Black Cat Weekly #90

Chapter 7-1

The Barb Goffman Presents series showcases

the best in modern mystery and crime stories,

The Barb Goffman Presents series showcases

the best in modern mystery and crime stories,

personally selected by one of the most acclaimed

personally selected by one of the most acclaimedshort stories authors and editors in the mystery

short stories authors and editors in the mysteryfield, Barb Goffman, for Black Cat Weekly.

field, Barb Goffman, for .

byI awake, just a moment too late. Her weight is already bearing down. I’m pinned beneath my thin blanket.

Please, God. Not again.

Please, God. Not again.I inhale, preparing to cry out, but a pillow is pressed into my face. My scream is muted. My precious breath wasted.

I kick and punch and thrash, but it barely moves her.

“I got ya,” she says to me. Her deep, gruff voice is muffled and distant. “I’ve gotcha now, Sis.”

I gasp for air that does not come. The rough pillowcase grows hot and moist against my mouth and nose. My lungs feel like they are going to both collapse and explode.

My strength ebbs. Frantic for oxygen, preoccupied only with breathing, I forget to resist.

The pillow lifts away.

I suck in great gulps of air, wheezing and hiccuping.

Crusher steps across the cell to her bunk.

Through the narrow rectangular window of our steel door, Officer Curtsy peers in at the spectacle. Her lips are stretched into a thin smirk; her cruel eyes are laughing.

My heart pounds. Tears stain my face.

I shriek at my cellmate. The words erupt so angry and hoarse they are nearly incoherent. “I’m NOT your dead sister!”

“Suck it up. It’s just bad chemistry.”

That’s what Officer Curtsy bellows whenever I complain about Crusher.

Crusher’s been my cellie for three weeks now, ever since my transfer to the Doddridge Valley Regional Jail, aka Heartbreak Holler. These stupid hicks in West Virginia must’ve thought it’d be funny to put the skinny young Black girl in with their biggest White bruiser.

Anyway, Curtsy’s right. Crusher and I do have bad chemistry. She’s pushy and sullen. Vulgar and witless. She snores and has terrible body odor. Word around the jail is she murdered her own sister for eating their last pepperoni roll.

doThey’d been roommates too.

However, as horrible as all that sounds, I wouldn’t even bother asking for a new cellmate if those were the sum of Crusher’s faults. After all, none of the offenders in C Block got here for their good behavior. Any woman capable of being a halfway decent cellie stays in the general-population housing unit, a dormitory where they’re free to move about, visiting other inmates and enjoying the yard. In a place full of bad apples, only the most rotten wind up in C Block’s six-by-eight cells.

No, the thing that makes it intolerable to bunk with Crusher is her habit of smothering me with her pillow every few nights.

I think she’s actually somnambulant when she does it. She straddles me on my bunk—she’s a stocky woman worthy of her nickname—and smashes the pillow into my face. As I struggle, she always mutters the same threat into my ear, “I got ya. I gotcha now, Sis.”

She repeats this over and over until I’m on the verge of blacking out, then suddenly stops. I don’t know what makes her quit. It certainly isn’t my feeble resistance. I’m a thinker, not a fighter.

And I know with absolute certainty that Officer Curtsy, the night shift guard, is aware of Crusher’s nocturnal assaults. More than once, as I heaved for breath after the pillow tumbled from my face, I saw her beady eyes retreat from the window in our cell door.

Crusher and Curtsy. Two burly, s******c, redheaded rednecks. They’re not related but appear like they should be. Like mirror images, Officer Curtsy’s free to roam the world, while inmate Crusher is caught inside the looking glass.

But Curtsy’s sadism is more refined than Crusher’s. Crusher is impulsive and primeval. From my minor in psychology, I suspect that Officer Curtsy is voyeuristic, bemused and satiated by Crusher’s psychotic behavior. And that means she will never agree to my reassignment requests.

neverNo, Officer Curtsy has deemed me deserving of a singular level of contempt. Like all the correctional officers, she’s envious of my college education, intimidated by my intellect.

And that’s why I’m wasting away here in C Block. Even the warden thinks I’m too intelligent for gen pop, too much of an escape risk. If it weren’t for overcrowding at the state prison, they’d probably send me there to serve my sentence under much tighter security. For now, though, C Block is the best they can do.

It’s just after ten o’clock and, unlike me, Crusher’s asleep. As usual, it took her awhile. She tossed and turned for hours, muttering half-formed, incomprehensible words with intonations that alternated between anxiety and anger. Or maybe it was anxiety and sorrow. I couldn’t tell. Anyway, she’s sound asleep now; that’s for sure. The ebb and flow of her ragged mouth breathing sounds like a wave of thick, infected mucous. It surges, gurgling and greenly, up a steep pinkish shore, crashes against a beach of craggy rocks, then quickly recedes, stuttering and spluttering, into the sucking, slimy depths from whence it came.

Right about now, I’d say she’s approaching high tide.

But it’s not the infernal noise that’s keeping me awake. I’m so desperate for shut-eye, I could sleep inside a bass drum during the firemen’s parade. No, it’s fear that’s keeping my leaden eyelids open. Fear of another panicked awakening. Of burning lungs, desperate for oxygen. Of sinking into oblivion, never to awaken again.

So, I lie here. Waiting. Watching. Listening. Marking each eternal, twenty-minute interval by the appearance of Officer Curtsy’s hopeful, hungry eyes, peering through our pane as she makes her rounds through C Block.

My sweet, sanity-sustaining siesta is interrupted by the curt command of the dayshift guard.

“Get up and cuff up, Salem.”

Like an automaton with a low battery, I roll off my bunk, stagger two steps to the door, and clasp my hands behind my back near the tray slot. The routine’s so engrained, I barely open my eyes.

The cold handcuffs click around my wrists. The bolt thunks open, and the door swings out.

A wonderful smell wafts into our dingy gray cell, stimulating my drowsy gray cells. It’s sweet, bright, and alcoholic, like a bowlful of minty, overripe fruit salad.

“That’s strange,” I think aloud, trying to discern its source. I’ve never known a correctional officer to wear perfume.

Crusher ambles in, grimy and perspirationous from her seven a.m. to three p.m. shift in the jail’s laundry. The delicious scent trails behind her.

The door closes, the bolt thunks back home, and each of us presents our cuffed wrists at the tray slot to regain the use of our arms.

I notice the pant leg of Crusher’s orange jumper is wet around one knee.

“Spill something on yourself?” I ask.

“What’s it to you?” Crusher mumbles. “Ain’t never spilled nothin’ on yourself before?”

“I just wondered what it was. It smells…nice.”

Crusher chuckles, rumbly and raspy. “You think thinner smells good? You one of those gals who like to huff it?”

Crusher covers her mouth and nose with her enormous hands and takes a few deep, rapid breaths. Her chuckle rumbles again.

Ignoring her pantomime, I say, “It smells sweet, like fingernail polish remover. Must be acetone.”

“Assa what?” Crusher retorts. “It’s just paint thinner, girl. Use it to get stains outta clothes from the paint shop. Pour a little on, rub it in, throw it in the wash. Been doin’ it for years, but today’s the first time it gushed on me like that.”

Crusher shakes a capsule from a squat glass bottle and tosses it in her mouth. As she washes it down with a jet of water from a squeeze bottle, I have an epiphany. A way to get Crusher out of my cell. And maybe get rid of Officer Curtsy too.

Crusher has a bad heart—both figuratively and literally. In addition to being spiteful and bad-tempered, she suffers from angina. She takes nitroglycerin four times a day to prevent chest pains.

I minored in psych, but majored in chemistry, so I know that acetone is a strong chemical solvent. That’s why it’s a common choice for removing paint. And given enough time and motivation, both of which I have in abundance, I realized it may be possible to use acetone to extract pure nitroglycerin from Crusher’s prescription.

And nitro would be very useful indeed. It’s one of the most powerful contact explosives. Alfred Nobel, also a chemist, figured out how to stabilize it with diatomaceous earth and invented dynamite. For my purpose, however, stabilization won’t be necessary. I want it to go boom at the smallest provocation.

boomI lie back down on my bunk. “How would you like to bust out?”

Crusher looks at me like I sprouted a second head. “Now I know you’ve been huffin’ somethin’.”

“I’ve found a way to escape,” I reply confidently. “But I need you to smuggle some paint thinner out of the laundry.”

Crusher starts to change out of her sweet yet sweaty jumper, so I turn over to face the block wall.

“And just how are you gonna use paint thinner to arrange this great escape?”

“If I mix it with some of your capsules, I can extract a liquid that will blow the cell door open.”

Crusher guffaws. “I ain’t givin’ you my meds to make some kinda voodoo magic potion crap.”

“It’s not magic,” I say to the wall. “It’s chemistry. And just because I’m Black, it doesn’t mean I practice voodoo. I’m from Pittsburgh, not Haiti.”

Crusher zips up her new jumper. “Just the same, I’m NOT interested. Now shut your crazy pie hole before I shut it up for you.”

About a month later, I’m lying on my bunk. It’s nearly time for our dinners to be delivered, but I’m staring straight into the wall again because Crusher’s using the toilet.

“Were you serious about what you said,” she suddenly asks. “You know, about bustin’ outta here?” Crusher, though never loquacious, seems to talk more often when there’s less risk of making eye contact.

My heart skips a beat. “Sure. Deadly serious.”

“Good.” A few seconds pass, and the toilet flushes. “How many of my capsules will it take?”

Hoping Crusher would have a change of heart, I’d already given that question some thought. Truth is, I have no idea what amount will be needed to blow open our cell door. And unfortunately, without access to the internet, there’s no way of finding out.

For some reason, the jail’s library doesn’t stock books on the manufacture and use of explosives.

So, somewhat arbitrarily, I settled on one gram. Each of Crusher’s capsules contained 6.5 milligrams of nitro, so I would need 150 of them.

I sit up on my bunk and share that number with Crusher.

“Bottle’s only got a hundred and twenty when it’s full,” she says solemnly. “That lasts me one month, taking four a day. There’s six days left this month, so I have around twenty-four on hand right now. Then I’ll get a new bottle on November first.”

“You could cut back,” I suggest. “Just take three a day. That’d save one a day, so by the end of next month we’d have, um…”

“Thirty-six,” Crusher interjects. “Plus, I’d get another new bottle in December, which would give us one-fifty-six.”