Page 7 of Road to Ruin
CHAPTER TWO
NIKITA
“Don’t fucking look at me, slut. Don’t blink. Don’t move. Don’t even fucking breathe.” Cruise Martin, convict, 43, serving year eight of his twenty-four-year sentence for murder, grinds the heel of his boot into the side of my head. I lie still on the polished linoleum, fingers spread wide, stomach flush with the cool surface of the floor. I’m calm. I don’t say anything. My heart’s beating slowly, despite the threat of extreme physical harm that hovers over me right now. Cruise is a big guy, one of the biggest in the Orleans Parish Prison. Not only is he huge, but he’s also extraordinarily violent. I know it’s crazy, but I’m fairly sure he can smell fear, so I just…turn it off.
“Don’t worry, Dr. Kelly. He’s not going to hurt you. He’s not stupid enough to add the years onto his sentence.” Mitch Davis peers through the tiny glass window in the door to my office that Cruise has barricaded with my desk. Mitch is one tough son of a bitch; if he wanted to, he could kick the door in with one swift, hard boot kick, but he’s not stupid. There are men inside the walls of this prison who do not react well to feeling cornered. If they feel like they’re backed into an indefensible position, they act rashly, wildly, without thinking. Given the box cutter Cruise is holding tightly in his hand, Mitch obviously wants to wait and see how Cruise is going to let the situation play out before he starts kicking anything.
“How long have I been treating you for, Cruise?” I ask evenly.
Cruise doesn’t say anything, He snarls under his breath, pressing his foot down harder against the side of my head.
“Four years. Every week for four years. That’s four hundred and eight sessions we’ve shared. Four hundred and eight hours we’ve spent in each other’s company, discussing very personal matters. Is there anyone else in the prison you feel comfortable discussing your most personal matters with, Cruise?” He’s told me in a round about way about the abuse he suffered as a child. He’s told me about his alcoholic mother, and the time when he was seven years old and his older brother was shot and died right in front of him. He’s told me how the smell of blood gives him an erection, and he doesn’t know why. I am the only person he would ever tell these things to in here. It took a full eighteen months before he opened up to me. I know he’s not going to kill me. I know, deep down inside that traumatized, dark, fucked-up mind of his, that he thinks of me as an ally.
A box cutter is still a box cutter, though. And the fact that he punched me in the face and threw me down to the floor when we came in here for his session today is what it is, too. He’s officially in the shit. No two ways about it.
“Why don’t you just shut your mouth, Doc? You’re not taking this situation seriously right now. You think I won’t kill you? You think I won’t slit your throat from ear to ear if I don’t get what I want?” His thin-soled plimsolls fill my view for a second. There’s blood marking the white band that runs around them, and it’s fresh. Must be mine.
“What exactly is it that you want, Cruise?” I ask. “You haven’t even told us yet. How can we give you something if we don’t know what it is?” My office is small—just enough room for a filing cabinet, a desk and two chairs. Cruise groans, tapping the base of the box cutter against the side of his head. He removes his foot from my head and begins to pace the length of the narrow space, muttering under his breath.
Technically I could get up now. I don’t. That would not be a smart move on my part, unless I want to get thrown to the floor again. Safer to stay put for a second and wait out this madness. Mitch makes eye contact with me through the glass window in the door and I can see how mad he is. As assistant warden in the prison, it’s his responsibility to make sure the staff are safe at all times. He’s told me repeatedly over the years that I need to have a guard in my office whenever I’m treating a patient, and I’ve always refused point blank.
Cruise’s groaning ascends in pitch, until he’s practically vibrating with anxiety. “I just need… I just need them to change it back,” he says, as if this should be obvious.
“Change what back?”
“The light bulb in my cell. It went out, and they replaced it.The new one’s darker, though. Dimmer. I should be able to read properly at night before lights out, but the light’s too faint. They did it to fuck with me. They did it to screw with me. Now I can’t read the letters my daughter sends.”
“The light bulbs are all sixty watts, Cruise,” Mitch says through the door. “Come on, man. You know that. We talked about it yesterday.”
Oh, great. So Mitch knew Cruise was hypersensitive about the light in his cell? That’s just fucking perfect. The guards are supposed to pass on information like that to me before a session, so I can monitor the inmate’s behavior. It probably seemed stupid to Mitch. An administrative complaint that didn’t make any sense whatsoever. To Cruise, however, who has such a small area of space to call his own inside this terrible machine, something like climate control or a change in lighting is major. It’s outside of his control and therefore something he’s certainly going to notice, if not become agitated about.
“I’m sure there’s just been a mistake,” I tell him. “We can go and get a new light bulb right now, if that’s what you want. You can pick the bulb and read the box, and you, Mr. Davis, and I will go and change it ourselves. Would that be okay?”
A compromise. An offering. A restoration of the small power he used to feel over his environment before he perceived its change. Cruise stops pacing and looks down at me. “It’s not that easy. I can’t just pick which light bulb.”
“Why not?”
He seems stumped by this. The three of us remain locked in our tense positions, me on the floor, Mitch leaning with his forehead pressed against the other side of my office door, and Cruise pressing the butt of his box cutter into the side of his head like it’s a gun and he’s about to pull the trigger.
Ten seconds.
Twenty seconds.
Thirty.
Mitch speaks. “You can pick it, I promise.”
Cruise stares at him suspiciously. “As soon as I walk through that door, you’re gonna Tase me and take me to the SHU.” Mitch can’t deny this. It’s protocol. Inmates can’t be allowed to assault members of staff whenever they feel like it, just because they’re having a tough time. “How many of you are out there?” Cruise asks. “I know it’s not just you.”
Mitch hesitates. “Me and two others. Barrows and Richards are here with me.”
Cruise’s shoulders slump. “Barrows is a cunt.”
“He probably thinks you’re a cunt, too, man.”
“Yeah. Probably.” He lowers the box cutter and retracts the blade. Looking down at me, it’s as though he’s seeing me laid out bruised and bloody on the floor for the first time. He has these breaks sometimes. He does things he can’t really remember correctly, aware of his actions but not really participating in them. He crosses the small space and holds out his hand, helping me up. “Sorry, Doc,” he says softly. “I just don’t like when they fuck with my shit.”
I’ve recommended Cruise be transferred to a psych facility a couple of times over the past few months. The prison board aren’t too generous with those kinds of transfers, though. Psych facilities are more comfortable. The inmates are given more freedom (where appropriate) and the buildings are typically newer, ergo less drafty, less worn, less dilapidated. A psych ward after Orleans Parish Prison would be like a five-star upgrade at a Sandals resort. Inmates have to be certifiably sick in order to get shipped out, and Cruise is only borderline neurotic. Will they change their minds now that he’s held me at the edge of a blade with his foot crushing my skull? Ideally I’d like to say yes, but the truth is that it’s unlikely. More’s the pity.
