The Payback Man

“Hey, Doc, you okay in there?”

They jumped apart like a couple of guilty adolescents caught in the hayloft.

“Absolutely.” Eleanor opened the door the rest of the way. “Come in, Selma. You need to know what’s been going on and what we’re planning.”

Steve shook his head. He knew she saw the gesture, but whether she’d keep her mouth shut about Newman’s attack, he had no idea.

She shut the door behind Selma and leaned against it. “Okay, here’s the deal. Chadwick, here, knows enough about computers to set me up a database to track the cow program. It’s fairly complicated, and heaven knows we can’t afford to pay one of the computer geeks at the university to do it. Any problem with that?”

Selma looked from one to the other. “Nope. He’s working for you. You want him to dig a hole to China, he starts digging.”

“Will the others resent it?”

“Sure. Not much we can do about that.”

“I can handle the others,” Steve said quietly.

“Good. Then let’s get started,” Eleanor said. “What’s happening with the painters?”

“I am going to kick Sweet Daddy all the way to the mess hall at lunch,” Selma replied. “Other than that, we’re okay.”

“I thought the men were brown-bagging it.”

“Not until tomorrow. You know changes take time when you work for the state.”

“Okay. Tomorrow. Today, I’m the one going out for lunch. Raoul Torres is picking me up here at eleven-thirty. I’ll get Steve—Chadwick—started with what I want and leave him with it.”

“Fine.” Selma turned to leave.

“Leave the door open all the way, will you?” Eleanor said.

“Sure thing.”

The moment the CO left, Eleanor said to Steve in a businesslike tone, “I spent last night making notes about what I want in the database, but they’re very rough. I’m not precisely certain what should connect with what.”

“I’ll take a look at what you’re proposing, then I can make suggestions about changes and additions. Okay with you?” He kept his voice as businesslike as hers. No one overhearing them would think they’d had any sort of personal encounter.

“Be my guest.” She pulled a folded-up sheaf of lined yellow pages out of her jacket pocket and dropped it on the desk. “Can I bring you some lunch? The walk up to the cafeteria is going to be painful.”

He shook his head. “Cheeseburgers alone down here? Against the rules. Don’t worry. I’ll make it. I’m already feeling better.”

“I’m only an animal doctor, so I can’t prescribe for human beings, but I can offer some horse liniment that might help, so long as it’s our little secret. I use it myself for aches.”

“Thanks.”

She picked up the computer and placed it on the desk. “Good luck.”

“Right.”

He sat behind the desk and watched her walk out of the room, back straight, hair swinging. Sweet Daddy would call her “fine”—if he called her anything printable. Fine she was, and not only her sleek body. There was a directness, an honesty about her that he found disarming even as it worried him. That very directness might be her downfall. He wouldn’t be able to watch his back and hers, too, not if he got out of here safely.

Somebody had to look out for her, that was for certain.

At the door she turned. “You said not to forget you’re just like them. I can’t believe that.”

As she turned and walked out of sight, he said softly, “One difference. I’m innocent.”

ELEANOR HAD NO IDEA whether Steve had intended her to hear his comment or not. But she had heard, and now she wondered….

At eleven-thirty Raoul Torres’s dusty white minivan pulled up by the barn. She hurried toward it and opened the passenger-side door.

“Oh, sorry,” he said. “Just dump that stuff in the back.”

She scooped up a stuffed bear, a plastic dinosaur, six CDs for children, and a stack of books and papers and laid them on the seat behind, next to a pink child’s seat. She climbed in and fastened her seat belt.

“Where to?”

“Anywhere as long as it’s out of here,” Eleanor said as they headed down the driveway toward the open gates at the front of the farm.

“Rough morning?”

She ran a hand over her hair and leaned back against the headrest. “You might say that. Lard Ass Newman beat up on one of my guys last night, and the victim won’t let me say anything.”

“He’s right.”

“Why?” She turned in her seat so that she could see Raoul’s profile. “Why is everybody so afraid of rocking the boat? There are rules against that sort of thing.”

“You ever have a really bad teacher?”

“Of course. Most people have at least one.”

“But they go on teaching every year because the rules and regulations they serve under require such meticulous documentation to do anything about them, and they have such power to pass or fail you that you just endure it.”

She shrugged. “Yeah. I guess.”

“Ratchet that power up to about a million, and that’s how much power the COs have. The pay is lousy, the hours suck, certainly the ambiance, if you can call it that, is one step lower than the sewers of New York, and the people they are supposed to guard are dangerous. They have to have leeway to protect themselves. They have to be able to count on the support of the warden and administrators. Most of the people who work here are decent people trying to do a decent job. But sometimes even the good ones can be corrupted.”

“Power corrupts, I know.”

“Yeah, and these guys have almost absolute power. It’s a battle between good and evil, and mostly evil wins.”

“Can I avoid corruption?”

He grinned at her. “I don’t know. Can you?” He pulled into a second-rate strip mall and parked. “You like Tex-Mex?”

She nodded.

“Then let’s go stuff ourselves.”