The Orion Plan by Mark Alpert

Author:Mark Alpert
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466872233
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

SIXTEEN

It was 6:30 P.M., almost dinnertime, but the jail’s exercise yard was still as hot as an oven. The yard was about the size of a football field and covered with a layer of asphalt that had baked and blistered in the sun all day. Joe could feel its heat through the thin soles of his sneakers.

About two hundred inmates crowded the yard. A few dozen gathered around the basketball hoops, either playing ball or watching from the sidelines, but Joe and most of the other prisoners paced along the perimeter. Some walked briskly and others barely moved, but they all went counterclockwise. The blank gray walls of the Otis Bantum Correctional Center bordered three sides of the yard, and on the fourth side was a twenty-foot-high double-layer fence, with loops of razor wire trimming the top of the chain link. Through this fence Joe could see the perimeter road that ran along the shoreline of Rikers Island, and beyond that the foamy wavelets of the East River.

It was a seriously depressing view, but coming out here was better than staying in his cell. The past twenty-four hours had been horrendous, worse than any of the cold, wet, nasty days Joe had spent in Inwood Hill Park. When he’d lived in the park at least he’d had the option of leaving. He could clamber out of his box and brush the dirt off his pants and wander the streets until he found someplace better, or until he was just too tired to care. But in jail he had no choice. He had to endure every misery.

He also had to endure the presence of a cellmate, even though Joe was the only prisoner in the cell. The impostor who’d stolen Annabelle’s voice was still locked inside him. She stood behind his every thought, watching and waiting. He’d tried to push her out of his mind by engaging in random pointless tasks—multiplying large numbers in his head, remembering the lyrics to old songs, staring intently at the hundreds of faint lines on his palms—but no strategy worked for more than a few minutes. Soon he would hear her voice again, calling him Daddy, asking him if he was ready to listen to her plan. And if he closed his eyes for more than a second he would see her too, dressed in her blue hospital gown, tied at the back. He hadn’t slept at all since lights-out the night before, because he knew Annabelle would romp through his dreams.

It became easier to keep her at bay, though, after he went outside to the exercise yard. Just looking at the hazy sky made him feel a little stronger. And the yard wasn’t nearly as dangerous as Joe had feared. The other inmates kept their distance from him as they paced alongside the fence. Some of the black and Latino prisoners even nodded at him in a respectful way, as if they were silently thanking him. At first this puzzled the hell out of

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