Tortured Teardrops

by P. D. Workman

  “You want to explain where this came from?”

  Tamara looked at the guard, then at her bunk. A shiv. Someone had either known that the search was coming and ditched her weapon in Tamara’s room to keep from being caught, or someone had been trying to frame Tamara.

  “I’ve never seen that before.” Tamara’s voice was calm and flat. She was proud of her reaction. It was controlled. It wasn’t a crazy, hysterical protest. It wasn’t an overdramatized denial. Just nice and straightforward and honest. It wasn’t her shiv. She’d never seen it before.

  “No, of course not,” the woman guard said.

  Tamara turned slightly, trying to see her name bar. Winder. A short i or a long i? Tamara decided on a short i, not liking the association with snakes that Winder with a long i brought to mind.

  “It was hidden in a slit in your mattress. But of course, you’ve never seen it before.”

  “I’ve only been in this cell a few days,” Tamara said. “Maybe the girl who was here before me…”

  “Cells are checked and are clean before new inmates are assigned. This isn’t someone else’s weapon, this is yours.”

  “Did you check for prints?” Tamara demanded. “You’re not going to find my prints on it.”

  “It was in your cell, it’s yours, whether you wiped it down or not.”

  “I’ve never—”

  “Don’t try to snow me,” Winder snapped. “I wasn’t born yesterday.”

  What an odd thing to say. Tamara pondered this. She wasn’t even sure why Winder was questioning her. Wasn’t it Kirk who had searched the room? Shouldn’t he be the one telling Tamara where he found the weapon and that he knew it was hers? If not Kirk, then why wasn’t a senior guard or staff member questioning her? Sitting in a meeting room, not standing in her doorway. A rookie guard asking Tamara about it in the hallway didn’t seem right. If Tamara were to be pulled out of class, it should have been for a formal inquiry. Not a hallway conversation.

  “You don’t know me,” Tamara said. “I’ve never been caught using a weapon. Check my record.”

  “I don’t care if you’ve never been caught before. You’re caught now.”

  “It’s not mine.”

  “Right. Someone just planted it there.” Winder’s voice was heavy with sarcasm.

  “Yeah.”

  “Look,” Winder pulled Tamara back out of the doorway and shoved her into the wall. “I’ve had enough of your attitude. You can’t pull one over on me. Your cell, your knife. I’m sure you know how serious it is to be caught with a knife here.”

  Did Winder? She seemed to think that Tamara should fear the consequences, but Tamara wasn’t worried. The experienced guards would know it wasn’t hers. If it had been, Tamara would surely have been carrying it with her in the hallway. With the bad blood between her and the Sharks and two girls already dead in the hallway, no one with any sense would have left a weapon behind in her room to walk around unprotected.

  “It’s not mine,” Tamara repeated. Broken record, the juvies called it. Just keep repeating the same thing over and over again. No matter what question was asked, just keep repeating the same thing. Few people could keep an interrogation going when the offender just kept repeating herself without variation.

  Winder pushed Tamara into the wall again, harder.

  Tamara resisted. “Get off of me!” she growled. “You’re not allowed to shove me around.”

  “I can do whatever I want. You resist, you’re going to end up hurt.”

  “Leave me alone,” Tamara raised her voice to a yell, to a level where anyone in the surrounding hallways would be able to hear her. “Quit hitting me!”

  Winder tried again with a shove into the wall, getting her face in close to Tamara’s, trying to bully her by invading her personal space instead of just using physical force. “Shut up. You are going to confess that shiv is yours or you’re going to be sorry.”

  “I’m not resisting! Quit hitting me!” Tamara yelled again.

  Winder’s face got red. She pulled Tamara away from the wall in order to get good momentum, then shoved her back into it with such force that Tamara’s head snapped back and hit the wall. Tamara swore. She ignored the pain, focusing instead on riling Winder up. Getting her even madder and more violent. “You think that’s hard?” she hissed. “I been beaten up by fourteen-year-olds tougher than you!”

  The funny thing was, it was true.

  Tamara had played it just right and a couple of other guards came around the corner to see what all of the fuss was about just as Winder sucker-punched Tamara.

  Tamara doubled over, coughing and gasping for air. Her hands were still cuffed behind her back; it was obvious that she hadn’t been a security threat to Winder.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Kirk raced forward and pulled Winder back a couple of feet. “Let’s cool things down here.”

  Tamara fell to her knees, still trying to pull in a breath.

  Kirk put his hand on her back. “You okay, French?”

  “She was—” Winder sputtered, “—don’t believe anything she tells you! She had a weapon in her cell. She was being defiant. She…”

  “You don’t sucker punch an inmate in handcuffs. Doesn’t matter what you think she’s done.”

  The other guard who had come to see what all the noise was about was Millican. He looked into Tamara’s cell and saw the shiv on the bunk.

  “Where’d that come from?”

  “It was in her mattress,” Kirk said. “I found it when I tossed the cells this morning. Told Winder to bring French in for me.”

  It was Winder with a long i, contrary to what Tamara had thought. She took in a couple of deep, gulping breaths, forcing her diaphragm to operate.

  “French doesn’t use weapons,” Millican said.

  “Just because she hasn’t before, that doesn’t mean she can’t start. She’s feeling the heat. Got trouble with the Sharks. So she gets or makes a shiv,” Kirk countered.

  “Then she would carry it with her when she left her cell.”

  “Not if I hustled her out before she had a chance to grab it. She didn’t like it when I said I was going to search it this morning.”

  Millican looked down at Tamara. “This your knife, French?”

  “No.”

  “She’s not going to tell the truth,” Winder objected, like an exasperated mother trying to explain something to a two-year-old.

  “You pat her down?”

  “No.”

  “Aren’t you concerned about what she might be carrying?”

  Winder looked at Kirk. He obviously hadn’t given her any special instructions on how to bring Tamara back to the housing unit. Kirk didn’t help Winder out.

  “You think it was hers?” Millican asked Kirk.

  “No.” Kirk gave a shrug. “When I said I was searching the room, she looked at her bag and her box. Not a flicker toward the bunk.”

  “So she’s smart,” Winder said.

  “I don’t think it’s hers,” Kirk reiterated. Winder looked at the makeshift knife and then back at Kirk. He was her superior and a more experienced guard. She might not like the answer or his conclusion, but he was far more likely to be right than she was.

  “Why did you tell me to bring her down, then?”

  “I wanted to talk to her, get some intel.” Kirk looked down at Tamara. “Not likely to happen now.”

  “She was mouthing off. I didn’t—I wasn’t—”

  “Like I said, doesn’t matter what you think she’s done. You can’t do that. A security officer who can’t stay in control isn’t any use to us here.”

  Winder appeared to understand what that meant for her. She swallowed and nodded, mouth a grim line.

  “Why don’t you head to the break room and have a coffee or two? I’ll follow up with you later.”

  They all watched Winder head off down the hallway. Kirk swore.

  Millican sighed. “You said it. Let’s get you on your feet, French.”

 
They each put a hand under one of Tamara’s arms and lifted her easily to her feet. Tamara’s breathing was starting to ease.

  “You know whose it is?” Kirk asked, nodding in the direction of the weapon.

  “No.”

  “No idea?”

  Tamara shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Anyone.” She took another long breath. “Maybe someone with a grudge. Maybe just someone who needed to get rid of it quick.”

  “Sharks?”

  Tamara considered. She shook her head. “Don’t think so. Lewis wouldn’t want to arm me and she wouldn’t want me to get caught. What she wants is to beat the hell out of me.”

  Kirk suppressed a laugh, snorting. Millican nodded, agreeing with Tamara’s assessment.

  “You can stay here until class change,” Kirk said. “Then if you’re feeling okay, you can go on to your next class. Let me just grab that first.”

  Tamara waited while Kirk went into her cell and picked the shiv up off of the bed. He handled it without gloves and nodded to Millican as he walked by them to properly log it at the guard station.

  “You can take off the cuffs and slot her away. I’ll take care of this.”

  Millican waited until Kirk was most of the way back to the guard station before unlocking Tamara’s handcuffs. Tamara brought her hands back around in front of her and rubbed her stomach where Winder had hit her. It was going to be sore for days. But it was muscle, not ribs. At least Winder hadn’t re-broken Tamara’s ribs. Tamara explored the back of her head where it had hit the wall. There was a knot starting to swell up.

  “You hit your head?” Millican inquired. He didn’t wait for a response, but turned Tamara around by her shoulder and examined her head.

  “It’s nothing,” Tamara said.

  “I should take you to the infirmary.”

  “For this? It’s nothing. I’ve had plenty worse.”

  And he knew she had. She’d been Glock’s cellie for almost two years. But there was a list of injuries that inmates were supposed to be sent to the infirmary for, and blows to the head were on it.

  “Just get me ice,” Tamara said. “That’s all they’re going to do. I don’t want all the fuss.”

  Millican prodded the bump for a few more seconds, then withdrew. “Ice it is,” he agreed. He didn’t want to have to fill out the paperwork any more than Tamara wanted to be seen in the infirmary again. If the other juvies kept seeing her in the infirmary, they were going to label her a victim. She was fighting hard enough for her rep as it was.

  An ice pack on her head for half an hour and Tamara was ready to go back to classes when the change bell rang. She was breathing normally and, though she had bruises, it was all par for the course in juvie and she was ready to get back into the regular routine. Kirk cleared her and she went on to her next class.

  For a couple of days, things were as normal as they could be in juvie. Tamara kept a close eye on the Sharks, and they kept a close eye on her. The guards kept a close eye on both of them.

  TMJ had been run by Vernon before the prison break. During the time that Tamara had been away, the mantle had been taken up by Brett, but Tamara had a pretty good idea that she wasn’t going to be able to retain power. She was a good lackey or lieutenant to Vernon and to Rosie, but she really wasn’t gang leadership material. She had stepped in to fill a void and, with the losses and injuries both gangs had suffered during the riot that led up to the prison break, neither gang had been in any position to wield its full power.

  Tamara watched Brett across the common room where only weeks before she had acknowledged Vernon as the rightful leader of TMJ. Brett spoke with a couple of the older girls in the gang, her manner covert, head swiveling to make sure nobody was close enough to overhear them. Tamara did the best she could to read lips and body language. Were they just chatting about internal affairs? Were they discussing another fight with the Sharks? Other targets or concerns? Was Tamara herself a topic of conversation? Was she ever anything more than a passing reference or footnote to their conversation?

  Lewis and a couple of Sharks entered the common room and Tamara’s heart nearly stopped. She looked around at the guards, sure that it was a mirror of the previous riot. The Sharks were there to start a fight for power over the block. They wanted to be the undisputed authority and to run things as they saw fit.

  But they entered casually, not like they were heading into a fight. Their gang tats were not on display. They didn’t have members strategically positioned throughout the room. No one else around Tamara seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. Just a normal, routine day. A few bored girls walking into the common room to see if there were anything good on TV.

  “Little jumpy there?”

  Tamara whirled around at the voice, too close to her ear. Blacksnake. An enemy Tamara had made before the break-out. She was taller than Tamara, heavier, but not more skilled. She might have strength, but she thought just a little too slowly, which made her easier to take advantage of.

  Blacksnake laughed at Tamara’s overblown reaction. Tamara didn’t stop to think things through and come up with the best strategy for dealing with Blacksnake, she just did what she had once before and threw a punch straight into the bigger girl’s face, landing square on her nose.

  Blacksnake bleated a protest, both of her hands coming up to her face to gauge the damage, leaving her body open. In former days, Tamara would have left it at that, backing off and waiting for the security staff to take over and clean things up. But that was before. There was bad blood between Tamara and the Sharks and Blacksnake was a Shark. And not just any Shark, but one who had a personal grudge against Tamara. If she were going to convince Lewis and the Sharks to just leave her alone, Tamara couldn’t stop at a bloody nose.

  Tamara followed up with a couple of body blows and when Blacksnake decided that it would be wise to open her eyes and protect her body, Tamara used her lower center of gravity to get in low and sweep Blacksnake. The bigger girl landed hard on her butt. Tamara allowed herself one wince of sympathy. The floors at the facility were tile over concrete, and if Blacksnake had fallen the right way, she was going to be dealing with a broken tailbone. Wouldn’t she look tough sitting on a pillow or inflatable donut waiting for it to heal?

  By the time Tamara got Blacksnake to the floor, the guards were moving in to break it up, but they weren’t in any hurry. If there wasn’t a big risk that two isolated inmates having a fist fight were going to permanently injure or kill each other, the guards were happy to just let them blow off some steam before interfering.

  Tamara wasn’t like Glock. She wasn’t fighting just to blow off some steam or to satisfy her bloodlust. She was protecting herself and her rep. Tamara kicked Blacksnake, watching the girl’s hands and trying to avoid getting tripped up. She didn’t want to be on the floor with Blacksnake on top of her. Her kicks were ineffectual; no reinforced toes, just canvas runners.

  Finally, Tamara was pulled back. Once far enough away from Blacksnake that she was safe from any retaliation, Tamara took a glance around the room. The Sharks who had just come into the room, Lewis and a couple of others, stood watching. They didn’t have any reason to start a gang fight over the altercation, especially when the combatant was Tamara, not a member of TMJ.

  Blacksnake was hauled to her feet by a couple of guards, her nose dripping a steady stream of blood. She cursed angrily. No permanent injuries. Tamara wasn’t that dangerous. She could hold her own, but she wasn’t out to disable anyone in front of the whole common room.

  “What’s going on here? What’s the problem with you two?” the guard who had jerked her back demanded.

  Looking around to make sure there were no further threats, Tamara saw Zobel out the corner of her eye.

  The sight of Zobel in the common room and the adrenaline of the fight sent Tamara spinning back to the day of the prison break. She was in the common room, caught between the two opposing forces. Zobel and the other guards were trying to break things up. Tamara trie
d to protect Zobel from Tabby’s attack and then to staunch the spurting fountain of blood.

  “No.”

  She clutched at him. The blood was everywhere. In her face and hair. Pumping with each of Zobel’s heartbeats. She gagged and gripped his arm, trying to keep it from all pumping out before help could arrive. But it was going too fast. His face was almost blue. He was unconscious, life draining away from him. Tamara choked, halfway between crying and being sick.

  “No, no, no!”

  Somewhere behind her was Vernon, and in a few moments events would take another turn. Another twist that would change her life forever. She should have killed Tabby sooner. Killed her before the gang fight. Before the series of events that had fallen like dominoes, one on top of the other, ending with Zobel lying there inches from death and Tamara about to be taken hostage with the point of a shiv pressed to her jugular.

  “Calm down,” a voice urged. “Shh. Take a breath, French. Come on, now. Take a deep breath.”

  She tried, but her heart was beating faster than she could draw in oxygen, and she panted for air, straining hard.

  “Focus on me. Everything is fine. Right here.”

  Tamara tried to follow the voice to its owner. She was looking at Zobel. Not stretched out on the floor, but at her side. Not dead. Not white and still and dead.

  “What…?”

  “French. Tamara. You’re okay. Just look at me. Stay with me.”

  She tried desperately to do as he said. She stared into his eyes, forcing herself to connect, to stay there. She found herself breathing more easily. The fight started to dissolve from her vision.

  “What happened?”

  “Take some deep breaths. Think about your body. You’re here now. Listen to me. Look at me. Smell. Feel. You’re right here.”

  Tamara’s vision was clearing. She took only brief glances away from Zobel’s eyes to look around her and gradually assess the situation. It was not the gang fight. It wasn’t her kidnapping by Vernon. She had just had a brief fight with Blacksnake. She wasn’t hurt. Neither of them was really injured, though because she was bleeding, Blacksnake would be taken to the infirmary. Once the bleeding was staunched, she would be given the choice of staying there or going back to her room. She’d choose to go back to her room.