THE ANGEL AND ICE TRILOGY.

REDEMPTION.

RESTITUTION.

RETRIBUTION.

BY.

SWORD 'N QUIL.

(SUSANNE BECK).

REDEMPTION.

PART 1.

MY NAME IS Angel, and around here, I'm known as the woman who can get whatever you need. 'Here', actually, is the Rainwater Women's Correctional Facility, more commonly known as 'The Bog' because we're safely tucked away in a nice cedar forest hard by a cranberry bog. That's probably more than you wanted to know, but I promised myself when I started writing this that I'd try my best not to leave anything out and so now you know the name of our little community.

As you may have guessed by now, my name isn't really Angel either, but I'm gonna save us both a bunch of heartache and just stick to the name I'm known by here. Names are really important in the Bog. To get one means you've succeeded in mastering some metaphysical rite-of-passage where the rules and players aren't really known until after you've succeeded. One day, they're calling you by your real name and beating you up at every opportunity; the next, you're given some sort of status and the abuse seems to lessen. Oh, it never stops altogether, unless you're really lucky or really strong, but at least you can close your eyes at night reasonably sure that your body will be in pretty much the same working condition as it was before you went to sleep. And believe me, in a place like this, that's really important.

They say that I was given the name 'Angel' because of my innocent looks. And, looking in the mirror, I guess that's true enough, though I can tell you that the face looking back at me isn't the same one that came into the place five long years ago. Back then, my hair was really long and more red than blonde. My face was unlined and my figure could best be described, I suppose, as awkward young adult. Now my hair is short and blonde, my face has lines added by the sun and worry as much as by simple aging, and my body has muscles that would make even an aerobics instructor jealous.

My time here has certainly changed me, and not all of it for the better. But I'd like to think that I've been able to retain at least some of that youthful innocence that came into this place with me. And believe me when I tell you that that is very hard to hold onto here. I've seen good women become heartless killers in the Bog. I've seen strong women end their own lives at the end of a belt. There but for the grace of God, I guess.

I suppose that if I'm to keep to total honesty here, I might as well tell you why I got locked up in the first place. Back in 1978, I was convicted of murder. Of my husband, to be precise. Now, most women in the Bog will tell you they're here on a bum rap. I'm not one of them. I killed my husband. Oh, I didn't mean to, but, as someone or other has been known to say, dead is dead.

My story is pretty much the same as any other's. Just your basic small town girl desperate to get away, grabbing on the first coat-tail heading out of town. My ticket happened to be my high-school sweetheart; a sweet, if rather dull, boy who happened to land a job at some steel mill or other in Pittsburgh. He wanted company and I wanted out, so we eloped, found the first Justice of the Peace who would marry us without our parents' permission, and set up house in a run-down studio in Pittsburgh. If you could ignore the squadrons of cockroaches who shared our apartment with us, noisy neighbors and middle-of-the-night shootings, our first six months together playing house like a couple of bona fide adults was pretty smooth. I managed to land a job as a secretary and general Gal Friday at a local warehouse while my husband worked nights at the mill. We didn't get to see each other all that much, but at the time, I was just so relieved at getting out from beneath the oppressive shadow of small town life that I didn't have time to be lonely.

Then Peter, my husband, started coming in later and later from his shift. He told me he was putting in a lot of overtime so he could buy us some nicer things, and I believed him. Then whole days went by without hearing from him and I began to suspect things weren't going the way they should. Then he'd come home from these binges smelling of sex and cheap booze and I realized that I'd made a very big mistake. But like many young women, and maybe you are one of them, I was too ashamed to reach out to my folks for help. Besides, I've always been an optimist and strong in my convictions. I thought I could change him. Of course, I was wrong.

What I called trying to change my wayward husband's habits for the better, Peter called nagging. He'd come home drunk, I'd start in on him, and the fights would begin. They weren't bad at first. Mostly yelling. Then he started becoming a really big man with his fists and I started getting to try out my budding storytelling abilities in explaining just how a cupboard door can manage to hit your face in the exact same spot three weeks in a row.

Now I know that there are plenty of you out there who are just shaking your heads and asking why I didn't just up and leave the bastard. I've asked myself that same question more times than I can count since coming to this place. All I can tell you, and myself, is that I don't have any good answers. I was young, and naive, and scared. But most of all, I was trying to hang onto any thread that would tell me that I hadn't just flushed my life down the proverbial toilet.

One evening, Peter came home smelling like a really bad whorehouse and demanding 'husband's rights' to my body. When I refused, he threw me down on the bed and started shredding my clothes. I snapped. I'd taken to sleeping with a baseball bat at the side of my bed for a sense of protection from intruders. I never thought I'd need to use it against my own husband. But use it I did. God knows, I didn't mean to kill him, just to stun him long enough to get away. But when that wood came into my hand, well . . . .I can't really explain it. It was like I knew exactly how to wield it as a weapon, and did. I can still remember the sound it made when it crashed down on his skull. It makes me physically sick to think of it to this day. He went limp and I pushed him off of me. He was dead before he hit the ground. At least that's what the coroner said at the trial, and I've got no reason to disbelieve him.

To say that I was completely devastated over what happened would be putting it mildly. At the time, though, it all seemed sort of surreal, like a really bad underground film. I had reached another crossroads in my life; a place where the most important decisions I've ever been faced with would have to be made. Should I run? We lived in a very bad neighborhood. Chances are, the police might have believed it was a simple burglary gone awry. Or should I stay and face up to the fact that I'd just taken a human life?

Maturity is a funny thing. You never know how it's going to come into your life. Most people just go along gaining maturity drop by drop as they grow older. They don't know they've fully matured until they find themselves making the same remark to another that their parents made to them. It's a scary moment. For me, maturity just walked up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. One moment, I was a sobbing young girl who had just killed her husband in self defense. The next moment, I was a full-blown adult, with a telephone in my hand, ready to take full responsibility for my actions.

Maturity isn't always everything it's cracked up to be, however. It doesn't come with an instruction manual, and believe me, it should. When the police came to my home, I did the worst thing I could ever have done. I confessed.

Now remember, I grew up in a small town where the worst crime we ever heard came from old Mrs. Simpson getting another ticket for driving on the wrong side of the road. I was raised to believe that the policeman was your friend and you should always be honest with him. So, that's what I went with.

I was handcuffed and in the back of a squad car before the idiocy of my actions bloomed fully in my brain.

Still, I hung onto that naive optimism for which I'm well known, even here, in a place as near to Hell as I ever hope to get. I mean, the evidence was clear, at least from my viewpoint. My clothes were ripped to shreds and I had bruises, old and new, littering my body bearing what I thought to be mute testimony to Peter's drunken actions.

I couldn't afford a lawyer, and was too mortified to call my parents, so they assigned me one. He was an older fellow who always sported a heavy growth of beard no matter how early in the day he came to see me. His suits were shiny, his shirts always stained, and he smelled of those red-striped mints people suck on to cover the scent of whiskey and cigarettes. He had a big mole on his right earlobe and whenever he would listen to me talk, he would rub at it constantly, as if trying, by sheer friction, to wear it away.

But still, I had faith in him and his big shiny briefcase and told him everything I could about the living Hell my life had become in the last six months. He always appeared distracted, as if listening to a sound that only he could hear. As I talked, he would scribble things down on his big yellow legal pad, using a mechanical pencil whose point invariably broke during the most important parts of my recitation. We would then spend the remaining time searching for another one. It got to be so bad that even the guards in the county jail where I was housed pending trial could barely cover their looks of sympathy when they'd bring him yet another pencil.

The days between my arrest and the trial dragged on interminably. Aside from talking to my lawyer, all I could do was sit in my tiny cell on my tiny cot and try to decipher the scribblings of the people who had been housed here before me. Jailhouse writings range from the profound to the sublime and if the day ever comes when I'm able to walk out of here as a free woman, I hope to write a thesis on them.

I won't go into the details of the trial. Suffice it to say that since I'm writing from within the hallowed halls of the Bog, the verdict didn't go quite as I'd hoped. My bruised body and torn clothes, which I had assumed would prove my case, were instead shown to be the marks of a valiant man's struggle against the rage of a jealous and deadly wife. My plea of self defense crumbled before my eyes and before I knew it, I was a felon, convicted of one count of second degree murder.

The part of me that was raised Catholic welcomed the verdict and subsequent sentence, seven years to life, as a justified penance for my sins. The rest of me grew red with rage. And believe me when I tell you, the color of rage is red. All bright and shining, like newly spilled blood, and impossible to think past once it has you trapped within its hungry grasp.

If red is the color of the enraged, the color of the despairing is green. Industrial green, as in the peeling, chipped paint adorning the interior of my newest home, Rainwater Women's Correctional Facility. It is the color of lost hopes and shattered dreams. It is the flat monochrome hue of the loss of innocence.

In the eight years since I first entered the battered steel doors here, that color has become more of a blessing than a curse, but when I first set eyes upon it, I experienced this strange feeling of a huge ocean wave, green and silty and violent, drawing up and over me and bearing me down with it to rest, broken, at the bottom of its oceanic home. In a weird sort of way, that sensation was almost familiar, as if it had happened to me before in some unknown past life.

Now, normally I'm not the type of person who believes in karma and past lives and astral projection, but if, from somewhere down deep in my subconscious I can dredge up a comfort in drowning, I'm more than happy to go with it. That feeling kept me sane those first few months of my new incarceration.

As I look back on the four pages I've managed to write amidst the clanks and yells of a humid jailhouse night, I realize that I've gone off on an incredible tangent. This story's not meant to be about me, not really. But, since I'm a large part of this narrative, being your person in the know, so to speak, I'll just continue on this way in the hopes that you won't find it terribly inane and boring in the extreme.

As I said before I drove down this long side road, I'm known here as the person who can get it for you. Now I know that makes me sound like I'm some big woman on campus, and, in point of fact, it does give me some sort of pull with the guards and prisoners alike, but mostly it means that a lot of my fellow inmates, big ones who would otherwise like to see what interesting shapes they could twist my nose into, instead come to me with the tiniest shard of respect shining in their eyes. Now, despite the depravity of my crime, at heart I'm still Ms. Small-Town-America. What this means, in plain English, is that I only get what could be gotten by your average citizen, and that in a totally legal way.

So, if they don't carry your brand of cigarettes in the commissary, or if you're wanting to wrangle a conjugal visit with your old man, or any one of a hundred other small things, I'm the person you come to see. Because I don't really have much need for money in the pen, I only mark the price slightly above cost. A girl's gotta make a living somehow, and for me, this is as good as any. I've been able to develop a good rapport with the guards, and the prisoners who'd normally have fun preying on a woman like me give me a wide berth. So it works out quite well for me, as you can guess.

I suppose, to keep this narrative complete, I should backtrack a little, once again, and tell you a little about the hierarchical structure of this particular state prison. In the eight years I've been here, I've seen two wardens grace the big office. The first, a woman by the name of Antonia Davis, was every writer's dream, if he or she were trying to think up a stereotypical warden for a revival of one of those horrid nineteen fifties Women in Prison movies. Her blonde hair was always kept in the most severe of buns and her lips were always heavily glossed with a color red more common to fire engines and ladies of the evening than blushing passion. She wore her uniforms at least two sizes too small, as if to show us by the very size of her 'assets' how qualified she was to be the top sow in the pen. She was also known to have a voracious appetite, tending toward nubile young blondes fresh off the streets. As a member of that particular genus, I always found it a bit miraculous that I never came under her scrutiny. In this one thing, I consider myself well blessed, since her conquests never did fare well once she tired of them.

Antonia was the darling of the prison gangs, a subject which I shall delve into with a great deal more detail latter in this missive. She curried their favor with a passion, and they, hers. Suffice it to say, for now, that when Antonia got over her latest convict du jour, she'd toss the leavings to her prison pets. What was left after they were through wasn't pretty.

The warden's downfall came when she let her hormones rule her mind and picked the wrong prisoner to love and leave.

You may remember, if you've been around town long enough, the story of one Missy Gaelen, a State Senator's daughter who was caught buying the wrong drug from the wrong dealer in a huge police sting. Not all of the mighty Senator Gaelen's money or prestige could get his daughter out of the trap of her own making, though he did manage to get her sentence reduced from five to ten down to two with one served. Nothing, however, could prevent her from being incarcerated in the Bog, and therefore coming under the appreciative and predatory stare of one Antonia Davis.

That Missy was a beauty there is no doubt. Tall and thin, she had a shock of white blonde hair tumbling in glorious waves down her back and deep green eyes that seemed to melt you even as they looked into the depths of your soul before finding you wanting and moving on. She was also so hooked on the eight-balls that consumed her existence that her beauty paled in comparison to her ravenous need.

Warden Davis hooked her talons into Missy right quick, discovering the quickest path to the young beauty's heart and trading drugs for sexual favors. At two months, the liaison lasted longer by far than any of Antonia's past conquests had, but in the end, she found her concubine wanting and tossed her into the tank with her pet sharks, daring them to do their worst. The repeated beatings and rough sex didn't do the young woman in. Rather, it was the abrupt loss of her drugs that cost her her life. She had turned up missing from the head count one evening, and by the next morning, was found in the laundry room, cold and stiff as the sheets which she had wrapped around her in an hallucinogenic nightmare of drug deprivation. The cause of death was easily discovered and Warden Antonia Davis, defiler of the innocent and guilty alike, went out in a blaze of glory, found at her desk with her service revolver, something she loved to use in her games of sexual power, gripped in a cold, dead fist.

As payment for not using his considerable influence in closing down the whole she-bang, Senator Gaelen was allowed to choose the next warden. And choose he did, bringing in a man who had as much experience in the administration of a prison system as I do in chicken farming. Which is to say none. What he did have, this man by the name of William Wesley Morrison, was the Pastorship of the largest Pentecostal church in Pittsburgh and its surrounding environs.

William Morrison is a man who wears his religion, like a badge of office, on his sleeve. He is also the man who, through his gifts of oration, was able to get the Senator over that final hump and into the State House with a few votes to spare. Morrison had always expressed a fervent desire to 'minister' to a group of 'godless prisoners' and so, patronage being what it is in this country, his back was scratched quite nicely by the Senator from Pittsburgh as payment for services rendered.

The new broom swept through the Bog with a passion. Gone were the trappings of individuality so prized by the inmates. Bright orange jumpsuits, designed to stand out from the rest of society like the proverbial 'Scarlet A', became the new uniform of the damned. Cells were turned out, personal items removed and replaced with crucifixes and bibles. A framed rendering of the Ten Commandments hung in each and every room in the prison, as if to make sure that we knew exactly which rules we were breaking. Cosmetics, jewelry, radios and televisions were confiscated. Mealtimes were preceded by prayers and on Sundays, chapel worship was mandatory no matter what God you did, or didn't, believe in.

Lily white he isn't, despite the most careful of appearances. William Morrison, almost immediately upon being instated in his high office, sunk his fingers into many of the prison pies and has, over the years if the rumors are to be believed, made himself a very rich man. Coveting his neighbor's goods apparently isn't a commandment Morrison needs to follow, and if the prison grapevine is any indication, he'll soon be coming to a rude awakening. This too will be delved into later in this story, and with much satisfaction, I might add.

Beneath the Warden come the guards and unlike other prisons, our group is quite extraordinary. The Head Guard is a woman by the name of Sandra Pierce and to the prisoners, she's a godsend. Tall and broad of body, with arms a bodybuilder would envy, her physical presence alone is enough to intimidate all but the most depraved inmate. Underneath it all, though, she carries a heart that is compassionate, caring and considerate. Her hazel eyes are always twinkling, as if laughing at a joke whose punch line only she knows. Her fellow guards follow her example well or risk expulsion or worse. But, cutbacks in the prison system being what they are, there simply aren't enough people who are willing to risk daily danger for the meager pay they're offered.

And so, when all is said and done, it's the prisoners who rule the roost.

Prison gangs are a fact of life in most facilities across the world, and the Bog is no exception. The gangs are separated along racial lines, with the African Americans holding the top honors in terms of sheer size, followed closely by the whites, with the much smaller groups of Hispanics and Asians rounding out the top four.

Contrary to popular belief, not all prisoners are gang members. The top third of each gang is filled with predators, sexual and otherwise. Most of the rest are hero-worshippers and hangers on who use the gangs to give them a sort of status that they otherwise would not have. The bottom rung is comprised by 'prey'. By this, I mean young women who haven't been able, for whatever reason, to find a niche in prison society and so are preyed upon daily by the other inmates. Many of these women turn to the gang for protection against this systemic abuse and so are swallowed up, never realizing that their protectors often turn out to be worse than their nightmares ever were. These hollow-eyed women, resembling nothing so much as World War Two concentration camp victims, shuffle through prison life, merely existing day to day, subjected to the basest depravities their so called protectors see fit to heap upon them.

Young, innocent, naive and on the verge of an all out suicidal depression, I was destined to become one of those women. Only a chance encounter with an extraordinary woman saved me from my fate. Though it was five years ago now, I remember the facts as if the scene had only played out earlier this morning.

I was running. Running as if my life depended on it, which in a way, I suppose it did. The remains of my breakfast tray were soggy on my cotton scrubs and my lungs were heaving with the need to draw a full breath. I had always been quick, but the heavy tread of my three pursuers told me I didn't have long to seek escape.

"We're gonna get you, bitch!"

"He-ee-ere, fishy, fishy, fishy!"

The taunting shouts echoed down the deserted hallways, making me want to burst my eardrums just to stop the vibrations from pounding in my panicked brain.

My jittering eyes spied a soft spill of light coming from a doorway just up ahead, and I made it my beacon, running toward it for all I was worth. The door was finally in sight and I plunged through it, tripping over a mop handle and skidding across the polished floor on my knees, still gasping for breath. "Please," I sobbed to the gray-haired figure seated behind the desk, "you've got to help me. They're gonna kill me."

The woman looked up from her reading and her face creased into a friendly smile. "What's wrong, child? You look as if you've seen a ghost."

"They're gonna kill me. Please, you've gotta help me. Please, I beg you. I'll do anything."

The sounds of running footsteps and heaving breaths came closer, then stopped right outside the door of my sanctuary. The largest of my pursuers, a women by the incongruous name of Mouse, stepped through the door, advancing on me with a predatory grin. "Gotcha now, fish."

The gray-haired woman stood up slowly from her desk, all evidence of her smile gone from her rounded cheeks. "Get out of here, Mouse. Your friends too, or you'll find out just what it's like to be hunted down."

The grin fell from Mouse's face. I almost smiled at the sudden look of fear I saw there. Still, she squared her shoulders and thrust her chin out defiantly. "You can't hurt me, old woman."

"No? Try me."

I could have sworn I saw my rescuer grow fangs. I blinked, then rubbed my eyes, finally dismissing the illusion as a trick of the light.

Mouse's deep voice showed a sudden hint of petulance. "She was ours first. We saw her. We got dibs."

I felt a thrill of fear work its way through my guts, wondering if I had just jumped from the frying pan and into the fire. I kept my eyes steadily upon the rotund form of the gray-haired woman.

"She's in my home now, Mouse. You'll do well to remember which boundaries you can and cannot cross. Now go and take your friends with you."

After a long stare-down, Mouse finally capitulated, but not without a last parting shot at me. "You can't hide behind her skirts forever, little fish. One day you're gonna have to come outta hiding. And we'll be waiting." Flashing me an evil grin, she spun on her heel and collected her cronies with a jerk of her head.

I couldn't help the gasp of relief that expelled from between my lips and, upon hearing it, the friendly grin once again graced the face of my rescuer. Walking from her place behind her desk, she wrapped her black shawl more tightly about her shoulders, then reached down a soft hand to help pull me to my feet. I accepted the help gratefully. "Thank you," I said with all the heartfelt gratitude I had in me.

"Think nothing of it, child. I'm always happy to chase off those bullies." Adjusting her half glasses, she looked down at my food-spattered top. "What did you do that caused you to be wearing breakfast so early in the morning?"

I knew my cheeks flushed, I could feel the heat all the way down to my toes. "I . . .um . . .I guess I picked the wrong table to sit at this morning."

I had only been in the Bog for two weeks, and just four days out of the segregation unit that all new inmates are placed in upon first entering the prison. Since I had no friends to tell me the rules, I went down to breakfast with the rest and, after filling my tray with tasteless food, found an empty table tucked into a shadowed corner, figuring to both eat and observe quietly. Mouse and her friends had quickly changed my notion that anything in the Bog could ever be that easy.

My protector looked down at me with a knowing grin. "Happened to me a time or two. This place should come with an instruction manual." Her grin widened. "Maybe I'll write one. Sure to make me the darling of the new ones." Reaching out, she again took my hand in a gentle, warm clasp and led me over to a long, battle-scarred table, pulling out a wobbly seat and gently pushing me down into it. "Sit here and I'll get us some tea. Then we can talk like civilized adults. And believe you me, young one, that'll be a pleasant change."

As the older woman left, walking to a well hidden and highly illegal hot-plate, I took my first look around the room that was my haven. For the first time, I realized that I had somehow stumbled into the prison library. Three of the four walls in the small room were covered with floor to ceiling book cases, which were crammed with all manner of reading material, most of which were dog-eared and tattered, with broken spines and missing covers. Taking in a deep breath, I let the comforting scent of printer's ink and musty paper enter my lungs, calming my racing heart. I'd always loved the library, even as a small girl. I used to spend most of my free time there when I was younger, caught up in fantasies no self respecting small town girl would dare to have.

Returning to the table, her hands clasping steaming mugs of fragrant tea, the old woman set down the mugs, pulled out her own chair, and settled her corpulent frame down next to me. "What's your name, child?"

When I told her, a twinkle came into her dark eyes. "Here for killing your husband with a baseball bat, right?"

My eyes must have widened to the size of saucers. "Yes. How did you know?"

"Nothing's kept a secret for long in here, child. You'll learn soon enough that the prison grapevine is one of the most accurate sources of information in the Bog. Much better than the paper." She smiled again, placing a hand on top of my own. "We're kindred spirits then. I buried four of my own husbands and was working on a fifth before they caught me."

I let out a gasp, beyond horrified that five men would take to abusing such a sweet old lady. She looked to me like someone who should be sitting in a rocking chair in a big old home with a litter of happy grandchildren begging her for just one more story, their faces and hands smeared with homemade cookie crumbs. My second lesson came quickly that day. Looks can be deceiving.

The woman's smile turned hard. "I'm afraid I wasn't quite as bold about it as you were. Arsenic was my weapon of choice. Not quite so quick, but satisfyingly effective nevertheless."

The look of horror must have shown on my face, because the woman lost her smile. Her eyes took on a calculating look. "Don't get any notions in your head that you're better than me, child. I've heard the stories that you didn't mean to kill your beau. Just because I did doesn't make you any better than me. We're both stuck here for the duration, isn't that so?"

In a weird sort of way, the woman's words made sense and, after a moment, I let my revulsion drain from me, turning a weak smile to my benefactor before lifting my mug to sip my tea. Halfway to my lips, my hand paused, trembling.

The woman threw back her head and laughed, long and loud. "Don't worry, love. I'm not out to add you to my tally." Reaching up, she used a corner of her woolen shawl to dab at her tearing eyes. "Besides, you're much easier on the eyes than any of my husbands ever were."

And that's how I met the infamous Corinne Weaver, known as the Black Widow; a woman who married for money and killed for fun.

In her mid-sixties, Corinne had been behind bars for more than thirty years when we first met, making her both the oldest and longest incarcerated inmate in the Bog. She also had the distinction of being the first prisoner transferred after the prison was changed to female from male back in the late forties. Corrine was a cool and calculating woman who never expressed regret or remorse for her crimes. Indeed, she was known to say, and that often, that if she had the chance, she'd do it all over again. She enjoyed killing and the money it earned her.

But she could also be gentle, considerate, kind and extremely loyal. Though she would cheerfully admit that reformation was a lost cause on one such as her, she was a zealot when it came to the reforming of others. Most of the inmates in the Bog weren't murderers. Rather they were young women who had made stupid mistakes with their lives. Their short sentences would either reform them or make them worse than they ever were. That was the inmate's choice. And Corrine made it her sacred duty to set out and find as many as she could, to make sure they made the right choice.

Every day, the library would see at least two or three young women studying for their GED amidst the musty papers and the yelling inmates. There were even a few, like myself, who studied for college courses. Yes, as of this writing, yours truly is the proud owner of a Bachelor of Arts in American Literature and is only six credits shy of obtaining her MBA. Now, before you ask what possible use a killer like myself would have for an MBA, let me remind you of what I've said earlier. I'm an optimist. And one day, I'm going to get out of this place. Now, given that I've already lived off of the generosity of your tax dollars for five long years now, which would you rather have? Me, an able bodied, intelligent young female spending the rest of her life on state aid, or me, an able bodied, intelligent young female contributing to your local economy? Thought as much.

Corinne was a favorite of the guards, always able to lend a willing ear when troubles with husbands, lovers, children or finances abounded. Though she had killed her own husbands, she was a firm believer in the power of love and was known to give sage advice where matters of the heart were concerned. Her advice actually saved a number of marriages. She was also a financial wizard, somehow managing to retain the fortune obtained with the murder of her husbands. That fortune grew from behind bars, making her one of the richest women in Pittsburgh, a thought that brought her wild glee over the years. To Corinne, it didn't matter that she couldn't spend her money. All that mattered was that she was playing the system, and coming out ahead.

Though growing ever older and tending toward frailty, despite her rather rotund stature, Corinne was considered an untouchable inmate. Her library was inviolate and all within were under her protection for as long as they stayed within the safety of those four walls. Aside from earning the respect of most of the prisoners and all of the guards, it was also said (and I have since, to my joy, confirmed this to be truth) that she had the full protection of a prison legend who, though she wasn't in the prison at the time, had her finger firmly on the pulse of inmate life. To touch Corinne was to die slowly and no one wanted to risk that.

Though I was somewhat under her own protection, that blanket didn't extend far enough to cover me completely. What I'm absolutely sure of is that I got nowhere near the amount of abuse I was destined for, but even 'light' pummeling is no picnic, as I'm sure you've guessed.

It was the day after I had first met Corinne, and I was making my way back from a day spent in her pleasant company. I had even taken my lunch within the warm confines of the library. The tuna sandwich and tea she offered was the best meal I'd eaten in months and I licked every crumb and drank every drop offered, much to my new friend's amusement.

I had spent a long winter's day wrapped up in the wonderful world of Wuthering Heights, a book I'd never gotten to read in High School, and was thinking about what I'd read. That meant that I was missing what was going on around me and thus breaking another sacred prison rule: "Always be aware."

I made it back to my cell, oblivious of the knowing, sneering looks being cast my way by my fellow inmates. To my great surprise, the cell was empty. My cellmate, a young woman who had earned five years tax free housing for using an iron bar to beat up a fellow street walker who had invaded her 'corner', was usually camped out on her bunk, her nose glued to the television we used to be able to keep. In the past four days, I'd been told far more about the plots of various soap operas than I had ever wanted to learn. Checking the ever ticking clock above the head of my bunk, I noted that it was time for her favorite show, and spared a brief moment to wonder where she'd gotten off to. Not wanting to leave the fantasy world I'd created for myself in the library, I simply shrugged the mystery off and prepared to get into my bunk and take a brief nap before the trial of dinner.

A squeak of rubber on tile caused me to whirl around and my heart rose up into my throat as I saw Mouse and her two cronies standing just outside my cell, evil leers on their faces. Mouse and one of the women stepped inside, leaving the third to stand outside my cell and guard the hall.

I looked them both over carefully, slightly relieved to see their hands empty. My eyes darted around my cell in search for a weapon, but, of course, there was none to be found. Squaring my shoulders as best I could, I took in a deep breath and faced them, locking gazes with Mouse.

"Told ya we would getcha, fishie. Your little . . .friend . . .Corinne doesn't come out of that cave of hers, ya know. That's why we call her the Bat." Mouse cocked her head, her grin widening. "Maybe that's what we should call you, huh? You know a lot about bats, doncha."

"What do you want."