Crooked Halos

by Charlie Cottrell

  Not that the criminals looked much better. There were six other guys in the bus with me. One of them had thin, lanky hair that hung in limp, blond chunks down to his chin. A couple of Latino guys with immaculately-groomed facial hair sat toward the back, huddled together and muttering in Spanish. A large black man with a shaved head and upper arms bigger around than my neck sat a couple of rows behind me, his arms folded and his massive hands half-hidden in his armpits.

  The last two guys set off warning bells in my head. One of them was a short, greasy-looking dude with a full beard and his hair trimmed in what I always thought of as the Nazi Cut: buzzed close to the scalp on the sides, left long on top, and blonder than blond. He was covered in tattoos: the ones I could see included an eagle, a burning cross, and at least three swastikas. He was about the least subtle neo-Nazi I’d ever encountered, and it’s not like those guys were particularly prone to subtlety in the first place.

  Then there was the last guy. He sat ramrod straight, his eyes beady and small in a broad, flat face. He stared straight ahead, right at me. The entire thirty-minute ride to Pratchett, there he was, those eyes trying to bore a hole straight through my skull and possibly almost succeeding. I didn’t want to pay him too much attention, just in case he somehow managed to ratchet up his attention even further.

  Our arrival at Pratchett Correctional was not nearly as momentous as I felt it ought to be. Here was a respected—well, by some—private detective with years of experience and effort trying to do right by the city, ignominiously tossed into prison without so much as a by-your-leave. There should’ve been someone there telling me they thought I was innocent. There should’ve been someone telling me they believed me. I shouldn’t have been forced to strip down naked and get cavity searched before they’d let us in further than the outermost chambers of the place, but we don’t always get what we want.

  I was next to Staring Guy, as I was thinking of him, as we stood in line to get a new jumpsuit and the sheets for our beds. I wasn’t expecting high thread counts in the linens.

  “This is the worst spa I’ve ever been to,” I grumbled. “Though the staff seem attentive.”

  Staring Guy glared lasers and daggers—or possibly daggers made of lasers—at me.

  “What?” I protested. “They can make me go to jail, but they can’t shut me up.”

  “Eddie…fuckin’… Hazzard,” Staring Guy growled, his voice like sandpaper and gravel had gotten together and had a really messed up love child.

  “Um, yeah. Do I know you?” I asked.

  “Cromhower!” one of the guards yelled. “Step forward.”

  Staring Guy continued to glare at me, a low growl rumbling in the back of his throat.

  “I said ‘Cromhower, step forward,’” the guard repeated, flourishing a stun baton. “Do not make me repeat myself again.”

  Staring Guy abruptly turned away from me and stalked toward the guard. I worked to swallow my heart, realizing I’d just survived an encounter with Ezekiel Cromhower, one of the most notorious gangsters in Arcadia.

  II.

  Perhaps I should explain.

  See, a couple of years ago, not too long after I’d met and discovered the true identity of Vera Stewart, I worked a case that was of mutual benefit to the city of Arcadia and the Organization. That case was to hunt down and capture members of the notorious Cromhower Gang, a group of criminal freelancers operating outside of the Organization’s control. They did horrible things—hit jobs, gun running, drugs, kidnapping—and were not scrupulous about who they hurt in the process.

  Vera couldn’t abide competition. She’d tried, on a few occasions, to absorb the Cromhower Gang into the Organization, but never with much in the way of results. I caught some small fish and made life more difficult for him, but Cromhower himself remained elusive and independent.

  Well, maybe not all that elusive, since it looked like he’d been arrested same as me.

  I watched Cromhower stomp his way to the guard, receive his change of clothes and his sheets, and then take his place in line behind the others to wait for admittance into the cell block.

  My name was called next. I hobbled up to the guard, received my own bundle, and was pointed to the line behind Cromhower. With all of us present and accounted for, the guards shouted for the gate to be opened. A harsh buzzer sounded, and the door swung inward. We were taken through the barred equivalent of an air lock, the door shutting behind us before the next one in front of us opened. On the other side of the lock, we were escorted to our cells, each of us peeling off from the group as the guard announced our name and pointed with his stun baton at a particular cell.

  We were in Block C on the third floor, which was really more of a metal grating/catwalk outside of the cells than a traditional floor. The middle of the block was open all the way down to the ground level, with metal mesh bridges spanning the empty space like spider webs, and a series of emergency staircases on either end of the block. Guards patrolled the flyways with stun batons and combat shotguns held ready.

  The cells themselves were…well, prison cells. They weren’t not nice. They weren’t not particularly clean. They were definitely painted that shade of institutional blue that no one likes but everyone uses. It ought to be considered a hate crime to use that color.

  My particular cell was C324. The room was a ten-by-ten-by-ten-foot cube with a pair of bunkbeds against one wall, a metal toilet and sink against the opposite wall, and a desk with a built-in reading lamp against the wall opposite the cell door. We had a small, age-and-dust-clouded window above the desk, which probably filtered in a bit of sickly sunlight from the outside during the day. The floor was linoleum, probably originally white but now a grayish-beige stained with years of feet, dirt, and God-only-knows what else.

  The cell door was shut behind me with a prolonged squeak of protest from the hinges. The metal bars rattled as the door latched, and I was officially a prisoner of Pratchett Correctional.

  “Hey, roomie,” my cellmate muttered from the top bunk as I stood there. “Welcome to the neighborhood.” He was a big guy, but soft-spoken, lying on the bed with his hands behind his head and his legs crossed. He looked remarkably relaxed, given where we were.

  “Thanks,” I said, tossing my spare jumpsuit over the desk chair and bending over to start putting my sheets on the empty lower bunk. My stomach twinged; getting gut shot was making everyday things like bending at the middle much more painful than it had any right to be. I moaned a bit in pain.

  “You all right there, friend?” my cellmate called down.

  “Yeah, just a slight stomach complaint that flares up every time I try to do anything,” I replied through gritted teeth. I got the fitted sheet around the mattress and collapsed onto it, sighing as my stomach unclenched a bit and went from horrible, stabbing pain to the dull, throbbing pain I’d gotten so used to.

  A large, upside down, square head peaked over the edge of the top bunk. The head had an unruly, massive mop of curly brown hair attached to it that hung down almost to my mattress. The head was grinning like an idiot and missing several teeth. “The name’s Martin, pleasure to meet you,” he said.

  “Hey, Martin. Eddie,” I replied.

  “Nice to see a new face around here. What’re you in for?”

  I sighed. “Not really something I want to talk about right now, guy,” I said as kindly as I could. “I just arrived and I feel like shit and I am reasonably certain there’s at least two or three people out there in the cell block plotting my death as we speak.”

  “Ooh, you are not a popular guy, huh?” Martin said. “Anything I can do to help?”

  “Go back in time and murder six or seven people for me, there’s a good man,” I said, clutching at my middle.

  “Hah! I wish,” Martin said with a chuckle. “I mean, all of my murders technically happened in the past, now, but it was the present when I committed them. I can only travel through time in the usual way—forward, one moment after another, just like everyone
else.”

  I gave Martin a considered look. “You’re a strange man, Martin,” I said.

  “That’s what everyone tells me, but I don’t see it,” Martin said, his head and hair disappearing back over the edge of the top bunk. “I mean, who among us hasn’t gotten so angry at the lady behind the counter in frozen yogurt place that we killed six other customers, right?”

  “Fuckin’ frozen yogurt, man,” I said with sympathy. My cellmate, while genial, was clearly bug nuts crazy. “So, Martin, you seem like a polite, friendly sort. Why kill all those people? Are you insane?”

  “Oh, heavens, no,” Martin replied. “I was deemed competent to stand trial, which I did. I tried to explain that the other customers at the fro-yo place were plants from the CIA here to perform secret experiments on the city of Arcadia, but no one really believed me. They said I was having some sorta temporary delusion.”

  “That’s a hell of a delusion,” I said.

  “Well, just because I sound crazy doesn’t mean I’m wrong,” Martin insisted.

  “I’m just gonna take your word for it, buddy,” I said.

  III.

  The next day, I got to experience the routine of the prison.

  The day starts early—around 6:30—when everyone is roused from sleep and forced to take care of their bodily functions without anything like privacy. Once you’d done your business, everyone was escorted by block to the cafeteria, where we received the first of our three meals for the day. Food was unceremoniously dumped onto a Styrofoam tray—goopey oatmeal, powdered eggs, and a piece of fruit older most people’s computers—and handed to the prisoners. I thought I’d understood the meaning of the word unceremonious before, but the apathetic cafeteria workers—many of whom were inmates themselves—revealed I had not properly experienced something that was truly unceremonious.

  “The oatmeal and the eggs are indistinguishable from each other,” I said as I sat at a table, poking the food with my spoon.

  Martin shrugged expansively. He was a massive guy, easily almost seven feet tall and at least half as wide, with arms and shoulders that looked like they’d been constructed rather than grown. Everything the guy did was expansive.

  “They don’t taste as bad as they look,” he said.

  “How could they possibly?” I asked, ladling a spoonful of oatmeal into my mouth and hoping for the best.

  The oatmeal was actually worse than it looked.

  I tossed my spoon on the tray in disgust. “Oliver Twist would not go back for seconds on this,” I said flatly.

  └●┐└●┐└●┐

  After breakfast came work. Prisoners actually get paid for the work they do behind bars. Admittedly, it’s like a nickel an hour, but that still averaged out better than what I made per hour as a private eye sometimes.

  They put me in laundry service. It was hot, humid, and filled with the stench of body odor and guys whose conception of personal hygiene began and ended with looking at the bar of soap from a distance.

  Martin happened to work in laundry, too, so he showed me the ropes. It was a pretty simple if rather vast, industrial setup: we had dozens of massive washing machines, bulk boxes of industrial-strength detergent, and dryers bigger than my first apartment.

  “It’s pretty straightforward,” he said, showing me where everything was and how much detergent to use and all that. “Those guys over there fold everything and put it in boxes to send back up to be recirculated through the prison.” He pointed to a group of men ranging in age from late-20s to late-1,000s, from the look of them. One old guy, whom Martin simply referred to as “Ol’ Pete,” looked like he’d been here since dinosaurs ruled the earth. His entire face was just made up of wrinkles, like a human shar-pei.

  There are few things less exciting in the world than doing laundry. After the hundredth pair of tighty-whiteys with deeply-engrained skid marks, they all sort of start to blur together in one disgusting, never-ending stream.

  Some of those skid marks, though…you could’ve used some of that underwear as a Rorschach Test.

  After several hours toiling in the fetid heat, we had lunch. My hands were red and raw from handling the heavy-duty detergents. Everything I wore smelled faintly of body fug. I wasn’t sure I would ever feel completely clean ever again.

  I sat with Martin and a couple of other guys from the laundry room. They were both genial lifers, men who’d committed some heinous crime in their youth who’d somehow gone mellow behind bars. I asked how that sort of thing could happen.

  “Well,” said Paulie, whose Jersey accent made it sound like that word had far more vowels in it than was actually the case, “it’s kinda hard to explain, see? We keeps to ourselves, and no one messes wit’ us. Plus, our first couple years in the slam, we made reputations by beatin’ the ever-lovin’ crap outta anyone who looked at us. We’re sorta like dos—whaddaya call ‘em, Freddie?” he asked his compatriot.

  “Elder statesmen,” Freddie replied. He sounded like a Mid-Atlantic blueblood.

  “—yeah, dem,” Paulie continued. “So’s we get respect, right? An’ that means we can relax and chill out a bit now.”

  “Um, congrats?” I said. I looked down at my food. It didn’t look any more appetizing than breakfast had. It was about the same uniform shade of gray as breakfast, too. “So, is the food here just a diet scheme someone made up, or is it part of the punishment?”

  └●┐└●┐└●┐

  After lunch, we were given half an hour in the yard. Calling it a yard was someone’s idea of a joke, of course: there was no grass or trees to be seen. Instead, the yard was an area the size of a football field made out of black asphalt. Heat radiated up from it, making the yard a good twenty degrees warmer than any other place at all times. Even the laundry room seemed cooler by comparison.

  Some guys lifted weights, while others shot hoops on one of the two basketball hoops someone had set up back before the turn of the last century. Their primary feature was rust. Every time the ball hit any part of the hoop, rust rained down like reddish-orange snowflakes.

  A lot of guys just walked the perimeter of the yard, getting as close to the fence as the armed guards would allow. Which, coincidentally, wasn’t all that close—anything within a meter or so got you a verbal warning and the hefting of a weapon in your direction—and gave the impression the guards were just hoping someone would try to actually touch the fence.

  “How many years do you have left in this place, Martin?” I asked him as we walked close to one another. The big man was the only source of shade in the yard.

  “Another three life sentences, I think,” he said. “How about you?”

  “Well, I was railroaded for a crime I didn’t commit based on trumped-up evidence produced by the real killer, so I’m pretty sure I’ll be murdered before my sentence is over.”

  I might as well have said, “before this sentence is over,” because that’s about the time a group of guys decided they wanted to try shiving me.

  IV.

  I’ve been stabbed more than my fair share of times, often by people who I thought of as friends or lovers. I don’t know if it was something about me or them, but I hadn’t ever given that aspect of stabbing much thought.

  This was different. Martin and I were suddenly surrounded by half a dozen guys whom I could describe variously as muscly, burly, and built like a fucking Buick. Their leader was a Latino guy, short and broad-chested, a nasty scar running down the left side of his face like someone had tried to remove his face like a Scooby Doo villain’s mask.

  “Crowder sends his regards, puta,” the guy said, pulling a shiv made from a sharpened piece of metal out of his pocket.

  “Whoa, hold up, buddy,” I said, holding my hands up placatingly. “Just ‘regards?’ Not even his ‘warmest regards?’” The guy flourished his shiv. “And hang on, that thing does not look sanitary. How do you clean that after you shank someone? And is ‘shank’ the verb? Do you shank with a shiv, or shiv with a shank? Are they interch
angeable?” I was trying to back away from him, but there were men behind us, too.

  “You talk too damn much,” Mr. Shiv said. He lunged forward with the blade.

  Martin caught the guy by the wrist and lifted him up into the air, one-handed, leaving the short man’s feet dangling a good foot and a half off the ground. “Carlos, we talked about this,” he said in an even tone. Martin almost sounded like a disappointed parent. “What did I say was going to happen if you tried to stab someone around me again?”

  Carlos sputtered and stammered, but had trouble getting a coherent response out.

  “Let me help refresh your memory,” Martin said. That’s when he plucked the shiv out of Carlos’s hand and began doing terrible, horrible things to the man’s spine that will haunt me until the day I die.

  I knew, intellectually speaking, that Martin was a mass-murdering crazy man. But, like, I hadn’t actually seen him kill anyone. He’d been a pretty relaxed guy around me.

  That was not the case with Carlos. I didn’t know you could fold a man in half like that.

  The fight—if you want to call it that—didn’t last long. Whistles were blown, a klaxon sounded, and an angry, shouty voice over an intercom told us all to get face down on the ground and stay there. Guards hustled over to us and grabbed Martin, Carlos, and myself for some reason. We were all dragged off into the administrative offices of the prison except Carlos, who was taken—I assume—to the infirmary.

  Martin and I sat in an office, handcuffed. The big man didn’t seem angry or out of control; on the contrary, he was quite self-possessed and seemed like his usual self.

  “Um, buddy, you okay?” I asked in a quiet whisper.