Lancaster sighed. “While I’m certain it has, I find your explanation a bit far-fetched. Are you afraid of reprisal? Just tell us what really happened. We can protect you from Simms.”
“I started the fight,” I repeated.
The trustee finished. The window gleamed.
“All done here, boss,” he said as he slunk out the door.
Lancaster folded his hands on the desk. “Normally, we have several means of addressing inmate-on-inmate violence. Loss of privileges. Time in administrative segregation. Criminal charges and additional years on your sentence. And if I truly believed you started that fight, we’d be pursuing one or several of those corrective measures. As it happens, I don’t. But if you insist on refusing our protection, I just hope that the next time we speak, it isn’t in the infirmary.”
* * *
The prison yard made me think of a carton of Neapolitan ice cream. Instead of strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla, the yard split along racial lines, but the invisible border between each color was just as real.
I didn’t like it, but then again, I didn’t like Neapolitan ice cream either.
The setup wasn’t too shabby. A couple of weight sets alongside a jogging track, picnic benches here and there, a few two-seater tables with chessboards set into the plastic tabletops. I could imagine I was on a college campus, if it weren’t for the fences, the gun towers, and the razor wire.
Paul walked the track, smoking a cigarette, keeping to himself. He gave me a wave and I wandered over. He shook his head at me.
“Wow. You just jump right in with both fists, don’t you? Gonna have a beauty of a shiner there, too.”
I touched the skin under my eye and winced. Puffy and raw.
“Well, shit,” I told him, falling into step as we walked along the oval track, “there goes my modeling career. Hey, read something for me?”
I tugged the last sheet of my paperwork from my pocket, folded into a neat square, and unfurled it.
“They have a literacy class here, meets every Tuesday.” Paul reached for the page. “You should look into that.”
“Here,” I said, tapping the corner of the sheet. The dates still blurred in my vision, like newsprint smudging under a gob of liquid soap. “How much time passed between my arrest and landing in here?”
“You tell me. You lived it.”
“Humor me. What does it say?”
Paul shrugged. “Four months, give or take?”
I tapped another line. “When was I brought into custody?”
“September sixteenth.”
“And what day is today?”
“The seventeenth,” Paul said. “Why? What’s the big deal?”
“Paul, how could four months have passed between yesterday and today?”
He blinked. Squinted at me.
“It…didn’t. That doesn’t make sense.” Suddenly on edge, he pressed the page back into my hand. “I don’t do riddles.”
“Not a riddle. How could I have been tried and convicted if I was just arrested—”
He held up a hand, grimacing like he felt a migraine coming on. “Please, drop it, okay? My head is killing me.”
This was bad. I’d hoped that whoever was behind all this, screwing with my memory and my sense of time, had kept it localized to me and anyone involved with putting me behind bars. I’d never met Paul before today, and even he couldn’t push his brain through the teeth of this trap. Under normal circumstances, most people would assume a time discrepancy like that was a typo or a filing mistake, but that’s not what was happening here. Anyone thinking about my trial just couldn’t parse time at all. And thinking too hard earned them an instant burst of sinus pain, encouraging a change of subject.
How many people had been affected? The whole prison system?
The whole planet?
More important question: who had the power to weave a curse like that, and what had I done to piss them off?
Prince Sitri. This deal had his name written all over it. One of his little games, maybe: drop me in prison, bury me deep, and see if I could claw my way out. Exactly the kind of dick move he’d pull if he was bored enough, or if he wanted to make some kind of point.
And what if the point is “Caitlin isn’t coming to help you”?
I shoved that thought into a mental box already cluttered with all the things that kept me up at night. Not a lot of room left in that box.
I was good at two things: leading my crew, and magic. Now my friends and family were on the far side of an electrified fence, and I couldn’t work a ritual in a place with zero privacy and guards standing watch around the clock. If there was a better way to keep me caged, I couldn’t think of one.
Despair started to creep around the edges of my mind, like lead weights tied to my wrists and ankles. I shoved that into the box, too.
Dig deeper, I told myself. There’s no such thing as a no-win situation. Think fast, fight hard, and breathe free air again. No matter what it takes.
“Back in processing,” I said to Paul, “Emerson told us that nobody’s ever escaped from the Iceberg. That true?”
“No, but…well, sort of. It’s compli—” He froze, eyes darting left. “Oh shit, hold on, here it comes.”
I saw it too. Two guys from the black corner of the yard, shirts tied off around their waists, marching hard and fast with murder in their eyes. Coming up on a skinny Latino with a full-chest tattoo of the Virgin Mary, all on his own by the chess tables. A lone gazelle, separated from the herd and blissfully unaware of the doom heading his way.
6.
“We’ve gotta do someth—” I started to say. Paul put his hand on my chest.
“No, we don’t,” he told me. “This is prison, okay? You want to survive this place? Here’s the best advice you’ll ever get: never get involved in other people’s fights. That makes it your fight.”
I wouldn’t have gotten there in time anyway. I watched as one of the attackers looped his arm around their target’s throat, hauling him back and off-balance. The other reached under his tied-off shirt and yanked out a shiv—a jagged spike of metal wired to a broom-handle hilt, cheap and nasty and built for violence. The blows rained down fast and frantic, punching the spike into the Latino’s chest and stomach and mutilating his tattoo, turning the Virgin Mary into a murder victim. If he prayed to her, it didn’t help him any.
A klaxon whined from the gun towers, shrill as fingernails on a blackboard and loud enough to set my teeth on edge. Paul dropped to his knees and hissed, “Down! Do exactly what I do!”
I followed his lead, kneeling on the jogging track and lacing my fingers behind my neck. Around us, from one side of the yard to the other, everyone—including the two assassins—was doing the same. The killer dropped his shiv and knelt down beside his victim’s corpse, waiting patiently as the hive doors burst open and uniforms flooded the yard. The klaxon fell silent.
“Don’t even breathe funny until they give the all clear,” Paul warned in a low voice, “and if you’ve got an itchy nose, live with it. Seriously, I can see the tower behind you. Jablonski’s up there and he’s staring right at us.”
“Us? Why? We had nothing to do with it.”
“Rotten bastard’s looking for an excuse to put a bullet in me. Which we are not going to give him today. Just stay calm and pretend you’re a statue.”
The assassins were hauled off in cuffs, their victim on a stretcher already dark with old bloodstains. The wave of guards fell back like a navy blue tide. Then the alarm honked, twice in sharp succession.
The inmates unlaced their hands and got back on their feet. Cigarettes lit up. A basketball thumped, game back underway. Like one of those old westerns where a bad guy gets gunned down in the saloon, life went right back to normal the second the body was dragged out of sight.
Except that it didn’t. As I gazed across the yard, I caught a web of silent glances, shifting conversations, and furtive finger signs. A conversation happening all around me, riding on the arc
ane geometries of the prison grapevine, and I felt a shift in the wind.
“That,” Paul said, following my gaze as he dug out a fresh cigarette, “is a problem. Smoke?”
“No, thanks. What’s going on?”
“Remember how I said we were fresh out of lockdown?” Paul took a long, slow drag, exhaling thin gray smoke into the warm afternoon air. “Way I heard it, there’s beef between the Cinco Calles and the Fine Upstanding Crew. It’s a drug thing, some kind of Vegas turf battle. The Calles made peace with the Bishops, who used to be tight with the Crew, so you can imagine how well that went over.”
I knew the Cinco Calles, by their reputation and their colors at least. They were in a partnership with my friend Jennifer, and they’d turned an abandoned tenement by the airport into an urban fortress. She hadn’t told me about any turf battles, at least none that had progressed from shoving matches to bloodshed. Then again, if Nicky Agnelli was on the run or already in custody somewhere, all the gangs that used to pay him fealty would be looking to carve out their own little kingdoms.
Forget the Chicago Outfit. With Nicky gone, Vegas could tear itself apart without their help.
“Hear anything else from the outside?” I asked. “Any idea how bad it is on the streets right now?”
Paul shrugged. “Been in here for eight years. My grasp of current events is secondhand and sketchy at best.”
“So what was that about Jablonski?”
He glanced back, craning his neck as we walked along the track.
“Thing you need to understand is Rehabilitation Dynamics of America pays their staff bottom dollar. I’m talking twenty percent less than any regular prison guard in the state, and they’re not union. So you can imagine the kind of applicants they get.”
“Washouts,” I said. “The guys who couldn’t qualify to work at Ely State.”
“Right, or the ones too dumb or too sadistic to keep their jobs there. RDA doesn’t care. Their job is to keep this place filled to capacity, so they get that sweet, sweet taxpayer funding, and run it as cheaply as possible. Now, when one of the hives—or better yet, all three—go into lockdown because of a gang violence problem, that’s considered a high-hazard situation. Guard shifts double and run long.”
“Overtime,” I said.
“Overtime. And the ‘high hazard’ is watching a bunch of cons who are locked up tight in their cells. Safer shifts and a bigger paycheck for our just and valorous overseers.”
“Which means,” I said, sniffing out the scam, “the guards have an incentive to promote inmate violence. We kill each other, there’s a lockdown, and they get paid more.”
Paul snapped and pointed a finger gun my way. “Give that man a prize. And while a better-run prison would hire guards with, say, morals, character, and human decency, those aren’t qualities that RDA screens for. If you can pee in a cup and you don’t have a felony on your record, congratulations, you’re hired. I say again, RDA doesn’t care.”
“So why were you worried about Jablonski in particular? Besides that he’s an asshole, I mean.”
Paul looked behind us again.
“The whites in Hive C don’t want any part of this feud. Not our problem, not our fight. Well, that’s just not enough mayhem for our dear Correctional Officer Jablonski. One of the Aryan Brotherhood heavies got released last month, so Jablonski spread a rumor about how they’d found a hit list in his cell with addresses for the families of the Upstanding Crew brothers on our tier.”
“Hoping they’d lash out in reprisal.”
“Exactly. I overheard him gloating about it to another guard. So I sent a line to Marcus, the shot-caller for the blacks, and convinced him to pow-wow with Brisco and one of the saner AB guys. Cooled everything down—and since those ‘hits’ on the outside never happened, in a few days everybody knew Jablonski was full of shit.”
We rounded the curve of the track. Guards stood like sentinels up on the gun towers, afternoon sunlight painting their glasses the color of cheap tequila.
“And he knows you were the one who snipped the fuse.”
“That’s what I get for playing peacemaker. That said, having one pissed-off guard drawing a target on my back is still better than a race war.”
A convict near the fence caught my eye. His hair did, anyway, a fluffed-out shock of white that reminded me of Albert Einstein. He looked sixty-something, wearing a hangdog expression on his deeply lined face as he stumbled along, kicking at the ground and mumbling to himself.
“What’s his story?”
Paul followed my gaze. “Oh, the Prof? Guy’s harmless. Totally nutty, lives in his own little world, but good psychiatric drugs just don’t fit in RDA’s budget.”
“The Prof?”
“Short for professor, I think. Not sure what he’s in for, but he’s been here longer than anybody can remember.” Paul paused, frowning. It was the same frown he’d made when I showed him the dates on my paperwork.
“What?”
“I’m…certain I was here when they brought him in,” Paul said slowly, brow furrowed. “Could swear I remember Brisco pulling his jacket and checking him out. But I know he was here before me…forget it. Never mind, just ignore the poor guy. He’s crazy.”
Maybe so, I thought. Then again, the way this day’s been going so far, I’m not too sure about my sanity either.
I needed to keep an eye on the Prof.
“Heads up, three o’clock.” Paul lowered his voice. “Ray-Ray’s coming.”
Ray-Ray was the bullet-headed con who had led me to Brisco when I first arrived. He nodded his head over one broad shoulder, back toward the picnic benches by the hive wall.
“The man needs to see you.”
Brisco sat flanked by his hangers-on. And Simms. There was another spot at the table, wide open just for me, but I didn’t sit down. Until I knew which way the wind was blowing, I wanted to stay mobile.
“I’ve been told,” Brisco said, his gaze swinging between me and Simms, “there was a problem on the tier earlier.”
Simms didn’t make eye contact with him. I did.
“No problem,” I said. “I think we understand each other now.”
“Is that right?” He looked at Simms. “Do you understand each other now, Simms?”
Simms shrugged and stared down at the table. Eloquent.
“Settle it up,” Brisco told him.
Simms set a plastic bag on the table and shoved it my way. A couple of Hershey bars and a bag of potato chips nestled inside.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I don’t need it.”
“Faust,” Brisco said. “When things are finished in here, they’ve gotta be finished, you understand? Lingering resentments, insults that don’t scab over—these are the things that can get a man killed.”
“I’m over it.”
“We don’t know that. And Simms is trying to make amends.” Brisco gestured at the bag. “So settle it up, and make us all feel better.”
I took the bag.
“Thanks,” I told Simms. “We’re cool.”
He muttered something that sounded like a thank-you and gave Brisco a sheepish side-eye. I noticed a fresh bruise on his chin that I couldn’t remember giving him.
“My boy Zap says the warden tried to get you to rat,” Brisco said. “He says you didn’t give an inch of ground.”
I glanced around the table. Quiet faces, hard eyes, but the blanket hostility I’d first felt was ebbing away. Now I was more of a curiosity, a new dog at the pound. Maybe friendly, maybe the kind that might bite.
“What happened was between us,” I said. “Simple as that.”
Two of the guys in Brisco’s entourage had my attention, as discreetly as I could manage. They were twitchier than junkies gone two days without a fix. I got the feeling they had something to say and didn’t want an audience when they said it. So I walked away from the table and gave them plenty of lead if they felt like following me.
Sure enough, I turned around at the edge of the
fence and there they were. Hovering ten feet back, locked in a silent argument. One wore the tattoo of a skeletal eagle on his meaty bicep, its black claws extended as it swooped in for the kill.
I knew that insignia. Blood Eagles. One-percenter outlaw bikers.
And I owed their boss a whole lot of money.
7.
“You’re Daniel Faust,” one of the bikers said, like he wasn’t so sure.
“That’s what they tell me.”
“Jaysus, man,” the other said in a voice tinged with an Irish brogue, letting out a gasp of relief, “we thought you’d never get here. Did Winslow get you inside?”
Of all the greetings I’d expected from the Blood Eagles—a vicious stomping being first and last on the list—that wasn’t one of them.
“To tell you the truth, I’m still working out how I got here.”
“He told us you guys had a deal. I mean, the stories about you are true, right? You handle the…the weird stuff?”
The “weird stuff” being underworld code for, well, the weird stuff. In other words, my average Tuesday. It all came back to me as I remembered my last sit-down with Winslow. I’d been backed into a corner, going up against a fanatic half-demon cult called the Redemption Choir. I needed wheels and a gun. Winslow sold me both, at one hell of an inflated price, but at the time I wasn’t in a position to argue.
He’d asked, then, if I thought I was “going inside.” This was long before the Chicago situation, but I’d been facing a shaky firearms charge and Harmony Black’s all-star cop coalition was dogging me all over Vegas.
“I’ve got a buddy inside right now,” he’d told me. “Friend of the MC. Needs a little help. Your kind of help.”
Then he’d laid out his terms. If I remained a free man, I owed him cash, and a lot of it. If I went behind bars, and I could help his buddy out, we’d be square. I had completely put the offer out of my mind. After all, no way I would end up in prison, right?
Right.
“Lucky for you,” I said, “it looks like I might be stuck here for a few days. What’s going on?”
The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust Book 5) Page 4
