “I used to be bitter, too. I’d go to work in the mornings and come home to an empty house and eat half a can of soup and wonder why I had even been put on this earth. I thought I had no one, but myself—”

  “And then you offered Jesus the rest of your soup,” I finished. “Look, I’m an atheist.”

  “It’s not too late to find your faith.”

  “What you really mean is that it’s not too late for me to find your faith,” I answered, scooping up Oliver as he made a mad dash for the open door. “You know what I believe? That religion served its historical purpose—it was a set of laws to live by, before we had a justice system. But even when it starts out with the best of intentions, things get screwed up, don’t they? A group bands together because they believe the same things, and then somehow that gets perverted so that anyone who doesn’t believe those things is wrong. Honestly, even if there was a religion founded on the principle of doing good for other people, or helping them with their personal rights, like I do every day, I wouldn’t join . . . because it would still be a religion.”

  I had rendered Tom speechless. This was probably the most heated debate he’d had in months; mostly, he’d have doors closed in his face. Inside my house, the phone began to ring.

  Tom pushed a pamphlet into my hand and beat a hasty retreat off my porch. As I closed the door behind him I glanced down at the cover.

  GOD + YOU = ∞

  “If there’s any math to religion,” I muttered, “it’s division.” I slipped the pamphlet onto the liner of newspaper beneath Oliver’s cage as I hurried to the phone, which was on the verge of rolling over to the answering machine. “Hello?”

  The voice was unfamiliar, halting. “Is Maggie Bloom there?”

  “Speaking.” I geared up for a zinger to put a telemarketer in her place for disturbing me on a Sunday morning.

  As it turned out, she wasn’t a telemarketer. She was a nurse at Concord Hospital, and she was calling because I had been listed as Shay Bourne’s emergency contact, and an emergency had occurred.

  Lucius

  You would not have believed it possible, but when CO Smythe came back to life, things actually got worse.

  The remaining officers had to give statements to the warden about the stabbing. We were kept in lockdown, and the next day a team of officers who did not normally work on I-tier were brought in on duty. They started our one-hour rotations on the exercise yard and the shower, and Pogie was the first to go.

  I hadn’t showered since the stabbing, although the COs had given both Shay and me a fresh set of scrubs. We had gotten Smythe’s blood on us, and a quick wash in our cell basins didn’t go very far to making me feel clean. While we were waiting for our turns in the shower, Alma showed up to give us both blood tests. They tested anyone who came in contact with an inmate’s blood, and since that included CO Smythe, his blood apparently was only one step removed from questionable. Shay was moved in handcuffs, ankle cuffs, and a belly chain to a holding room outside the tier, where Alma was waiting.

  In the middle of all this, Pogie slipped in the shower. He lay there, moaning about his back. Two more COs dragged in the backboard and handcuffed Pogie to it, then carried him to a gurney so he could be transported all the way to Medical. But because they were not used to I-tier, and because COs are supposed to follow us, not lead, they did not realize that Shay was already being brought back to the tier at the same time Pogie was going out.

  Tragedies happen in a split second in prison; that’s all it took for Pogie to use the handcuff key he’d hidden to free himself, jump off the backboard, grab it, and slam it into Shay’s skull, so that he flew face-first into the brick wall.

  “Weiss macht!” Pogie yelled—White pride!—which was how I realized Crash—from where he was still being kept in solitary—had used his connections to order a hit on Shay in retaliation for ratting him out and giving his hype kit to the COs. Sully’s attack on CO Smythe had just been collateral damage, meant to shake up the staffing on our tier so that part two of the plan could be carried out. And Pogie—a probate—had jumped at the chance to earn his bones by carrying out a murder sanctioned by the Aryan Brotherhood.

  Six hours after this fiasco, Alma returned to finish drawing my blood. I was taken to the holding cell and found her still shaken by what had happened, although she would not tell me anything—except that Shay had been taken to the hospital.

  When I saw something silver winking at me, I waited until Alma drew the needle from my arm. Then I put my head down between my knees.

  “You all right, sugar?” Alma asked.

  “Just feeling a little dizzy.” I let my fingers trail along the floor.

  If magicians are the best at sleight of hand, then inmates have to be a close second. As soon as I was back in my cell, I pulled my booty out of the seam in my scrubs where I’d hidden it. Pogie’s handcuff key was tiny, shiny, formed from the fastener of a manila envelope.

  I crawled beneath my bunk and wriggled the loose brick that concealed my prized possessions. In a small cardboard box were my bottles of paint and my Q-tip brushes. There were packets of candy, too, that I planned to extract pigment from in the future—a half-empty pack of M&M’s, a roll of LifeSavers, a few loose Starbursts. I unwrapped one of the Starbursts, the orange one that tasted like St. Joseph children’s aspirin, and kneaded the square with my thumbs until the taffy became pliable. I pressed the handcuff key into the center, then reshaped a careful square and folded it into its original wrapping.

  I did not like the thought of profiting in some way from an incident that had hurt Shay so badly, but I was also a realist. When Shay ran out of his nine lives and I was left alone, I would need all the help I could get.

  Maggie

  Even if I hadn’t been listed as Shay Bourne’s emergency contact, I would have found him quickly enough at the hospital: he was the only patient with armed guards standing outside his door. I glanced at the officers, then turned my attention to the nurse at the desk. “Is he all right? What happened?”

  Father Michael had called me after the attack on CO Smythe and told me Shay hadn’t been hurt. Somewhere between now and then, however, something must have gone drastically wrong. I had tried calling the priest now, but he wasn’t answering his cell—I assumed he was on his way, that he’d been called, too.

  If Shay hadn’t been treated at the prison hospital, whatever had happened must’ve been pretty awful. Inmates weren’t moved off-site unless absolutely necessary, because of cost and security. With the hoopla Shay had generated outside the prison walls, it must have been a matter of life or death.

  Then again, maybe everything was when it came to Shay. Here I was literally shaking over the news that he’d been seriously injured, when I had spent yesterday filing motions that would streamline his execution.

  The nurse looked up at me. “He’s just come back from surgery.”

  “Surgery?”

  “Yes,” said a clipped British voice behind me. “And no, it wasn’t an appendectomy.”

  When I turned around, Dr. Gallagher was standing there.

  “Are you the only doctor who works here?”

  “It certainly feels that way sometimes. I’m happy to answer your questions. Mr. Bourne is my patient.”

  “He’s my client.”

  Dr. Gallagher glanced at the nurse and at the armed officers. “Why don’t we go somewhere to talk?”

  I followed him down the hall to a small family waiting lounge t