In the morning, Danny would do about thirty push-ups and crunch out about twenty sit-ups before sitting down to breakfast. If he had an old newspaper, he read it; otherwise, he became a slave to dull routine—a cup of coffee and an Entemann’s chocolate donut, followed by a languorously enjoyed cigarette, a quick consultation with his calendar, and although not every day, he formulated different projections regarding his next visit with Sonya.
Three weeks later, Danny was having a cup of coffee at Bongo’s before heading off to work. His seat by the window allowed him to watch the pretty young girls hurry by, their long hair flowing, their legs like sleek wings flying down the pavement.
The sky grew dark quickly and suddenly a heavy rain was pouring down. Danny could see the spattering drops hit the pavement and the roofs of cars. Umbrellas bloomed and people broke into half-staggered runs towards shelter. The door to Bongo’s opened and an umbrella was closed revealing a face Danny did not particularly want to see.
Maggie Linden was drenched and she looked disoriented as she searched for a table at which to sit. Danny was no more than a few feet from her and wasn’t in the mood to hurt anyone’s feelings. He pulled the other chair away from his table.
“Have a seat,” he said.
Like someone caught by surprise, Maggie took way too many moves to finally sit down. She put her umbrella on the floor by her feet and her raincoat was draped over the back of her chair. “Aren’t you nice,” Maggie said, smiling at Danny.
“Let me buy you a cup of coffee,” Danny said.
“Tea,” Maggie said.
“Sure.”
When the waiter came over, Maggie ordered a pot of Earl Grey that came with a tiny porcelain pitcher of milk. She shivered a bit and after the waiter returned with her order, she quickly stirred the milk into her tea and took a sip. “Ah,” she said, warming up.
“Come here often?” Danny asked.
“No. Not at all,” Maggie said. “Not that this doesn’t seem like a charming establishment but you save so much money if you fix it at home.”
Danny had to keep reminding himself the age of the lady he was sitting with. Who pinches pennies that much? he thought. “I like Bongo’s,” he said. “I’ve been coming here for a long time.”
“This place is fairly new,” Maggie said. “Only three or four years.” After sipping the Earl Grey again, she said, “Oh, but this is good.”
“Got kids?”
“No,” Maggie said. “My husband never wanted any.”
“Oh, so you’re married.”
“No, not anymore. My husband died—of a stroke.”
Danny scratched his cheek. “I’m sorry. That’s tough.”
“How about you? Are you married?”
Danny betrayed a smile. “Well, I hope to be. I’ve got a lot riding on that eventuality.”
Maggie studied Danny’s face, which had brightened.
“Where did you meet her?”
“I’ve known Sonya since I was just out of high school. Even then, she had class.”
Maggie wondered if she had heard properly. “My goodness, and you’ve kept the flame alive all these years?”
Danny sighed, realizing that he had not been on guard. “Well, we were together and then something happened and we went our separate ways. And now, I’m trying to bring us back together again.”
Maggie admired a man who openly professed his love for a woman. It came from a confidence that most men didn’t have, at least the ones she had come across. “I think that’s lovely,” she said, allowing her admiration to grow from the safety of knowing that he was tied up in another woman’s heart. “It sounds like an old Al Green song.”
“Who’s that?”
“Come on, I’m not that old, and you aren’t that young!” she chided him.
“Right,” he said awkwardly. Danny looked at Maggie, considered her age and experience, and a suitable question arose in his mind. “Listen, you’re a woman. If you don’t mind me asking. If you had a first love and he kind of did something…he really messed up. You would forgive him just about anything, wouldn’t you?”
Maggie’s eyebrows rose as if she had not expected a request for her opinion on such a subject. She replied slowly as if she were discovering her own feelings on the matter as she spoke. “If I loved someone enough, I could forgive him just about anything.”
That was exactly what Danny wanted to hear. But Maggie kept going.
“Unless he turned out to be some kind of a murderer or a serial rapist.” Maggie laughed. “But I’m sure you don’t have anything to worry about on that score.”
Danny tried not to react but he was sure he had flinched involuntarily.
“I think you’re safe, Danny,” Maggie said. “Besides you have such history together.”
Following her last few words, Danny seemed distracted. He looked through the café window and Maggie wondered if she had offended him without meaning to.
“It’s stopped raining,” he said. “And I have to go to work.” Danny removed his wallet and left two dollars on the table for a tip. He snatched up the check and quickly nodded. “I’ll pay for this up front. It was nice seeing you again, Maggie.”
Maggie watched Danny pay the front cashier and push through the door to the street. A gust of wind blew in from outside and it felt like a gentle kiss on Maggie’s face. She looked down on the table and noticed a card that must have fallen from Danny’s wallet when he retrieved his cash. The card had the Seal of the State of New York on it and the name of Louis Castillo, Special Case Worker, Prisoner Release Services.
Louis came by the diner a few days later. Sitting at the counter, he ordered a tuna melt on toasted rye, coleslaw, no fries. When Danny collected the tub of dishes near the counter, Louis spoke discreetly. “Dr. Kelty tells me you still haven’t gotten back to him.”
“What do you guys share bunk beds?”
“I work in the program. So does Kelty. Is it really that hard to figure out?” Louis said, admiring the platter the waitress put down before him on the counter. “Just a glass of water, no ice,” he said to the waitress who nodded. “So, what’s the problem?” Louis asked Danny, getting back to the subject.
“I gave enough blood,” Danny said.
“Just go down and see him,” Louis said irritably. “Christ. What are you, a six year old girl?”
“I feel like some laboratory rat,” Danny said. His borrowed terminology from Caine was not lost on him and he immediately regretted using it.
Louis let an unbearable impatience permeate his face. “Listen, don’t you have some dishes to wash? Let me enjoy this,” he said before taking a healthy bite of his sandwich.
After Louis was gone, Danny had to train a new kid on the machine. Danny thought this one looked high too—unkempt red hair, invisible brows, a mouth that hung open by some force of gravity and of course, eyelids that drooped over hazy, dilated eyes.
On his break, Danny chugged down half a glass of Dr. Pepper and then went to the men’s room. Standing at the urinal, Danny heard the door open behind him and saw with his peripheral vision a slender man who smelled of soap and floral aftershave stand in the stall next to him.
“Keep your eyes facing the front. I don’t go that way!” the man protested angrily.
Danny was about to turn and finish his piss on the man’s pant leg when he saw Paris Easley’s wide open grin. Paris almost pushed him over before Danny had a chance to zip up.
Paris gazed at Danny’s dishwashing apron and laughed. “Look at you. I knew you wouldn’t let that second chance go to waste.”
“I guess you must be a self-made millionaire by now. What—Austin oil man?” Danny offered facetiously.
“Shiiit. They couldn’t keep me in that town. I aint no fuckin’ cowboy. Anyway, I got out of there so fast—although they did have some damn good barbecue, that’s for sure.”
“What are you doing now?” Danny asked.
“Me? Parking other people’s cars.”
“Pay good?”
“Depends on what’s in the glove compartment.”
Danny laughed. “Where are you staying?”
“Some hole up in Queens,” Paris shrugged. “Say, when do you get off, man?”
CHAPTER 14
General Ronald Winfield wore his Purple Heart to the meeting. A distinguished looking man in his early seventies, Winfield was proud of his service in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as for being the beloved grandfather of eight. Winfield sat across the table from Steven Harrier, Chief Executive Officer for American Correctional. Harrier had learned the ropes on Wall Street in his early twenties, made a killing in junk mortgage loans, hedge funds and oil futures, and now in his late thirties, he was on the cusp of amassing his fourth billion. Dr. Gordon Conlan sat conspicuously between Winfield and Harrier at the end of the table. The conference room was spacious with a high ceiling that dwarfed the men and coaxed a slight echo when voices were raised. As General Winfield addressed Harrier, Dr. Conlan was reminded of the importance of the meeting as it was absent of assistants, deputies, colonels or senior vice presidents. It was just the three of them in a windowless chamber, isolated by their own significance.
“There is currently a seventeen percent expulsion rate in the Northeast alone,” Winfield announced as a pretext. “Texas and California will be soon to follow on those numbers. I would say Premium Sentencing—not to mention Conlan Laboratories—has made significant progress and is well on its way. You both should be very gratified.”
“Just wait until Congress passes our bill next week,” Harrier said. “Once we start the transfers from the county jails and consolidate the state-run units, we will accelerate the timetable on the remaining Premium Sentencing cases and in three to five years, with the anticipated public support, we will have completely reconfigured the prison population of the future.”
General Winfield bristled in his seat. “But I do want to make sure we do not lose sight of the goal, at least as far as Project Talon is concerned. There is supposed to be a triangulation of purpose and the last time I consulted my geometry, a triangle had three sides.”
Conlan waited his turn for he knew that his work was the key to it all. Without it, Winfield and Harrier had nothing.
A status report was in order. Winfield sharply turned to Conlan and said, “When will we be ready?”
“Soon,” was all Conlan would say.
“Is there a problem?” Winfield pressed, not letting Conlan off so easily.
“We’ve had a couple of setbacks,” Conlan admitted, before averting his eyes under Winfield’s blistering gaze. “We’re not getting some of the results we had hoped for.”
Harrier felt the palpable discomfort pervading the room. He could afford to be optimistic and offered to lighten the air. “Well, at least we can all agree that Premium Sentencing has been a remarkable success,” he said. “I think time will show that one victory leads the way to the next. There is an inevitability factor and I don’t think we should dwell on whether the triangulation of the mission is incremental or simultaneous.”
“Agreed,” Conlan said quietly.
But General Winfield was having none of it. “Dr. Conlan, I won’t tolerate setbacks or delays. Either it all works or none of it works.”
Dr. Gordon Conlan first met General Winfield in a curious fashion, or at least he had thought so at the time. Two years earlier—before Conlan had met Steven Harrier or had even come up with the scientific process that would become the blueprint for Premium Sentencing—on an insufferably muggy afternoon in late August, a courier had been sent to Conlan’s home in Toms River to announce the General’s interest in meeting with him. The courier was dressed in uniform and looked tidy and sharp as if he were ready to undergo inspection at any moment. The courier had waited while Conlan read the message on General Winfield’s personal stationery. The message was short, the important part being the specific time and date of a proposed meeting to which Conlan was to inform the courier whether he accepted or not. The courier then left in a black sedan, leaving Conlan to imagine the most outlandish possible scenarios. And while the purpose of the meeting did not match the scenarios, it was nevertheless unexpected and astonishing.
On the date of the accepted meeting, General Winfield showed up alone at Conlan’s door with only a uniformed driver waiting in another black sedan, this one elongated and sleeker than the courier’s. Despite the deep grooves under his socketed eyes, the taut, shiny cheekbones and the silver and gray flattop he had sported since military academy, at six feet four inches tall, Winfield was still an imposing man, giving counterbalance to his well-worn years. He walked with a slight limp, favoring his right leg to his left, due to an encroaching arthritic condition which he tried to hide. Conlan welcomed the General inside, guiding him to the living room and offering him a drink. The General was dressed in civilian clothes but the suit he had selected for the meeting was as immaculate and stiff as a uniform and no less intimidating.
The General waved off the drink and after a few questions about the house and Conlan’s family status (unmarried, with a niece living in Connecticut), he began to talk purposefully.
Winfield said that he been made aware of Conlan’s recent breakthroughs in age progression therapy. Conlan was flattered by the General’s interest and began to recall with deliberative detail the chronological events that highlighted his work. Conlan spoke of his research with patients suffering from progeria, the physiological condition in which children aged with hyper-accelerated growth, where a child of ten years had the body of a sixty year old. He moved on to his work with blood cell manipulation and regenerative platelet mutations. Soon, Conlan became relaxed and grew visibly more excited as he extrapolated on his experimentation with mice and even small primates, until the General harshly cleared his throat.
“Back up,” Winfield had said, his eyes alert and fixed. “Tell me again about these mutations.”
Paris Easley had been true to his promise. After he was released and transplanted to Austin, Paris had spent every waking moment trying to figure out how to get women into bed with him. He laughed in Danny’s apartment at his kitchen table while sharing a single cigarette, the last one in the pack.
“You should have seen this one chick. Built. I mean, she turned and nearly took my head off,” he laughed.
“How was she?” Danny asked, genuinely interested.
The light dimmed a little in Paris’ eyes. “She was a little slice of heaven—for somebody else,” he laughed. “Naw, she wasn’t looking at this.” He presented the length of his body with his open hand like a car show girl—something Danny remembered Paris doing at the halfway house, except this time it seemed even more self-deprecating. “I bet I could have gotten her but she caught me when I was in my slumming clothes.”
“No doubt,” Danny said politely.
“How ’bout you, man, you get back with your baby mama?”
Danny nodded. “I saw her.”
“I bet she crawled all over you.”
Danny smiled. “We made love.”
Paris blasted out a raucous laugh. “Yeah! That’s what I’m talkin’ about!”
“Not like you though. How many?”
“Me? Oh, about seven or eight that first month.”
Danny slapped the table. “Damn.”
“I told you I had priorities.”
“Seven or eight? I guess you proved them wrong. You silver haired bastard! What are you packing in there?” Danny laughed, his finger aimed at Paris’ crotch.
“I could have lined up a few more,” Paris mused, “but my money ran out.”
Danny stopped laughing suddenly, the story filling in by itself. “I guess it got kind of expensive taking all those chicks out for dinner and drinks.”
“Dinner and drinks?” Paris said, his head jerking back. “I paid for every last one of them.”
When he couldn’t think of what to say, Danny just nodded. “Still, they must have been hot—”
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“I guess—if you call toothless crack whores hot.” Paris’ eyes drifted from Danny’s as if he realized the pitiful substance of what he was saying.
Danny abruptly shifted the conversation. “I saw Wilson Caine.”
Paris was immediately snapped out of his melancholic indulgences at the name. “And how is that crazy fucker doing?”
“He tried to kill me. Only his gun ran out of bullets.”
“No shit!” Paris exclaimed, rising halfway out of his seat before lowering himself again.
“Remember Vic Carbona?”
“Yeah. Ugly dude. Sad face.”
Danny nodded. “He saved my life. Caine killed him because Vic stepped in between us.”
Paris shook his head. “That’s some heavy shit.”
Something caught the corner of Danny’s eye, his attention suddenly snagged as if by a fish hook. Paris followed Danny’s eyes to the little TV which had been tuned to the football game which was now over. 60 Minutes had started immediately after the game and an interviewer sat in front of a large graphic of a gray haired man behind bars with the words “The Bio-Justice Solution” in bold white lettering. Danny and Paris watched quietly, almost anxiously, as if they were waiting for secrets to be unspooled. In the introduction, the interviewer spoke about the man behind Bio-Justice and the place he did business. “You won’t find Gordon Conlan at home nights and weekends, soaking up the substantial financial and professional success his discoveries have brought him. Rather, seven days a week, around the clock, you’re likely to find Dr. Conlan in his fifteenth floor New Jersey office atop Conlan Laboratories pushing himself tirelessly, in a relentless quest to cross the next threshold of bio-science.”
Danny and Paris looked at the distinguished elderly gent in his middle sixties, with his faded blue eyes and owl-like brows, who spoke slowly but forcefully.
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