anyone watching on CCTV, Pete always imagined it must look like a scene from a science fiction film, with one person sitting in an endless, empty environment in which the virtual surroundings had yet to be built around them.
He ran his fingertip over the surface of a desk that completely divided the room. It squeaked slightly. Everything here was clean, polished, sterile.
And then the room was silent again.
He waited.
When there was something awful that had to be faced, it was better to face it immediately; as bad as the event might be, it would occur regardless, and at least that way you wouldn’t have to endure the anticipation as well. Frank Carter understood that. Pete had visited him at least once a year since his incarceration, and the man always made him wait. There would be some petty delay back in the cell block—some manufactured incident. It was a statement of control, making it clear which of the two men was in charge of proceedings. The fact that Pete was the one who could leave afterward should have been reassuring, but it never was. He had nothing to offer Carter but diversion and entertainment. Only one of them had anything the other wanted, and they both knew it.
So he waited, like a good boy.
A few minutes later, the door on the far side of the desk was unlocked, and two prison guards entered, moving to either side of it. The doorway itself remained empty. The monster, as always, was taking his time to arrive.
There was the usual sense of unease as the moment approached. The escalation of the pulse. He’d long stopped trying to prepare questions for these meetings, as the words inevitably scattered into a jumble in his mind, like birds startled from a tree. But he forced his face into a blank expression and tried to keep as calm as possible. His upper body ached from the gym that morning.
Finally, Carter stepped into view.
He was dressed in pale blue overalls and was manacled at the hands and feet. Still sporting the familiar shaved head and ginger goatee. As always, he ducked slightly as he shuffled in, even though he didn’t need to. At six-foot-five and close to three hundred pounds, Carter was an enormous man, but he never missed an opportunity to make himself seem bigger.
Two more guards followed him in, escorting him to the chair on the far side of the desk. Then the four departed, leaving Pete alone with Carter. The door closing at the back of the room seemed like one of the loudest sounds he had ever heard.
Carter stared at him, amused.
“Good morning, Peter.”
“Frank,” Pete said. “You’re looking well.”
“Living well.” Carter patted his stomach, the chains that bound his wrists rattling softly. “Living very well indeed.”
Pete nodded. Whenever he visited, it always surprised him how Carter seemed to be not only surviving his incarceration but thriving on it. Much of his time appeared to have been spent in the prison gym, and yet, while he remained as physically formidable as he had been at the time of his arrest, there was also no denying that the years in prison had softened him in some way. He looked comfortable. Sitting here now, with his legs splayed and one beefy arm resting on the chair arm, he might have been a king lounging on a throne, surveying a courtier. It was as though, outside these walls, Carter had been a dangerous animal, angry and at war with the world, but caged in here with his celebrity status and coterie of fawning fans, he’d finally found a niche in which he could relax.
“You’re looking well too, Peter,” Carter said. “Eating well. Keeping in good shape, I see. How’s the family?”
“I don’t know,” Pete said. “How’s yours?”
The sparkle went out of Carter’s eyes at that. It was always a mistake to needle the man, but it was sometimes hard to resist, and Carter’s wife and son provided an easy target. Pete still remembered the look on Carter’s face as he’d listened to Jane Carter’s testimony playing in the court via video link. The man must have imagined she was too scared and broken to turn against him, but in the end she had, letting Pete into the extension and retracting the alibis she’d given her husband in the months before. His expression that day was similar to the one he wore now. However comfortable Carter might be in here, the hate he felt for his family had never