White Sister

Chapter 49.

I WAS IN cell A-5. It was small and contained only a bed, a sink, and a steel toilet. The bars were painted the same cream color as the floor. I sat on the thinly padded, red vinyl mattress and tried to sort this out. I knew I had to recapture my memory of what happened inside the El Rey Theatre, so I started with my last recollection. I pictured myself back inside Chooch's Jeep, parked on the street outside, and tried to walk myself through it a step at a time. I remembered watching the black Chevy Impala SS slide by my parking place, its darkened windows vibrating gangsta rap. I tracked my progress, as I followed the black, four-door Chevy down the alley behind the theater. This time, my memory continued on beyond where it had stopped before and I remembered the fat gangster dressed in black, wearing chrome shades. Mister something… Smith. With the gaudy yellow crocs. Crocodile Smith. I remembered Krunk and the other one Little Poison and the two younger bangers. In my mind's eye I watched as those four scaled the fence and knocked on the back door. I remembered Stacy, or someone who looked a lot like her, letting them inside. A lot of pieces were starting to return. The VIP room. Walking down the glass-walled corridor to meet Lionel Wright in the sound booth. A big guy in a tan Kufi hat. Elijah Mustafa from the Fruit of Islam. Then I recalled Louis Maluga bracing me in the crowded lobby, threatening my life while the gorgeous woman I assumed was Sable Miller stood nearby and watched, waiting to see what would happen. But there the memories abruptly ended. I still couldn't fathom what I had done that led to the riot. I needed to get the custodial officer so I could make a phone call. I stood and started tapping on the bars with my wedding ring the only piece of jewelry the booking sergeant let me keep. "Stop that racket or I come down there an' put a foot up yer ass," a sleepy voice from another cell growled. After a minute, Sgt. Patrick Collins arrived and looked in at me. "Shhh!" he hissed. "One riot a night oughta be enough for anybody." "There's no phone inside this cell." "It's three a. M. No attorney's gonna talk to you until morning." "Hey, Patrick, that's just not your decision to make. I got a right to phone calls twenty-four hours a day, no exceptions. Read the jail manual." "It's great havin' a cop in here, so we don't forget the real important stuff," he complained. But he took out his keys, opened the cell, and led me down the hall. The big holding dorm that housed twenty sleeping prisoners was dimly lit by night-lights, but even in the faint glow, I saw Insane Wayne standing at the bars glaring, dressed to thrill in silk and leather. "You best look out, motherfucker," he growled as I passed. "Bad shit be coming." "Don't talk to him," Sgt. Collins ordered. "That's a threat," I said. "Aren't you going to do something about it?" Collins didn't respond and pulled me farther down the corridor to a large shower room with a wire mesh door. He opened the door, pushed me inside, then shut and locked me in. There was a phone on the wall outside with a cord that was just long enough to reach through a metal porthole that had been cut in the chain link. The way it worked, I could stand in the locked shower stall and by pulling the receiver in with me, I could then reach through and dial the phone attached to the wall outside. I retrieved the handset while Sergeant Collins watched me. "You mind?" I asked. He finally turned and walked out of earshot. I could just make out the corner of Insane Wayne Watkins's cell a few feet beyond the intersecting corridor. It was so dim over there, I couldn't quite see him, but I could feel his insolent glare coming out of the darkness, vibing me. I reached through the narrow port, dialed information and asked for Gustafson Law Associates. Once the operator gave me the number, I called it collect and got a woman on his answering service who was polite, but seemed tired of dealing with dirtbags calling collect from jail in the middle of the night. I told her what I wanted. "He makes jail visits after court in the morning. If you got booked tonight, you won't be arraigned until Tuesday or Wednesday, anyway." "I need to talk with him now." "Honey, it's three a. M." "Wake him up. I'm the cop accused of killing David Slade and that rapper, Diamond Back, at the Oasis Awards. My case is gonna be worth a million in free national publicity. You tell Gustafson to call me in the next ten minutes or I'm moving to Thomas Mesereau, who happens to be the next celebrity guy on my list." She hesitated, so I said, "I'm in a shower cell. I'm holding a phone through a porthole. This is not a good situation down here. Don't keep me waiting." I gave her the pay-phone number and hung up. Three minutes later, the wall phone rang. I reached through the hole and picked it up. "Shane Scully?" a rough voice said. "Yeah," I replied, keeping my own voice low so I wouldn't be overheard by Wayne Watkins. "Gunner Gustafson." "Didn't take you long," I said. "Knock it off. Let's go, cowboy, it's late so gimme your story." His voice was raspy, like a fighter who'd been hit in the windpipe too many times. But it fit him. I remembered he was only five-foot-six, but the guy was definitely street product. When I'd testified against his dirtbag clients, both were found not guilty. It had angered me at the time, but now it warmed my heart. "Start at the top and don't leave anything out," he said. I filled him in on all of the facts I could remember. I told him I had amnesia surrounding the immediate event, but my memory was slowly coming back. "You didn't tell the cops you couldn't remember what happened," he said, sounding worried. "I may be stupid enough to be in jail, but I'm not that stupid." I explained where I was being held and about Alexa and why I needed to get out on bail by ten a. M. When I finished, I heard him breathing slowly on the other end of the line. "And you said the D. A.'s going after a bail deviance on the first degree murder?" he asked. "That's what the booking sergeant told me. I don't have a million. I guess my house is worth maybe three-quarters of that and I only have about one hundred grand in equity. But none of it matter because I can't wait until Tuesday. I need out fast." "You don't make it easy, friend. You've left me no time to put together a bail package. And if you can't make the million bond, we're gonna need to file our own bail deviation request, which means I'll need to put together the standard choir of angels who can hallelujah and amen all my arguments as to your saintliness. We need people who are beyond reproach your son, your division commander, if he'll stick his neck out, your priest if he's still talking to you anybody else you can think of. But I can't do any of that by ten a. M. I also need to get an appraisal on your house and have a bondsman qualify you. Again, no time. Put this off until Tuesday, you'll at least be giving me a fighting chance." "My wife is undergoing surgery. Didn't you hear what I told you?" I was getting angry with him. "Okay, okay, hold your water. I'll call the guy who books Division Thirty arraignments first thing in the morning and have your name put on Monday's court appointment sheet. But I won't promise anything. If I screw this up, it's one hundred percent on you." The recent story of my life. "Thanks," I said. I hung up the phone and whistled for the custodian. "Hey, fish! I got somethin' for you," I heard Wayne Watkins growl from across the hall. "You about to get fronted. There's people in here 'bout to buck down on yer ass." He was threatening me right in the men's jail. Something wasn't right. How would he pull it off? I was a high-profile, isolated prisoner. Sergeant Collins arrived. The door to the shower was unlocked and I was led outside. Collins walked ahead of me, leading me back to my cell. "I got yo four-one-one right here," Wayne growled, holding something out through the bars a rag or a torn sheet. I swerved slightly, putting myself between Sgt. Collins and Insane Wayne, blocking the custodian's view. Then as I passed by his cell I snatched a torn cloth out of his hand and wadded it into a ball inside my fist. After I was locked back in my cell, I held the cloth up to the dull corridor light. It was a torn piece of bed sheet. On it, Wayne had written something in blood. I strained to read it. Trustees. Maluga rules. Fire. I looked at the message again, trying to figure out what it meant. I sat down on the bed and then lay back, turning the problem over. I took the three sections of the note one at a time. Trustees. I knew from past experiences with the jail that trustees more or less ran the place. Most of them were first-timers in on low-weight drug dealing beefs. They swept up and delivered the food trays to isolation cells, made minor repairs, and kept the jail buses washed and cleaned. The majority of the trustees were gang-bangers, both black and Hispanic, but without serious violent crimes in their jackets. That still didn't mean one or two weren't monsters in training. Maluga rules. I thought about that for a while as I wondered how far a trustee might go to please a rich thug and rap mogul like Louis Maluga. I suspected fifty thousand in cash or a promised rap contract would buy a lot of cooperation. Could he corrupt a trustee with money or a promise of fame or glory? Probably. Fire. How did that make any sense? This was a concrete and steel facility. Hard to find much that would burn. I wrestled with this and then found myself thinking back to the buses in the parking area and that African-American trustee who had the key to the drive-in cage. It suddenly occurred to me that there was gasoline in those buses. How hard would it be for a trustee to slip underneath and siphon some out? How hard to smuggle a book of matches in here? I sat up and pulled the mattress off the bed and studied it. It was thin, but with a hard, red plastic cover. It might make a good shield. I put it on the floor beside the bed and lay back down on the cold metal shelf. How long I waited, I don't know. There were no clocks. The sound of men snoring punctuated the silence. I gripped the edge of the mattress and thought about the next morning and how long it would take me to get bailed out, if I could even arrange it. I wondered where Chooch was and if I should get the sergeant to take me back to the shower so I could call him. I couldn't bear to tell him I was in jail for murder. After struggling with this for a while, I decided to wait until I knew more. He had enough to deal with just looking out for Alexa, and since he hadn't called the jail, I could only hope he'd been asleep when I was arrested and hadn't seen anything about it on TV yet. Finally, I drifted off. My mind was looking for comfort somewhere else. But this time I didn't find it in a dream. I slept fitfully. I thrashed and rolled, fighting demons that came at me in shadowy forms. In most cases I was running, trying to get away from faceless enemies I could sense but couldn't quite see. Then I heard someone outside the bars of my cell and my eyes snapped open. I couldn't see who it was, but I caught a glimpse of purple. Trustee. Something wet splashed on my arm. I smelled gasoline. I snatched up the mattress and held it out in front of me as more gasoline from a plastic water bottle sprayed into the cell. Most of it hit the hard mattress, then splattered onto the floor. A lighted match followed and the room exploded. "Fire!" I yelled, and danced back into the far corner of the small cell shielding myself with the mattress. I could barely get away from the heat and spreading flames. I was trapped and starting to catch fire. My sleeve was burning as well as some of my hair. I slammed my burning arm against the wall in an attempt to extinguish it, then clawed at my head to put out the fire. I don't know how long I was inside fighting to stay alive. I was choking on smoke and fire was beginning to get on my clothing. The gasoline-soaked floor was ablaze and spreading quickly. The billowing smoke triggered a fire alarm and the sprinkler system in A-block turned on. Water rained down. Suddenly, three custodial officers flung open my cell door and began spraying me with fire extinguishers. I dropped the mattress and dove through the door, rolling on my shoulder in the hallway to extinguish the fire that was now burning my shirt. They shot the fire out with C02 cannisters. For the next few minutes the custodial officers beat down the flames in my cell as the sprinklers in A-block continued to drench us. The entire floor was thick with smoke. Prisoners were coughing and screaming in fear all around the block. It took twenty or thirty minutes until most of the prisoners were moved out of the dorm cells on two and taken down to the staging cells on the first floor. I was led to the jail medical ward for treatment. Sergeant Collins was shaken as he sat to fill out an incident report. I had seen nothing. A purple uniform. I couldn't identify my attacker. Collins promised that all of the trustees would be interviewed by detectives and polygraphed. Wishful thinking. Nobody was going to agree to a plea bargain or make a voluntary statement on a polygraph. My burns were mostly superficial. Some of my hair and eyebrows had been singed off and there was one bad place on my left arm. The MT greased and wrapped it, then gave me pills for the pain. Two arson detectives from upstairs pulled me into an I-room. I knew this would go on for the rest of the night. "You think we should send him back to the thirteenth floor?" one of the arson dicks asked the young doctor working the jail ward. Like everybody else, he was in a big hurry to hot-potato me off to somebody else. "I think he's okay," the doctor answered. "Lucky you had that mattress handy," the arson detective said. I had a jail breakfast at six o'clock and as I was finishing, Sergeant Collins came over, holding a sheet of paper. "The list just came over from Division Thirty and your guy worked a miracle. You're on it." I thanked him and watched as he walked back to his desk. Through it all, I couldn't shake one question. Why had Insane Wayne Watkins saved my life?