Leland Coyle

1. #1Project Boneyard

   Keys: Leland, Prison farm

   THE BONEYARD Prime Asset Leland Coyle Prison Farm, Sinyala Facility, 1961

   A lore record of Sergeant Leland Coyle in Project Boneyard. Nothing is added to the file. Where Sinyala does not know a thing, the record says so.

   1. The order

   On July 5, 1961, the Board authorized the program code-named the Boneyard. Results were to be cut inside the company before they reached the Agency. Prime Asset Leland Coyle’s chart was marked for regular blood tests through the Trials, and for penicillin as necessary. He had shown more eagerness than usual to repeat the Trial. That willingness was not to loosen the locks.

   On May 27, A. Bradley Avellanos had asked if it was safe to give him so long a leash. Moses Scarfiotti said the leash threatened a Trial Environment’s integrity. Hendrick Joliet Easterman said containment was their problem, and that Coyle’s privileges over the Warden were absolutely vital. They were making killers. Aggression had to sit under levers Murkoff still held.

   Of every figure in Sinyala, Easterman called Coyle the clearest shape of authority. He was giving him a gift: the Warden. Gifts travel downstream, he said. A master giving his dog a bone. He expected Coyle to push the man a little, and call him names.

   Scarfiotti said domestic partners would like a prison setting. Alabama studies looked promising. Avellanos said prisons would be a growth industry. Scarfiotti called it a prison inside a prison. Easterman resented that. Sinyala, he said, was not a prison. It was the polar opposite of one. In the same hour he called a prison a lens for focusing authority. Reagents would identify with the Warden, see that Coyle was a bully, and see that the bully answered to Murkoff.

   The therapy does not say that.

   A Reagent sent into the Prison Farm is briefed in Easterman’s voice: You are freedom. The indefinable promise that keeps prisoners at the grindstone that turns authority to profit and back again. Do not let false authority stand in the way of real capital. Kill the Warden, and we will let you out.

   In the Boneyard, freedom is the wage for killing the man whose title says he is in charge.

2. #2Blackwell

   Keys: Blackwell, Leland, Sergeant

   Blackwell

   Leland Coyle was born in Blackwell, Oklahoma, in 1923 or 1924, a sundown town. He still calls the ground he walks a sundown town.

   Childhood is marked anecdotal: abuse of animals, sexual assault, then a military academy. Teenage crime was kiboshed, Clyde Perry’s word, by the local Ku Klux Klan. After the war he returned to the Klan, and Perry wrote that this segued naturally into law enforcement. He has been on a police payroll since 1947.

   A pamphlet taken from his residence after intake is dated August 23, 1951: patriots, an enemy slant-drilling freedom, a six o’clock meeting at the San Luis Obispo Men’s Club. Perry notes no evidence Coyle dealt directly with the man it calls the General. The paper was in the house anyway.

   At nineteen he married. Six months later the wife was dead. He told police she had fallen down the stairs, and joined the Marines to get clear of the investigation. Perry’s summary: two years in the Pacific, honorable, three confirmed enemy kills, two suspicious American deaths in his company. Courthouse dialogue indicates Okinawa. The personnel summary does not name the battle. The dates fit. They do not, alone, prove the beach.

   He was an extremely effective policeman. The profit came from prison labor, extortion, and civil forfeiture. Commendations followed. He stood high in the Elks and the VFW, and he was liked. Popularity made the rest of the record survivable. He kept obsessively complete notes. Perry thought he considered himself necessary to history.

   He married again and extorted the wife’s family. They died in an electrical fire. The file records the fire and does not contain a confession that he set it. The wife fled to Chicago and died, officially, of natural causes. The body was recovered on Kostner Avenue, between the 900 and 2000 blocks.

   Promoted to Sergeant, he married a third time. Within six months she was dead of what the paperwork called suicide: multiple gunshots to the head. Within a year her family was dead, apparent suicides, the methods more violent and more convoluted as the year went. His hand in those family deaths is implied, not sealed.

   When Murkoff put him in the same Trials as Phyllis Futterman, he said she reminded him why he had killed all those wives of his. Two names survive in his own writing from the Farm: Irene and June. The file does not say which marriage was which. The third name is absent. Easterman’s former wife was also an Irene. She is not this one.

   During surveillance he was seen five times standing in a field, watching lightning. The patrol line does not change. He used to stand in a storm and watch the lightning strike the plains, and think: well, there you go. That was justice. Sometimes the finger of God reaches down and touches you. You never know which finger you are going to get.

   The weapon they strapped to him is a shock baton fed by a Pontiac car battery across the body, wire down the right sleeve. He puts the live metal to his own hand, and to his groin, for the feeling. Mannequins in his environments are dressed as people already used that way: burns at the thighs, the buttocks, the crotch; trousers gone; a shattered woman with semen on the pieces; a scorched man bent over a table.

   He will sell a listener any enemy they came in wanting — a Jew, a Black person, a communist — and he calls the law a miracle, life insurance on a thing that has already happened. He says he has seen the film that teaches a man how to spot a communist. He hates unions, Catholics, foreigners, and any woman with a tool in her hand. He cannot contemplate a greater horror, he says, than an armed woman. Arousal, he says of Gooseberry, is not approval.

   He is also afraid of being caught asleep. They will do to him, he says, every filthy thing they can invent, leave him broken and crying, cut his throat, and piss on him while he bleeds.

   The uniform disagrees with the rank. The file says Sergeant, Blackwell. The breast badge reads Lieutenant Born to Kill. The hat badge reads Special Killer. The buckle reads Sheriff’s Department, Oklahoma. White shirt, red tie, black leather jacket, black sunglasses, navy belt, grey trousers, boots to the knee. A cigarette burns between blistered lips and does not go out. The right side of the face is blistered and scabbed. The file does not settle whether the burns are the prod’s or the Facility’s. Black hair, already graying. Tall, strong enough to lift a grown man in one arm. In the dark the prod’s blue crackle finds him, and extends his notice a little past his eyes.

   When he kills a downed Reagent he lights the cigarette off the sparks and sets the baton on the Experimental Special Operations Platform in the chest until the heart stops. Another Reagent can knock him off. A grab-shock kills the rig in the hand for a span of seconds. On March 6, 1960, Scarfiotti wrote Cornelius Noakes that the platforms — he called them toasters — were being disabled by the prod, and that a Prime Asset was not to sabotage the machines. People in this organization, he added, are not fired.

3. #3Intake

   Keys: Leland, Perry, Courthouse

   On February 16, 1956, Perry telexed Avellanos from Wichita. He had met Coyle at a bar on Route 177 under the pretense of a bribe. Coyle was known and liked there. He drank heavily and ate the nuts on the table. Years later he still wants a handful of pistachios. He discovered the pretense within minutes.

   Perry felt like a crippled mouse used as a plaything by a tomcat. If Coyle had meant to kill him, he would not be writing. The charisma was undeniable. He recommended Sergeant Leland Boyle for Project Lathe. The transcription leaves the typo. Two broken fingers, deep bruising, blood in the urine, a week in Wichita. The Collections comic shows the town talking to him as a neighbor, and not siding against him when the violence starts. The comic’s room and the telex’s bar are not reconciled. Both end the same way.

   Nothing in the surviving letters shows him taken from a prison or an asylum. The hour and method of his removal are not there. By July 14, 1958, Easterman already counted him among the charisma problem. Gooseberry and Whitehorn had built cults through money or a screen. Coyle’s occupation alone had given him a monopoly of power and of violence. Easterman wanted blank canvases. Scarfiotti said everyone is one.

   On February 5, 1960, Easterman set the archetypes. The toolpost of the lathe was charisma. In Gooseberry, a mother. In Coyle, a father. When Murkoff put them in a room, the father looked at the mother and remembered why he killed his wives.

   An early interview, noted on April 13, 1960, has Coyle saying, more colorfully than Easterman would copy, that he does not care about control. He wants authority.

   On March 5, 1959, Heavy Ex-Pop Henrietta Grubbs attacked him. She had been a Reagent, still carrying the impression of Reagent 0486, and she would not bow to a Prime Asset. He hurt her badly enough that she was presumed dead and put on a biohazard shuttle. She lived for months after the food was cut, and came back as the Jaeger.

   Before the Farm he already ruled two houses. Kill the Snitch, in the Police Station: he works a prisoner with the prod, kills the lights, hunts the garage, and comes when the execution starts, because the snitch is his. Vindicate the Guilty, in the Courthouse: he has sentenced Avellanos in his own mouth, and he will not hear a mistrial. After Lathe, innocent meant guilty with an excuse. He sings a crooked “This Little Light of Mine.” The law will put you on your knees. He recites an alphabet of American organs of force, and it ends in U.S.A.

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