All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 188

188

Inside they waited while a secretary busied herself with a call from the Twenty-fifth Judicial Circuit. Patch heard talk of recusal and a change of judge as the woman made notes.

They waited in silence for twenty minutes, Patch content to leave his confines, to stare at the wood paneling, the patterned carpet and gold flag stands.

Blackjack handed him off as Warden Riley told him to lose the cuffs.

“We’re gentlemen,” Riley said, like they were to take iced tea overlooking his plantation of lost souls. He shook Patch’s hand a little too hard, his face a bluster of burst capillaries, hangdog eyes, and shaving nicks. He wore pinstripes, his shirt a little tight at the neck so surplus flesh spilled over like potted meat from a tube as he ushered Patch to sit before the mahogany desk.

Riley slumped into a brown leather chair, and as he moved to pull it in Patch saw the large wall behind him, and the single painting that hung in the center beneath a satin nickel wall light, like it had been placed there by God’s hand as a reminder.

There was a moment when Patch looked around, like a prank had been pulled on him.

And then he stared for a long time at the scene.

Main Street bursting with color he knew well. A diner took one side, a vista of rolling hills fed blue slate rooftops beneath a sunset that dazzled with two dozen hues.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Warden Riley said, turning to look. “There isn’t a person that comes in here that doesn’t spend a little time lost in that

painting.”

Patch had not seen it in near twenty years. His first sale, his touch crude, he saw only imperfections. Flecks where he had overloaded his brush, his hand heavy at the bleed of the sidewalk.

“Where did you find it?” Patch said, transfixed.

“Aileen. My wife. She decorated this office a half dozen times, picking swathes and swatches. That painting is the only constant. Hell, even my chair was chosen not to detract from it.”

Patch remembered to smile when the man laughed.

Riley rolled his shirtsleeves back over plump arms and reached for the letter on his desk. “You want a library service for the gentlemen on C

Level.”

“Yes, sir.”

Warden Riley leaned back, the chair creaking as he steepled his fingers and furrowed his brow, like what had already been decided still left room for further thought. Patch tried not to notice the lure of the painting, that low pain in his gut, in his bones. He tried not to see Sammy’s face as he worked, Saint’s as she stopped by with a plate because his mother could not care for him. He tried not to see Nix, Misty, the Mad House, and the town of Monta Clare. But mostly, when he lay down in thunderous silence each night, he tried not to see Charlotte.

“The Federal Bureau of Prisons makes certain recommendations.”

“Yes, sir,” Patch said, and tuned him out awhile, his mind on grinding out the past year, fixing so hard on keeping his head down low enough. Not reacting when a yard fight got out of hand, when a Kansas City biker got in his face and threw a hard right. Patch had dropped to a knee, spit his own blood in the dirt, and took a couple of kicks to the ribs. That night he’d coughed hard and knew his ribs were broken, didn’t say shit about it the next day, just went about his library work.

A week later the biker’s people wanted him involved in a hustle, Patch guessed at drugs. His resistance cost him a couple of teeth, knocked loose before Blackjack stopped it. That night Patch lay in his bunk, swallowed down his blood and watched the keening breeze chase shadow across his

cell till morning. A table and bench bolted to the wall. A steel basin and toilet without a lid. Sometimes the smell of shit flowed the walkway like a river, creeping beneath doorways like a reminder of the sewage among them.

“You’ve got a daughter, but she doesn’t visit?” Warden Riley said, flipping through a thin file, tutting at the crime like it was the first he’d heard of it. Like it had not been in the newspapers, the story of the known painter who had thrown a single punch at the beloved veterinarian who

struck his head as he fell back.

“And you go to chapel?”

“Yes, sir.”

Warden Riley nodded like it lent legitimacy to the ask. “In your letter you said you were willing to deliver books yourself, because we can’t spare the men. I daresay it’s not a place people want to spend more time than they need to.”

“I want…I turn to reading when times get hard. Lose yourself for a while, we all need that sometimes. People say they don’t deserve it, that none of us do. But we’re serving our time. A lot of us won’t breathe free air again. Reading isn’t a privilege, sir. I believe we all have the right to leave our problems and escape into another world, if only through the written word.” Patch heard the words leaving Cooper’s mouth as he spoke them verbatim. Six months practicing. A single shot would miss or hit.

“And the people on C Level—”

“Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as

in Christ God forgave you,” Patch said.

“Okay,” Warden Riley said.

That night Patch did not sleep.

The next day he would visit C Level.

Death row.

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