Chapter 7 - Forty Years of Watching
Sol Briggs was locked inside a medical examination room, sitting on a paper-covered bed. His blood pressure cuff had been left inflated until his fingers tingled. A young nurse named Harper Doyle finally loosened it.
"You're not sick," she said. "They asked me to make you look sick."
"That's a special kind of medicine."
Harper glanced at the hallway. "Inspector Grant is asking for you. They're telling her you're unstable."
Sol swallowed the anger rising in his throat. He had earned every year of his sentence; he'd killed a man in a robbery when he was thirty-two. Nothing would make that right. But forty years had taught him the difference between serving a sentence and letting other people disappear.
Andrew Finch had learned it much faster.
Three weeks earlier, the maintenance supervisor had slipped Sol a copy of a meal count. Eight names appeared on the kitchen order for the closed north annex. According to official records, those eight men had already been released or transferred.
Andrew had gone looking for the missing men. He hadn't come home.
Sol had made his own list, not on paper but by scratching dates into the underside of a battered checkers board in the recreation room. No one ever bothered to confiscate it. Marcus had laughed at Sol for keeping a board with three missing pieces.
"They're going to move the boy," Harper said.
Sol grabbed her wrist, then released it immediately. "Sorry. I need you to tell the inspector something."
"They'll fire me."
"Maybe. But they're going to hurt that child."
Harper held his gaze. Then she took a folded medical glove from her pocket.
"Write it on this," she said. "I'll get it out."
Sol wrote six words in tiny block letters: CHECK THE BOARD. COUNT THE MISSING.
The door opened before he could finish folding the glove.
May you like
Marcus stood on the threshold, flanked by a guard.
"Old man," he said quietly, "we need to talk about what you remember."
