At a signal, the ranges of cell doors rolled open. The simultaneous clangor was deafening.
Remo walked toward the beige corridor to his open cell, just short of the last cell on death row.
A rough voice called after him, "In the yard, cop." After the cell door buzzed shut with a temporary finality that Remo never got used to, he spoke a question into the air. "Know a con named MeGurk?" Popcorn's voice was wry. "Yeah. He's the dude they call Crusher. Ain't that a comic-book name, man? Crusher McGurk. They say his first name's Delbert. "
"Faggot?" Remo wondered.
"Yeah. Real butch. Why you ask? He take a shine to you?"
"Yeah."
"That Crusher, you gotta watch out for him. He pitches, but he don't catch. Know what I mean?"
"Yeah. He says he'll be looking for me in the yard."
"Then don't go into the yard."
"Have to. I have to keep in shape."
"What for? Sparky suck you dry in the end, bro."
"Someday I may get out of here," Remo said. He noticed that someone-himself or the guard-had kicked the corridor cigarette closer to the bars. He went over and put his hand through the bars. He forked the cigarette between two fingers and withdrew to his cot.
"Sure," Popcorn said as Remo examined the white paper for damage. It had split at one end and was dirty where a boot sole had crushed it. But the other end was clean. Remo flicked dust off it carefully. "Someday you'll get out," Popcorn was saying. "There's a white hearse that's gonna carry all us Dead Men outside of these walls one fine day. You can count on that."
"No. Not that way," Remo said, putting the clean end of the Camel into his mouth. "Someday they'll figure out that I'm innocent."
Remo ignored Popcorn's howling laughter as he searched his pockets for a match. He discovered he had no pockets, and of course there was no match either.
And Popcorn kept laughing as if Remo's innocence was the funniest thing on death row.
Chapter 4
For Remo Williams, convicted murderer, his first day at Florida State Prison was not much different than all the days he could remember at Trenton State Prison. The guards came around for the ten o'clock head count. Lunch was served at twelve-thirty. Remo's food tray was placed on the shelflike slot in his cell door. It was meatloaf stew. He smelled it, and although he felt hungry, he returned the tray to the slot. By the time the guard came back to retrieve it an hour later, the surface had congealed into cold grease.
There was another head count at three in the afternoon, and again at eight. Lights-out came at the stroke of eleven, and a final bed check came twenty minutes later as a lone guard strolled down the line, pausing to turn his big D-cell flashlight on each cell. Once he called to a con to uncover his head. Only then did the beam pause for a moment; then its on-and-off activity continued.
The light came on in Remo's eyes and he turned over. The guard went on, repeated his ritual at Popcorn's cell, and then clumped away, his going punctuated by the diminishing loudness of the door buzzers as they closed in succession.
Remo stared at the flat blackness of his cell's outer wall, wondering if the nights here would be as bad as those in Trenton.
They were.
Distantly a voice called out, "Beam me up, Scotty," and Remo almost laughed. Except that the forlorn tone of the man's voice dampened the laughter. He had not been joking. In fact, he launched into an extended one-man performance of an imaginary Star Trek episode, playing in turn the parts of Captain Kirk, Spock, Scotty, McCoy, and even, in a ridiculous falsetto voice, Uhura.
"Shut your hole, chump!" a bass voice warned.
"You shut your hole. Let the man be. He be entertaining us."
That last came from Popcorn. Sighing, Remo rolled out of bed.
"Does this go on every night?" he asked.
"Some nights," Popcorn told him. "That be Radar Dish. He know every Star Trek episode by heart. Says he seen 'em seventeen times each. So naturally he get to the point where he roll his own, so to speak. You shoulda heard the one he spun last Saturday. When it was over, Kirk had got hisself zapped by the Romulans and Spock took over the bridge. First thing he do is to order retreat and start ballin' Uhura. That Radar Dish, he really gets into being Spock. But he likes to put his own spin on things."
Remo sighed. Back at Trenton, there had been a con who did Dragnet impersonations all night long. His Joe Friday had been so accurate that it prompted one lifer to stick a sharpened number-nine pencil into the con's Adam's apple, with fatal results. It seemed like a long time ago now. Remo couldn't even remember either man's name.
Finally the talking aloud, the sobbing, and the groaning tapered off and silence descended over the humid darkness of death row.
Remo slept.
In his sleep, he dreamed.
And in his dream, he was free.
Remo dreamed that he was riding an elevator to the penthouse of a high-rise apartment building. He saw himself framed in the gold-wallpapered elevator cage, as if having an out-of-body experience. One hand was in his pocket and the other hung at his side, fingers snapping impatiently.
The elevator doors slid open and he started to step from the cage. He hesitated momentarily. The gleam that came into his eyes was short-lived. Then, casually taking the hand from his pocket, he stepped out into the corridor. He whistled.
From either side of the elevator doors, a burly man appeared. Each wore an expensive Italian silk suit. They carried compact little Mac-11 machine pistols. One placed the muzzle to Remo's neck and the other on his opposite side. Remo stopped whistling.
In his sleep he cried, "Oh, shit!" But in the dream he looked as cool as an actor starring in a TV movie of the week.
One of the two men mumbled, "Get off on the wrong floor, pal?"
To which Remo heard himself reply, "Not if this is Don Polipo Tentacolo's suite."
"Don Tentacolo ain't seeing visitors tonight, pal." This from the other man, the one who started patting Remo down. The other goon-there was no better word for him-kept his Mac-11 jammed in Remo's side.
What happened next happened so fast that it made Remo jerk in his sleep.
The kneeling guard was checking Remo's ankles when one of Remo s feet snapped up. The toe seemed only to tap the man's chin, but his head flew back like it was on the end of a snapped cable. The crack of splintering vertebrae was as distinct as thunder.
Then-or perhaps it occurred simultaneously, because Remo's attention was on the head snapping back and not elsewhere-the dream Remo twisted his upper body so that the pistol muzzle pointed at thin air. He took the other goon by the wrist. Instead of exerting pressure against the natural flex point of the joint as he'd been taught at the police academy, Remo inserted his pinky finger into the open muzzle of the Mac-11. The sound of the barrel splitting merged with the crack of the splintering vertebrae.
The Mac-11 fell apart as if every weld and screw had simultaneously disintegrated, leaving the goon holding a very shaky gun butt with the shiny little bullets visible in the exposed top of the magazine clip.
The goon looked down at his useless weapon and then at his fallen comrade, whom Remo dislodged from his expensive Italian loafers with a casual flick of his ankle.
"May I?" Remo asked, smiling politely. And without waiting, he extracted a bullet from the clip. Another bullet sprang up to replace it.
Remo watched himself take the tiny bullet in one hand and place it against the goon's forehead. Then, with coiled forefinger, he tapped the primer cap on the end of the shell casing. There came a firecracker pop! and the standing goon suddenly became the prone dead goon with a black crater in the center of his forehead.
Remo casually stepped over the bodies and walked up to a black door of fine wood. He knocked on the door and waited, hands on hips.
In his cell, Remo tossed in his sleep. He noticed for the first time how thin his arms were. He looked like he had lost all his natural body fat and thirty percent of his musculature. His wrists, however, were u
nusually thick. The combination made him think of Popeye the Sailor Man-but less grotesque.
Remo was staring at his own oddly expanded wrists when a splintery hole jumped into the black door panel and his dream self simply faded back from the line of fire-for the solitary hole had been made by a gun pressed to the opposite side of the door.
The dream Remo lunged forward, the palm of his hand striking the doorknob with such force that it shot from its socket and into the penthouse. An unseen man howled in exquisite agony, and Remo casually pushed the door open.
He paused beside a man holding his groin with both hands in a doubled-up stance only long enough to poke him in the eyes. Before he fell face-forward, Remo caught a glimpse of the mashed jelly his eye sockets now contained. If he hadn't been sleeping, he would have turned away.
In the dream, Remo was moving from room to room in an elegant penthouse suite until he found a man cowering against a plate-glass window that gave him a panoramic view of some unidentified city. There was neon piping in the background. It was not rolled into scroll or signwork, but edged several tall office buildings. That told Remo that the penthouse overlooked Dallas, Texas.
The fat man had his back to the glass as if he were standing on a narrow ledge and only the friction of the glass kept him from falling to his death.
"If you're a cop," he was saying, "I can pay you."
"Wrong guess," Remo heard himself say.
"If you're a fed, I can roll over."
"Not even close."
"Then what do you want?"
"Oh, a nice home, a pleasant wife, maybe a couple of kids."
"Done! I'll set it up." The fat man was sweating, even though he outweighed Remo by an easy sixty pounds.
"Sorry," Remo told him. "There are some things not even money can buy. It won't buy me, and it won't buy the life I want."
"There's gotta be something we can do," Don Tentacolo said urgently. "Some deal we can cut."
"Let me think about this," Remo said disinterestedly. He tapped the glass beside the man's head. The fat man winced as if Remo's fingers were hypodermics.
"Is this a single pane or a sandwich?" Remo asked.
"Single. Bulletproof."
"Good," said Remo, tracing a ruler-straight line over the fat man's quaking head. The glass squealed as if scored by a glass cutter. Then Remo ran the finger from one end of the line to the floor and repeated the action on the other side.
The manipulation framed the fat man in a thin white rectangular line, rather like the outline of a coffin.
"What ... what are you going to do?" he quavered.
"You look hot. Like you could use some air."
"Yeah," Don Tentacolo said, wiping his forehead. "It's roasting in here."
"Then permit me," Remo said. He placed his hand on the man's heaving chest and gave him what looked like a gentle shove.
Except that there was nothing gentle about the way Don Polipo Tentacolo went through the thick glass, taking with him a doorlike rectangle of glass. His feet were the last things to disappear into the darkness beyond the window.
Remo saw himself lean out of the opening in the glass, and his dream viewpoint suddenly dollied to follow the madly gesticulating body as it fell twenty or thirty stories to the hard pavement below.
The glass struck first. It shattered into thousands of separating shards. The fat man shattered too, but the bag that was his fleshy envelope kept his disintegrating bone structure from becoming organic shrapnel. With one notable exception. A short length of femur shot out of his trouser seam to impale his left palm.
Dusting off his hands as if having completed a minor but stubborn household-repair task, Remo's dream self turned from the window as if to go. But recognition crossed his face and he gave a cocky half-grin and asked an unseen person, "How did I do?"
The responding voice was squeaky and querulous, like Daffy Duck after a hard day on the set.
"Your elbow was bent," it said bitterly.
And the expression of disapointment that spread over Remo's dream face was tragic.
Remo woke up with the identical expression on his true face. He just didn't know it.
Popcorn's voice whispered through the shell-pink cinder block to his ear, "You okay, Jim?"
Remo sat up. "Had a bad dream," he said quietly.
"Got news for you. You still havin' it. 'Cept now your eyes are open. You dig me?"
"I know where I am. It just seemed so real." And for the first time, Remo's voice had lost the hard edge that prison life had made second nature.
"I got a sayin', Jim: Dead Men dream deepest. You be on death row awhile, you get to know what I'm sayin'."
Remo felt under his pillow. The Camel was still there, only now it had developed a fissure and resembled a bent paper nail.
"Don't suppose you have a match?" Remo prompted.
"Not since Muhammad Ali went soft in the head."
"That's old."
"In stir, every joke is old. If I slip you a matchbook, you gonna slide it back afterward?"
"Sure."
"Okay, my man. Don't screw up any worse than you did to get here."
The matchbook slid into view like a dim hockey puck. It came to rest beside a cell bar and Remo retrieved it on the first try. He tore off a match and struck it. The flame caught the dirty end of the Camel in Remo's mouth.
Remo sat on his bunk and took a deep drag.
The tobacco smoke hit his lungs like mustard gas. The urge to cough was overpowering. He tried to choke it back, knowing that it could bring the guards or, worse, wake up every man on death row. But the coughing refused to be suppressed.
Remo went to his knees. He put his head under the cot and surrendered to a coughing fit. He hacked like a twelve-year-old trying to get through his first smoke.
"You okay, Jim?" Popcorn hissed. "You gonna bring down all kinds of shit on our sorry heads if you don't stifle yourself."
Remo's coughing spasms trailed off into a strangled moan.
"Don't you die on me, Jim," Popcorn pleaded. "You got my last book a' matches. Don't you die on me."
Through his own pain Remo heard the sincerity in Popcorn's voice. Prison sentimentality. Don't die until I get back what's mine. He never got used to its callous ruthlessness.
Finally Remo crawled back into his bunk. "First time?" Popcorn asked wryly.
"I'm used to filtered cigarettes," Remo said. His lungs felt like they were on fire. Instead of clearing his head, the nicotine dulled his brain even more. Maybe, he thought, he was having a reaction to the sedative that had kept him asleep during the trip from New Jersey. Still, he shouldn't have a reaction like that. He was a pack-a-day man.
"What about my matches, man?"
"In the morning," Remo shot back weakly. "I'm sick."
"You crazy if you think you're gonna keep my matches, sucker," Popcorn hissed. "You hear me?" The speed with which Popcorn's easy solicitude had turned hard and then nasty was elemental.
Remo turned over and tried to find sleep, but it eluded him until the five-o'clock buzzer, and then, too soon, it was the start of another interminable gray day.
Chapter 5
Before the guard appeared with the breakfast trays, Remo set the matchbook outside the bars of his cell and gave it a single-finger shove.
"There it is," he called. "Got it?"
"Yeah, man, I got it." Popcorn's voice was wary. Remo imagined him opening up the cover to carefully count each match. He must have done it twice because it was a while before his voice, again suffused with cocky good humor, came back.
"That's two you owe me, Jim," he said. "One for the tailor-made and the other for the igniter."
"Catch you in the yard sometime," Remo said. "If we get the yard on the same day."
Breakfast was cold cornflakes in a single-serving package and a separate pint container of low-fat milk. Remo poured the milk over the flakes slowly. The smell of it was strong. He put his nose to the bowl. Not sour. Just strong. He had
never smelled milk this strong. Funny. He had never thought of fresh milk as having a smell before.
Remo decided to skip the sugar and forced the first spoonful down his throat. It went down hard. The flakes felt like they were sandpapering his esophagus. He got it down. Five minutes later he threw it up all over the floor.
"You sure you done time before, Jim?" Popcorn's voice was wary again. "You don't seem to be acclimatizin' none too good. Hate to think you was a fish. 'Cause if you was a fish, that'd mean you was a rat. Though what the Man would be doing puttin' a rat on the row is more than I can understand."
"You got anything to rat about?" Remo asked, spitting the last of the milk from his mouth. It tasted sour now, but that was stomach-acid taste.
"No. But you be acting like a first-timer, not a lifer."
"I haven't smelled free air since . . ." Remo hesitated. When did he go in first? Was in '71. No, earlier, '70. Maybe '69. No, it couldn't have been '69. He remembered pounding a beat in '69, just another beat cop on his way to a faraway pension.
The C.O. came around for the tray and saw the mess on Remo's floor. His tight expression turned into a glower.
"You do that on purpose?" he demanded hotly.
"I threw up," Remo told him.
The guard looked closer. "Doesn't look like vomit to me."
"It wasn't in my stomach more than two minutes," Remo said with the sullenness that came to a prisoner after being in the joint for so long that all the pride had seeped out of the soul. It was a consequence of being treated, for all intents and purposes, like a dangerous teenager.
Popcorn spoke up. "I can vouch for whitey, there," he said. "I heard him throw. Man sounded like he was coughin' up his lungs. Kidneys too."
"Shut up, Dead Man."
The guard went away, coming back with a mop and bucket.
"Rack Number Two," he called down the line. The door to Remo's cell rolled aside. The C.O. shoved the mop and bucket in through the half-open door.
"Clean it up," he told Remo.
Remo looked in the bucket and said, "No water."
"Boy, you got endless water," the guard said, pointing to the open stainless-steel toilet.
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