Different Seasons - Stephen King [39]
As there are honest politicians on the outside-ones who stay bought-there are honest prison guards, and if you are a good judge of character and if you have some loot to spread around, I suppose it's possible that you could buy enough look-the-other-way to make a break. I'm not the man to tell you such a thing has never been done, but Andy Dufresne wasn't the man who could do it Because, as I've said, Norton was watching.
Andy knew it, and the screws knew it, too.
Nobody was going to nominate Andy for the Inside-Out program, not as long as Warden Norton was evaluating the nominations. And Andy was not the kind of man to try a casual Sid Nedeau type of escape.
If I had been him, the thought of that key would have tormented me endlessly. I would have been lucky to get two hours' worth of honest shuteye a night Buxton was less than thirty miles from Shawshank. So near and yet so far.
I still thought his best chance was to engage a lawyer and try for the retrial. Anything to get out from under Norton's thumb. Maybe Tommy Williams could be shut up by nothing more than a cushy furlough programme, but I wasn't entirely sure. Maybe a good old Mississippi hardass lawyer could crack him and maybe that lawyer wouldn't even have to work that hard. Williams had honestly liked Andy. Every now and then I'd bring these points up to Andy, who would only smile, his eyes far away, and say he was thinking about it.
Apparently he'd been thinking about a lot of other things, as well.
In 1975, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank. He hasn't been recaptured, and I don't think he ever will be. In fact, I don't think Andy Dufresne even exists anymore. But I think there's a man down in Zihuatanejo, Mexico named Peter Stevens. Probably running a very new small hotel in this year of our Lord 1977.
I'll tell you what I know and what I think; that's about all I can do, isn't it?
On 12 March 1975, the cell doors in Cellblock 5 opened at 6.30 a. m., as they do every morning around here except Sunday. And as they do every day except Sunday, the inmates of those cells stepped forward into the corridor and formed two lines as the cell doors slammed shut behind them. They walked up to the main cellblock gate, where they were counted off by two guards before being sent on down to the cafeteria for a breakfast of oatmeal, scrambled eggs, and fatty bacon.
All of this went according to routine until the count at the cellblock gate. There should have been twenty-nine. Instead, there were twenty-eight. After a call to the Captain of the Guards, Cellblock 5 was allowed to go to breakfast.
The Captain of the Guards, a not half-bad fellow named Richard Gonyar, and his assistant, a jolly prick named Dave Burkes, came down to Cellblock 5 right away.
Gonyar reopened the cell doors and he and Burkes went down the corridor together, dragging their sticks over the bars, their guns out. In a case like that what you usually have is someone who has been taken sick in the night, so sick he can't even step out of his cell in the morning. More rarely, someone has died or committed suicide.
But this time, they found a mystery instead of a sick man or a dead man. They found no man at all. There were fourteen cells in Cellblock 5, seven to a side, all fairly neat-restriction of visiting privileges is the penalty for a sloppy cell at Shawshank-and all very empty.
Gonyar's first assumption was that there had been a miscount or a practical joke. So instead