Brimstone

This was his chance. Hugging the machine close to him, D'Agosta ran downhill as hard and fast as he could, leaping, ripping through brambles, stumbling, recovering, ru

D'Agosta kept ru

{ 83 }

Buck sat on the cot in his cell at the Manhattan Detention Center, listening and waiting. It was a modern, sterile facility, all white walls and fluorescent lighting, the lights recessed behind caged glass. Despite the fact that it was past midnight, he could hear a lot of noise from the other prisoners, who were banging on the bars, yelling, arguing, demanding lawyers. Some were shouting in unintelligible languages that sounded harsh, almost barbarous.

He'd been processed, fingerprinted, photographed, showered, given a change of clothes. He'd been fed, given a copy of the Times , been offered a phone to call a lawyer-and told absolutely nothing. It seemed he'd been in the cell forever. Every hour that passed turned the screw another notch. When would it begin? Is this what Christ felt, waiting to be brought before Pontius Pilate? He would have preferred almost anything-beating, torture, abuse-to this interminable wait. And this environment was sterile, suffocating. What was worse, he'd been given a cell to himself. His treatment was almost cruel in its courtesy. He wondered how much longer he could stand these people coming and going with his food: these people who never answered his questions, never looked him in the eye, never said a word.

He knelt to pray. When would it happen? When would the walls shake, the voices sound on high, the ground open to swallow the unclean? When would the screams of the damned fill the air, the kings and princes run to hide among the rocks, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse appear in the sky? He didn't even have a window to look out of, no way to see anything.

The suspense was literally killing him.

Yet another guard appeared: a large black man in a blue uniform, carrying a tray.

"What's this?" Buck asked, looking up.

No answer. The man opened the sliding tray in the bars, set it down, slid it in, shut the slot, turned, and walked away.

"What's happening out there?" Buck cried. "What's-?"

But the orderly had disappeared.

Buck rose and sat down again on the bunk. He looked at the food: a bagel with cream cheese and jelly; a chicken breast sitting in some congealed gravy; some grayish green beans and carrots; a dollop of hardening mashed potatoes. The sheer banality of it made him sick.

Now, above the usual prison sounds, he heard something else: voices, a clang, a sudden burst of shouting from the other prisoners. Buck stood up.

Was it starting? Was it starting at last?

Four police officers appeared down the hall, heavily armed, billy clubs swinging from their hips, swaggering in formation. For him: they were coming for him . He felt a tingle of anticipation. Something would happen now. It might be very hard. It would no doubt test him to the utmost. But whatever it was, he would accept it. It was part of God's great plan.

They halted outside his cell. He stared back at them, waiting. One stepped forward and read from a card clipped to a green folder.

"Wayne Paul Buck?"

He nodded, stiffening.

"You're to come with us."

"I'm ready," he said, defiantly but with quiet dignity.

The man unlocked the cell. The others stood back, guns at the ready.

"Step out, please. Turn around and place your hands behind your back."

He did as he was told. It was going to be bad, very bad: he could feel it. The cold steel of the cuffs went around his wrists, and there was a click: a portent of things to come.

"This way, sir."

Sir. The mocking was begi

They marched him silently down the hall to an elevator, rose a few floors, then down another sterile corridor to a gray metal door. They knocked.

"Come in," said a feminine voice.

The door opened, and Buck found himself in a small office with a metal desk, a single window looking out over the nightscape of lower Manhattan. Sitting at the desk was that one, the female cop who had led the centurions in to arrest him.

He stood proudly before her, unbowed. She was his Pontius Pilate.

She accepted the folder from the lead cop. "Have you had access to a lawyer?" she asked.

"I don't need a lawyer. God is my advocate." He noticed, for the first time, how pretty she was-and how young. She had a discreet bandage above her ear, where she had been hit with the rock. He had saved her from death.

The devil has many faces.

"As you wish." She rose, pulled her jacket off a hook, slid into it, then nodded to the policemen. "Is the marshal ready?"

"Yes, Captain."

"Let's go, then."

"Where?" Buck asked.

Her only answer was to lead the way down the hall. They took another elevator down and out through a maze of corridors into the yard, where an unmarked police car sat, idling, gleaming beneath a dozen sodium lamps. A uniformed cop was behind the wheel. A small, heavyset man in gray polyester stood beside the passenger door, hands clasped before him.

"You can uncuff him," Hayward said to the cops. "Put him in the back, please."

They uncuffed him, opened the door, eased him in. Meanwhile, Hayward was talking to the man in the suit, giving him the green folder and a clipboard. He signed the clipboard, handed it back to her, got in beside the driver, and slammed the door.

Now Hayward leaned in at the rear window. "You're probably wondering what's going to happen to you, Mr. Buck."

Buck felt a rush of emotion. This was it: he was being led away, taken to meet his end, his supreme moment. He was ready.

"This gentleman is a U.S. marshal, who is going to escort you by plane back to Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, where you are wanted for parole violation."

Buck sat there, stu

"Did you hear me?"

Buck did not acknowledge. It had to be a trick.

"The D.A. decided not to file any charges against you here in New York-too much trouble. And to tell you the truth, you didn't really do anything all that wrong, outside of exercising your right of free speech in a rather misguided way. We were lucky, avoided a riot, managed to disperse the crowd peacefully once you left. Everyone went home and the area's now fenced. Soon the Parks Department will be giving it a thorough cleaning and reseeding, which it needed anyway. So, you see, no real harm was done, and we felt it better to let the whole incident die a quiet death and be forgotten."

Buck listened, hardly able to believe his ears.

"And what about me?" he finally managed to say.

"Like I said, we're shipping you back to Oklahoma, where there's a parole officer really anxious to talk to you. We don't want you. They had a prior and wanted you back. Nice ending all around."