Riven - Jerry B. Jenkins [158]
“I really need to get going, Gladys. Can we talk tomorrow?”
“We can, but you’re going to hear me right now. For a lot of years you’ve been known as the easy mark, the milquetoast man around this place.”
“I’ve worked on that.”
“And you’ve succeeded, at least with the inmates. But I’m talking about with your coworkers. I like to see a little fire in you.”
“Well, thank you. Can I go now?”
“Don’t ask, man. Just go. Be the new Thomas.”
Thomas had no idea what that was all about. He certainly didn’t feel new. He felt like a frustrated old man who’d been through the same thing so many times he could hardly imagine bearing it again.
And now he had this haunting encounter with the Heiress Murderer to plague him. Well, it was time to put God to the test once again. Apparently his first prayer about this man had been answered. There seemed to have been planted within Thomas some kernel of compassion or concern or care. But it meant nothing if the inmate never asked to see him again.
What kind of a policy was that anyway? Hire a chaplain, give him an office and a huge congregation, but don’t allow him to talk to anyone without their permission?
Craziness.
But in spite of himself, Thomas felt led to pray for the young man. But how? And for what exactly? God knew. And so Thomas’s petition took the form of simply repeating the inmate’s name to God, over and over.
The newspapers always called him by all three names.
Brady Wayne Darby.
55
Brady didn’t know what to make of how he was feeling.
First he was cold. He pressed his bare back up against the concrete block wall and endured the shock until a little warmth developed there. But he had to wrap his shins in his forearms and tuck his head between his knees to keep from shivering, and even that didn’t help much.
He hated this about himself, but his need for a cigarette was actually allowing him to forget what he had done, at least for a few seconds at a time. Brady even considered pleading with a passing guard, offering him anything for a smoke. But as he understood it, not even the staff was allowed to bring tobacco into the facility. He was going cold turkey and that’s all there was to it. And each time he got that into his brain, his body seemed to scream for nicotine all the more.
But then the horror of the murder came rushing back. How could it not? Desperate as Brady was to push it from himself and think of anything else, he could still smell the gunpowder, the blood.
He could still see Katie hurtling from the car in a torrent of flesh and gore.
He could still feel the cool pavement on his palms as he perched there, braying as his life too was ending.
All he wanted was to die, and if there was a way to accomplish that before three years passed, he would do it.
Brady was also lonely, but he couldn’t think of a person he wanted to talk to except Katie. That was so strange. He couldn’t expect a bit of sympathy from a soul, but did anyone understand that he had suffered a loss too? Yes, he had done it. He had murdered the Katie who so repelled him and had made clear that he had been duped, played, betrayed. But with her had gone the woman he had loved as he had never loved anyone else in his wretched life.
That was the Katie he missed, the one he could talk to, the one who teased him, flirted with him, held him, and kissed him.
Brady was smarter than people gave him credit for, evidenced by the high school teachers who always seemed surprised at his reading ability. But he had never considered himself an intellectual and so now wondered if there was a description for what had happened to him in all this.
Shock? Maybe. But not physical. He had not been injured. Yet as soon as he had moved from his hands and knees in the street to sit with his back to the borrowed car, it seemed his entire past and future passed before his mind’s eye. Nothing was unclear anymore. It was as if he had taken his best hit of dope ever.
Brady had thought of every family member, loved one, friend, acquaintance he had ever had.