Into the Fire

by Gregg Hurwitz

  He squinted, the pair of teardrops at the corner of his eye squirming like slugs. An ugly cut on his chin had scabbed over, sutures poking out through his stubble like the bristles of a caterpillar. “You taking an interest in Bedrock?”

  “Who?”

  “I saw you looking,” Teardrop said.

  Half hidden by the shirt collar, a tattoo rode the hollow of Teardrop’s neck, the pinwheel of the Armenian eternity sign, the center of the swirl beckoning like a bull’s-eye.

  “Did you,” Evan said.

  “I did.” Teardrop jammed a finger into Evan’s chest at the junction of his arm. “Watch. Your. Step. Bozi tgha.”

  He spit on the floor and knocked Evan’s shoulder as he walked off.

  Evan gave him some distance and then started back to his cell.

  Over by the main door, a sheriff’s deputy was feeding newspapers through the hatch to the men in the yellow jumpsuits, whom Evan took to be the pod leaders. A lineup of prisoners waited as the papers were distributed according to some predetermined pecking order. One paper was run up to Bedrosov’s cell.

  They were quickly gone.

  Evan looked through the glass at the yellow bucket and mops. Out of reach, every rivet and screw accounted for. His thoughts rumbled, searching out a new angle.

  He started for the stairs. The old inmate on the landing had moved on to today’s L.A. Times, the earlier one folded beneath his ass. Evan stood over him until he looked up.

  “I’d like a section of the newspaper.”

  “Three sausages for sports and entertainment. Two for the front page.”

  “What’s the cheapest?” Evan asked.

  “Dunno. Shit, lifestyle, prolly. One sausage.”

  “I don’t have a sausage.”

  “No shit, fish. You just walked in. Tomorrow morning you’ll get breakfast sausage.”

  “I need the paper now.”

  The man studied him with jaundiced eyes. Then he withdrew the folded section from beneath him and handed it off.

  Evan said, “Pay you tomorrow.”

  “You’d motherfuckin’ better, fish, or I’ll take it out your ass.”

  Evan carried the lifestyle section to his cell. Casper was gone, but Monkey Mouth lay sprawled on his top bunk, talking at the ceiling. “—never called never called couldn’t give a damn about me rotting in here—” He paused only to suck on his last bit of ramen.

  All in all, not an enviable existence.

  The cell was dark, a bit of streetlamp yellow leaking through the tiny fixed window. Evan took advantage of the relative privacy. He worked his thumb into a slight tear in the wall-facing side of his mattress, enlarging it. No springs, only stuffing. He snapped his soap into thirds, extracted the staple from his heel, and sank it into one of the pieces of soap. Then he stored that hunk and one other inside the tear and firmed the mattress once again to the concrete wall.

  Focusing on the newspaper, he removed the centerfold and tore it down the crease. After stashing the excess pages beneath the mattress, he brought the single sheet over to the sink atop the toilet and doused it. Then he sat cross-legged on his upper bunk, hunching so the ceiling brushed the top of his head. Starting at one corner, he rolled the page as tightly as possible, pressing all the space out of each turn. His fingertips cramped with the effort of mashing every millimeter of the damp newspaper as tightly as possible. It took a solid fifteen minutes to roll the single sheet into a long cone. Then he climbed off the top bunk, sprinkled some more water over the flimsy cone, and smoothed it again and again and again until it was a single solid stick of newsprint rather than a bunch of compressed layers.

  All the while Monkey Mouth rattled on and on, snatches of phrases bumping across the contours of a terrifying inner landscape.

  Casper came back in before curfew and Evan lay down on his upper bunk, placing the slender cone of newspaper between his arm and the wall so it could dry in the open air.

  Casper clanked around, making plenty of noise. Then he took an endless leak, watered his dying plant—a losing battle—and kissed it good night. At last he settled into the bunk beneath Monkey Mouth, who was still motoring. “—and he made me, and I was so little, and he tasted like dirt—”

  Casper kicked the bottom of Monkey Mouth’s bunk hard, causing him to bounce up so high he nearly struck the ceiling. “Shut the fuck up!”

  Monkey Mouth whimpered and settled down onto his mattress facing Evan. His eyes were wide, terrified, and his lips moved as rapidly as ever. But he made no sound. He was looking at Evan but not looking at him at all.

  “G’night, fish,” Casper said.

  His big frame shifted around on the mattress a bit more, and then there was quiet.

  In the pin-drop silence, Evan stared at the smooth ceiling above his face. Tried not to think about the men he was locked in here with. The forged steel and concrete surrounding them. The chain-link and razor wire beyond that.

  He’d smuggled inside nothing but himself. He was his own Trojan horse.

  He thought about Max across the city in Lincoln Heights, maybe sleeping, maybe not, but just as alone as Evan was here. That was his tether to the outside world, his purpose that would have to carry him through this hell and out to the other side.

  He placed one palm on his chest, the other on his stomach. Closed his eyes. Tried to find a tranquil place inside himself, a place that looked a lot like an oak forest outside a two-story Virginia town house. Ceaselessly clear sky. Air crisp enough to sting the throat. Waving leaves and solitude and the calls of hidden birds.

  He was at the brink of sleep when he sensed a stir in the air. He came fully awake just in time to spot Casper standing over his bunk, his massive fist looming.

  It hammered Evan in the temple, his head flying across his makeshift pillow and smacking into the concrete wall.

  46

  Some Martha Stewart Shit

  When Evan returned from the split second of perfect blackness, the pain was so excruciating it made no human sense. It had colors—orange and green—and it made noises—a hi-hat cymbal trilling under an insistent drumstick.

  Before Evan could find his other senses, Casper’s arm slammed down onto him, the blocky hand seizing his loose-fitting shirt. The right fist was already drawn back again, set for the follow-up blow.

  The next punch would kill him. With luck he might survive second-impact syndrome. But there wasn’t a name for third-impact syndrome because no one made it that far.

  The age-old choice fired his lizard brain: move or die.

  His thoughts weren’t functional, so he relied on muscle memory. Through the black-and-white speckles clouding his visual field, he made a series of split-second calibrations. Top bunk. Casper standing. Leaning in. Firm grip. Punch imminent.

  He seized Casper’s wrist and, rather than fending the hand off, pulled it in tighter, throwing Casper off balance. Casper’s right arm flailed to prevent him from toppling, so he couldn’t land the strike.

  Evan flicked a hand at the bridge of the big man’s nose, shattering it. Holding the left wrist firm to keep Casper’s arm locked across the lip of the bunk, Evan spun up and around, flying off the bunk sideways so his knees struck the top of Casper’s braced elbow.

  The impact carried the force of Evan’s momentum and his full falling weight.

  Elbows prefer to bend the other way.

  The snap was loud enough to awaken Monkey Mouth in the next bunk.

  Both men hit the floor, Casper on his back with blood spurting from his nose and his arm flopping loosely, Evan on his feet.

  Evan’s knees buckled, and he had to grab Monkey Mouth’s bunk to hold himself upright. His brain seemed to jog in his skull, streaks of light and nausea crowding in on him.

  He looked down at Casper, watching him writhe. He tried to talk, but his words came out a slur. He cleared his throat, shut his eyes against the pain, and tried again. “If you get to the medical bay quickly and tell them about how you slipped and fell
, they can set that and avoid permanent damage.”

  It took everything Evan had to reach down, grasp Casper’s good hand, and haul him to his feet. Mewling, Casper cradled his shattered arm and stumbled out.

  The instant he cleared the cell, Evan collapsed. One hand on the concrete floor. Static bugs poured across the room, a sheet of movement. He crawled to the toilet and vomited, then vomited again.

  He sat with his back against the wall, palms pressed to his skull, trying to fight down the throbbing. He imagined his brain inside, swelling, creaking the junction points of the plates.

  “You should go,” Monkey Mouth said. “To the infirmary with Casper. It’s no good getting hit in the head like that.”

  But the last thing Evan could afford was for anyone to take a closer look at him and see that he wasn’t Paytsar Hovsepian.

  Which meant he had to muscle through the pain. Or die here on the cell floor.

  Right now it felt like it could go either way.

  * * *

  A half hour later, an electronic bleat announced breakfast, sounding like an air horn going off between Evan’s temples. It took him a solid thirty seconds to stand. By the time he did, Monkey Mouth was gone.

  Evan took Casper’s beloved plant from the Styrofoam cup, shook the clod of damp soil into the toilet, and flushed it. Then he tilted the miniature fern back into the cup, slid it to the other edge of the sill to absorb the direct morning sunlight, and staggered out.

  Downstairs he joined the herd of inmates assembly-belting toward the metal picnic tables. His balance was terrible, tilting him into an inmate beside him and earning him a violent shove in return. But he kept his feet.

  He scanned the mob of faces all around, searching for Bedrosov, but his blurry vision made it near impossible. The pod leaders circulated carts among the tables, serving the prisoners a few sad items each.

  Evan took a seat at a table with other seeming outsiders, including the gray-haired inmate who’d sold him the newspaper section, and hunkered down over his tray. Powdered eggs, biscuit, three breakfast sausages. To repay his debt, he gave one sausage to the older inmate, who received it with an appreciative grunt. Then Evan arranged the food neatly, aligning the sausages so they were parallel. Set the rubber spork on the left edge of his plate. Unfolded his napkin and rested it in his lap.

  The old guy across from him watched his preparations with wry amusement. “Nice picnic, fish. That’s some Martha Stewart shit.”

  Evan heard the words as if underwater. When he looked down at his tray, his vision doubled, a spork doppelgänger springing into existence. He tried to stare it back into one utensil but failed, so he reached somewhere between the two images and came up with the actual object. He pressed the flimsy spork against his tray, but it had too much give to be useful as a weapon, so he set it back down.

  With great effort he picked up his head and scanned the bay for Bedrosov. He didn’t see him, but he did pick out Teardrop at a table on the far side of the staircase. Evan figured Bedrosov was sitting on the other side of the same table, just out of sight.

  “What you looking for?” the guy across from him asked.

  “I want a tattoo,” Evan said, concentrating hard to get the words out cleanly. “Commemorate my time in here.”

  At this the other inmates chuckled.

  “Anyone in here do that?”

  “Shit, Cedric over there’s a ink slinger,” the gray-haired man said, chinning at an obese inmate two tables along. “But not no more since the screws took his kit in the shakedown. He got no more needles, no more spoon to mix the ink with toothpaste, no more lace to soak that shit up. So for the meanwhile you’re stuck with your baby-smooth Martha Stewart skin.”

  Cedric sat with his legs spread to accommodate the dip of his belly. He’d already wolfed down his breakfast and looked to be jonesing for a smoke, rolling his fingertips against one another, sucking on the end of his spork.

  Evan ate his eggs first and then the remaining sausages.

  He folded the biscuit in his napkin and pocketed it.

  When the alarm blared for them to return their trays to the carts, Evan stood up, lost his balance, and plopped back down onto his seat. No one paid any mind. His next attempt was more successful. Firming his equilibrium, he stared over at Teardrop’s table once more. The ring of Armenian Power lieutenants parted, and Evan caught his first glimpse of Bedrosov.

  He’d gained weight on the inside, his cheeks shiny, a curtain of fat hanging from his jawline. He looked like a bloated politician, sure-footed and entitled, as if he already knew the deck was stacked and just had to wait for the game to play out.

  In the jostle to the cells, he and Evan locked eyes across the bay.

  Bedrosov’s core of protectors carried him off, and Evan watched him vanish into the swirl of dark blue prison wear.

  * * *

  Back in his cell, Evan lay flat on his bunk until he was sure he wasn’t going to vomit. Once the pain had receded a notch below all-encompassing, he removed the cone of newspaper from where he’d hidden it beneath his sheet. Though it had hardened as it dried, it was brittle enough to break if he tapped it against the wall.

  While Monkey Mouth spoke to the ceiling in one endless unbroken sentence, Evan retrieved another sheet of newspaper from beneath his mattress and repeated the process, first wetting it, and then wrapping it around the fragile initial cone as tightly and meticulously as possible. He was careful to keep his exposed pinkie away from the paper to avoid leaving a print.

  If all went well, his little craft project would wind up as evidence.

  When he finished, he rested it in the gap between the side of his mattress and the wall. Then he rested, worn out from the level of concentration. Every half hour he would repeat the process until he’d built the cone up painstakingly, one sheet at a time.

  He interrupted Monkey Mouth’s monologue. “Can I trade a biscuit for your cigarettes?”

  Monkey Mouth rolled his head to take in Evan with large, childlike eyes. He was scratching his arm repetitively, drawing blood. “Do you have any ramen?”

  “I’m sorry, pal,” Evan said. “I don’t have any ramen.”

  The man’s disappointment held the weight of the world. “Okay, then.” He reached into his sock and pulled out two bent, sweat-stained butts.

  From top bunk to top bunk, they exchanged items.

  Evan split the cigarettes between his thumbs, exposing the tobacco. Then he pulled down his blue lowers and tore a shred of papery fabric from the leg hem of the jail-issue boxer shorts. Ripping the shred into two rough squares, he divided the tobacco between them, twisted the fabric at the tops to form tea-bag pouches, and tied off each with a thread plucked from the sleeve of his oversize top. He had to squint the entire time to keep everything from blurring.

  He headed out, moving unevenly along the catwalk. The floating clock above the bay showed 11:59 A.M.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Evan paused and stared directly at the top surveillance camera. He blinked four times. Each blink was a signal to Joey. She couldn’t watch the feed around the clock, but when she reviewed footage, she’d note his blinks and count four hours forward from noon. At 4:00 P.M. they’d meet back here virtually and he’d give her the next set of coded instructions in real time.

  He spotted Cedric the inker in the dayroom and wandered over to take the chair next to him. Cedric tilted back in a chair bowing beneath his weight. His fingers were still jumping around, searching for a cigarette, and he was sucking on his bottom lip. He stayed focused on the TV even as he addressed Evan. “What you want?”

  “I know you’re an ink slinger,” Evan said.

  “Can’t make no tattoos no more,” Cedric said. “Don’t have shit for needles. No spoon, nuthin’.”

  “Do you have ink?”

  “Maybe I managed to hide me some. But what good’s ink for by itself?”

  Evan took the two bound pouches of tobacco from his pocket and held them in his palm
.

  “What’s that sorry-looking shit?”

  “Pouch tobacco. You can stuff it in your lip like a Skoal Bandit.”

  Cedric leaned over, the chair creaking, and poked at the pouches. He made a face and shifted away, hugging his chest and pretending to watch the TV. He couldn’t help but work his lower lip between his teeth, an oral fixation hamstering out of control.

  Finally he sighed theatrically and withdrew a crappy Bic pen refill from his breast pocket. He slapped it into Evan’s hand and snatched up the pouches. “I don’t know what you’re gonna do with that,” he said. “Then again, I don’t know what I’m gonna do with it neither.”

  By the time Evan reached the door, Cedric had already tucked one of the pouches into his lower lip.

  Wobbly on his feet, Evan walked back across the bay, glancing up to see Teardrop blocking the bottom of the stairs. As Evan approached, Teardrop shifted back on his heels, arms crossed high on his chest.

  “The man wants to see you,” he said.

  “The man can come see me himself,” Evan said.

  Teardrop grinned a wolfish grin. “You don’t wanna do Bedrock like that,” he said. “Listen to me, bro, I may be getting kicked soon, but don’t think I won’t do one last job up in here.”

  “Then you won’t get out of here anytime soon.”

  “Oh, I’m sure Bedrock’d make it worth my while.”

  Evan considered. Gave a faint nod.

  He followed Teardrop to Cell 37, concentrating so as to not slip on the steps. The Armenian Power lieutenants, inked up as members of the Glendale chapter, parted to let them through.

  Bedrosov sat on a makeshift king-size mattress built of two stacks of twins shoved together. Except for a single unoccupied bunk bed against one wall, the rest of the cell was empty, a testament to his influence. The bottom bunk was bricked in with packages of instant ramen, hundreds of them, the vision Monkey Mouth would see if he ever dreamed pleasant dreams.