Blackjack

by Andrew Vachss

  Guards patrolled up and down the aisles, as tightly wound as the prisoners. Something was going down. Something a lot bigger than any individual attack. But nobody seemed to know what that would be, or where it was going to come from.

  AFTER SUPPER, a group of Aryans positioned themselves to the far right of the shower room. A young white inmate walked toward them, a towel in his hand.

  “Fish,” one of the thugs hissed.

  The young white man stepped to the other side, and found himself on black turf, where he was immediately accosted. “You in the wrong part of town, Chuck!”

  The white inmate turned away, mumbling apologies, but too late—he found himself surrounded by blacks. The same whites who had been ready to rape the young man now moved in to defend him, chesting their way forward.

  The distinct sound of a shell being jacked into a chamber chilled the entire shower room. All eyes turned to a trio of guards: one kneeling, two standing, all ready to fire their “non-lethal” weapons. This was a kill-trained team, eyes unreadable behind their face shields, but there was no mistaking their orders.

  “Better come with us,” one of the whites said to the young man, putting his arm around the kid’s shoulders.

  “Thanks, man. I didn’t know.…”

  “It’s okay,” the older man told him, comfortingly.

  As he walked the kid toward the right side of the shower room, two of his crew stayed behind, watching his back. And waiting their turn.

  “Fresh meat,” one said to the other.

  “Yeah. Looks juicy, too,” the other responded.

  As the words left his mouth, a tiny line of darkness appeared to circle one of the showerheads, throbbing as if it had a pulse. At the word “meat,” the circle became arrow-shaped, pointing down:

  “Hit!”

  AT THE scream, the squad charged into the shower. They found one of the would-be rapists dead on the floor, his blood flowing into the drain. But even the most invasive search failed to turn up a weapon of any kind.

  It wasn’t until the bag-and-tag team took the required photos that the presence of a tattoo on the dead man was noted.

  “Must be a new one,” the camera operator said, looking at the jack of spades overlapping the ace of hearts.

  By the time the body was wheeled into the infirmary, the tattoo had disappeared.

  And the photos the team took never came out.

  THAT SAME evening, Cross was again having a smoke on the tier, leaning over to watch the activity below. He turned at Banner’s approach, and they began a conversation.

  Suddenly, the Riot Bell sounded. The goon squad thundered past, sweeping convicts out of its way like a bulldozer.

  “Goddamn it!” Banner rasped out. “They must’ve made another move. This keeps up, we might as well have it go all-out.”

  IN THE prison hospital unit, a white inmate was lying on a bed, the back of which was elevated to put it in something close to a sitting position. No injuries were visible, but his face was bleached out, as if his eyes had seen something too much for his mind.

  He was surrounded. Not only by guards, but also by men in suits who must be Administration from the way the guards deferred to them.

  One of the suits shook his head, and made a gesture. The others walked out with him, leaving the contingent of guards in place.

  Within minutes, the suits walked through the corridor, grim-faced. They didn’t stop until they reached the Director’s office.

  “HE’S STICKING to his story?” a gray-haired man asked the others.

  “That’s right, Chief,” one of the suits replied.

  “What’s your take on it?”

  “I’m not sure, sir. The kid’s not lying. Not intentionally, anyway. Far as he’s concerned, some kind of creature just … materialized or something. Then it hacked four Brotherhood members into hunks of meat.”

  “You think …?”

  “I don’t know what to think. Those cons—the dead ones—they’re known booty bandits. No question what they had on their minds when they muscled that kid into that corner—we even found a little tube of Vaseline on the floor. So, if it wasn’t for the physical evidence, I’d say the kid was flying on chemicals and he just hallucinated the whole mess. Hell, that’s what we’ve got him here for, right? Dope fiend?”

  The suit looked up, his face grave. “He didn’t hallucinate those bodies. God! They were done the same way Towers was. Like there’s a goddamned recipe or something. And nobody saw a thing.

  “Yeah, I know: in a place like this, nobody ever does. But this much is for real. Not even our own CIs know anything. And, with what we put on the table for them, they’d spill in a minute if they did.”

  RUMORS WHIPPED like a vicious wind, gusting throughout the prison on razor wings, passing from whisperer to whisperer, each time picking up speed and adding content.

  “They got four of our guys!” Banner said to Cross. “Four! This is out of control.”

  “Now you know why I’m here?” Cross asked.

  “Yeah. And all glory to Odin that you are. I’ve got over twenty calendars in, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Even when they had us outnumbered five to one, they couldn’t make things like this happen.”

  “I’m gonna need some stuff.…”

  “Whatever it is, you got it,” Banner promised, as solemnly as a new bride.

  VISITING DAY. Tiger waited patiently in line for her pass. She was dressed in a burnished-gold short-sleeved T-shirt several sizes too small, black spandex pants, and bronze spike heels with black soles. Nobody was looking anywhere else: male or female, black or white, convict or guard.

  “Prison’s prison, but that there is just plain wrong,” a black convict whispered to the man next to him as Tiger strutted past. “I knew there was still women out there, but this is downright ridiculous, bro. How am I supposed to look my wife in the eye, now? That woman could always tell when I was slip-sliding around. Now I’m in a place where she knows I can’t be getting any pussy. But I bet I got that exact same look on my face, right this minute.”

  Tiger greeted Cross with a deep kiss and tight embrace. Her mouth stayed locked on his a long time. If the guard hadn’t been busy gaping at the wonder of spandex, he might have told them to break it off.

  The Visiting Room was as racially divided as the rest of the prison. Cross escorted Tiger over to a corner, a move requiring them to walk the entire length of the room. Cross looked neither left nor right. Physical attacks can happen anyplace in a prison, but the Visiting Room was considered sacrosanct space—any excuse to cancel visiting privileges would be a victory for the guards and a defeat to all prisoners, regardless of color.

  Cross slid into an empty space created by Brotherhood members. He sat with his back to the wall, virtually disappearing behind a human curtain.

  On the other side of the large room, a young man who was once “Roscoe” from a disguised posse car spoke respectfully to a man known to him. Not personally, but as a trusted comrade of his own leader.

  Roscoe left his gangbanger threads at home. He was dressed in a neat business suit, talking to a middle-aged black man wearing a tricolor African knit cap.

  The man was one of obvious importance, as could be judged from the phalanx of on-the-alert convicts surrounding him on all sides. He was deep in conversation with Roscoe when Cross and Tiger walked by. Not a flicker of recognition showed on either man’s face.

  Cross took Tiger’s hand, pulled her into the corner with him. His eyes danced over the room as they spoke softly to each other. After a few minutes passed, he got up and approached a white guard.

  Over the guard’s shoulder were the restrooms. Though they were once painted men and women, that paint had long since been worn off. And never replaced. It was common knowledge that the left room was for contraband transfer, the right one for sex. Only one couple at a time was allowed in either.

  “You’re next,” the guard told Cross.

  As a man and woman eme
rged from the restroom, arms around each other, Cross again took Tiger’s hand and walked her with him to the vacated spot.

  Inside, he leaned against her, speaking only for her ear.

  “They’re here,” Cross said. “No question. Got four more last night.”

  “Save some for me,” Tiger answered, pulling her T-shirt up to her neck. Cross pressed her against the wall. The surveillance camera captured the groping, but not the mouth-to-mouth transfer, an exact duplicate of the “greeting” kiss they had used to test that same system earlier.

  JUST WHAT was transferred was not known until Cross had passed through three separate search stations before being allowed back to his cell.

  Cross sat on his cot, smoking as if deep in thought, watching through veiled eyes. Suddenly, the entire wing was plunged into darkness. As the inmates cursed and the guards tried to fight off panic, Cross removed a wafer-thin microchip from behind the back molar where Tiger had planted it with the tip of her tongue. After many rehearsals, he was able to open the back of the prison-issued radio working by touch alone. It only took a few seconds to insert the microchip.

  BY THEN, Tiger was on her way out of the institution. But before she stepped off the grounds to enter the parking lot, she was cornered by a guard who clearly spent a lot of time in the weight room—a state-of-the-art facility installed to help prison employees deal with the stress of their jobs. Another “working-class union victory” in a country where the salaries of prison guards are triple those of child-protection caseworkers.

  “You look like a smart girl,” the guard leered, looming over Tiger. “I’ll bet you know how you could make it real easy on your man back there.” As if accidentally, his fingertips lightly brushed across her breasts.

  “Really? How?” Tiger asked, wide-eyed and smiling sweetly.

  “It’s easy. You go along; he gets along, see? You like to play games, honey?”

  “I love to play games,” Tiger purred.

  “Yeah? What’s your favorite?”

  “Squash,” Tiger whispered, her lips twisting from come-hither to combat-snarl. The guard, instantly paralyzed and about to faint from the stabbing pain, futilely tried to pry her vise grip off his testicles—so recently engorged, but now in danger of withdrawing completely into his body.

  As the guard slumped to the ground, still cupping his sack and mewling, Tiger walked off, her spike heels clicking a challenge to anyone else with bad ideas.

  THE NEXT morning, the surveillance cameras planted throughout the prison flashed various war-zone images. Roving gangs stalked the corridors, armed with a variety of homemade weapons. The level of organization was impressively military: one man walked point, the next men up carried the heaviest weaponry, the last man walked backward.

  Even as the convict patrols were in motion, other prisoners were working on rearmament: carefully turning out shanks from any material possible, sharpening them down to needle points, wrapping their handles in tape.

  Specialists were at work as well. One was twirling a glue-coated piece of rope through a pile of finely ground glass; another was fashioning a crude zip gun out of a length of tubing, a carved-wood pistol stock, and a thick rubber band for the nail that would serve as a firing pin.

  “We only got two bullets,” the con keeping watch said to the gun-builder, opening his hand to show the tiny cartridges within, “and they’re .22 shorts. Tell the Sandman he’s got to be close.”

  Some convicts were walking alone. One moved stiffly—the steel bar stolen from the weight room and now hidden down the leg of his pants hampering his movements. Another apparently unarmed warrior’s entire upper body was wrapped in “Convict Kevlar”—thick layers of dampened newspaper.

  On the yard, a group of blacks practiced a complex set of martial-arts katas under the watchful eye of their instructor. The Aryans were neither planning nor practicing, they were already picking out potential targets. A lone Latino squatted as far away from the black and white crews as possible. He was delicately fingering a short length of razor wire, heavily tape-wrapped at one end.

  WITHIN MINUTES, any illusion of organization had disappeared. Close combat raged over every screen.

  One camera showed a black man cornered by a group of whites. He held a two-pointed shank in one hand, poised to strike, but it was obvious he wasn’t going to survive the coming encounter.

  Another showed a white convict taken out from behind by a pipe-wielding black.

  The cameras were capable of zooming when hand-operated. Usually set to “automatic sweep,” now they were individually manned. A close-up showed a dark hand holding a small glass bottle with a rag wick. He lit the wick and threw the bottle into a cell, which exploded in flames. The camera did not reveal how the unseen firebomber had managed to get inside the Isolation Wing.

  “Tell my Juanita I died a man …” one Latino murmured to his crew as they dragged him from a battle scene, his life bleeding away from multiple stab wounds.

  A slim but hard-muscled Latino wearing a T-shirt knotted at the midriff over a pair of bleached jeans with the back pockets removed whirled in mid-stride, a curved piece of honed steel in his hand. “Come on!” he challenged an unseen menace. “I got what you want right here, don’t I? So come and take it, puta. You call me maricón? Bueno. Quién es más macho, eh, puerco?”

  THE IIT—the prison’s Internal Investigation Team—was standing outside a large cell, clad in full-body armor. One was shining a high-intensity lamp, the other taking photographs. They paid no attention to the large group of black convicts in the background, perhaps because five other members of their team were facing that direction, their hands full of firearms which clearly failed to meet any “non-lethal” criteria.

  Two fresh kills were hanging inside. Neither had a spinal cord; only one had even a fragmentary piece of a skull.

  “Twenty-nine, documented,” the cameraman said.

  “Damn! They’ve never hit in this wing before,” the man shining the light replied.

  “Who knows?” The cameraman shrugged off the statement. “The pictures I take never come out anyway.”

  BACK IN the Administration office, the IIT leader was making his report. “Chief, they took out a few more. Must have been before the riot jumped off. Same as in the shower room. Four men were in the rec cell at the end of the corridor. Playing cards, far as we can tell. All blacks. Probably UBG.

  “Why they let this guy Camden live, we don’t know. We don’t have him registered as UBG, but we know he rolled with them. Still, he wasn’t a member. Never inked up, either.”

  A studious-looking member of the IIT was holding a file in his hand. “I’ll tell you what was different about that one, Chief. He didn’t do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “The crime. Yes, I know, the whole joint’s full of innocent men. But it really looks like this guy Camden was outright railroaded. He was just a kid when he first came into the system—crime committed on federal property, some park, I guess. They probably only sent him here to send a message to blacks on the street. There’s nothing in his file that connects him to that rape he’s doing time for.”

  “I don’t know his case, just his charges. What are you saying, the whole thing never happened?”

  “No, the girl was gang-raped, all right. And they got the guys who did it. Five of them, matter of fact. This guy Camden, like I said, he was just a kid at the time. He was hanging out with the men who committed that rape, but that was much earlier that day, a good nine hours before the rape went down.

  “And get this: the woman herself—the victim—she even said as much during the trial. Pointed right at Camden and said he wasn’t one of the ones who raped her.”

  “And he was still convicted?”

  “I guess he was, although I’m damned if I can see how. No fingerprints, no DNA, solid alibi. This is one kid who never got a break.”

  “He sure got one last night,” the Chief said, turning to address the entire IIT. “This has got
to stop. I need all the shot-callers in here. And I mean now!”

  INSIDE THE conference room. At one end was the Chief, flanked by openly armed guards. At the other end: Banner, the middle-aged black man in the tricolor cap, and a Latino with three tears prominently tattooed on the right side of his face, just below his eye.

  The Chief addressed all the convicts collectively. “This is how it’s going to be, from now on. I brought you men in here because the killings have to stop. They don’t stop, and I’d just as soon have you all gunned down.

  “Now, you all know I can do that. Another escape attempt gone wrong, who’d be shocked at that? And there wouldn’t be any of that ‘At-ti-ca’ bullshit, not this time. You must know we’ve got every one of your crews infiltrated. And that the security cameras see only what we want them to see.”

  “You can’t fake—”

  “Can’t fake what, Banner? Can’t fake a convict we own stabbing a guard? Why even fake it? And why would we miss a guard who was bringing in drugs … or maybe even pistol that ended up in another convict’s hand. You know, that same convict who started the whole escape attempt.”

  “I believe you,” the black man said. “You people got Freon for blood.”

  “You’re not wrong, Nyati. And I’d rather go that route than put up with anything that makes it looks like I can’t control my own house. If this is some stupid game to get the media on your side, it’s already failed.”

  His eyes still on the black man, the Chief continued: “We’re telling nothing but the truth in here today. I’ll be dead-center straight. Nyati, at first we thought this was your gang’s work. It looked like one of your typical UBG moves. But now some of your own men have been hit, and in exactly the same way.

  “And you, Ortega, maybe you thought your carnales could lay back, let the other colors cut their numbers. But when Montero and Rodriguez got done the same way, you knew you were in the kill-zone, too. There’s only one color that counts in here anymore. That’s red. Blood red.