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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 from the 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."
Excerpted from Pain Management by
Andrew Vachss
Copyright 2001 by Andrew Vachss. Excerpted by
permission of Knopf,
a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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