D. C. Noir 2

by George Pelecanos

  “For a better world,” I replied

  “Thanks. Now, when we get back to the table, you will stay with us for about three minutes. We will leave first … You understand?” Yes, I said. “After a while, you can leave. Good luck with everything, Linda.”

  I did just as she said, but that was the longest five minutes of my life. The last time I saw her in person was in that awful West Side bar. But I read about her in the Paris papers and in Freedomways magazine. It is rumored that she operates a gun-running ring for African liberation movements from an office in Paris. Jennie has found her river.

  About me, there isn’t much here to say. Except, perhaps, that the children must come now. We’re working on that. I look forward to playing for them. Our parents are quite proud of us. I do find myself a little nervous these days—some hovering tension lurking in the air. We’re doing well, but the pressure to keep up is great. We have a house on a quiet treelined street in Westchester. I go to club meetings once a month. I work with the church choir; and once in a while, for kicks, I get my hair done at Henri Bendel’s …

  PART II

  IN THE SHADOWS OF FEDERAL CITY

  KIS THE SKY

  BY JAMES GRADY

  Lorton, VA

  (Originally published in 1996)

  Flat on his back at night when the TV and radio whispers and the coughs and sobs faded away, Lucus let his arm float up until his fingers pressed against a concrete sky and told him where he was.

  What’s going on, he thought, remembering a song from another Death City son who’d been big back when Lucus had been an outside man. Now …

  Grounded, man: Got to maintain. All day. All night.

  Night meant the admin killed the cells’ overheads. Dudes with desk lamps had to snap them off. Unblinking walkway bulbs on the tiers cast a pale light into every cell.

  Same as ever, cell lights snapped on at 7 a.m. that cold autumn morning.

  From the bunk under his, Lucus heard H.L.S. whisper: “Think they’s gonna go for it today?”

  Lucus said nothing.

  Jackster lay on the cot an arm’s length from H.L.S.’s bunk, waiting to take his cue from the two gray men the admin had sardined him with, waiting before putting his feet on the floor and figuring on whether to take his meal card, make for breakfast. “Maybe it’s all cool,” said Jackster.

  “Maybe it’s chilled.”

  “They been rocking the cradle,” said H.L.S. “Put a dude to sleep with its-forgots, put steel in him when he’s dreaming. They thinks they got a beef, they got a beef, and it don’t blow away in the wind. Hard luck.”

  “I know what you’re saying,” said Jackster, not backing down like a punk but not pushing like a fool. “What you gonna do, Lucus?”

  Silence answered those whispers in cell 47, tier 3, Administrative Building 3, Central Facility of the Lorton Correctional Complex, which drew its residents from the streets of Washington, Death City, a half hour drive north on a Virginia highway.

  Then from down the tier came the buzz of a cell door as officers called a D-Dude out, the tinkle of chains as they strapped him in full restraints—hands linked to a chain belt in front, ankle hobbles, a lead line and chains to the next guy in line.

  D-Designate residents were linked up to be marched to and from the mess hall, the first cons for breakfast and last for dinner. Lunch got carted to them in their cells, a universally unpopular feeding system negotiated between Eighth Amendment court rulings and the administration.

  When the jerks moved the D-Dudes to the mess hall, other cons were supposed to stay in their cells. Their gates might be locked, but it was easier for the guards to yell the corridors clear and march the D-Dudes past open cells as fast as the shackled men could shuffle. D-Dudes shuffled fast: In full restraints, you were a soft mark to get tore up.

  Two years into his stretch, Lucus became a D-Designate after he and Marcus jumped the hospital bus guards, stole the vehicle, and damn near made it to the freeway before troopers threw up a roadblock. Lucus shot a trooper in the leg with a bus guard’s pistol. After a SWAT sharpshooter cracked Marcus’s head open, Lucus was able to press the guard’s revolver into Marcus’s dead hand, then surrender unharmed. The trooper who got shot couldn’t make a positive ID on which orange-jumpsuited convict had pulled his trigger, so dead Marcus ate that beef. Lucus only got tabbed for an escape.

  That adventure added five to his forty, kept him in chains for the next seven years.

  Chains tinkled past the cell. Lucus drilled his eyes into the concrete ceiling.

  H.L.S. swung off his lower bunk, went to the seatless toilet, urinated.

  “Man,” he said, “hard luck, my plumbin’s so creaky, can’t go but half the night without hitting porcelain and I still gots to go first thing in the a.m.!”

  “I hear that,” said Lucus.

  A rhythm worked its way down the tier, squeaky shoes followed by a loud clunk, moving closer: the fat Guard Rawlins unlocking the manuals on each cell door. Rawlins threw their bolt, squeaked down the line.

  Jackster whispered: “What are you going to do, Lucus?”

  Respectful. Wary. But pushing.

  The warning Klaxon echoed through the five tiers of Building 3, then came the sledgehammer clang of all the cells unlocking electronically.

  Lucus sat up.

  Cell doors were slid open by their residents. Lucus didn’t need to remind his two cellmates to leave their door shut that day. To sleep warm in the seasonally cold cell, he wore his orange jumpsuit over a white T-shirt—the seven-inch shank hidden along his heart-side forearm, inside the orange sleeve, held in place by a fuzzy red wristband like the iron-pumpers sported. Two winters before, a fish with a machine-shop job thought he could wolf out Lucus with the shiv he’d made right under the jerks’ eyes. Lucus broke both the fish’s arms and one of his knees, kept the blade, and left the fish to gimp around like a billboard.

  At their cell sink, H.L.S. splashed water on his face.

  “I’m hungry,” said Lucus. He slid to the floor, slipped into his sneakers. Glanced to the man at the sink whose hair was white: “You hungry, Sam?”

  H.L.S.—Hard Luck Sam.

  “Hell yes,” he answered. “If it’s gonna keep running out, got to put more in.”

  “Want to stroll, Darnell?” said Lucus. Darnell, not Jackster: not using the dude’s street name. Not dissing the younger man, but underlining who was who.

  “Think I’ll hang here for a while,” answered Darnell.

  Jackster, thought Lucus, you keeping safe distance?

  “I ain’t that hungry,” added the young man.

  Justifying, thought Lucus. Making sure I bought what he sold.

  “What’s hunger got to do with it?” Sam put on his shoes.

  Could have just been H.L.S. running off at the mouth again.

  But Lucus knew better.

  And the flicker in Darnell’s eyes said that he wondered.

  Central Facility’s dining hall could hold all 2,953 residents, but by the time Lucus and Sam made their way through the checkpoints out of their cellblock and the chain-link fence tunnel to the dining hall, half of the bolted-down picnic-style tables were empty.

  Lucus recognized several crews of younger inmates clustered at their usual tables, a politicization of geography that mirrored neighborhoods from which those men drew their identity. Here and there sat old timers like Sam and him, neither apart from nor a part of any group. Tattoos from a biker gang filled the corner table; they were laughing. Spanish babbled from three tables. Two Aryan Brotherhood bloods kept themselves close to the main doors—close to the control station where two guards sat. Two more guards punched inmates’ meal passes as they moved into the food line. Three guards strolled the aisles, their faces as flat as the steel tables.

  The dining hall smelled of burnt coffee and grease. Breakfast was yellow and brown and sticky, though the cornbread from the prison bakery was fresh.

  Sam carried his tray behind Lucus,
sat with him at the table that emptied of other convicts as soon as Lucus arrived. The exodus might have been coincidental, Lucus couldn’t be sure. He was grateful for Sam staying where he didn’t have to be.

  “You lookin good this morning,” Lucus told him.

  “Hard luck is, I look like myself.”

  Five tables away, Lucus spotted Twitch—6'3” of too-tight piano wire, a guy with kinky hair like the man who thought up the atomic bomb. Lucus had seen a picture of that guy in the prison library encyclopedia when he started the program and learned to read good. Twitch bunked four cells down from Lucus. Twitch lifted a spoonful of yellow toward his grim mouth—the spoon jerked, and yellow glopped down to the tray. Nobody laughed or dissed Twitch: He was a straight-arrow postal worker who’d bought his ticket here when he beat a man to death when the guy complained about slow mail service.

  Twitch met Lucus’s eyes.

  Hope you’re taking your medication, thought Lucus. Twitch’s lawyers lost the insanity plea, so their client bused it to the prison population instead of a loony bin, but the courts let admin make sure Twitch took pills to keep him functional.

  In the chessboard of tables, two men sat surrounded by an invisible bubble. One was thin and coughed; the other looked fine. The Word was they had the Ultimate Virus, and once that was the Word, those men were stuck where they were.

  Someone snickered to the right.

  Easy, casual, Lucus drifted his eyes to the laughter.

  Two tables over, sitting by himself, bald head on 300 pounds of barbell muscle and sweet-tooth fat: Cooley, pig-blue eyes, thick lips. In the world, Cooley cruised for hitchhikers and lone walkers, made page one when Five-O tied him to three corpses.

  Why ain’t you a D-Designate? Lucus said to himself, knowing the answer, knowing that Cooley played the model prisoner, except for maybe once or twice a year when he found some unconnected sheep where the admin wasn’t watching. Cooley left ’em alive, which kept the heat off, and always washed his hands.

  Twitch heard Cooley snicker, jerked his head toward that mountain of flesh.

  Don’t do it, Twitch, thought Lucus. He made his mind a magnet for Twitch’s eyes. Don’t be a fool today. Crazy as you are, Cooley’ll eat you alive and love the memories in his lockdown. Ride your pills. Keep it cool.

  Magic worked: Twitch’s eyes found Lucus, blinked. Bused his tray and left.

  “Hard luck,” muttered Sam. “Twitch losing a cushy government job like that.”

  Lucus smiled.

  Sam lowered his voice and talked with tight lips: “Ears?”

  Lucus shook his head.

  Sam told him his back was empty, too, then said: “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m in the flow of events,” said Lucus.

  “Just you?”

  “Gotta be who it’s gotta be, and it’s gotta be just me.”

  Sam said: “Believe I can—”

  “You can’t help me enough,” said Lucus. “That’d just be one more body in the beef. That’d force it up to big-time, but it’s not enough to back it down. I won’t let you stand on that line and get slaughtered since it ain’t gonna do no good no how … But bro,” finished Lucus, “I hear you. And thanks.”

  “Hard luck.” The older man sighed. Lucus wasn’t sure if it was with sorrow or relief. “So you’re in the flow.”

  “There it is.”

  “I be on the river banks.” Sam shrugged. “Never know.”

  Then, for all the room to see, he held out his hand and slapped five with Lucus.

  “What about Jackster?” Sam asked.

  “Yeah,” said Lucus. “What about our Darnell?”

  Darnell had folded the cot, leaned it next to the toilet. His footlocker was jammed up against the wall. With the small desk, the sink, the rust-stained toilet, and built-in footlockers designed for only two prisoners in this Resident Containment Unit, enough space remained for him to pace eight steps along the front of the cell bars.

  “You getting your exercise, Jackster?” asked Lucus when he and Sam got home.

  H.L.S. stretched out on his bunk—feet facing the front of the cell. “Why didn’t you take it to the rec? They got three new ping-pong balls and you loves to watch that talk-show lady strut her stuff.”

  “Figured I’d just hang here,” said Darnell. “Wait for you.”

  “Wait for us to what?” Lucus kept his voice flat, easy. He perched on top of the desk, the open front of the cell and Darnell filling his eyes.

  “Shit, man, I don’t know!” said Darnell, pacing, staring out across the walkway, across the yawning fifty-foot canyon between their wall of tiered cells and the identical scene facing it. “We’re partnered here, I figured—”

  “Partnered?” said Lucus. “Don’t recall signing on with anybody when they put me in here. You remember anything like that, Sam?”

  “I disremember nothing and I don’t remember that.”

  “Shit, man,” said Darnell. Not turning around.

  “Course, we do have to live together,” said Lucus.

  “Yeah,” said Darnell. “That’s what I’m talking ’bout.”

  “I mean,” said Lucus, “we all gots the same cell number.”

  Darnell humphed.

  “Numbers, man,” chimed in Sam from the lower bunk, “they can be hard luck.”

  “What you mean?” snapped Darnell.

  “Why, nothing, Jackster,” said Sam, flat on his back, hard to see. “Just talking about numbers. Luck. Like when I went to that sporting house outside of Vegas. Man, they trot the women out in a line, I’m gassed, blow and booze and riding a hell of a score, squinting at them long legs, them firm—”

  “Stop it, man!” hissed Darnell. “Don’t kill me like that!”

  “How do you want us to kill you?” said Lucus, sweet and low.

  Jackster didn’t reply.

  “Just a story!” came the words from the lower bunk. “It ain’t about women, it’s about numbers. Them ladies all had these number tags on ’em, kind of like our designations, only you couldn’t tell as much from reading theirs, just their number. Some of ’em were dog meat, but I spot number nine and she’s so fine—”

  “I heard this shit already,” said Jackster.

  “And I choose her, tells the man nine, pay him, go to the room and skin down—and who strolls in but the skaggiest bowser in the line who’s so untogether, she’s number six but her number’s on upside down!”

  “Hard luck,” said Lucus, rolling out Sam’s punch line.

  “Yeah,” spit out Jackster, “like when old H.L.S. here, him already a two-time fall man, cases his apartment rip so bad that the lady done showed up coming home—”

  “She got sick at work.” Sam’s tone was flat. Hard. “She wasn’t supposed to.”

  If Jackster knew what he was hearing, he didn’t show it.

  “Yeah,” he said, “hard luck that lamp you whomped her upside the head with—”

  “She wasn’t supposed to be screaming, getting in the way of me getting gone.”

  “And hard luck when you dropped out her window and the alley dumpster lid caved in on you, and hard luck it was empty so’s you hit steel bottom and busted your foot instead of bouncing off a pile of dirty Pampers, and—”

  “You talking about my crime.”

  Even Darnell heard the sound of gravestone from the man on the bottom bunk.

  Can’t let this shit roll down today, thought Lucus; said: “Enough hard luck out there to fill our happy home.” Zero the score so H.L.S. won’t need to. “Kind of like when somebody sells three bags of rock to a roller wearing a beard over his badge, deal going down just in time to catch the new mandatory-sentencing guidelines.”

  Darnell’s eyes risked flicking from the lower bunk to Lucus.

  Lucus smiled: “Some guys just ain’t cut out for the spy game.”

  “I don’t play no games,” said Darnell. But his edge was jagged, backing away.

  The air inside the room ea
sed out the open cell door, whirled into the cacophony of shouts and radios and sweat in the cellblock.

  “The point of the story,” said Sam, his words round and smooth again, “is numbers. Some people get their number wrong, and look what hard luck that brings.”

  “I got my number,” mumbled Darnell, “don’t worry about it.”

  “I won’t,” said H.L.S. “I be glad for you.”

  “What about you, Lucus?” said Darnell.

  “What about me what?”

  “You gotta be working on your number,” said Darnell. He met Lucus eye for eye. “Like you said, we live together, no choice. That means your number’s chained to mine.”

  “I know about chains,” said Lucus.

  “Me too,” said Jackster. “And us being linked, it’s righteous I should get to know what’s what and figure my score around your play.” He shrugged. “Ain’t saying I’ll throw with you, but I gots to do the stand-up thing by the guys I’m bunking with.”

  Chaos and chatter from the tier filled their cell.

  “Time for me to hit the shower.” Lucus snagged his towel, stepped past Darnell. “You boys play nice while I’m gone.” Then Lucus was on the walkway, strolling down the tier, his towel looped in his left hand. Inside his sleeve rode the shiv.

  Split the walkway toward the right, stay closer to the rail than the cells. Not so close it’s an easy bull-charge to push you over, but better than walking next to the bars where you’re an easy pull into a cell for a pile-on of badasses and blades. Ripping it up on the walkway meant that the tussle might get seen by the tier monitor in the tower. He could punch the horn, maybe get nightsticks there while you still had some pieces left. In the cells, you’d fall into a setup so savage it’d be history before anyone got there, even if the monitor saw you snatched.

  Usually when Lucus walked the tiers, dudes sang out to him, gave him a nod, or even strolled up to jazz. That morning, the guys hanging outside the open cells and doing their busies inside sent him no words. Guys in his path rolled away.

  “Hey, sir,” Lucus said to the guard behind the desk at the cage entrance to the shower rooms, “okay if I catch a shower so’s I won’t stink up the boss’s office today?”