by Callie Hart
“I’m sure there’s just been a mistake,” I tell him. “We can go and get a new light bulb right now, if that’s what you want. You can pick the bulb and read the box, and you, Mr. Davis, and I will go and change it ourselves. Would that be okay?”
A compromise. An offering. A restoration of the small power he used to feel over his environment before he perceived its change. Cruise stops pacing and looks down at me. “It’s not that easy. I can’t just pick which light bulb.”
“Why not?”
He seems stumped by this. The three of us remain locked in our tense positions, me on the floor, Mitch leaning with his forehead pressed against the other side of my office door, and Cruise pressing the butt of his box cutter into the side of his head like it’s a gun and he’s about to pull the trigger.
Ten seconds.
Twenty seconds.
Thirty.
Mitch speaks. “You can pick it, I promise.”
Cruise stares at him suspiciously. “As soon as I walk through that door, you’re gonna Tase me and take me to the SHU.” Mitch can’t deny this. It’s protocol. Inmates can’t be allowed to assault members of staff whenever they feel like it, just because they’re having a tough time. “How many of you are out there?” Cruise asks. “I know it’s not just you.”
Mitch hesitates. “Me and two others. Barrows and Richards are here with me.”
Cruise’s shoulders slump. “Barrows is a cunt.”
“He probably thinks you’re a cunt, too, man.”
“Yeah. Probably.” He lowers the box cutter and retracts the blade. Looking down at me, it’s as though he’s seeing me laid out bruised and bloody on the floor for the first time. He has these breaks sometimes. He does things he can’t really remember correctly, aware of his actions but not really participating in them. He crosses the small space and holds out his hand, helping me up. “Sorry, Doc,” he says softly. “I just don’t like when they fuck with my shit.”
I’ve recommended Cruise be transferred to a psych facility a couple of times over the past few months. The prison board aren’t too generous with those kinds of transfers, though. Psych facilities are more comfortable. The inmates are given more freedom (where appropriate) and the buildings are typically newer, ergo less drafty, less worn, less dilapidated. A psych ward after Orleans Parish Prison would be like a five-star upgrade at a Sandals resort. Inmates have to be certifiably sick in order to get shipped out, and Cruise is only borderline neurotic. Will they change their minds now that he’s held me at the edge of a blade with his foot crushing my skull? Ideally I’d like to say yes, but the truth is that it’s unlikely. More’s the pity.
As soon as Mitch sees Cruise has put away the blade, he belts the door open with his boot, sending the desk that was jamming it closed skidding away. It almost hits me as Cruise pulls me to my feet.
“Down, down, down. Drop the knife, Cruise. I said drop it!” Mitch’s Taser is out of its holster and his finger is on the trigger, ready to send the probes firing out at Cruise. Cruise does as he’s asked right away, dropping the box cutter so that it clatters harmlessly to the floor. Mitch begins to lower his weapon, but then Barrows and Richards storm in behind their boss, and Barrows acts quickly. He fires his own Taser, both probes hitting Cruise square in the chest, and then the huge man is toppling to the floor, a monolithic felled tree crashing down to earth. His jaw clenches as his teeth grind together, his body convulsing under the current that’s flowing through him. His eyes swivel in his head, finding me, pleading, filled with pain…
“For God’s sake, Barrows, stop! He was unarmed.” Barrows is only a kid. I heard he applied for the police force and got kicked back twice, which is how he ended up working for the Department of Corrections. I know his type all too well. He’s power hungry. He craves authority over others, and he’ll do anything to obtain it. He shouldn’t have even fired on Cruise without Mitch’s say so, but he rushed in and reacted immediately, way before he could possibly have even assessed the situation. He continues holding his finger on the trigger, lips pressed into a grim white line as he watches Cruise twitch and spasm on the floor.
“Barrows. Barrows!” Mitch hits him in the upper arm, a little harder than is probably necessary. Barrows steps back, releasing the trigger on the Taser, instead shooting a hate-filled sideways glance at Mitch. A lot of the guards talk about Mitch, saying he’s too soft. I know otherwise, though. I know about all of the broken wrists and shattered eye sockets that have been brought into the medical bay because of Mitch. A guy even had internal bleeding and a detached retina because Mitch beat the shit out of him one time. Barrows hands over the Taser and Mitch shuts it down, sending him a look that could melt the polar icecaps. “He was right, y’know. You really are a cunt.”
Barrows just smirks. He doesn’t mind being an asshole. He doesn’t give a shit if everyone hates him, so long as he gets to lord his position over others. I’m guessing he used to hurt animals when he was a child. Cats. Mice. Rabbits. Dogs. Anything he could get his hands on.
“Get him out of here. Take him to see Doc Lorne.” Mitch gestures at Cruise, head lolling, sprawled out on the floor, barely conscious. Barrows takes Cruise by the arms, allowing his head to hit the floor as he lifts and then appears to lose his grasp on the mountain of a man. Richards bites back laughter as he collects Cruise by the feet, then the two men carry the inmate out of my office, leaving me and Mitch behind.
He rounds on me, frowning, hands on his hips, just above his appointments belt. There are two deep creases between his eyebrows that I swear weren’t there when I first met him. “You’re gonna give me a heart attack before I’m thirty-five, Nikki. What the fuck was that?”
I shrug, dabbing at my lip with my fingertips. Blood. I have a split lip. God knows how bad my face is but Cruise slugged me pretty hard. I’ll have a black eye by morning knowing the way I bruise. “That was a man who felt out of control and lost his temper.”
“That was you being fucking reckless. Again.”
Sometimes, once our shifts are done, Mitch and I go to O’Halloran’s and have a few beers before we go home. We never go home together, but I suspect he thinks that’s where we’re headed. Very slowly. He’s a good-looking guy, sure, and he cares about me, but I know what will happen if I sleep with him. Once he gets what he wants, he’ll freak out. He’ll start distancing himself, being curt at work, no more O’Halloran’s and no more concerned talks after events like this. I’ve seen him do it with women before. He’s not built for intimacy. He sure as hell isn’t built for a relationship, and I’m not a part of the Tinder generation. I don’t fuck and call it quits after one night.
“He wasn’t going to hurt me, Mitch. Not really. You can cease and desist with the knight in shining armor routine, okay? I have this handled.”
Mitch’s laugh is derisive at best. Mocking at worst. “Your face is royally fucked up right now and you think you have this handled? Please. Do me a favor. At least have a panic button installed on your desk. That way we can get here in less than thirty seconds if shit is hitting the fan.”
He’s never mentioned a panic button before. A panic button makes perfect sense. “Sure.”
“I still don’t get why you won’t just let one of us sit in.” He sounds like he’s sulking—not a particularly endearing quality on a man who’s supposed to be in control of the prison’s security. He should be stoic. Stony. Emotionless. That would really send a message. I collect the orange tag from the top drawer of my desk, not bothering to bully the piece of furniture back into position in the corner of the room where it belongs. If I hand the tag I’m holding over to Sheree at the prison’s front gate, she’ll give me my purse and my cell phone, along with the emergency pack of cigarettes that have been gathering dust in the inside pocket of my leather jacket.
“Do you think any of them will talk if there’s a guard standing behind them, Mitch? You know as well as I do, half of your staff taunt and mock these guys every chance they get. There isn’t a
single one of your guys who’d honor patient confidentiality, or not jump at the opportunity to use whatever they hear inside sessions against the men on the blocks.”
He grunts. I mean, Barrows? Really? He knows that man would gladly humiliate and embarrass anyone he could at the first opportunity he got. “You want me to walk you out?” he asks, dodging my statement altogether.
“No, it’s fine. I have another session in fifteen minutes. I just want a breath of fresh air.”
“Seriously? You just got the shit kicked out of you, and you think it’s a good idea to meet with another inmate?” Mitch’s handsome face distorts into a look of frustration. “Go home, Nik. Go to the fucking med bay and see the doc. You look like hell.”
“I’ll wash my face. I’ll be okay.” He just stands there, staring at me. I move past him out of the door, unwilling to hear any more protest from him. “I’m a professional, Mitch. I’m here to do a job, and I’m damn well going to do it. Besides, my next session is with Junior. You and I both know he’s not going to mind the bruises. He’s definitely not going to cause me any trouble either. Not three days before he’s gonna be released from this hell hole.”
By the time I get back from my brief break, leaving my pack of smokes back at the front desk with a very disapproving Sheree, my office furniture is back where it belongs. Mitch no doubt fixed it all up before he vanished. I enter the combination into the filing cabinet and I take out Peter Alexander Kendrick Jr’s file, flicking absently through pages and pages of my handwritten notes. The first time I met Junior, his jaw was wired shut. He’d arrived at the prison beaten half to death and only intermittently conscious. It was criminal, really. He should have recovered in a hospital for a solid three weeks before he was brought to our doorstep, but regular hospitals get antsy around convicted felons and so the state ordered he be brought to the Parish’s medical wing while his bones knitted back together and his body healed.
Our first session was fairly one sided on account of the fact that Junior obviously couldn’t talk. That was three years ago. He was only twenty-one, then. A young kid with a baby face; he suited his nickname down to the ground. He watched me with big brown eyes as I talked to him, his pupils narrowed down into pinpricks, the muscles in his arms and legs jumping like crazy every few minutes. It took a while for me to realize that he was so twitchy because he wasn’t on any kind of pain meds and his entire body was alive with pain.
“We don’t waste morphine on addicts,” Dr. Rossi had said. “Men like him need to feel a little pain every once in a while. Reminds them that there are always consequences to their actions.”
“He’s not a man. He’s a kid. And since when did the Hippocratic Oath allow room for interpretation? Do no harm. He has eight broken bones, and you’re allowing him to lie there in agony. You’re doing him harm. You should be fucking ashamed of yourself.” I’d had him written up for neglect. Three weeks later he applied for a transfer to a facility in Texas. No doubt he thought the psychologists in the Lone Star State would be less humane. I still pray daily that he was wrong.
Slowly, over a period of long months, Junior told me about what had happened to him. How he had ended up in trouble with the organized crime syndicates of New Orleans, owing favors to the wrong people while just trying to keep his head afloat.
Despite Dr. Rossi’s assumption, Junior wasn’t an addict. He’d never touched narcotics in his life. At first I was skeptical—nearly everyone in Orleans Parish Prison has had some interaction with illegal drugs, myself included—but after a while it became clear that it was true. Junior was sweet, kind, and easily led. He was also six foot five and built like a Spartan wrestler. He became fiercely protective over me. He would get into fights (that he always won) whenever another inmate talked shit about me. For the past three years, defending my honor has been a full-time job for Junior.
Richards brings him to my office at 4:00 p.m. exactly. Junior has to duck to avoid hitting the top of the doorjamb with his head. “Hi, Nikki.” He’s the only inmate I allow to call me by my first name. He smiles shyly. For the past year, he’s been on the honor block, the block inmates get housed on as a reward for good behavior, so he’s not wearing the same prison blues Cruise was wearing earlier. He’s in his street clothes, presumably sent here for him by his family. Oversized t-shirt, jeans, and Adidas sneakers. I snuck a red velvet cupcake into work with me a couple of weeks ago so we could celebrate his twenty-fourth birthday together, and ever since then he’s been kind of remote. Quiet. Not unusual for him, but I can tell something is bothering him. He sits himself down in the chair opposite me and looks down at his hands.
“So,” I say. “Less than seventy-two hours until you’re a free man. Are you excited?”
He nods slowly. “Damn straight. My own room. I get to see my friends, go have a beer. I can take a shit without three people watching me. What’s not to look forward to?”
I ask him where he’s going to be living. If he’s thought anymore about what he plans on doing for work. His eyes remain locked on his hands. “I don’t know. Not really. Everything’s kind of up in the air.”
“Your family is coming to get you?”
“Yeah, just my brother.”
I’m relieved to hear his cousins are staying away. They’re the ones who landed him in prison in the first place, by the sounds of things. He refuses to talk about them very often, so it’s hard to get a proper gauge on the situation, but it seems parts of his extended family are involved with some very dangerous people.
“You could do some part-time study. Go to a community college. You’re a smart guy, Peter.”
“College?” He laughs, looking up at me. “College isn’t for guys like me. Guys like me are made for steel works and construction sites.”
“That’s not true. You make your own decisions in life, don’t you? Why follow a career path prescribed to you by someone else? What someone else thinks you’re capable of?”
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. He clenches and unclenches his jaw, simmering under his own skin. Finally, he says, “It’s not as easy as that. The moment I walk out of those doors into the parking lot, I have responsibilities again. I have commitments. Not the kind that you can just walk away from. Not ever.” His eyes shine brightly, a fevered madness growing in intensity as he continues to stare at me. “When you work for Bastien, you always work for Bastien. There’s no out. There’s no handing in my notice. There’s no polite resignation and a farewell party afterwards. if I decide I want to stop fighting, there’ll be a shotgun or a knife out there with my name on it, and nowhere for me to hide.”
“Fighting?” He’s never mentioned this to me before. It makes sense, though. I know about the underground fighting circuits in New Orleans. I’m also familiar with the name that just tripped carelessly off his tongue: Bastien. Alexander Bastien. The cruel bastard who technically owns the deed to my grandmother’s house, the house I’ve lived in my entire life. If he’s caught up in the Bastien Empire then sadly he’s right. He will be expected to go back to work as soon as he walks out of the prison. Escaping his ties to the most evil family in Louisiana is an almost impossible feat.
“Why have you never told me this before?” I ask softly.
Junior sighs, picking at his fingernails. “What’s the point? Talking about it doesn’t help. It doesn’t get me out.”
My mind is spinning, a thousand thoughts running through my brain, cogs turning frantically. Junior is so dejected. This is the reason why he’s been quiet the past couple of weeks. Because he’s getting out. Most people would be thrilled that they’d served their time and they were getting to go back to their normal lives, but in this particular instance I can understand Junior’s apprehension. For some, prison is a vacation when compared to life working for Alexander Bastien. For some, a life sentence in the Parish is a get-out-of-jail-free card in the most ironic way possible.
A sick, sinking feeling pulls at my insides. Junior thinks in three days’ time, hi
s life is officially over. In some ways, it could be. Bastien’s staff members don’t tend to make it past thirty a lot of the time. But…shit. I try to block the thought from my mind. It won’t stay gone, though. There is a way Junior could be free of the Bastiens. A frightening, terrible way albeit, but still…a way.
I clench my hands into fists under my desk. Junior doesn’t see the action. He’s too caught up in his own thoughts, which is a relief. If he could see the look on my face right now…
He clears his throat. “I’ve made my peace with going back out into the world,” he says softly. “You don’t need to worry about me, okay?”
But I am worried about him.
I am.
CHAPTER THREE
TOMMY
It would have been nice to fly back into Louis Armstrong, but Bastien has people working at the airport who would recognize me. It would be a death sentence to disembark from a plane and walk through arrivals there. Same goes for Biloxi and Baton Rouge, so David and I fly into Houston and drive for six hours in a fucking Prius rental that I just can’t seem to get comfortable in. David complains about my passenger seat fidgeting until he has enough, pulls over on the side of the road and gets out, demanding that I drive. He insists it has nothing to do with the fact that he has three broken ribs and a broken index finger, along with myriad bruises. No, that would be weak of him, so he cusses me out for not being able to sit still for five seconds, then promptly passes out on the back seat, muttering wretchedly in his sleep. Twice, he shouts. Alex really did a number on him before he sent him off to find me by the looks of things. I fucking hate the bastard. I hate that he hurt my brother and I wasn’t there to protect him. I really fucking hate that I have to travel back to my home city under a cloak of secrecy as well. I should be able to come and go as I please. It shouldn’t even occur to me that I might end up dead because I’m stepping foot into the French Quarter.
