After Midnight, page 1
AFTER MIDNIGHT
Allan Leverone
© 2015 by Allan Leverone
Cover design by Elderlemon Design
All rights reserved as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976. No part of this publication may be used, reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents, some of which may be based in part on actual names, characters, places and incidents, either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is unintended and entirely coincidental.
Originally published 2015 by DarkFuse
Second eBook edition: 2017
1
The man finished tidying up his basement workshop and smiled, pleased with himself. A place for everything, and everything in its place.
Cleaning the workshop had been a simple task, since virtually nothing was out of place to begin with. Still, knowing his tools were all stored exactly where he wanted them gave the man peace of mind; a sense of accomplishment that he had to admit had little to do with actually accomplishing anything.
He glanced around the basement. Small hand tools—hammers, wrenches and the like—hung neatly from a gigantic pegboard bolted onto one basement wall, while larger power tools such as his belt sander and electric jigsaw were tucked away in specially constructed bins stacked neatly under his workbench. The basement floor had been swept and then swept again until the man felt confident he could eat off the concrete if he wanted to.
He nodded in satisfaction. The man’s impressive housekeeping skills were rarely put to use in the rest of the house, and the irony of this fact did not escape him. His wife called him “The Human Hurricane,” most of the time fondly, for his consistently demonstrated propensity for messing up a room within minutes of stepping foot in it.
But the rest of the house was different. That was Gina’s territory. The basement workshop was his. His wife rarely ventured down here, and when she did, it was only to express the obligatory admiration for one of his woodworking creations before retreating within minutes to her own sanctuary upstairs.
After one last look around—everything was still shipshape; nothing had defied the laws of physics by moving itself—the man walked briskly to the stairs and began climbing. He had told Gina he would watch a movie with her tonight, some sci-fi thing about a young girl who had to shoot flaming arrows at people in order to survive. Or something.
It didn’t sound like the man’s cup of tea, but even after all these years he loved Gina and wanted her to be happy. He preferred gritty crime dramas to fanciful accounts of futuristic worlds, or sparkly vampires, or whatever was currently in vogue, but he had been married plenty long enough to recognize the truth of the old adage, “Happy wife, Happy life.”
He would watch the movie.
Halfway up the stairs, and apropos of absolutely nothing, the man had a sudden thought. It came out of nowhere and arrived fully formed in his brain: he needed to sharpen his letter opener.
It was a ridiculous notion, at least in part because the letter opener would be at work, not here at home. Work was where he used it. He could picture its location perfectly, because he always kept the opener in exactly the same place: right side of his desk inside a little wooden basket Gina had given him years ago. In addition to the letter opener, the basket contained a multitude of pens, pencils and markers.
He shook his head and climbed one more step and then another thought struck him, again coming out of nowhere like a bolt of lightning and again fully formed. He should reach into the left front pocket of his pants.
He did so immediately, almost out of instinct, virtually no conscious thought involved. He blinked in surprise as his fingers closed around a metallic object with a short handle and long, dull blade tapering to a blunt-edged tip.
His letter opener.
The man withdrew it from his pocket and stared at it in slack-jawed wonder. Why the hell would he have brought the damn thing home?
To sharpen it, of course.
Ah.
To sharpen it. Of course.
But why now? Why was it so important to sharpen a fifty-year-old gold-plated commemorative letter opener when he had never once had occasion to do so in the entire time he had owned it?
And more to the point, how had it ended up in the man’s pocket? He must have put it there, undoubtedly in anticipation of sharpening it in his workshop tonight, but for the life of him, the man could not recall having done so. It was the sort of thing he should remember.
He stood motionless, halfway up the basement stairs, his movie night with Gina forgotten. It was critical he sharpen this important office tool; that was what he needed to keep foremost in his mind. The fact that he could not recall bringing the letter opener home was mildly interesting but ultimately irrelevant.
The man turned and retreated down the stairs, stepping with a sense of urgency to his workbench. He opened one of the drawers beneath it, removed a pair of plastic goggles and placed them on his face. He then opened a second drawer and pulled out a pair of work gloves, sliding his hands into them.
Next, he turned to his left, where an electric grinding wheel had been bolted to the wooden table. He lowered a reinforced glass shield mounted on a flexible arm until it hung suspended over the wheel.
He flipped a power switch and the grinding wheel powered up with a smooth whir. Within a second it was spinning at full RPMs, and the man carefully lowered the letter opener to the wheel, holding it firmly in both hands.
Tiny sparks began to shower off the surface. It looked like an ant-sized Fourth of July fireworks display. The man eased the length of the letter opener’s blade along the spinning wheel, then turned it over and repeated the process, paying careful attention to the tip. It was important the tip be honed to a razor-sharp point.
A moment later he was done. He flipped the power switch off and the grinding wheel whirred to a stop. The man slipped off his gloves and removed his goggles, being careful to replace each item in its appropriate drawer.
Then he examined the result of his labor.
It looked good; a fact that surprised the man not at all. He was an experienced woodworker/home repairer and when he started a job, he expected to complete it to his own high standards.
He had done exactly that.
The man slipped the letter opener back into his pocket, handling the little tool much more carefully now than he had a few moments ago. It was suddenly considerably more dangerous.
His work complete, the man returned to the stairs and began climbing, once again ready for his movie night with Gina. His previous unease regarding the letter opener and why he had removed it from his office was forgotten.
What difference did it make, anyway?
2
Mack Pender liked to think of himself as an administrator. A businessman. As the top law enforcement official at Bridgewater State Hospital, home to those Massachusetts inmates determined by an impartial justice system to be criminally insane, he couldn’t kid himself, though.
He was a prison warden.
Still, despite the fact that his biweekly paychecks arrived courtesy of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, “administrator” seemed a much more civilized title. To Mack, the term “warden” evoked images of 1930s black-and-white gangster films, of James Cagney talking tough and overacting inside Hollywood’s romanticized notion of prisons after shooting up the insides of banks with his tommy gun. The title just seemed dated.
And after nearly three decades on the job, the last half of which had been spent right here in the corner office at Bridgewater, Mack felt he had earned the right to picture himself however the hell he wanted.
As administrator, he had always felt it was critical his employees understand that they had the support of management, particularly in a high-stress environment like Bridgewater State Hospital. The fact that the residents of this facility were considered in the eyes of the law to be irresponsible for their own criminal actions—incapable of understanding right from wrong—made them more dangerous than typical inmates, not less.
One of the first things Mack had done after inheriting the administrator’s job back in 2000 was to sit down with every single staff member, one on one, and emphasize to them that his door was always open. He had done the same thing with all employees hired in the intervening years and intended to continue doing so as long as he was in charge.
The fact of the matter was, though, that Mack Pender’s open-door policy had yielded little in the way of actual visits from his staff over the last fifteen years. Prison guards—and that’s what they were, guards, no matter how big the Massachusetts Department of Corrections spelled out Hospital on the sign at the front gate—were first and foremost a part of the law enforcement community. And that community valued chain of command more than almost anything else. Prison guards simply weren’t wired to go to the Big Boss with their complaints.
Still, Mack Pender wasn’t one to be easily dissuaded from something he believed in. The open-door policy had been one of the keystones of his administration, and he applied it literally. Rarely was his office door closed.
Today, though, as he parked his car and strolled toward
He stopped a moment, confused, wondering where the hell that thought had come from. There wasn’t a single bit of business he needed to conduct privately, today or most other days.
After a moment, Mack resumed walking, shaking his head. Maybe he was overtired. Maybe it was time to get away. Gina had been bugging him to take a vacation; he hadn’t done so in years. Perhaps now was the time.
When he reached the door, Mack smiled warmly and nodded to the guard, intending to pause for a couple of minutes and pass the time of day with him. Then everything changed. For the second time in a matter of seconds, the warden halted in his tracks and shook his head, blinking in confusion.
He felt funny.
Not ill, exactly, just funny. Strange.
It made Mack forget all about the meaningless conversation he had intended to share with Officer Tommy Bradbury. Suddenly it became very important he get to his office. Close the door. Do something that at first blush shocked the hell out of him but after a moment’s reflection seemed utterly logical. Necessary, even.
Mack realized Tommy was talking to him, had been for several seconds now. He was saying something about the Patriots’ stupid offseason personnel moves: “…and they call Belichick a genius? Man, without Mayo that defense just isn’t up to par. It’s gonna be a long season if they can’t shut down the opposing quarterbacks.”
“Yeah, defense,” Mack agreed. “It’s the key to building a championship team.”
He didn’t give a damn about the New England Patriots, hadn’t watched an entire game from beginning to end in at least ten years. But it seemed that the local teams were a subject of unrelenting importance to most of his staff, so Mack had always made an effort to keep up, at least enough to speak with his people semi-intelligently on the subject of sports.
Not now, though. Now he had important duties to attend to. He noted Bradbury’s surprise at the fact he had resumed walking. Noted it but didn’t care.
“We’ll get ‘em next week,” he said to Tommy as he passed, too distracted to consider the fact that it was February and the Patriots’ season wouldn’t begin for another six months.
Tommy wrinkled his forehead in surprise but said nothing. Mack was glad. He could tell from Tommy’s response that he had said something wrong, but had wasted far too much time here at the front door already when he had time-critical business to take care of in his office.
Once inside the prison/hospital complex, Mack picked up his pace. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember what was so important he had to get started right away, but he knew it was a top priority and needed to be knocked out immediately.
He hit the outer office almost at a dead run, shoving the wooden door open without stopping. Without even slowing. It swung violently inward and nearly decapitated Mack’s longtime secretary, Nancy Bickford. The elderly lady was bent at the waist, leaning over a large filing cabinet that had been placed inopportunely next to the door. She managed to pull her head back just in the nick of time.
The rush of displaced air ruffled Nancy’s hair, giving her a rumpled appearance, which Mack barely noticed. It caused her also to glare severely at her boss, which Mack did notice.
He skidded to a stop with a distracted smile. “I’m sorry, Nancy, I had no idea you were right there. I hope I didn’t startle you.”
“Startle, yes. Injure, no. Fortunately. What’s your hurry? It’s not even eight a.m.”
Mack still could not remember why he was in such a rush to start the day. After a moment, he realized Nancy was gazing frankly at him, awaiting a response. It was like being a teenager forty years ago, dealing with his mother after getting caught red-handed with an unsmoked joint in his underwear drawer.
Finally he said, “Uh, just a busy day ahead of me, I guess. A lot to do. You know how it is.”
She continued to stare at him, eyebrows raised. The implication was clear: you’ve lost your mind and no amount of searching is going to get it back.
Instead of saying that, though, Nancy Bickford just shook her head and said, “All right, Tiger, go get ‘em. Just slow down, so you don’t kill me in the process.” Then she barked out a laugh and bent back over the filing cabinet.
Mack continued into his office, closing the door behind him, officially and irrevocably—for now—nullifying his open-door policy. He took two steps into the room before returning to the door and locking the knob. Today’s work is important. Mustn’t be disturbed.
He moved to the reinforced glass window looking out into Nancy’s antechamber and tugged on the little-used string to lower a set of cheap plastic blinds. As they fell, he observed Nancy Bickford looking up in surprise. He locked eyes with her for a half second and then Mack twisted the plastic wand hanging off the right edge of the blinds, levering them closed and ensuring his privacy.
He sighed in satisfaction and glanced around the room, anxious to get started.
He walked to his desk and sat behind it in his well-worn leather executive’s chair.
He then examined the clutter, not sure what he was looking for, but confident he would know it when he saw it.
There was a stack of paperwork roughly two inches high; a weekend’s worth of daily status reports on all inmates. Mack shook his head. These would have to be reviewed and signed off on at some point this morning, but they weren’t of a critical nature. They could wait.
There was an equipment requisition: for a television to replace the one in the guards’ break room that had finally burned out after twenty-some years. That could wait, too.
There was Mack’s desktop computer, which he powered on. It started whirring and clicking as it booted up.
There was an inbox and an outbox, filled with assorted evidence of the bureaucracy without which government enterprise could not possibly operate.
There was a stack of official correspondence, for some reason placed next to instead of inside the inbox, which up until quitting time yesterday had been held down by a gold letter opener with the words “1855–Bridgewater State Hospital–1955” stamped along both sides of the blade. The opener had been a commemorative item celebrating the prison/hospital’s one-hundredth anniversary and had been passed on to Mack by the previous warden, who had inherited it from his predecessor.
There was a—
Wait a minute.
Mack looked at the stack of correspondence. He reached into his pocket and removed the letter opener that had so recently sat atop the stack of papers, the one that had been so important that he sharpened it last night at home.
He placed it on his desk and examined it with interest.
The thing was in remarkably good condition for being a half-century old; certainly it had held up to the passage of time better than the facility for which it had been issued. Despite being in a near-constant state of remodeling, Bridgewater’s best days were well behind it, if they had ever existed at all.
Mack picked up the opener and ran his index finger along the cutting edge. Poked the tip. It wasn’t exactly razor-sharp, but it just might do.
He dropped it onto the surface of his desk with a clatter at the same time a brief knock came at his office door. “Warden Pender? Sir? Is everything all right?”
It was Nancy. Mack worked to control his impatience. He should have expected this. Nancy Bickford was an outstanding secretary: prompt, courteous and organized to a T. The office, and indeed, to a large extent the entire facility, ran as smoothly as it did thanks to her efforts.
And the reason things ran so smoothly was because Nancy was a creature of habit. Stern and forbidding in many ways, she was like an iron-fisted schoolteacher. So this departure from the norm—Mack’s closing and locking his office door—had thrown Nancy for a loop.
“Yes, Nancy, everything’s fine.” Mack raised his voice so it would carry through the closed door, doing his best to keep the impatience out of his voice. “It’s just that I really need to buckle down and get this project done.”
