If the colonel was upset by what had taken place, I couldn’t tell. He always operated at fever pitch, always yelling orders, always coming on way too strong.

I glanced over at Shutt. He looked as if he’d just killed a man. His whole body, which appeared to be trapped in adolescence, trembled.

“You okay?” I asked him while the colonel reported to the superintendent what had happened.

He didn’t look up, so I repeated the question. When he finally looked at me, he appeared to be in a trance, not knowing where he was.

“Huh?” he mumbled.

His pubescent face was a mask of shock and fear.

When he dropped his head again, I slid my chair over next to him. When I put my hand on his back, it actually shook from the force of the tremors running the length of his body.

“Colonel, Officer Shutt needs to see a doctor,” I said.

“What? No he doesn’t. Do you, son?”

Son didn’t respond. He just continued to stare at the floor.

“Call Medical, now,” I said, employing the colonel’s method of communication.

“Ah, hellfire, Chaplain. He’s been trained. He’ll be all right.”

“Call Medical now, or I will. And if I do, I’m going to declare a medical and psychological emergency. Then you can explain to them why you didn’t.”

The colonel snatched up the phone, pushed three buttons, and yelled into the receiver, “Get Medical to my office now.” Hanging up the phone, he looked back at me. “Chaplain, you need to get a few things straight about the way things work around here. If I wasn’t leaving this afternoon, I’d take you under my wing and make things real plain for you. But the short version is this: I—”

A quick knock on the door was followed by the entrance of the warden, Edward Stone, a deliberate-moving black man in an expensive suit.

“Colonel, Chaplain, Officer Shutt,” he said by way of greeting. His eyes stopped on Shutt. “Have you called Medical, Colonel?”

“Yeah, they should be here any minute,” he said curtly, as if he were talking to a new officer and not his boss.

“He’s obviously in shock,” Stone said. “How you holding up, Chaplain?”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said, my voice quivering slightly with the anger I felt toward Patterson. “Just ready to get cleaned up.”

“I heard how you responded to the, ah . . . situation very well. Control said you reacted with no hesitation. You never know until it comes down to it what a man will do in those kinds of situations. I know you’re new, but everybody’s trust for you just jumped up several notches. Isn’t that right, Colonel?”

“Yeah, you never know what a man will do in a crunch,” he said, careful to respond to Stone’s first comment and not his second.