Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

‘What accident?’

She doesn’t seem to hear me. ‘I got free physiotherapy. Citizens don’t have a right to free health care, but prisoners do. The Eighth Amendment—it’s considered cruel and unusual punishment to withhold it. Can you believe that? My whole life I worked my ass off for health care. Turns out all I had to do was get myself thrown in jail.’

‘What accident?’ I ask again.

‘Ah.’ Penny picks up a pen and starts tapping it on the desk. ‘There are rules for prison guards. They can’t make you stand up for too long, they can’t deprive you of sleep, et cetera. It’s in the Geneva Convention. Not so for the other prisoners who, believe it or not, didn’t take kindly to having a former cop in their midst. For my own protection I was moved to a segregation unit with the child molesters. They needed protection, too. The other prisoners attack them, to feel righteous. Making themselves into heroes. You know?’

I think of the shed of tortured criminals in the backyard. ‘I know.’

‘But the paedophiles in seg don’t like me much either,’ Penny says, ‘because I’m there for murdering one of them. So they attack me. Always right after a meal, because there’s a lockdown after each fight and no one wants to go hungry. I got stabbed in the kitchen, punched in the shower, and one time someone tripped me at the top of the stairs. I went all the way down.’

Penny hasn’t gotten up from her swivel chair the whole time we’ve been talking. I’m starting to think she can’t. That would explain why she never leaves this room—she can’t go down the stairs. No wonder such a small woman still makes the floorboards creak.

‘You said it was an accident,’ I remind her.

‘Force of habit. That was how it was recorded in the logbooks. And once it’s in there, you can’t change it and you shouldn’t try. Arguing looks bad to the parole board. I was denied twice.’

You’d think a woman with her experience would know how to manipulate a parole board. Something clicks in my mind. There is another reason criminals turn themselves in. Not for fear, but to escape. A woman beaten by her husband might think she’s safer in prison. A man who’s made a powerful enemy might find freedom behind bars.

I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t concentrate … They can’t make you stand up for too long, they can’t deprive you of sleep, et cetera.

‘You didn’t feel guilty,’ I say. ‘You just didn’t want to look after a kid anymore.’

Penny shoots me a look that could turn people to stone. ‘Excuse me?’

‘That’s why you turned yourself in,’ I say. ‘That’s why you killed Swaize in the first place. Prison was your way out.’

Penny tries to get up, like she’s forgotten about her broken spine. She collapses back into the chair and nearly falls off it—grabs the edges just in time.

‘I love my son,’ she says, so hatefully she’s almost spitting.

‘Even after he locked you up here?’ I say. ‘He’s punishing you, right? For leaving him.’

Penny is trembling with fury. I must have reached the truth. People who are falsely accused get annoyed. People who are correctly accused get enraged.

‘Hey, I get it,’ I say, thinking of Kyle. ‘No judgement here. Kids can be a real pain in the ass. I—’

Penny flings her pen at me. I duck. The pen cracks against the wall behind me and rolls back under the bed, where she’ll never be able to reach it on her own.

‘Get out,’ she snaps.

‘No problem.’ I head for the door. I’ve wasted too much time up here already. She hasn’t helped me identify Samson’s killer, or told me anything I can use to get Thistle and the other prisoners out.

‘Wait. I’m sorry.’ Penny rolls her chair after me. Her poise is gone. She still looks pissed, but also afraid of being left alone. No wonder she spent an hour stalling me with a shaggy dog story.

‘I haven’t told you what happened after I was released,’ she says.

‘I gotta go. Your son gave me a case to crack.’ And Thistle is waiting for me to rescue her. ‘So unless you know something about Samson’s murder …’

Penny’s tongue is pinched between her teeth. She desperately wants me to stay, but she has nothing more to give up.

‘I’ll see you,’ I say.

‘No! Hang on.’

I pause in the doorway.

‘Take a closer look at the body,’ she says finally. ‘And then come back, so we can talk more.’

‘Why?’

She purses her lips, and says nothing.

Ten minutes later I’m in the editing room, clicking my way through the security systems. I do want to take another look at Samson’s body—but first, I need to work out how to turn off the motion detector on the driveway. If I can’t, the Guards will be alerted before Thistle and the other prisoners are half a mile away. They might catch up to us in the van. Even if we get away, the Guards will be long gone before Thistle’s colleagues come back to arrest them.

The labels are strings of random numbers. Unsearchable. Every time a rectangle goes dead in front of me, I realise that I’ve switched off a camera instead of the motion detector, and it takes a few precious seconds to turn it back on. If the Guards come down here before tonight, I don’t want them to notice anything has changed.

On one of the screens, someone has left the voting results from the subscribers open. Baby Killer is still in the lead, with more than two-thirds of the votes now. If I don’t get Thistle out of here soon, the Guards will kill her.

I click through the last of the switches. Now the motion detector is off. Theoretically.