A Small Town Read online

  Also by Thomas Perry

  The Butcher’s Boy

  Metzger’s Dog

  Big Fish

  Island

  Sleeping Dogs

  Vanishing Act

  Dance for the Dead

  Shadow Woman

  The Face-Changers

  Blood Money

  Death Benefits

  Pursuit

  Dead Aim

  Nightlife

  Silence

  Fidelity

  Runner

  Strip

  The Informant

  Poison Flower

  The Boyfriend

  A String of Beads

  Forty Thieves

  The Old Man

  The Bomb Maker

  The Burglar

  THOMAS PERRY

  A SMALL TOWN

  A NOVEL

  Copyright © 2020 by Thomas Perry

  Cover design by Daniel Rembert

  Cover collage: town, Feifei Cui-Paoluzzo/Getty;

  background, Jonhy Blaze/Getty

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011, or [email protected].

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in Canada

  This book is set in 13-point Arno Pro by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH

  First Grove Atlantic edition: January 2020

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN 978-0-8021-4806-3

  eISBN 978-0-8021-4807-0

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  The Mysterious Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  20 21 22 23 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To my wife, Jo

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Thomas Perry

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Back Cover

  1

  As Beth Tiedemann packed Jack’s lunch, she occasionally looked up from the kitchen counter and out the window at the town. Most of the important parts of it just peeked up above the roofs of the small two-story houses like theirs. She could see the spires of the five churches—Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist—all lined up on the circular drive around the city park, and the old Tivoli movie theater, tall because it had a loge level high in the back where high school couples like her and Jack used to sit and misbehave. It wasn’t the sort of thing that she’d heard kids did now. That was still a time when a lot of people in town got married so they could have sex. She and Jack hadn’t been that way, but there wasn’t much indoor privacy available. She could also see the upper levels of the Holiday Inn outside town and the tower of city hall right in the center, but those were partially obscured by the thick summer foliage of the big trees along the parkway.

  She cut slices from the roast beef she had made for dinner yesterday, picked the best ones, and put them on the bread for Jack’s sandwich with the layers of lettuce and mayonnaise and some black pepper, then wrapped it in wax paper with perfect folds, like a present. She put two small thermoses in the box, one with cold milk and the other with hot coffee, because Jack was going in for the night shift, 7:00 p.m. until 7:00 a.m. Having him get sleepy was a huge worry to her.

  She hated that he worked at the prison. He wasn’t the sort of man to work as a prison guard. He was big and strong, and he had played left tackle for Weldonville when they were in school, but he wasn’t mean or a fighter. It was hard on him to be in the punishment business.

  It was hard on the whole town to be in the punishment business. She and Jack had been about thirteen when the men from the Federal Bureau of Prisons came to hold an informational meeting at city hall, but she remembered it, and if she hadn’t, her parents had talked about it enough so that she couldn’t misremember it. The government men had talked about Weldonville being one of the competing sites for the new federal facility. They knew a lot about the town—that the cattle grazing and mining that had given people a livelihood were long gone. Lots of people had taken to working away from town, driving long-haul trucks or commuting once a week from Denver or Colorado Springs. The prison would employ over a thousand people in government jobs in a facility that didn’t need to make a profit and could never go out of business or move to another country.

  A few days later the mayor had asked that the city have a vote to tell the local politicians what to do. People were eager for the jobs, so the politicians lobbied for the prison. Whether there really was a competition or not, the town of Weldonville got the prison. The government selected a contractor, and the contractor even included a few local people in the workforce, which kept them employed for five years. By the time they were laid off, the big, bright, brand-new prison was taking applications.

  Beth had been a little concerned when Jack Tiedemann applied for a job, and that concern only got worse with time. The money was good—Jack was twenty-eight and making more than her daddy had ever made working at the department store. But she felt the job was costing them something, just as it had cost the town. Weldonville didn’t really have an identity now that was separate. When people in surrounding cities and towns mentioned Weldonville, they didn’t mean the nice little Colorado town with the round park in the center and the old trees shading the grid of residential streets. They meant Weldonville Federal Penitentiary; just like when people said “Leavenworth,” they didn’t mean a city in Kansas.

  Since the subject had become important to her, she had noticed that the government seemed to prefer to build prisons in places like this, where the ground was flat and covered with fields of grain or weeds for miles in every direction. That was so if a prisoner ran away, he would have no place to hide.


  She loved Jack so much it hurt, and if she closed her eyes and pictured him in his guard uniform going inside the high-walled complex, she could make herself cry, even though she wasn’t a crier.

  The Bureau of Prisons men had said this would be a modern, limited-security facility for white-collar and nonviolent offenders. But a few years after the complex was finished and Jack was working there, something had changed. Or maybe just their story had changed. The supervisors said there were many more violent criminals and fewer tax evaders and insider traders and computer hackers than they had planned for. Some of the other prisons in the system were old and out-of-date, not suited to house more difficult prisoners. Because Weldonville was new and had been built to a higher standard, it was one of the only places they had that would work.

  Jack had found himself on details in the general prison population with a couple of other guards, all of them carrying only extendable batons and pepper spray because the thing prisons feared most was an inmate getting his hands on a guard’s gun.

  There were snipers in the guard towers and on the catwalks with M4 rifles, partly to protect those unarmed guards. Sometimes the man on the catwalk who had to be prepared to kill prisoners was Jack.

  She put the apple and the cupcake in Jack’s lunch box and was nearly ready to shut it. She looked up at the window again and saw that the pinks, oranges, and reds on the white wisps of cloud were losing their fire, and the night blues and blacks were waiting behind them. The night shift was coming, and she had only a few minutes.

  She reached into the drawer where she kept things like buttons and needles and took one of the invitations from a small stack. She carefully blotted her lipstick on the inside, and then looked at it. There was a clear impression of her lips. She knew it was a corny thing to do, but she didn’t care. She took the ballpoint pen lying next to her shopping list and wrote on the invitation, “Date at seven a.m.?” beneath the red kiss. She could feel herself blushing as she closed the invitation and put it in its small envelope and pushed it under the coffee thermos. She knew that would keep him awake. She shut and latched the lunch box.

  Jack came into the kitchen and gave her a gentle hug and a kiss on the back of her neck. She shivered and spun around to face him. “Your lunch is ready,” she said. He was wearing the blue pullover shirt she had bought him a week ago. It looked great on him. “Be careful,” she said. “Keep your eyes open and stay alert.”

  “No argument from me,” he said. “But it should be an easy night. After a couple of hours they’ll all be locked in their cells, and most of them will be asleep by midnight.”

  She kissed him, then pointed at the wall clock above the kitchen table. “You’d better get going.”

  She watched him lift the hanger from the coat hook on the door. It held his uniform, all starched and pressed by the cleaners: the tan short-sleeve shirt suitable for July 19 and the razor-creased green pants. The embroidered patches on the shoulders made him look like he was an important man.

  “See you in the morning.”

  “Bye,” she said. She got a little pleasure out of making it sound routine. In a few hours he’d open the little invitation and learn what she’d been thinking.

  2

  It was evening. The Weldonville Federal Penitentiary was down and quiet now, the head count finished and the inmates in their cells for the rest of the night. The day-shift guards were on their way to their cars, and the relief process was complete.

  Putting the inmates to bed at night and making them get up again in the morning were done during the overlap when both shifts of guards were inside the walls at once, because those were the times when friction was most likely to occur and the largest number of inmates were outside their cells. In the evening, inmates had to get up from what they were doing—sitting in classes, watching television, playing games—and as they filed along the cellblocks past one another, there was an opportunity for the kind of accidental jostling that caused resentment or even fights. All of them were about to be locked into their cells for the whole night alone with their thoughts, and at Weldonville, as in all federal prisons, the thoughts often ranged from tragic to insane.

  All of that was over for this day, July 19. The appropriate lines on all the papers on clipboards in the administrative wing had been checked and signed by the responsible duty officer in each section.

  The night shift consisted of fewer officers than the day shift because little supervision was required for the 2,500 inmates when they were locked up and asleep. Nobody had to be overseen or conducted anywhere or reprimanded or protected. Only forty-two officers were on duty during the night shift. There were also a doctor and two nurses and a staff of seven non-sworn personnel, who did things like ensure that the food and other supplies ordered for the next few days had been received, sorted, stored, and paid for, and administrative tasks like checking time cards to ensure that the workers’ hours were being reflected on the payroll and making employee schedules for the next month.

  Captain Gene Humphry, the executive officer for the night shift, made his first rounds at ten o’clock. He found that all inmates were accounted for and the prison staff was present. This hadn’t surprised him, because there were few absentees in July. The guards in the towers were alert, and the roving guards were patrolling the catwalks at appropriate intervals. He held a surprise locker inspection for the guards and was pleased.

  He always dreaded these locker inspections because he felt they were intrusive, but even more because he was afraid that someday he would find something—contraband for a prisoner or an unauthorized communication being smuggled outside, for instance. It would be easy to take the attitude that if you didn’t look, you wouldn’t see anything you didn’t want to know about. That was the way ranking officers at some correctional facilities he’d read about operated. That was also the way they got guards selling drugs, alcohol, and cell phones to inmates. He’d even heard of guards bringing in weapons. It was hard to fathom stupidity like that.

  Once again, Weldonville was clean. Humphry loved being the boss of a shift that had some professionalism to it. Every locker had the man’s personal belongings—car keys, cell phone, wallet, watch, the occasional pocketknife. That meant they weren’t carrying them on the cellblocks. He and his deputy, Scott, had gone through all of it, from the shoes on the locker floors to the pockets to the stuff on the shelves at the top, and found nothing that would cause him to make a comment in anyone’s file.

  When Humphry had taken the job, Weldonville had been planned as a low-to-medium-security prison for nonviolent offenders—people embezzling from the government and tax cheats. But that wasn’t who they had now. The vast majority now were violent criminals, the overflow from high-security facilities. He suspected that when the Bureau of Prisons had asked wardens to send Weldonville their excess, there had been quite a few inmates hand-selected from their worst-behaved lists.

  Humphry marched along the broad walkway in the center of the ground floor that the staff called Main Street. He walked with his head up and his shoulders back. His heels made a bright, hard click when they hit the polished concrete. He wasn’t going to tiptoe along. If any of the inmates in their cells could hear it through the steel doors, then it would do them good to hear the sound of honest, unapologetic strength. Weldonville was not the old-fashioned kind of facility that was designed to be ugly and threatening, but Weldonville was still a prison. If you resisted it, what would break first would be you.

  He reached the open stairs that rose toward the administration levels. There were only a few elevators in the complex. They were made for moving freight, not people, and they were isolated from the cellblocks and other areas where inmates roamed. In the hall at the top of the steps was a set of bars across his route. He walked to the electronic lock, inserted his key card, and tapped his code number into the keypad, and the bars moved aside almost silently, rolling on well-oiled wheels into a pocket in the wall. After he passed, a sensor in the mechanism
triggered the motor and made the gate roll back across the hall again and lock. He went through another gate at the top of the next set of stairs.

  After that barrier, he entered a hallway. He could see the Operations section office, where he worked. Often the section reminded him of the bridge of a ship, partly because of its location and partly because it was full of monitors and other instruments for watching and controlling the prison. As he approached the office, he heard an alarm beeping and a female electronic voice saying, “Disturbance on Cellblock C. Disturbance on Cellblock C,” over and over.

  He heard a crash bar disengage a lock, a steel door swing open, and then the sound of boots hitting the concrete floor. He ran toward the noise and turned the corner near Operations in time to see a squad—three in the vanguard and then two and two—running out the door and away down the hallway perpendicular to his. They were six guards and a sergeant to supervise them. He couldn’t help appraising their appearance. They wore uniforms like his, the starched khaki shirts and green creased pants, black boots, and black belts. They looked sharp, and they looked formidable. He felt proud.

  He turned away from them toward the Operations office and stepped inside. Before the door swung shut he heard the squad clattering down the stairs toward Cellblock C.

  Humphry stepped into Operations just as the intercom system went quiet again. He asked Paul Scott, “What’s up on Block C?”

  Scott was younger, only thirty-one, but he had an air of competence that reassured people, even Humphry, who was aware the quality had to be a good temperament and not extensive experience. Scott was a good man to have on a night shift because he was responsible. Night shifts at Weldonville consisted of very few men, so most of the time just Humphry and Scott were in Operations.

  “We’re not sure, sir. We could see on the monitor that two men were out of their cells. It looked like they somehow slipped out between the bed check and the general door lock. They looked to me like they were squaring off to fight. The trouble squad took off a minute ago.”