Dana's Dilemma

Prologue Mel kissed me goodbye softly before she crept out of the house in the pre-dawn hours. She didn’t know I was awake...I couldn’t sleep. I was worried about her going all the way down to the Big Sandy Federal Penitentiary to talk to a lifer on a long shot to get the information she needed to find his own son, Ryan McClarnan, and arrest him for his crimes. I’ve been in supermax prisons before – not a place you want to make a habit of visiting. She’d never been inside any jail but the Muskingum County jail that she operates as the County Sheriff. Supermax penitentiaries are a beast. The first time I’d ever interviewed a convict in one, it was perspective changing. No one else was home. Kris, Mel’s twin sister, had stayed the night with her boyfriend and Kris’s teenagers, Beth and Cole, were staying out at the family farm with their grandparents. I got up and wandered into the family room on my crutches. I flipped channels on the TV for a while but nothing stuck. I’m not much of a TV person anyway and at 4:00 AM on a Saturday, long winded infomercials seemed to rule the airwaves. I turned the box off after a frustrating half hour. I went back into Mel’s den. She’d so graciously turned it into my bedroom while I was recuperating from the shooting incident that messed up my leg and botched up my life for a while on my last assignment. She’d said I could use her laptop and I decided to take her up on it. It was a bit of a trick to maneuver on crutches behind the desk she’d had to move to allow the sofa bed to be pulled out but, once I was back there, I planted myself for a while. I surfed the news sites and read all of the articles that caught my fancy. While I sat and read, the room started to brighten. The sun was coming up in the shaded window behind me. I pulled the blind slats apart and gazed outside. It was shaping up to be a beautiful day. As I stretched, I contemplated trying to sleep for just a bit since it was still early but I was pretty keyed up. Instead, I opted to partake of a nice, warm shower to get the day started off and then to get outside and enjoy the early hours and the beautiful sunshine on the deck. That would be my last pleasant memory of the morning. –––––––– Some time while I was in the shower, Ryan McClarnan and his sidekick Levi ‘Sticks’ Jones started working to gain entry to the house. From the bathroom, I heard them at the kitchen window while I was stepping gingerly out of the shower stall, trying not to put any weight on my injured leg. Trouble had come calling and I was defenseless against it. After nudging the bathroom door mostly closed, as quickly as I could, I pulled on the underpants and the sweats that I’d brought in with me. As dripping wet as I was, I knew there wasn’t time to wrestle with getting a bra on. I’d no sooner looped my arms through my sweatshirt than the two men were in the den, opening the bathroom door and confronting me. McClarnan, still high or drunk or both after a night of partying and carousing, reeked of filth, sweat and alcohol. ‘Sticks’ Jones wasn’t in much better shape. Jones reached out and grabbed me by the hand and pulled me out of the bathroom. My bad leg collapsed and I tumbled to the floor and out of his grip. The last thing I remember, before waking up in this God forsaken hospital again, was McClarnan’s foot coming at my face.