Deadlock

8

The things I do for my country, Lock thought to himself, as he stood facing the wall of the prison’s tiny reception area, his fingers touching the whitewashed concrete, his legs spread wide as a prison guard squatted beneath him with a flashlight.

‘OK, now reach down there with your left hand and spread your cheeks,’ came the officer’s command.

Lock complied, consoling himself with the fact that men of a certain age in the United States actually paid a physician to endure this humiliation on an annual basis.

‘Keister’s clear,’ said the guard matter-of-factly to one of his colleagues. Then he turned back to Lock. ‘You can pull up your pants now.’

Before their handover to the US Marshals Service, Ty, who figured that over half of the kids he grew up with in Long Beach were currently serving time somewhere in the nation’s prison system, had brought Lock up to speed on some of the prison lingo. Keister was slang for your anal cavity, also known as a prison purse. The keister was the hiding place of choice for drugs, or money, or, more commonly, prison-manufactured improvised weapons, also known as shanks.

Lock turned round. In front of him, two more correctional officers were puzzling over his paperwork. The guard who’d just cavity-searched him nodded towards Ty. ‘You and your homeboy here might have come in together, but once you’re on block together you might want to keep your distance. The white cons frown on any of their number hanging with a black.’

By ‘frown’, Lock knew that the guard meant ‘would murder in cold blood’. The racial segregation strictly enforced by the prisoners was also something he and Ty had discussed. It would make communication difficult but gave each of them access to two separate powerful groups. If Lock’s cover was blown, or a hit on Reaper was imminent, Ty was more likely to hear it from the black prisoners. Lock’s first warning would likely be a knife in the back while taking a shower.

The two guards staring at the clipboard were still deep in conversation. Finally, they looked over to Ty. ‘OK, Johnson, you’re A-block, unit 8. You too, Lock. But be aware of what you were just told. You guys associate in here and something jumps off, that’s down to you.’

The older of the two guards chipped in. ‘Stick with your own kind and you’ll be fine.’ He paused. ‘Probably.’

In cell 845, Reaper was sitting cross-legged on the top bunk, deftly crocheting what looked to Lock like a multicolored beanie hat. The crocheting was a surprise, Reaper’s appearance slightly less so. Even sitting down, Lock could tell that he was vast. Rather than his decade in prison having withered him, it had only succeeded in putting even more muscle on his bones. The image that flashed into Lock’s mind was that of a Great White Shark patrolling the vast ocean in a remorseless death-quest. And he was stepping inside a cage with the beast.

Six feet four tall and two hundred and fifty pounds, with a huge barrel chest and freakishly big biceps, everything about Reaper seemed inflated. Atop broad shoulders, a square head sported a walrus mustache His eyes were dark grey, bordering on black. Like many of the original members of the Aryan Brotherhood, he could have stepped straight from the pages of one of the Louis L’Amour dime-store westerns the gang so respected.

When Reaper looked up, Lock’s focus shifted from the man himself to his environment. Unlike the other cells, which Lock had passed with the floor cop who was escorting him, Reaper’s home was bereft of pin-ups. Instead, it looked like the place had been recently vacated by some strange hybrid of domestic goddess — Martha Stewart, say — and Eva Braun. On the walls were tacked needlepoint samplers, and stacked at the end of the top bunk was a neatly folded array of knitted sweaters.

Reaper carefully placed the crochet hook and the hat on the bunk next to him. ‘Who the hell’s this?’

‘This here’s your new cellie.’

‘Reaper don’t share his house with no one. Least of all not some punk-ass fish.’ He turned back to his crocheting. ‘Find him somewhere else.’

The young floor cop hitched his thumbs into his utility belt. ‘One more word from you, Reaper, and you can go back to the SHU.’

Reaper jumped down from the bunk and landed softly on the concrete floor. As he did so, the floor cop moved his right hand to the oversized can of pepper spray on his belt.

Reaper glanced at the bottom bunk, although ‘bunk’ was a rather grandiose word for what amounted to a solid concrete slab that he was using to store his collection of books, which ran the gamut from jailhouse classics such as Mein Kampf and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil all the way to the slightly more practical Stitch ’N’ Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook. Lock reflected that somehow in these surroundings even the title of a book on knitting could take on a sinister edge.

Reaper’s gaze, steady and unflinching, honed no doubt by years of prison face-offs, shifted to Lock. ‘You can sleep on the floor.’

The floor cop stepped out on to the walkway and waved to the other correctional officer situated in the control pod a few yards away. ‘Good to close 845.’

A second later, the barred door of the cell slid back into place, sealing Lock inside with Reaper.

One tier down and two cells along, Ty’s reception was proving a little warmer. In fact, he felt like the prodigal son returned to the fold. His new cellie grasped both of Ty’s hands and burst into a warm laugh. ‘Look who it ain’t. I heard a rumor you were heading to these fair shores. Never thought you’d be my cellie though.’

Ty threw his meagre possessions on the bottom slab and looked at the three-hundred-pound colossus who filled most of the rest of the space. ‘How you doin’, Marvin? How’s your mama?’

‘She good. Her kidneys are bad. Too much salt.’

Given the neighbourhood that Ty had grown up in, and the fact that most of his graduating class in high school had proved criminally precocious by graduating a few years ahead of schedule to juvenile hall, he’d anticipated meeting a few old faces.

Marvin had fallen in with a street gang known as the Crips, one of the two major black street gangs in California, the other being the Bloods. He was known in Crips circles as Lil Dawg, which demonstrated that even organised criminal gangs don’t always lack a sense of humour.

Marvin enveloped Ty in a hug. ‘You finally gave up on that war hero shit, huh?’

Ty shrugged. ‘Guess so. What you here for?’

‘Some trumped-up bullshit, that’s what.’

Ty let it go. Ask any of the inmates whether they were guilty or not and they would tell you they were innocent, or that there had been some misunderstanding, most of which involved either guns, drugs, or a combination of both. There was no point arguing with them.

Ty sat down, and Marvin began to regale him with a list of old faces from the neighbourhood and their current status, which divided evenly into the dead and the incarcerated. Far from being disappointed that the one person he’d grown up with who’d gone on to live a productive life was now in jail, Marvin seemed delighted to see Ty. It was as if in some perverse manner Ty was some kind of statistical aberration. Which, in a way, Ty knew he was. As Marvin rattled off the names of their old friends who weren’t dead, what particular part of the California penal system they now called home, and what sentence they were currently serving, Ty grew more depressed.

‘So, who do I need to watch out for in this unit?’ he asked when Marvin finally paused for breath.

‘Everyone in here is a bad ass. You come in here as a murderer, that don’t make you jackshit.’ Marvin stopped. ‘Not that I’m saying you’re jackshit. I mean, with you being in the military, you’ve probably capped more mofos than anyone else down in this place.’

Ty humored him with a smile. ‘Something like that.’

‘Tell you who we do got on this unit right now though. Came in today in fact. Just before you got here.’

Ty shrugged a ‘who?’

‘That Reaper mofo. Just got moved in here from the SHU.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Not someone we want on our unit,’ said Marvin, with a sniff reminiscent of a suburban housewife who didn’t approve of the new neighbors

‘That still don’t tell me who he is.’

Marvin looked Ty straight in the eye. ‘He’s the guy that you and your homeboy are supposed to be babysitting.’

‘What the hell you talking about, Marvin?’

‘How much they paying you, Tyrone? Because whatever it is, it ain’t gonna be enough.’

Ty sighed. ‘How’d you know?’

‘Reaper has been locked down in the SHU for years. All of a sudden he’s out on the mainline and you and your buddy come riding into town on some bullshit manslaughter charges no one’s heard about. Never try to con a convict, Ty.’

Ty thought of Lock, and his ashen face when he realised who had been murdered along with his family. He turned to Marvin. ‘I’m gonna need your help to make sure nothing happens to Hays.’

‘And you’re asking me?’

Ty took a breath. ‘Yeah, I am.’

‘You know what that mofo is in here for? Killing two little black girls and their papa. Those little girls could have been our sisters.’

‘I’ve been in the military, right?’ Ty said.

‘I know that.’

‘Well, sometimes you find yourself on some strange sides.’

Marvin glanced round the cell. ‘No shit, Tyrone.’ He paced to the edge of the cell door and back again.

‘I’m asking you as a friend.’

Marvin puffed out his cheeks, then exhaled. ‘OK, here’s how we’re going to play this. I’m gonna make sure that we got your back on the yard. You do what you came here to do. But as for your homeboy and Reaper, if it jumps off, they’re on their own. And, man, in this place it don’t take much for the shit to jump off.’