Security plans for the Central Facility called for two corrections officers to be on front desk duty at the cleansing unit’s entrance, and for one officer to be stationed “in visual range” of the showers in each of the five locker rooms. The building’s architect had taken the “custody and care” charge of incarceration laws seriously. Under the latest budget plan, however, there was only enough manpower for one front desk officer.
That pockmarked guard had seven years left to his pension. Whenever he found a dollar bill on a walkway, he failed to smell fermenting homebrew. The guard skimmed the clipboard of demerit denials and didn’t find Lucus’s name or designation. “Number two and four are busted out,” he said.
“Believe I’ll try three,” replied Lucus, signing his name and number on the second line of the log book.
The guard frowned, spun the log book around, and double-checked the scrawl on the line above Lucus’s name.
“I thought you could read, boy.”
Keep it level—hell, slam it straight back at the fat son of a bitch: “Do my numbers too.”
“You know who’s in there?”
“I don’t care.”
Flat out, the power mantra.
The guard shook his head, scrawled his initials in the column. Said: “Never figured you for that scene, Lucus.”
Like all its counterparts, Unit 3’s locker room had no lockers. Wooden benches were bolted to the floor. A set of prison-orange clothes and a DayGlo undershirt were neatly stacked up in the empty dressing room when Lucus walked in. From inside the tiled shower area came the sound of rushing water and billowing steam.
Lucus stripped to his skin, stacked his clothes by the wall opposite the other pile. A scar snaked around his left ribs where he’d been too slow seven years before. He held the shiv along his forearm, his other hand fanned a path through the warm fog.
There, against the far wall, under the last of all twenty spraying shower spigots, shoulder-length permed tresses protected by a flowered shower cap, saying: “And lo, it is the man himself.”
“Who you expecting, Barry?” Lucus walked through the lead-heavy rain.
Barry was six feet three inches of rippling muscles. Long, sinewy legs that let him fly across the stage of the city ballet or lightspeed kick the teeth out of dudes inside who were dumb enough to think his style equaled weakness. The shower steam made the mascara over Barry’s right eye trickle down his cheek like a midnight tear.
“Expecting?” Barry turned his bare shoulder toward Lucus, flashed his floodlight smile, and swung his arms out from his sides, up above his head, hands meeting in a point as he stretched to his tiptoes, eyes closed in ecstasy. He held position for a full count, then fluttered his arms down, cupped his hands shyly above his groin, and lowered his chin, eyes closed: a sleeping angel scarred by the midnight tear.
One heartbeat.
Barry’s eyes popped open and he beat his lashes toward the man with the shiv.
“Why, I’ve been waiting for only you.” Barry cocked poses with each beat as he sang: “Just you, indeed, it’s you, only you, yes it’s true …” Whirling around, dancing, singing: “No-body bu-ah-ut—” Cobra coiled, shrinking back on one cocked leg, both pointing fingers aimed right at Lucus’s heart: “Yooou!”
“Good thing you came,” said Lucus.
“What else is a girl supposed to do?” Barry leered. “My pleasure.”
“No, man,” said Lucus, “my payoff.”
“Oh my, yes,” replied Barry, washing. “Lucus to Mouser to Dancer—why, you’d think we’re playing baseball!”
“We ain’t playing shit.”
“Certainly not, manchild.” Barry smiled. “And right you were. The play’s been called, the sign is on for a hit.”
“When?”
“Well, that nervous Nellie was all denial, you see, as if he hadn’t been cruising around the yard, too scared to make a move, afraid his bros would put him down. Those savages! As if they’ve never grabbed a punk in these very tiled walls and made the poor boy weep! But of course my man wasn’t really doing it, you understand, just accepting my smitten appreciation of him being such a stud.”
“When?”
“Let a girl tell her story or you’ll never get anywhere with her!”
“We’re where we are and where we’re going. You been paid, you come across.”
“Always.” Barry savored the moment. “What did Mouser owe you that he swapped my debt to him for?”
“Enough,” said Lucus. “Now give me what I bought: When?”
“Why, today, dear man.”
Lucus showed nothing.
“Probably in the afternoon exercise.”
Yard time, thought Lucus. Starts at 3:30. About five hours away.
Barry washed his armpits.
“My simple little use-to-be-a-virgin’s crew has traded around and rigged the stage and done the diplomacy and even rehearsed wolf-packing. They have a huge enough chorus to smother any friends of their featured star who try to crimp the show and make it more than a solo death song.”
Water beat down on the two men.
“What else?” said Lucus.
“Nothing you’d want. He cried. I think he actually feels guilty. That’s the only charming thing about him—though he does have nice thighs. Not as nice as yours.”
“Does he suspect that he was set up with you or that he ran his mouth too much?”
“He’s all ego and asshole,” said Barry. “He can’t conceive that he’s been bought and sold and suckered clean.”
“How about his bros? By now, they might know about you two.”
“Not from him. He’s too scared of getting branded to confess, cagey enough to not let it slip out. If they do know, no worry: Like you said, I used to middleman powder for upscale customers from a boy tied to their crew. That makes moi acceptable.”
“We’re square.” Lucus stepped back, his eyes staying on Barry as he moved toward the door.
“How about a little something for the road?” Barry smiled. “It’ll calm your nerves. For free. For you, from me.”
“I got what I need for the road.”
“Oh, if only that were true for all of us! If only we could all believe that!”
Lucus turned, disappeared in the steam. In the locker room, he dressed. Don’t run. Don’t show one bead of sweat.
“You get what you was after?” asked the guard as he signed Lucus out.
“Guess I did.”
“Guess I did—sir.”
“Yeah.” Lucus saw his reflection in the guard’s eyes, saw how it shrank because of what that guard thought happened in there. That’s his problem, thought Lucus. He went back to the cell.
Spent the morning on his cot, like he had nothing to do.
Jackster and H.L.S. puttered about, neither one leaving Lucus.
“Lunchtime,” announced Lucus, swinging off his bunk. “Come on, Jackster. Today you eating with the men.”
“I eat where I want,” snapped Darnell.
“Why wouldn’t you want to eat with us?” asked Lucus.
Darnell mumbled—then obeyed Lucus’s gesture to lead the way.
A table emptied when Lucus and his cellmates sat down.
Lunch was brown and brown and gray, with coffee.
Jackster kept sneaking looks at other tables, locking eyes with bros from his old neighborhood.
H.L.S. ran down “Chumps I have known.”
Like Dozer, a Valium freak who bypassed a pharmacy’s alarm system, then overindulged in bounty and nodded off in the baby-food aisle. The cops woke him.
And Two-Times Shorty, a midget who tried to bully an indy whore into being his bottom lady. She chased him through horn-honking curbside shoppers and lost tourists looking for the White House, pinned him on the hood of a Dodge, and pounded about a hundred dents in him with her red high-heeled shoe. Tossed him buck naked into a dumpster. Climbing out, pizza parts stuck to his naked torso, Shorty grabbed the offered hand of a fine-
looking woman. What the hell, he figured, second time’s the charm, and he reeled off his be-mine pimp spiel. She slapped policewoman bracelets on him.
Then there was Paul the Spike, who tested heroin on street dogs. While he was slicing and dicing a batch of Mexican, Paul heard a knock on the door. Because of the ’sclusionary rule, he beat the narco charges but drew ninety days for cruelty to animals.
“Hard luck can bite anybody’s ass,” said Sam, “but it always eats up chumps.”
“I ain’t no chump,” said Jackster.
Sergeant Wendell entered the mess hall, scanned the mostly empty rows of tables.
“Who said you were?” Lucus let his eyes leave the sergeant to study Darnell.
“No fool better!”
Sergeant Wendell started toward them.
“Trouble with young punks today,” said Sam, “they got no finesse. Our day, needed to smoke a guy, you caught him in private, did your business, and everything’s cool. These days, you young punks let fly on street corners and wing some poor girl coming home from kindergarten. No respect for nothing, no style or—”
“Style?” snapped Jackster. “You got no idea, man, no idea what style is!”
“Resident Ellicot!” yelled Sergeant Wendell.
“Yes, sir?” answered Lucus.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I was just—”
“You know your damn schedule as well as I do! Your ass belongs in Administrator Higgins’s office as of ten minutes ago!”
“On my way, sir!” Lucus stood.
H.L.S. pulled Lucus’s tray so Lucus wouldn’t need to bus it.
“Why’d you make me have to come fetch you?” Wendell asked as he marched Lucus along in front of a dozen sets of eyes.
“Just guess I ain’t so smart,” said Lucus.
“Don’t give me that shit,” said Wendell, who was no fool and a good jerk, though no con had ever been able to buy him. “Move!”
Assistant Administrator Higgins kept his office almost regulation. Sunlight streaming through the steel mesh grille over his lone window fell on a government low-bid desk positioned in line with the file cabinets and the official calendar on the wall next to facility authority and shift assignment charts. But Higgins had taken out the regulation steel visitors’ chairs bolted to the floor in front of his desk and had risked replacing them with more inviting, freestanding wooden fold-up chairs that a strong man could use to batter you to death.
Higgins was a bantamweight in chain-store suits and plain ties. He wore metal frame glasses that hooked around his ears. Glasses on or off, his dark eyes locked on who he was talking to. That afternoon, he slowly unhooked his glasses, set them on the typed report in the middle of his otherwise blank desk, and fixed those eyes on Lucus.
“So, do you understand this report?” asked Higgins.
“I can read now, so that ain’t what I gots to talk to you about.”
“That was on your meeting request.” Higgins leaned back in his chair.
“The administration,” started Lucus, “they got to like what I been doing. They been catching hell on the news, in the TV ads from those two citizens running for senator. I heard the warden—”
“Chief administrator,” corrected Higgins.
“Oh yeah, I forgot. Change the name and everything’s okay. Long as there’s no trouble.”
“What do you mean, trouble?”
“There’s some that say the understaffing helps you guys, cause it’ll inspire something to happen, and then you all can say, See? We need more budget. Jobs.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“Maybe some of the guards do.”
“The officers are paid to watch inmates, not make policy. I need to be told about any of them who act differently.”
“I ain’t the telling kind,” said Lucus. “I just sensitive to your problems about image and keeping up the good show so the warden don’t get bad press and take heat from his buddy the governor and every other politician looking to get elected.”
“What’s this got to do with anything?”
“I just glad to help out—with things like that charity program on your desk.”
“You’ve done good work, Lucus.”
“What will it get me?”
Higgins frowned. “You knew that isn’t the way this works.”
Lucus shrugged. “Things change.”
“Don’t go con on me now, resident.”
“Sir, you was the one who showed me about attitude, about getting out from behind it and how nothing would change if I didn’t. So I been workin on my attitude, what’s behind it, what I do. But where’s it getting me? Still right here.”
“You’re down for Murder One, five counts … plus. Where do you expect to be?”
“Oh, I’m a criminal,” said Lucus. “No question about that. I can do the time for what I did, but man, let my crime justify my punishment.”
“Five murders,” said Higgins. “Plus.”
“I already done my plus in chains.” Stay calm. “But I never did no murders.”
“The law—”
“Sir, I know the law. We were sticking up gamblers. The law made them crooks, which made them marks. The law did that—not me. Figure, heist a crook, he can’t holler for cops. Rodney had the gun, had them fools lined up against that wall, told me to check out the basement. We agreed before we went in there: in and out with cash, nobody hurt, nobody can do shit about us. I’m in the basement looking for whatnot, I hears those pop-pop-pops … Man, Rodney done me just as much as he done them dudes!”
“Not quite,” said Higgins.
“Yeah, well, what’s done is done, but I didn’t kill nobody. It’s the law and Rodney that made me guilty.”
“You chose to rob, you chose to run with a trigger-happy partner, you chose your juvie record, your prior theft and assault rec—”
“Yes, sir,” said Lucus, interrupting with polite formality. Got to hurry this up. “I admit I’m guilty, but fitting my crimes with two twenty-year stretches, back to back, no parole—no right man can do that kind of justifying.”
“It’s a done deal, Lucus. I didn’t think you were fighting that anymore.”
“I got a lot of time to mess with it. Nineteen more years.”
“Might just be enough to make yourself a new life.”
“Yeah. Starting when I’m sixty-two.”
“Starting every time you breathe.” Higgins blinked. “You want something.”
“This new attitude you helped me get,” said Lucus. “Working programs—with my program in my head. Not getting in any beefs since I got out of chains—”
“At least none that you got caught for,” said Higgins.
“I been doing good time.”
“The law isn’t about doing good time. That’s what you’re supposed to do as a minimum. No matter what you do in here, every day is on the payback clock, and you gotta get to zero before you can claim you’re owed.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe not always.”
Higgins shrugged. “What do you want?”
“A transfer,” said Lucus.
“What?”
“Out of here. Right now. Not a parole, you couldn’t pull that off. But you could take a paper out of that desk, sign it, and there it is, a transfer out of the Wall to the Minimum-Security Farm. Effective soon as the ink is dry. Call the duty sergeant and—”
“You’re down for hard time. You’re a five-count killer with one escape and one shot-up officer—don’t tell me where that gun was found—plus a jacket full of incidents.”
“All before I changed my attitude.”
“Never happen. I never bullshitted you it would.”
“The transfer ain’t for me. It’s for my son.”
Higgins blinked.
Blinked again, and in the administrator’s dark eyes, Lucus saw mental file cabinet drawers slide open.
“Kevin,” said Higgins. “Kevin Ellicott, down for …”
“Last year, a nickel tour for what they could get him on instead of big dope. He’s done angel time for thirteen months.”
“Your boy runs with the Q Street Rockers,” said Higgins. “They’re no church choir.”
“I didn’t say he was a genius. What he is, sir, is a juicer. Just about to become a full-bore alcoholic, if he stays in here much longer. And what’s that gonna solve? How’s that gonna make life easier for the warden? What justice is—”
“Doesn’t add up,” said Higgins. “He can get pruno as easy at the Farm as here.”
“Maybe if he gets into the Farm’s twelve-step program—”
“It’s his maybes, not yours. Why isn’t he asking? Why are you doing this?”
“He’s my son. I wasn’t there to bring him up. Hell, if I had been around before I got my attitude program, probably wouldn’t have done him much good. Maybe he could have learned better street smarts, but … he stays in here, he dies in here.”
“Of alcoholism?” said Higgins.
“Dead is dead,” said Lucus.
They watched each other for a dozen heartbeats.
“And you think a transfer to the Farm will keep him alive.”
“It’ll give him a chance.”
“What aren’t you telling me?” asked Higgins.
“I’m telling you everything I can,” answered Lucus.
“That you can? You got to learn that we create most our own cans and can’ts.”
“We do?” Lucus paused; said: “You always say that we pay for them too.”
“That’s right.”
“Yeah,” said Lucus. “That’s right. So if somebody’s already paid, then he deserves a can.”
Softly, Higgins said, “Don’t blow it, Lucus. Whatever’s going down, don’t blow everything you’ve accomplished.”
“What’s that, sir? Any way I cut it, I still got nineteen years to go. What could I blow?”
“The way you get to look at yourself in the mirror.”
“I see a man there now. I’ll see a man there tomorrow.”
“If you won’t help me,” said Higgins, “I can’t help you.”
“I’ve been helping you—sir. Look at the report on your desk. Let the warden take credit for it, keep his image shiny. I ain’t asking nothing for me. Who I am, what I’ve done, what I can do—one way or the other, all that should pay for something.”