Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [99]
I couldn’t figure out why Hunsaker’s clique hadn’t made a move on him, especially when it came time to draw commissary, but they never did. For sure, Swift wasn’t scoring off his parents; he never had any visitors. There were things you could do to get stuff in there, but he didn’t have enough horsepower to rough it off, and I never caught him creeping anybody’s stash, either.
It didn’t add up. I started sleeping most of the day, like the meds were really doing me in. Of course, I tongue-palmed the fucking things whenever they gave them to me, and I stayed quiet enough not to court the hypo again. So I was awake at night. All night.
In the dark, I slitted my eyes and watched, trusting Lune and his patterns.
I was watching real late one night—I didn’t have a watch, and there was no clock in the dorm—when Swift sat up. He looked around, real careful. I figured, okay, now he was going to make his move; now I’d see where he scored all his stuff from.
He got up like he was going to the bathroom, a big white place with hard tile and no door. He walked right past it, straight to the dorm door. The one they locked every night.
He pulled down on the handle, very slow and careful. And the door opened! I couldn’t believe it. I knew that they locked that door every night. And that the late-shift guard would walk by the giant wire-meshed window that gave him a good view of the whole dorm every couple of hours or so. But Swift pulled the door closed behind him and he was gone.
In another minute, so was I, my bare feet soundless on the filthy linoleum as I stalked him down to a long, dark hall where the floor switched to carpet. I knew where that hall led—right to the part of the building where the big shots had their offices. I figured I knew what he was up to then. I’d always wished I could get in there one night and do a number on all that nice furniture and paintings and plants and trophies and … all of it.
But everything changed when I ghosted around a corner and saw Mr. Cormil. We had to call all the guards “mister” or “sir.” Cormil was the guy who was supposed to be cruising by the big window, looking at all the crazy fish in the concrete aquarium. But he wasn’t doing that. He was doing Swift.
He held Swift’s hand like he was his father. They walked along until Cormil opened one of the offices with a key from the big ring he wore on his belt. They went inside. Cormil left the door open, probably so he could hear if anyone was coming.
But he never heard me coming. They don’t call it reform school for nothing.
It didn’t look like rape. Not to me. Not to a kid my age. Not to a State-raised kid who’d seen rape. It looked like … like Swift on his knees, sucking Cormil off while the guard leaned forward and stroked the kid’s hair. And then it looked like Cormil pulling his cock out and helping Swift stand up. And bend over. He smeared some greasy stuff on his cock and fucked Swift in the ass. But slow and gentle, talking to him like a lover all the while.
It wasn’t anything like I knew rape to be. There was no gun. No knife. No fist. No threats.
It took a lot of years before I understood what I had seen that night.
As soon as we were alone the next morning, I told Lune. He just nodded—you could see his mind was somewhere else.
“How’d you know?” I badgered him.
“I didn’t,” he said. “But I knew there was a pattern. Swift had things. He had to get them from somewhere. He was … special. How come? I didn’t know. But I knew, if you watched him close enough, we’d find out.”
“You’re a dangerous motherfucker,” I told him.
Lune and I didn’t speak the same language. He didn’t get that I was showing him high respect. “I just want to find my real parents,” he said, sadly.
After that, the only hard part about busting out was waiting for Swift to visit Cormil again. And keeping Lune from screwing things up. He didn’t know how to move quiet. And he was so nervous,