Page 22 of Go First
“The guards call me Reverend Cox and ask me if I slept.I’ve been given everything short of a front door key.Isn’t that so, Mister Coates?It’s a special politeness that is all the sweeter for being so temporary.”
“You’ve got thirty seconds left of your visit,” said the older guard, stonily.
Cox shrugged.“Come again, Father.”
The older guard’s full name was Raymond Aloysius Trebannion Coates, though most folks, in the prison and out of it, simply called him Ray.He’d been walking tiers and unlocking chains for nearly thirty years, long enough that he could tell which inmates were going to break within a week and which would keep their noses clean until parole.He knew the bluffers from the hard men, the talkers from the true predators, the hustlers who knew how far to hustle.You couldn’t survive this job without developing a second sight.
And yet—today had rattled him.
After he’d escorted Cox back to his cell, Coates deliberately went back to the visit room and sat on the fixed chair, letting the echo of the conversation roll around inside his head.On the surface it had been a polite, almost philosophical exchange.But Ray had seen something that made the hair prickle on his forearms.Or heard it.Or sensed it.Hell, Ray Coates didn’t knowhowhe knew what he knew.He just knew what he knew, because he knew cons.
And that conversation felt staged.
Not in the way inmates sometimes put on a show for the cameras—shouting, strutting, playing tough for the benefit of their own egos, or to detract attention from therealbusiness of the moment, which might be a savage beat-down for some guy whose face didn’t fit, or the landing of a heroin-laden drone on the ball court.No.This was subtler.A script between two men, each line weighed, delivered, received.Like actors rehearsing.Self-conscious, every gesture carrying more meaning than it should have.
It was just plain wrong.
Convicts lost their self-consciousness.Always.Didn’t matter if you were doing a month for calling the judge a jerk-off, serving life without parole or waiting for the needle.The routines crushed it out of you.Cells with no doors, only bars; cameras staring down from every angle; guards always watching, and if not guards, then the other cons.Everything you did was observed, judged, catalogued, ranked, probed and tested.
But Cox and the chaplain… no.Their words had been chosen too carefully.Their silences too deliberate.They had been playing to someone.
Ray rubbed his jaw.He didn’t like it.
What was that business about Santos visiting a few of the residents?Ray had seen the roster of scheduled visits for this week and the next.And Santos had got squeezed in today by dint of some special favour: the Governor had a weakness for clergy, especially the earnest, intellectual kind.Their presence around the prison allowed him to believe he was doing some good for humanity, not just running a warehouse for bad guys.So that accounted for today.But Santos hadn’t asked to see any other inmates.There was nothing on the cards for next week.
That wasn’t really suspicious on its own.But it wasn’t on its own.
He remembered how Cox had sat: straight-backed, regal almost, chains rattling like stage props instead of restraints.The way Santos had leaned in at precise moments, not too close, not too far.They had apparently never met before, and yet they seemed to know each other.There had been no fumbling, no nervousness, not even the natural interruptions of two men talking.It had flowed with an awkward rhythm Ray had only ever seen in one other place—on a stage.
And flowed into such strange places, too.Jewish terrorists hiding daggers inside fish, under tables.What the hell?And what was with those answers that missed the question, but only by a few milimetres?Q: Is there anything I can bring in?A: I have everything in place now. That wasn’t the answer.The answer would be, ‘No thanks, I don’t need anything.’Wouldn’t it?
He walked back to the control desk, signed to confirm that Cox was back on his tier, then lingered by the monitors.The camera outside Cox’s cell showed him at the bars, just standing there, like some large beast of the forest, not moving, not watching, barely even blinking. Most of the men, after a visit… Well, itchangedthem.It didn’t matter who it was who’d visited.Could be a loved one.Could be a cop, some detective hell-bent on keeping them locked up for even longer.Could be a lawyer with a bill and some bad news. Whoever it was, this brief bit of contact with the outside world, with this alternative plane of existence, got them all discombobulated.Shook up and stirred.Out of sorts.So much so that some of the Life Without guys, they stopped having visitors altogether.Easier that way, forget you had a family, friends, a job, a Life Before, instead of trying to leap between worlds, which created a jarring, grinding, psychic crunch, reminiscent of the old manual gearboxes.
But there was nothing like that going on with Cox.He wasn’t shook up. He looked… there was no other word for it.The guy lookedsatisfied.
And Ray Coates didn’t like that.
He lit a cigarette on the outside steps, ignoring the sign that forbade smoking within twenty feet of the entrance.He’d been doing it right here since the nineties and no one was going to stop him now.The smoke curled upward, sharp in his lungs, grounding him.
What was it about Cox?He moved with deliberation.He spoke with deliberation.He looked at the world as though it was still a stage upon which he had a role to play.And now here came this new chaplain, matching him line for line.
Ray tapped ash into the wind.
Those two were hiding something.
Not contraband.He’d been a guard too long to miss a pass of notes or pills or a sliver of sharpened glass.And it wasn’t just two men talking theology either— there were plenty of Bible experts in prison, not to mention scholars of the Koran and the Talmud.When you’re all out of options, God can seem like the answer.And He doesn’t bill you for His time.
But that conversation he just witnessed… Well, itwasn’ta conversation.That was the single, most notable thing about it.It wasn’t ‘I say X, and you say Y.’ It was more like a kind of ritual dance, like the Japanese tea ceremony he’d seen on National Geographic, each participant with his own set moves and phrases.They weren’t talking, they were...The word that sprang to mind waschecking.
Checking what?
Ray ground out the cigarette under his boot.He wasn’t paid to solve puzzles.He was paid to keep men alive until the state decided otherwise.But long years had taught him one thing: when something felt wrong, then itwaswrong.And you kept your eyes on it.Sure as shit kept your eyes on it.
CHAPTER NINE
Jakes sat with his elbows propped on the chipped laminate of the kitchen table, the blinds drawn tight against the fading daylight.The cheap aluminium slats rattled faintly whenever a truck passed three floors below, a thin percussion against the silence he needed.The monitor glowed in the dark like an altar.
Floor plans first.He had memorised them already, of course, but memorising was not the same as inhabiting.He needed the walls to become the inside of his skull.Every corridor, every emergency exit, every blind corner had to live there as naturally as the layout of his own bones.