Chapter 13: Yellow Tag

The Bureau van backed onto the dock at 5:20, and a Racine pickup swung in behind it and parked across the only way out.

The thin man in the Bulls cap climbed down with the laminated card in his hand.

The courier was a heavy man in a gray jacket.

He had hauled Crack dead to the crematorium for six years without once being asked a question.

"I only drive," he said, and he read all four signatures under the dock light.

Reiss signed the state hold into his tablet before the man had finished reading.

"Two a.m., the floor of his cell opened up," the Racine man told me, low.

"Three came through, and we put them down in the corridor."

"He was on the cot with his eyes open, Doc, and he was gone before we got to him."

"Del sent a Ranger along to stand the door with us," he added. "A kid of twenty-two. He's in my cab, and he's polite."

The biggest of the three lay under a tarp in the truck bed on forty pounds of ice.

I had called the Marine at five and asked him for one whole fold, kept cold and never frozen.

I had told him only that I needed to read it.

Nobody in eight years had put a bare hand on a fresh one.

I had a ring seated in a toe, a cabinet of bent metal and a hospital band grown into a wrist.

I did not trust what I thought they added up to.

The Racine truck pulled out for the church on Honore Street with the fold and the kid in it.

Deloris and the courier wheeled the tagger inside.

I opened the cold-room door, and Reiss took the doorway with his back to me.

"Two hours," I said, and I took my glove off.

[Reach: two hours. Carried: 6 hours. Capacity: 12.]

At 12:06 a.m. I lay on a steel cot in cell four with my boots off and a stick of cinnamon bark between my teeth.

The tagger was calm, and calm was a strange thing to be inside.

Down the corridor the Racine men had a radio on, a replay of last night's Bulls game, and he hummed over it.

I knew the hymn now.

It was the one they had sung at my father's funeral, and I felt him find the tune and settle into it.

At 12:41 a deputy slid a coffee through the slot.

"Bureau transfer at one-fifteen, Crew Lead," the deputy said. "Sally port, around back."

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