Salvation Row

Epilogue

Claude Boon waited in line. There were three pay phones and six men who wanted to use them. Louisiana State Penitentiary was known as Angola, but the inmates referred to it as the Farm. It was the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, with more than six thousand offenders and nearly two thousand staff.

It was a nasty, brutish place, but there was nothing too surprising about that. Boon expected it. He had heard all the stories: rape, gang rape, men who were bought and sold like cattle.

Boon was not a large man. He did not look particularly impressive.

Fresh meat.

Boon had been in places like it before and knew what he would have to do to render his stay bearable. He knew, for example, that he needed to make a demonstration as soon as he arrived. He selected the man who would help him to do that. An inmate called Clarence Wright, better known as the “Booty Bandit,” a bear of a man whose vocation was beating, torturing, and sodomising fellow inmates while prison guards looked the other way. Wright, a psychopathic serial rapist, was the guards’ resident enforcer. They arranged for men who needed to be reined in to be transferred to his cell. Boon made a nuisance of himself in the canteen to make that happen and, on the first night, as Wright made his move, Boon murdered him with a shank that he had fashioned from a toothbrush, pushing the sharpened plastic into his throat. The carotid artery had been severed clean in two, and Boon had bathed in the fountain of the big man’s blood. None of the guards or other inmates wanted anything to do with him after that.

Now the authorities were in the process of adding a new homicide charge to his rap sheet, but Boon didn’t care about that. He wouldn’t be around long enough for that to become relevant.

The man at the phone nearest to the line finished his call and replaced the receiver. Boon walked to the phone, ignoring his place in the queue. One of the others, a tattooed brute who ran with Ride or Die, started to protest until he saw who it was who was cutting the line.

Boon gave him a glance, even and calm, and saw the man take a step away from him.

He picked up the phone and dialled the number that he still remembered from all those years ago.

“Pronto Dry Cleaning. How can I help you?”

“I need to speak to the director.”

There was a slight pause as the woman on the other end of the call adjusted her expectations. “Can I ask who’s calling, please?”

“Yes,” Boon said. “Tell him it’s Avi Bachman. I’d like to come home.”