Hard Sentences: Crime Fiction Inspired by Alcatraz

by David James Keaton

  “Start the truck,” Frank ordered. “Start the truck, you idiot.”

  Joey, touching his chest, noticed his fingers wet with blood so bright it was incandescent and looked like red paint. Frank could smell it from his side of the cab.

  Joey Knuckles was mumbling now, and looking to Frank as if to complain, when a bullet came through the rear window and plowed through Joey’s head. It shot out of his cheek and passed through the windshield and disappeared out a small hole Frank could have stuck his pinky through if he’d have wanted to.

  Stunned, turning to look behind him, Frank saw two cops fire their weapons—one crouching, the other jammed against the side of a Cadillac and using the roof for support—both unloading into the back of the Ford with brutality seldom seen.

  Frank, breathing fast, clutching the money to his chest, glanced at Joey Knuckles, who’d strapped his tattered brown belt around his slender arm; paper-thin skin purple and swelled, head slumped to the side as blood poured from his cheek and shards of jawbone pushed through the hole in a slick, sweet sheen like polished alabaster.

  A third officer, stumbling from the same nearby diner, scorching cup of coffee sloshing in his hand, watched as the first two cops fed the air with hot smoke and burnt lead.

  Crouching down as low as he could, Frank felt the bullets pound the truck. He watched the right side mirror shatter; then the rear window blew out completely and peppered his hair with glass.

  Something thumped his back, and he wondered if he’d been shot.

  “Okay!” he yelled. He thought he tasted blood. “I give up, for Hell’s sake. I give up!”

  When he held both hands above his head to surrender, a cop shot him through the center of his left palm and blew off two fingers and a thumb.

  Screaming now, cursing, blood on his lips, he threw the door open to make a run for it, but when he swung his leg out it was blasted by a shotgun.

  He tossed the bag into the street and curled up in a ball, crying out, holding his mangled hand. He pulled his right leg up to his body and closed his eyes. He thought he saw his foot lying on the ground.

  It was a cool day in San Francisco as Frank Colette waited to die.

  Before he’d gotten out of that truck, he looked Joey Knuckles in the eyes. He asked him if he was ready.

  “Yeah, let’s go.”

  “Sure you’re okay?”

  “Why you askin’?”

  “Cuz you don’t look okay.”

  “I’m fine.”

  With the skin of his gaunt face stretched tight across his square-framed jaws, and with his pale skin and his emaciated body, he did not look fine. But Frank trusted him. He’d always trusted him in the past, and that trust had been well placed. And though he would swear he was off the tit, Frank knew better. When he’d ask Joey if he was clean, he would say he was, but being clean was nothing Joey knew anything about, and they both knew it.

  Still, Joey never used dope on the job. Not once in all the years they’d been doing stick-ups.

  “You better be fine,” Frank said. “Listen: I’m in, I’m out. Quick as I can.”

  “You worry ’bout you, okay? Let me worry about me.”

  Opening the door and climbing out, the single-barrel shotgun hidden beneath his overcoat in a wire holster of his own construction, Frank closed the door gently, because it liked to stick, and if something went wrong he’d be standing there getting shot at as he wrestled the handle.

  Even though he was unable to open his eyes, he realized he’d been thinking instead of dreaming. With some difficulty, he lifted one eyelid to find his head wrapped in gauze. If he squinted, he could see through it: this thin, opaque filter that both freed and enslaved him.

  More talk, some laughter. He was inside a room. It was very small, but he was not alone. It was hot. Standing beside his bed was a nurse with gray hair wound very tight beneath a cheap, white cap that looked too small for her head. There was a doctor beside her, talking to a plainclothes detective and a uniformed cop.

  As things came into focus, Frank wondered if he was the cop who’d shot him. He wasn’t. After listening to them talk, Frank learned it was the partner of the cop Frank had shot inside the bank; the cop he’d never intended to shoot in the first place, until the son of a bitch pulled his burner and Frank cut him down with the scattergun.

  That was when all Hell broke loose. As he was leaving, two cops came out of nowhere—one with a white napkin, crisp and clean, unfolded, hanging from the neck of his shirt, still chewing a mouthful of something, his gun already drawn, uncocked and firing—the other attempting to unholster his weapon at a fast walk and not having much luck, until he stopped and looked down and took his time and drew.

  Frank, stumbling, ears ringing, had reached again for the shotgun. But when he turned to raise it, the wire hanger broke inside his coat, and he dropped it. He’d sprinted to the truck then, leaving it to be picked up moments later by the first cop, who’d used it to shoot Frank in the leg at close range when he’d opened the door to run.

  Frank coughed, and the voices inside the room became still. They knew he was awake, and in this new silence, with quick, light steps, the doctor came toward him.

  Only vaguely aware of his own existence, Frank wondered if his hand was gone. And he wondered if his foot had been shot off, too, or if that had been a dream. He wondered if there was anything else missing he should know about, then he wondered how he could still be alive if there were.

  “Wake up, tough guy,” he heard someone say. A distant voice moving closer.

  Frank flinched, not that it mattered. The top of his head was heavily bandaged. They could not see his face. They just wanted to talk to him. Not torture him. Talk.

  The uniformed cop, who Frank could barely make out—angry, talking fast, stepping loud—passed the doctor in his hard-sole shoes then halted by Frank’s bedside. He spoke about his partner and cursed his bad luck for cashing his check on lunch, not to mention Frank’s own misfortune for robbing a bank next to a diner and getting shot by his own gun.

  He said, “You’re not very good at this.”

  Frank said nothing. He was so far away.

  Reaching down, grabbing what was left of Frank’s hand, the cop squeezed hard where his fingers once had been. Frank felt nothing. Patches of light dripped through his dressing in blonde fragments like warm dabs of honey as he floated on ten-thousand bubbles that carried his body in a dream. A dream he could sense would end soon, one he was loath to vacate. It washed over him. Transitory and short-lived and ephemeral.

  “He’s heavily sedated,” the doctor said, annoyed. He can’t feel anything.

  “Lucky for him.”

  Leaning over the bed, very close now, the cop aligned his face with Frank’s; his breath fetid and foul, as if some primordial creature had crawled inside his mouth long ago and shat and died and the cop never knew.

  Squinting now, Frank could see him. His features old but tough; his chin was very square at the bottom. Both jaws wide. Hard and angular, as if his now distorted features had once been antediluvian stone some malevolent god used to carve him a face.

  He stood up and relit a fat cigar that resembled a wet dog turd and told the doctor he should pull the plug.

  “Excuse me,” the doctor said, pushing his way by the cop, waving his hand in front of him to cut the smoke.

  “This mook killed a cop.”

  “My job’s to save ’em, your job’s to kill ’em.”

  “That’s right,” the cop said. Thick lips bending into a broad grin.

  The doctor said, “Guess you shoulda done a better job.”

  Both cops laughed. The detective walked out, uniformed cop behind him. The doctor, following last, turned off the lights and closed the door.

  It was dark. Frank was alone. Finally. He had time to think. To find a way out. But there was no one on earth to save him, and nothing inside the room to help.

  The next day there was nothing. Only his thoughts and his inner
reflections and the darkness that enveloped him. Then the lights: loud fluorescent tubes that hummed and vibrated. They called to him with electric energy, like whispers from forgotten ghosts.

  And then it was one of two doctors, or two, sometimes three cops: all looking to jam him up. It was the same hustle it had always been, the same one he’d been caught up in his whole life.

  “Ya messed up now, pal,” they said. “You’re goin’ back to The Rock. You know what they do to cop killers out there?”

  “Give them a reward?”

  Nobody laughed.

  “You think you’re real tough, dontcha?” said the same hard-faced cop when he came back. This time he was alone. Frank ignored him. So when he pretended to sleep, the cop lifted his nightgown and burned him with a hot cigar.

  Frank shrieked. A chimney-red burn below his belly button already swelling amid small, white blisters filled with blood.

  “That’s what I thought,” the cop said. “Hope ya got a chance to look down there ’n’ see what’s missin’. Guess ya won’t be hitchhikin’ for a while.”

  Eyebrows arched, shrugging at Frank’s limbs suspended in air, the cop pointed. That leg.

  Frank said he was fine, fully aware of his injuries. It was the first thing he’d taken stock of upon his awakening.

  The cop said, “I guess you’ll never dance again.”

  Frank said, “Look at the money the state will save on shoes.”

  The cop left the room, leaving Frank with the sounds of monitors. Later the cop returned and watched him sleep and smoked a cigar. When Frank woke, there were more cops in the room. They asked him questions he ignored. They all shook their heads: the cops in uniforms and the doctors and the detective. They told him he was dead once he went back, and Frank said he was dead already.

  What he didn’t tell them was that he wasn’t going back, that he already had a plan. One he set in motion the day he arrived.

  There was no clock in the room and no way to keep time, but at the end of what Frank could only assume was several days and after numerous surgeries—all attempts to save his foot and all of them failures—the doctor lifted Frank from his bed and set him in a worn-out chair. It was yellow and plastic and old.

  Then the cop returned and said, “Ready to ride The Warden?”

  He laughed as he smoked and asked Frank what he thought about that.

  Frank said he couldn’t wait. But he would not be riding The Warden Johnston. Not this time. He’d ridden it twice before, once on his way to The Rock and once on his way back, and he’d made a promise to himself not to take that ride again. The ferry was old, and the water was cold, and Frank hated boats to begin with since he had never learned to swim.

  He sat in his chair, and he laid in his bed, and they waited ’til he was strong enough to move. When he was, the cop was the first to give him the news. News he delivered with pleasure. Delivering bad news meant a lot to a man like that in a world where nothing else meant a thing.

  “We’re takin’ you back tomorrow,” he said. “But I doubt you last ’til your court date. I hear you ain’t so popular out there on account of how you left things with Stubby Thompson.”

  Frank swallowed. His lips cracked, and his mouth was very dry.

  The cop watched him, tried to sweat him. Frank wanted water but refused to give him the satisfaction of knowing his thirst. He remained silent.

  “You’re gonna die out there while you wait for trial,” the cop went on. “Gonna get you your old cell back—your old cellmate, too. Fact, buncha your old friends back there can’t wait to see you.”

  That was one more reason Frank would not be going. He didn’t have any old friends. Just old enemies. Alcatraz was full of them. And he had left things in a bad way. He’d accumulated some debts while inside, mostly gambling, and mostly to his former cellmate, Stubby, a man respected and feared, a man who once punched Al Capone in the jaw. He’d been housed there eighteen years, and that was a long time to be there and know he would not get out. He hated anyone else who did.

  The cop was right. Frank Colette would not last one night on the island.

  Using all of his energy, he crawled out of bed. It was dark, but after some time a thin crack of light entered the room and found him. The light was long and warm and he was sitting in the plastic chair when the doctor arrived.

  That surprised him, Frank’s ability to move himself like that.

  “Guess you feel okay,” he said.

  “Never felt better.”

  The doctor said that was nice to hear. They had good folks out there that could use his bed. Decent folks.

  Frank nodded. He knew he was right. Frank Colette was as indecent as they come.

  Signing his name to a paper attached to a clipboard, the doctor said there was someone there to see him. Your friend, he said. “The partner of the cop you shot.”

  “You tell him I said to fuck himself.”

  The doctor, stunned, sucked in a mouthful of air but did not respond.

  Frank looked down where his foot used to be and told him thanks for nothin’.

  The doctor, red-faced and fuming, stomped from the room and closed the door, as Frank, standing on the only foot he had left, pulled his chair across the floor. It was fifteen steps to the window and thirty feet to the sidewalk; he’d measured them in his mind.

  When he was almost there, he heard voices in the hall. A hearty round of laughter, as Frank, walking the chair out in front of him, limping, hopping, using momentum and all the strength he had, hurled the chair through the window, his stump grinding into the concrete floor, dark blood a snaking smear behind him.

  Glass was still dropping from the wooden frame as the cop burst through the door. Frank leaned out the window as the cop pulled his revolver.

  “You gonna shoot?”

  “You gonna jump?”

  Frank said he was by not saying he wasn’t, and the cop put his gun away.

  As he plucked splinters of glass from the framework, their eyes connected, and in one imperfect moment they saw each other for who they were.

  The cop nodded.

  Frank sat on the ledge and leaned back into nothing. Without looking down, without a sound, he fell.

  The Music Box

  by Leah Rhyne

  I was eleven years old when I fell in love.

  Long of limb and stuffed full of talent, I was told Mademoiselle Helene would come to Alcatraz Island to work with me, a budding ballerina, Tuesdays and Thursdays before the little girls appeared for their baby ballet class. When she stepped into the ballet studio, a makeshift deal in the big room in the Officer’s Club, I stood alone at the barre, wishing for wall-to-wall mirrors so I could check the arch of my foot, the curve of my arm overhead. I was talented, they said. I could go places with my dancing. Hence Helene.

  She was French, and my parents paid an exorbitant amount to convince Helene to cross the grim chop of the San Francisco Bay to work with me. They said she had danced as a soloist with a Russian company before the war. Following an escape to the States, California had been her home for a brief tenure before my parents found her and offered her employment. When they described her to me, I made a mental note to ask about her escape. It sounded dramatic. Exciting. Exactly the opposite of civilian life outside our country’s most notorious penitentiary.

  I gasped when Mademoiselle Helene entered the room. My foot dropped from the barre and hit the parquet floor with a dull thud.

  I’d never seen Venus personified. I’d never seen a creature embody such grace. Beauty. Seduction. I’d been alive a meager eleven years, after all, and the scope of my life was limited to children playing baseball on the parade grounds. The men I encountered were old and gnarled, wearing carefully pressed uniforms. The women were ancient mothers in housedresses. Curlers.

  Slender and graceful as a Victorian candelabra; therefore, Mademoiselle Helene was so different it was breathtaking. She wore an elegant wool coat and three-inch tall heels. Her hair, a brown
so deep it was almost black, was cut in a French style Audrey Hepburn wouldn’t make famous for a decade. High, well-defined cheekbones and almond blue eyes topped a perfect pout mouth. The milk-and-potato honed children who surrounded me on the Island were nothing beside Mademoiselle Helene.

  Her smile was gentle, even shy, as she began to peel off the layers she had worn against the damp, biting chill outside. Beneath the coat were dance clothes, tight and form-hugging, pressing up against her muscular legs, Scarlet O’Hara waist, and gently curving neck. She kicked off those tall stiletto heels one at a time, and even the careless pile in which they fell was made elegant by her presence. As she wrapped the ribbon of her pointe shoes up her perfect calves, I tried to speak but found no words that would convey my instant adoration, nor my own clumsiness. Insignificance. So I stood and I stared, my heart dancing a moonlight sonata and parts of me growing damp from nervous sweat.

  Mademoiselle Helene nodded at me, walked over to the record player in the corner of our small “studio,” and lowered the needle. The music was from Swan Lake, my favorite tragic tale. Helene swayed to the strings, and then began to dance.

  I lived and breathed ballet from birth. Every time a company toured in San Francisco, I begged and pleaded until my mother found a way to take me. I’d marvel at the dancers’ strength. Their grace and elegance.

  I’d never seen anyone dance like Mademoiselle Helene.

  She didn’t leap—she flew. She didn’t pirouette—she cycloned. She floated on the air, weightless. She danced hard, throwing herself through the steps, and yet she remained delicate. When she was done, I realized I hadn’t breathed, and tears cut down my face like a closing curtain. I exhaled a damp, rattled breath, swiping at the wetness on my face. My bare wrist did little to wash away what Mademoiselle Helene unleashed in me.

  She bowed deeply and then her face burst open with a smile. “You want to dance like this, yes?” she said in an accent that oozed pheromones.

  “Oui,” I gasped, the only French word I knew.

  “Jete, jete, sissone, plié, pirouette, repetez, jete, jete . . . oui, yes, trés bon, and oui, yes, good, again.”