Nick stopped breathing. His eyes widened, and his electrified gaze shot straight at John. But he stepped on whatever realization he’d come to, and took on a look of calm resolve.
“What do you think I should do, John?”
“Are you - did you just ask me for advice?” John was grinning like an idiot.
“Consider it a test run,” said Nick, wrinkling up his nose like he was about to stick his tongue out at John.
“Okay.” Nick’s questioning had taken John’s own opinion in a different direction.
“Don’t run to WITSEC or some hotel upstate. Trust us, grit your teeth and spend a few days in solitary so we can nail this bastard fast and for good. I -” John’s resolve wavered. “I know that’s an awful thing to do to you.”
“I can handle it,” said Nick. He gave John a little smile. “Let’s do it. If New Orleans is out of the running, a nice bleak insanity-inducing cement box sounds like the next best thing, really.”
The smile went away and Nick's expression turned utterly sincere. “Thank you. So much.” For letting it be my choice.
John looked back at him wordlessly in the knowledge that something monumental had just taken place in what Mari had called “The story of you and Nick.”
A sharp rap on the door startled all of them. The CO Nick liked, Larson, was out there with Nick Kasdan. Larson pulled the door open.
“Morning, all. Working a double today, came to say hi to Aster before I go on shift and found this stray wandering around.”
Nick grinned. “Uncanny timing. John. Larson. I need you to get a few inmates in here to talk to me.”
“Why?” asked John.
“Remember I told you I did time with some innocent men?”
John nodded.
“There’s this guy who always just broke my heart. Most decent, good-natured man in this place, he has a wife and two kids and he’s serving life for a murder he just didn’t do. He can’t talk about his family without crying.”
John shivered. “Let me guess. Plea bargained out of Rikers.”
“Yeah - he said he knew it would effectively end his life, but jail was so bad he was going to kill himself if he had to stay there, so he pled to murder.”
“How do you know he’s innocent?” asked John.
“It’s ....there’s this crushed, heartbroken part to some guys you just come to recognize," said Nick. "They’re good prisoners, good people, and they’ll never have faith in fairness again. He’s the epitome of that.”
Larson was smiling, propping his large frame up in the door frame. “I’m gonna guess we’re talkin’ about Green here?”
Nick nodded, while John looked between the two of them. “Who is ....”
“A member of Nick’s gang,” said Larson.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The Exploits of the Cowering in the Corner Crew
JOHN
“You have a gang?” John gave Larson a baffled and shocked look. “Nick was in a gang? Nick couldn’t win a fight with a wet kitten.”
“Well, technically....” The officer scratched under his chin and frowned uncertainly.
“Knew there had to be a ‘technically’ in there,” said John, smirking at Nick.
Nick smirked right back.
“.... he ran a gang.”
Larson burst out laughing at John’s expression. “You didn’t know Nick led a prison gang?”
“NO!”
It was Nick’s turn to start laughing. “Orchid and mint are our gang colors.”
John snicker-snorted despite himself. “What are you called, Fancy Hats Behind Bars? The Designer Gang?”
Nick wrinkled his nose. “Inmate Support Network.”
“That’s.... not very badass,” said John, giving him a deliberately crestfallen look.
“What do you expect from an outfit that jumps people in with a feather duster?” retorted Nick.
It fell to Larson to explain. “Nick was.... one very brave, baffled, and scared puppy when he came in here. He was smart, but he had no support. Kept looking to us for that, which was endearing as all hell but it was gonna get him in trouble with the inmates, and you could tell it broke his fucking heart when we had to get tough on him.”
“I couldn’t cope,” said Nick. “Everything was so strict I wanted to curl up and die. I - really didn’t think I’d survive years of not existing with free will. I just broke down one day, ended up on my stomach in restraints getting screamed at. I remember going from shaking to completely limp, detached like all the strings broke and I was a broken puppet on the floor. Like ....okay, I’m an object. I can’t try to be a person here. Thank God I can’t feel any longer.”
Larson cast an empathetic glance between John and Nick. “I put Aster on lockdown knowing I’d have a chance to talk to him without inmates around. At that time ....inmates on lockdown weren’t allowed to use their bunks during the day, so I find Aster hidden under the bunk, not crying or anything, just trying to stop existing.”
Nick shivered. Fisher was tucked out of the way in the rear corner, sober. Black had faded to thin violet tinged with orange as the sun rose, a change only hinted at through the thin slit of a window at the rear of the cell.
A nurse strode past with a rattling cart. A yawning inmate disinfected the floors. So much for any chance of sleep. Sing Sing Penitentiary was waking up, and Nick looked exhausted.
“He asked me if I was thinking about suicide,” said Nick. “How does someone putting you through this care whether you’re breathing or not? I didn’t answer until he said, ‘Aster, we’re all human here. Nothing I do is because I want you to be miserable.’”
“There’s not much an inmate can do to make me real emotional,” said Larson. “I look at professional pity plays all frikkin’ day. But when I say that, Aster sticks his head out from under the bunk, and looks at me like I’m his lifeline, which kinda broke me because I was the one who ordered him on lockdown. He tells me he doesn’t want to die, but he has no idea how to be alive in here, and his head just falls down into his arms.”
John sucked in his breath. His legs felt oddly weak. It wasn’t hard for him to imagine that exact scene, and the realities of Nick in prison were hard to handle.
“Jesus.”
Larson leaned heavily against the door frame. “I had another new guy on lockdown -- Aster had his wits about him, this inmate was totally broken. Clearly abused in prior custody, has a panic attack any time we get near ....headed for seg if he didn’t get his shit together. My feelers are screaming he’s gonna try and kill himself. So the next day I hold Aster over on lockdown for special duty, and I see him looking at me like oh, God, please don’t do this to me again. I tell him, ‘you’re gonna learn by teaching. You’re gonna save a man’s life.’”
Nick grinned. “He was nuts. I mean ....I’m gonna help someone cope? And the stakes are he might die? But it meant being let out of the cell ....”
Larson shifted his weight to the other side of the door frame. “I sat Aster down on a chair outside Green’s cell, and tell him that’s where he’s spending the day.”
“And he meant it,” said Nick. “This bastard even made me eat lunch sitting in front of that cell, and finally Green says his first word to me. When we started talking, the things I told that poor guy to try and comfort him applied to me too. I was agonizing over five years, he was -- it was his life.”
“Ouch,” said John softly. This place played serious with its pain. “Green the guy you think’s innocent?”
“Is innocent,” said Nick with a tired bite to his voice. “End of the day we were able to smile and goof around, and we figured we’d make it. I was so exhilarated that night, it changed everything. I could affect the world I was in and have an impact. I could be something other than a broken puppet. I had a friend. I could breathe again.”
So could John. He let out a long, slow breath and regarded Larson with new respect. Larson caught the look and flashed him a tiny, hidden smile.
&nbs
p; Nick gave John a wry look. “I started greeting freaked-out newbies. Some moron’s told ‘em that on arrival they need to beat someone to death and join a gang, and all they really want is to hide in a corner and cry. I wanted to save people from going through that godawful adjustment on their own the way I had.”
“So you formed the Cowering in the Corner Crew?” asked John, returning the wry look. “You’re not really delivering on the ‘badass prison gang’ premise here.”
Nick gave him a mock glare and swatted at him. “I should shank you for that.”
John was going to return the swat, remembered that ill-considered file folder, and gave him a very gentle shove instead.
“You didn’t even know a shank when it stabbed you in the stomach. You can’t make ‘em out of silk ties, you know.”
Nick’s eyes narrowed in amused contentment. “I kept meeting inmates, even a lot of murderers, who weren’t monsters, just normal guys acting tough. This is a scary place if you’re on your own.”
Larson nodded. “I’m not saying rape’s anywhere as common as people think, but intake took one look at Aster and single-celled ‘im near the guard station.”
Nick brushed it off with a shrug. “People cling to safety in numbers and crave social structure. Largest population group here was just trying to keep their heads down and survive. Nobody had organized them or realized just how much combined control they would have. So I formed a gang, and it was the largest in the prison within a month. Since we were a nonviolent support network, it was even legal and we were given resources by the state.”
John stared. That was so ....Nick. Who else in the damn universe would even think of pulling something like that off?
“You got state funding for a prison gang?”
Larson chuckled at John’s disorientation. “Yes, Nick Aster is one of the most powerful inmates in Sing Sing.”
“Our first move was to seize control of the Art classes,” said Nick. “I’m serious!” he protested against John’s chortle. “Next thing you know we were running the kitchen, the library --”
“You take over knitting club too?” asked John. “Or was that a Crips stronghold?”
“You go ahead and laugh,” said Larson. “We try to segregate by social group, you don’t put rival gangs on the same block. Nick managed to get his guys housed together. Aster’s block is the calmest and safest in this prison. Still, to this day. And they hold a rather startling amount of power.”
Fisher tried to get the conversation back on track. “So you wanted us to fetch the ....uh ....leader of your prison gang?”
Nick nodded. “The sting needs four components. One, you guys gotta flip Vineil. Two, Mozzie as the middle man who finds someone in the prison to off me. Three, we need that someone, and Green would knock it out of the park. Four, I gotta be protected from those wild cards Starr met with. If I’m in solitary and there’s a whole - uh - ‘inmate support group’ watching for the approach, they’re not getting close.”
John frowned. “These guys’d cooperate with law enforcement?”
“To take down a corrupt cop? Absolutely,” said Nick.
“Done it before,” said Larson, his face taking on a haunted look.
John shifted uneasily. “Uh ....I’d want any suspects delivered breathing and in one piece.”
“Biggest rule of Nick’s gang is no violence,” said Larson.
Nick seemed offended by John’s implication. “If a CO or a vulnerable inmate has to fear you under any circumstances, you’re out. We stop violence and revenge, we don’t inflict it.”
“They actively train on nonviolent conflict resolution, and they have their own inmate crisis negotiation team,” said Larson.
Nick was plainly exhausted, having been up most of the night. He looked small and vulnerable and beaten, wearing orange inmate scrubs with his hair messy and his blood still staining the wall where an FBI agent had attacked him. There was an IV line in his arm from his ordeal with the antibiotic reaction.
John bit his lower lip. This was going to have one hell of an audience. But Nick had to hear it. He looked his friend directly in the eyes. “You have no idea how damn much I respect you right now.”
Nick didn’t have the energy, and had too large an audience, to react much. But his complex blue eyes flashed through the myriad micro-expressions that could so tug at John’s heart. Validation, gratitude, affection, appeal for support, a tiny bit of gloating ....
John returned the tiny smile that lurked only behind Nick’s eyes. Nick gripped the gray wool blanket tightly and forced himself to look professional again.
“All righty then - I’ll interview Green as a potential victim, and set up the sting,” said Fisher.
“Dan.” Nick shook his head. “You’re talking about the most painful event in this man’s life. Empathy ....not really your thing.”
Fisher chuckled. “And Langley here is Mister Tactful?”
“No. But he can see pain, and knows how to respond.”
“Okay .... I’ll just wait outside then?” Fisher looked almost pathetic, and John was tempted to halfway forgive him for hitting Nick.
“Just let us make the initial approach,” said Nick. “I know he’ll have to spend days going over stuff with your team.”
Halfway.
“Far outside,” snapped John. “You can listen, don’t interrupt.”
JOHN
Lyndon Green was a lean black man in his early thirties, with a pleasant face and haunted eyes. He was clean-shaven, wore his hair short, and carried himself like a suburban dad, not a blustering thug. John liked him instantly.
Green listened to Nick’s introduction to John and the situation with a wrenching mix of distrust and hope.
“So this is your beloved Agent Langley?” He shook John’s hand and looked deep into his eyes, seeking his character and attitudes, looking for a man he didn’t realistically hope to find.
“You should know I’ve cleared innocent people before,” said John. “I’ll listen with an open mind, and I’ll care.”
“I pled guilty,” said Green. “And you can watch my interrogation. It was professional, courteous, and in no way violated my rights. No lawyer has ever offered me hope, let alone a law enforcement officer.”
“Did you confess during your interrogation?” asked John.
“Oh, hell no. I was so upset and scared you can hear me on the tape begging my lawyer to get them to understand I didn’t do it. I never confessed to a cop. I pled guilty to a judge, and that’s a hell of a lot worse.”
“Was it Rikers Island?” asked Nick.
Green looked at the corner and nodded.
“The other guys,” asked Nick. “Anyone else go through Rikers, and plead guilty because of it?”
“Four of us,” said Green with certainty.
“Us being guys who maintain innocence?” asked John.
“We are innocent,” said Green with steel in his voice. “I’ll walk you out onto that floor, FBI agent, and introduce you to twenty-three innocent men. That’s down two from twenty-five, since Miguel killed himself and Sig got to die of a heart attack alone in a prison cell. But if you want just those of us who were tortured into confessing to a judge while we were in Rikers, that’s four for sure. Maybe more.”
“I’d like to meet them,” said John. “I can only investigate Federal crimes, so I have no standing to look into your initial cases.”
Green’s air of disappointment was the mild but very deep hurt of a man whose hopes had been crushed too many times to let hope build any more. “I understand.”
John ached inside. Why was it always the good people, the Nicks and the Greens, who accepted, and the bad ones who fought and hated?
“If we prove what Starr did, it’ll cast doubts on your convictions at worst and automatically invalidate them at best,” said John. “There are lawyers and advocacy groups -- it’ll be a very different picture.”
“Starr?” Green frowned, then his eyebrows shot up. “Stu
ffy commander guy? He did all this? I met him like ....once, for about a minute. Hated his guts, he looked at me like I was a cockroach he wanted to stomp, but ....”
“He had help,” said John. “But, yes.”
“Wow.” Green’s expression lightened a little. “So - I always thought it was the detective who interrogated me who sent me into that hell. It ....sounds silly, but it hurt, because he seemed like a nice person.”
“Can you tell me what happened there?” asked John.
Broken Blue Lines: Love. Hate. Criminal Justice.: An FBI Crime Drama / LGBT+ Love Story Page 36
