23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

39.

Maricón winced a little as the needle dipped in and out of the skin on the back of her hand, but she didn’t make any noise. Queenie kept glancing up at her face as if worried she were hurting Maricón. Then she would dip the needle into Maricón’s hand again and leave another dot of ink.

The needle, a normal mundane sewing needle, was held in the barrel of a ballpoint pen, and wrapped around and around with a piece of thread that had been soaked in the ink. The ink cartridge from the pen had been cut open to get the blue ink inside, which was mixed with cigarette ash for color and saliva to keep it from drying up as the thread was dragged through it again and again until it was dripping.

The only concession toward hygiene the women made was to hold the needle under a lighter flame until it was black with soot—which darkened the ink, as well. Clara had cringed more than Maricón the first time the needle pierced the Latina’s skin.

This was going to be a cover-up tattoo. Maricón had several tattoos already, some of them done professionally but a lot of them done in this same makeshift fashion. Her prison tattoos tended to be simple, usually just a string of letters—coded gang marks that you had to know how to interpret. “ALKN” meant Almighty Latin King Nation, Maricón had told Clara, while “PV” stood for Por Vida, for life, meaning Maricón would die before leaving her gang. The one Queenie was covering up read “BO,” for Brown Only, and that was unacceptable in Guilty Jen’s mixed-race set. So Queenie had drawn a new logo over the faded letters. The new tattoo read “GJ,” for Guilty Jen, with a crude teardrop dangling from the hook of the J.

“You’re up next, Featherwood,” Maricón said, squinting a little as the needle scratched on her hand. “That Nazi bullshit on your ears.”

“Don’t remind me,” Featherwood said. She was standing guard by the door, listening for the sound of anyone moving out in the hallway. “Anyway, maybe it should be Marty who gets the next one.”

The former CO, who was crouching in one corner as if he was afraid he was about to be beaten, didn’t even look up. Clara had tried to talk to him briefly before she realized he wanted to be left alone. When she asked him if he was okay, if the set had hurt him too much, Guilty Jen’s eyes had lit up. She was just waiting for a new sign of weakness from him, something she could use to twist him deeper into her clutches.

Now she’d found an opening. “What about it, hog? You down with me, you gotta wear my name on you somewhere. How about on your forehead, would you like that? Or the palm of your right hand. You can get a lot of respect for ink on your palm, you know. It’s supposed to be the place it hurts the most.”

Marty glanced up but studiously avoided making eye contact.

“How about on his balls?” Queenie asked, and the women had a good laugh at that. “You know,” Queenie added, “if he can find them again.”

Clara thought she should try to defuse the situation. If Marty reacted, the women would hound him mercilessly—but if he didn’t react at all, they would probably hurt him just to make him react. “That’s real loyalty,” she said, louder than she’d meant to. “Getting Maricón to cover that one up.”

Guilty Jen turned very slowly to look at Clara. Then she got down from the table, moving like a cat, and came over to where Clara sat against one wall. She started to crouch down in front of Clara, then swung around to make clawing motions at Marty while stomping one foot on the floor.

The ex-CO jumped. Not much, but enough to get another laugh.

“My bitches are color-blind,” Guilty Jen told Clara. “That’s the first thing you get rid of when you join my set. It don’t help nobody, hating on people of color. That right, Featherwood?”

“That’s right, Jen,” Featherwood agreed. “You helped me see that.”

“I’m impressed,” Clara said. “I know most gangs in prison gather around racial lines, because—”

“What the boys do in their gangs is bullshit, and it means nothing to us. When you got a dick, you lose the ability to think straight.” Guilty Jen crouched down easily next to Clara. “Sometimes I think you dykes have the right idea. No men around to fuck things up, no men to play stupid games about who can piss farther or make the smellier fart. Women join gangs for protection, that’s all. They don’t really care, deep down, if your hair is straight or kinky. They know life is more complicated than that. Oh, they can memorize the bullshit lines the men hand them, about racial purity this, and ten thousand years of history that. They can talk it back to you all day. But they join the gangs in the first place because they want somebody to watch their back. So they don’t get stabbed over some drama they didn’t even start.”

“Is that why Queenie joined up with you?” Clara asked. “Or Maricón?”

“No,” Guilty Jen said. “They came to me because they wanted some respect. They wanted to respect themselves. They wanted to share the respect I get. I taught ’em that, that there’s more to life than being safe and protected. Anybody can take a beating if they have to. Maybe they don’t believe it at first, but they learn. Not just anybody can fight back, get revenge. That’s where respect comes from. These girls know I’m tougher than anybody else they’re likely to meet. They know if somebody disses them, somebody puts a hand on their stuff or maybe grabs their ass in the showers, they know I’ll be there to kick that somebody’s teeth out. That’s respect.”

Clara looked at the women of the set. Featherwood’s face was scalded. Queenie’s jaw was puffy and bruised, and when she tried to eat it hurt her too much to chew. Maricón was wearing thick bandages over one eye. “You must have kicked a lot of teeth out for these three.”

“You shoulda seen Carol, she had her leg snapped,” Maricón said. “And Shanice, she’s gonna get plastic surgery on her nose, they said, ’cause they didn’t set it until it was too late. They were both in hospital when this shit came down. Thanks to your girlfriend.”

Clara’s mouth formed an O. “I see,” she said. “It was Caxton who did all this. And yet—the last time I saw her she was just fine.”

Guilty Jen’s face remained calm. Her eyes didn’t widen, her nostrils didn’t flare. But down by her side, she brought the fingernails of one hand together and then flicked them apart violently. This was clearly a sore spot.

“She’ll get what’s coming to her. She’s going to die, there’s no question about that. In fact,” Guilty Jen said, and she started to smile again, “I think we might be able to do a little worse than just kill her, now that we have you. Like maybe, we get her to come in, turn herself in, whatever, for the vampire, and then, just as she’s about to get her blood sucked, I cut your throat while she watches. That would work for me.”

Clara felt the skin crawl up and down her spinal column. She had no doubt that Guilty Jen was capable of carrying out her threat.

The phone in her pocket rang then and saved her from having to think anymore. She knew better than to grab for it, and instead let Guilty Jen take it from her. The set leader put it on speaker so everyone could hear.

It was the warden on the other end this time.

“Hsu,” the woman said. “You’re going to die. Do you understand me? There’s no way out of this that doesn’t involve me drinking your blood. I know you can hear me. I watched you take my phone. I couldn’t stop you, but I saw everything.”

Clara looked up at Guilty Jen, who shook her head.

“Hsu’s here, alright,” Jen said, “but I’m doing the talking. You know me, Augie. This is Guilty Jen.”

“Oh yes? She went to you for protection?”

“Not exactly,” Guilty Jen said. “More like I agreed not to kill her on the spot because I figured she might be worth something to you. You want her back? It’s going to cost you.”

Clara shook her head. If Guilty Jen turned her over to the warden now it would be all over—the warden would kill Clara immediately. If she could hold out for a few more hours, though, until Fetlock and his SWAT teams arrived, then maybe, just maybe, she would stand a chance.

“You name your price, I’ll meet it.”

“Simple. My set and I walk free out of here, no strings attached. You provide civvies for us to change into, and a car, and you never see any of us again.”

“I doubt that, if you mean you won’t be coming right back here the next time a deal goes bad or you get bored enough to kill somebody. But I won’t be here then, so fine. Bring her down to—”

Clara had been mouthing, No, no, and shaking her head enough to make Guilty Jen at least hesitate. “Hold on,” she said, and pressed mute. “You got something on your mind, Hsu?”

Clara nodded. “Listen. She’s lying to you. She can’t guarantee anything that you want. She’s not in charge here anymore. It’s the vampire who’s running the show. If you turn me over now the warden will kill me. That will just infuriate Malvern. She’ll hunt all of you down just because you thwarted her plan. They know all about respect, too,” Clara said. It probably wasn’t true. Malvern was far too smart to waste time on petty debts—but Jen didn’t need to know that.

“It means waiting until nightfall, right? The vampire’s in bed right now.”

Clara glanced at the screen of the BlackBerry “It’s almost three now. That’s only a couple of hours. You give me to Malvern instead, and she will be very grateful. She’s the one who really wants Caxton, not the warden.”

Guilty Jen thought about it for a second, then took the BlackBerry off mute. “Okay, Augie, we’ll bring her to wherever the vampire is at dusk. I’ll hand her over directly to the vampire. You have our stuff waiting.”

“You’re making a mistake, Jen,” the warden said.

“I don’t make mistakes. I make corpses,” Guilty Jen replied. “You want me to make one out of Hsu right now? ’Cause I will.” And then she ended the call.