Mind Games

The other inmate never paused, didn’t even glance in Ray’s direction.

“Fuck off.”

“I’m getting the hell out of here!” Screaming it, he threw himself at the mesh.

“Hey, man.” The Black guy continued with his push-ups. “This crazy mofo’s interfering with my endorphins.”

“Settle down, Ray.”

But he wouldn’t, he couldn’t, and ended up back behind the door with the voices screaming in his head.

That night, he wept himself to sleep, where dreams chased him like hounds.

When he woke, shaking, the silence bit more viciously than the hounds.

He took his mind on a journey where he sat with a cold beer on the terrace of a fancy-ass house and looked out at the water. When it calmed him, finally calmed him, he reminded himself he could go wherever he wanted in his head.

He just had to find a way to use that to get the rest of him out.

He’d been born with a calculating and knowing mind, a special talent. It was time he started using it.

He let his mind wander, from cell to cell, from inmate to inmate. Some of what he picked up had his whole body shaking, and the scope of the push had blood dribbling from his nose, his ear.

He kept at it. The headache nearly made him scream, but he didn’t quit.

Ray Riggs was no quitter.

He shouldn’t even be here. They should never have caught him. Someone had to pay for that, and someone would. But first he had to survive.

So he ate what came through the slot. He didn’t fight when they came to the door, but shuffled down for his hour a day in the mesh cage and sat, brooding, thinking.

He read the guards, looking for openings, any opening, but found none. Just scattered thoughts about the next smoke break or money worries, or wives and women.

He read other inmates but found no hope of help from any. Just roiling rage, hopeless resignation, regrets, resentments.

And many he feared too much to read.

He sweated through the nights, so many voices, and sometimes dreamed of the face of the kid, the girl, the picture on the wall he’d taken.

She’d done this to him. He’d caught something about her, about her pointing the finger, from the detectives when they’d dragged him out of the motel.

But he’d been too shocked, too scared to catch more than a whiff.

Now he had time, nothing but time, to think back on it. To think of that smirking little girl.

She hadn’t been there—he knew that—so what the fuck.

But that picture on the wall. Hadn’t she looked right at him?

And for just a second, in the mirror when he had that goddamn watch in his hands …

Riggs shot up. He’d seen her. He’d seen that little bitch. In his head. Behind him in the mirror.

Both.

She had been there, just like he could go where he wanted in his head.

She was like him, that had to be it. She was like him. She’d seen his face, she’d watched what he’d done. And she’d used that to put him in this cell.