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The first time you end up Inside, you think serving your sentence is going to take forever. But soon you learn: no matter how much time you have to do, some parts of it never take long. The Aryan clenched his fists, glancing down at his cartoon-huge forearms as if to reassure himself all that cable-tendoned muscle was real. He was on the downside of steroid burnout, dazed and dangerous.
The Latino wouldn't know a kata from the Koran, but he was an idiot savant of violence, with the kinetic intelligence of a pit bull.
They faced each other in a far corner of the prison yard, screened off from the ground-level guards by the never-intersecting streams of cons flowing around them.
Any experienced gun-tower hack could read the swirls below him, see something was up. But the convicts knew the duty roster better than the warden. They knew the tower closest to the action was manned by a tired old guy with thirty years on the job and a good supply of gash magazines. All they had to do was keep the noise down.
"Only play is to stay away." The Prof spoke low to me.
"Yeah," I said. "Larsen's not built for distance. If Jester gets him tired, he can—"
"Our play, fool!" the Prof hissed at me. "The fuse is lit; it's time to split."
We faded, working our way back through the crowd sneaking glances at the duel. By the time the whistle blew and the first shots sounded from the tower, we were standing on either side of the sally port as the Goon Squad rushed through, hammering wildly at every con within reach.
Larsen didn't run. He was facedown on the filthy asphalt, Jester's shank protruding fromthe back of his neck. The matador had gone in over the horns.
They locked the whole joint down, tore up everyone's house looking for weapons. But all that did was simmer the pot more, as plots and counterplots festered into a Big House brew of pus and poison. Usually it was black against white, with brown trying to stay out of the crossfire. But this one had rolled out different.
Larsen rode with a motorcycle gang; there were a lot of bikers Inside then. And Jester had been flying colors at sixteen, when he'd taken the life that had bought him a life sentence. The kid he'd killed was another PR, from a rival club, but that didn't matter anymore.
Back then, when it came to prison war, race trumped tribe every time.
You never got a choice about that. The cons had all kinds of names for areas of the prison—Times Square, Blues Alley, D Street—but I never heard of one named Switzerland.
"On the bricks, niggers do the paper-bag trick," the Prof told me. "But Inside, you can't hide."
"What's the paper-bag trick?" I asked him. The Prof had been schooling me for a while, so I didn't even blink at a black man saying "nigger." I knew words were clay—they took their real meaning from the sculptor.
"I ain't talking about passing, now," the Prof cautioned me. "It's a class thing. Motherfuckers'll hold a paper bag next to they faces and look in the mirror, okay? If they darker than the bag, there ain't but so far up the ladder they can climb, understand?"
"I . . . guess."
"Nah, you don't get it, son. I'm talking about the colored ladder, see? Mothers want they daughters to marry light. They know high-society niggers don't want no darkies at their parties."
I just nodded, waiting for mine, knowing it was coming.
"Yeah," he said, softly. "It's different with white folks. Color ain't the thing. Boy like you, you was born trash. You could be light as one of them albinos; wouldn't make no difference."
I knew it was true.
By the time they ended the lockdown and we could mix again, the clay had hardened. Larsen's crew called it for personal, put out the word. They weren't going race-hunting. They only wanted Jester.
I guess the hacks wanted him, too. They never bing-ed him for the killing, and they knew Jester would never take a voluntary PC. That section of solitary was marked "Protective Custody," but the road sign was just there to fool the tourists. Cons called it Punk City. Jester, he'd rather swan-dive into hell wearing gasoline swim trunks.
For a lot of the Latin gang kids I knew coming up, it wasn't whether you died that counted, it was how you died.
When Jester hit the yard, he wasn't alone. There was a fan of Latinos behind him, unfurling from his shoulders like a cape in the wind.
"Jester don't mind dying, but he sure mind motherfuckers trying," the Prof said out of the side of his mouth.
The motorcycle guys stood off to one side, watching. Everyone gave the two crews room, measuring the odds. There were a few more of the Latins, but they all looked like they'd come from the same cookie-cutter—short and slim to the point of being feline. The motorcycle guys were carrying a lot more beef. Question was: What else were they carrying?
"Only steel is real," the Prof said, summing it up.
The yard buzzed with its life-force: rumor. Was it true that the hacks had looked the other way, let the whites re-arm? Had the search squad really found a few live .22 rounds during the shakedown? What about the word that they were going to transfer a new bunch of bikers in from Attica and Dannemora to swell the ranks?
Jester turned and faced his crew, deliberately offering his back to the whites. One of them started forward; stopped when their leader held up his hand.
It wasn't going to be today.
And the next three weeks went by quiet.
The motorcycle guys trapped me in a corridor near the license plate shop. My fault—I should have been race-war alert, but I'd let the quiet lull me.
"How much?" their leader, a guy named Vestry, asked me.
"How much for what?" I said, stalling, but honestly puzzled, too.
"For the piece, man. Don't be playing dumb with us. You're all alone here."
"I don't know what you're—"
"Your boy, Oz, he's the guy what makes all the best shanks. So we figure he's got—"
"The Man shut him down. You know that. Oz don't keep a stash. Makes them to order and hands them over soon as they're done."
"We're not talking about no fucking pig-stickers, Burke. We want the piece. If the hacks found bullets, there's got to be a gun. And, word is, it's yours."
"The word is bullshit."
"Look, man, we're willing to pay. Or did the spics get to you first?"
"I'm not in this," I told him. "If I had a piece, I'd sell it to you. You know I'm short—you think I'd bag my go-home behind getting caught with a fucking gun?"
"We know you got it," Vestry said, stubborn-stupid, stepping closer. A sound came from the men behind him—the trilling of a pod of orcas who'd spotted a sea-lion pup far from the herd.
One of them said "Oh!" just as I heard a sound like a popgun and saw his hands go to his face. He stumbled to one knee, said, "I'm . . . ," and fell over.
Another popgun sound. Vestry grabbed at his neck like a bee stung him. But blood spurted out between his fingers.
Everybody ran. Everybody that could.
"It just came out of the shadows," I told them. "Like it was a ghost or something."
"At least two ghosts, then," Oz said. "Vestry made it to the hospital in time; the other guy didn't. But there were two shots."
"So—not a zip," the Prof said, thoughtfully. "Ain't no way to reload one of those suckers that fast."
"Or two zips. And two shooters," Darryl said.
Everyone went quiet for a while. Then the Prof said, "I think Schoolboy nailed it the first time."
We all looked at him.
"It was a ghost," the little man said. "And we all know his name."
The Prof was on the money. So, by the time Vestry came up to me on the yard—alone, with his hands held away from his body—to ask his question, I had the answer ready.
"Five hundred dollars?" he said, stunned. He patted the yellowing tape around his neck that held the stitches in place, as if that would make his ears work better.
"Soft money," I told him. "No smokes, no trades, no favors. Folding cash."
"There ain't that much soft in this whole—"
"You got chapters on the bricks," I said quietly. "Take up a collection."
I guess they raised the money. When they racked the bars for the morning count a couple of weeks later, Jester didn't move. Died in his sleep, word was. Maybe something he ate.
"I already paid half," Vestry said the next day. "In front. How do I know he did that spic? I heard the docs don't know what killed him."
"You know who you're dealing with," I told him. "You don't come up with the other half, that's what they'll be saying about you."
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Copyright 2001 by Andrew Vachss
