Killer Move - Michael Marshall [1]
He folds his hands together over his stomach and looks cheerfully across at the man sitting bolt upright in one of his chairs. “So. Feeling good?”
“Very good, sir.”
“Not surprised. Been a long time.”
The man nods. He is privately of the opinion that only someone who has been incarcerated for sixteen years can have any understanding of how long a period that represents, but is aware this is not a fruitful direction for the discussion to take. During the course of preparing for three unsuccessful parole hearings, he has learned a good deal about fruitful discussion.
“Any questions? Any particular fears?”
“No sir. Not that I’m aware of. The counseling sessions have been real helpful.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Now, I know you do, but I’ve got to ask. You understand, and will fulfill, the conditions of your release and parole, blah blah blah?”
“Yes sir.”
“Don’t want to see you back here, right?”
“With respect, sir, the feeling is mutual.”
The warden laughs. In a way, he is sorry to see this prisoner leave. He is not the only malleable man among a population dominated by feral recidivists and borderline psychopaths, but he is intelligent and reasonable and has—most important—responded well to the program of rehabilitation that the warden has accentuated during his tenure; which is why the prisoner is sitting here now rather than being kicked unceremoniously back into the world like the rest of today’s lucky few. Hunter has expressed contrition for his crime—the murder of a twenty-eight-year-old woman—and exhibited a sustained understanding both of the conditions and circumstances that led to the event, and ways to avoid such triggers in the future. He has said he’s sorry and shown genuine awareness of what he is apologizing for. Nine years is an unusually long time to have lopped off a sentence, especially for a murder crime, and the warden feels proud on the man’s behalf.
Meanwhile, the man sits in front of him. Polite, silent, immobile as a rock.
“Anything else you want to discuss?”
“No sir. Except, well, just to say thank you.”
The warden stands, and the soon-to-be-ex–prisoner follows suit. “A pleasure. I just wish everyone in here could look forward to this kind of ending.”
“People get the endings they deserve, sir, maybe.”
The warden knows this isn’t even remotely true, but he reaches out and the two men shake. The warden’s hand is warm, a little damp. The other man’s is dry and cool.
The prisoner is escorted along a series of corridors. Some are the pathways that have circumscribed his universe for the best part of two decades, routes between mess hall and workshop and yard that echo with the shouts and cage rattling of men—thieves and killers, parole violators and pedophiles, carjackers and gangbangers anywhere from eighteen to seventy-one years in age—whose names and natures and varying degrees of moral deviance he has already started, with relief, to forget. A few call out as he passes. He ignores them. They’re ghosts, deep in the caves. They cannot hurt him now.
Subsequent corridors are foothills of the route out, the freedom side of iron gates and multiple locks. As these start to predominate, the man experiences moments in which it is difficult to maintain a flatness of emotion that has been hard-won. To walk these halls is to feel as if you are making unexpected headway in the endless maze in which you have spent a third of your life; to sense you may finally be escaping the madness that had colonized every corner of your mind—except for the tiny, central kernel in which a soul has crouched, interred in time, for a period long enough to hold four Olympic games.
In Holding & Release Hunter signs papers under the supervision of correctional officers who treat him differently now, but not so very differently. To them, as to the world outside, this period of time will never quite be over. Once a criminal, always so—especially when your crime was murder. Murder says you are not like the rest of us, or so it comforts us to pretend.
A clear plastic packet of possessions