“I’m scared,” he said in the small voice of a scared child. “Satan wants me.”

“Nothing spiritual, good or bad, can happen to you that you don’t allow,” I said. “I’ll come back and talk to you again in a few minutes. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said in an upbeat voice, soothed like a child.

When Rogers and I reached his desk, he sat down.

I stood across from him.

“What happened to make him go off like that?” he asked.

“I really couldn’t say. He was okay, and then all of a sudden he exploded. Does he often do that?”

“He does pretty much whatever he wants around here,” he said.

“Whatta you mean?”

He frowned. “Certain inmates are looked out for around here.”

“Who gives that kind of preferential treatment to an inmate as unstable as he is?”

“He’s not unstable. He’s a damn actor. Did you say anything about Johnson to him?”

I nodded. “Why?”

“That’s the only thing he seems to genuinely get upset about. I think he’s scared for real about that.”

“Do you think he had anything to do with it?”

“He had everything to do with Johnson. They were both down here constantly. So either he had something to do with it or it scared him shitless, excuse my language, because he didn’t.”

“Like if it he didn’t do it, it was done in part as a message to him?” I asked.

“Think about how it was done,” he said. “It was a message to someone.”

I nodded. “No doubt.”

Rotund yelled from down the hall, “Come on. What’s taking so long?”

“Just a minute,” Rogers yelled back.

I glanced at my watch. It was almost time for my meeting with Tom Daniels and Edward Stone.

“What’s gonna happen to Jacobson?”

“He’ll be taken to Medical, checked out, and probably taken to the isolation cell and sedated and watched for twenty-four hours. That is, unless Captain Skipper cuts him out. Then he could be sent back down here or who knows? There’s no telling. Hell, I just work here.”

“What’s the difference in being confined in one cell as opposed to another?”

“Not much during the day, but I’ve heard at night all sorts of weird shit happens in here.”

9

They looked like men sitting around a barber shop on Saturday morning. Nowhere to go. Nowhere they had to be. Nothing but time to kill. Inmates don’t have much, but what they have—time—they have a lot of.