by Jon Bassoff
Eventually, he breathed more easily. “So you seeing Bogan this morning?”
“Breakfast after shift.”
Southwestern Law Enforcement Academy ran Monday through Friday in Ector County. Rory stayed there and came home on the weekends so Saturdays were Jace and Rory’s catch-up day.
Urrea winked. “She gonna get you wanting to go to the road before too much longer.”
Jace shook her head. “I’m happy where I am.”
The road was a different beast than the jail. The people roadies met weren’t always bad people. More often than not, they were car accident survivors, or victims of fires and thefts, of burglaries and rapes, of shootings and stabbings. Inside, the people Jace dealt with were those who had committed those crimes. Both on the road and in the jail, the people ZCSO dealt with were the lost and lonely, the quiet and the loud, but roadies got to help people keep moving down the road while jailers interrupted lives to try and put people on a different road; sometimes rehab, sometimes prison, sometimes a few weeks in county stir to contemplate their mistakes.
There were practical, more brutal differences, too. Jace had been involved in a number of fights in the jail and two small scuffles on the road while riding with Rory. On the road, those who fought usually did so just enough to get away and avoid jail. But once in the jail, those who fought knew they were going to lose the war because of the emergency response team, the ERTs, so they tended to fight out of anger and vengeance. Those fights tended to be more violent and left more damage on both officers and inmates.
“Too smart to be happy in the jail. You’ll get bored eventually. Just like Rory. She got bored real quick. Me and her started about the same time and she was ready to move to the road before she even graduated jailer school.”
Jace laughed. “Well, I’m happy for her.”
“Me, too, don’t get me wrong. But I’m gonna miss that sassy bitch in the jail.”
So was Jace. She’d been melancholy since Rory started the academy ten weeks earlier. The jail just didn’t have as much life when Rory was gone. It was colorless without her energy and drive, without her salty language and her standing dare to anyone—officer or inmate—to get in her way.
—control from 410…inmate moving back to A Pod—
—10-4—
Thud-thud-thud
They both looked toward the far end of the upper tier. The inmate who’d been moaning most of the night, Franco, was visible through the narrow window of his door, motioning to them.
Jace headed to the inmate while Urrea stayed at the computer in case the door needed to be opened. When she got to the inmate, he spoke through the glass of the cell door.
“Pissing blood. Gotta go to medical.”
“Pissing blood? What happened?”
He shrugged but had a hand pressed against his right kidney. She looked at Urrea and nodded for him to open the door. Before he did, she backed up, giving herself room if this guy wanted to start swinging.
The electric lock popped, a huge metallic whang in the pod and, and with her hand on the door, she motioned the inmate to back up a step. He raised his hands as he did. With the door open, light from the pod spilled inside the cell and Jace’s breath caught.
The guy was beat to pieces.
Bruises crawled all over his face and down his throat and neck until they disappeared beneath his orange jail shirt. His arms were bruised a surprising number of shades of black and blue, of a purple so deep it reminded Jace of summertime sunsets.
“Holy crap, Franco, what happened to you?”
“Fell down.”
“How many times?”
“You think this is funny?”
“Hey.” She said it sharply and with a bit of steel. “Easy. You give me a crap story and I’ll give you a crap answer.” She backed up and motioned him to come out and head to the stairs. As they walked, she asked who he’d been fighting with.
He walked silently, with a slight limp, his hand still on his kidney.
Urrea watched them carefully as they crossed the pod and headed for the interior door. “Wha’cho got?”
“I’m guessing a yard fight but Franco won’t say.” Jace put the inmate on a chair, his knees on the seat with his legs pointing out. She shackled him quickly, then cuffed his hands behind his back. Once secured, she let him lead her toward the door as she keyed her portable radio. “Control from 479…D-david inner, please.”
—479…where you going?—
“One for medical.”
A second later, the electric lock snapped opened and Franco pushed into the go-between. It was a small area between two secured doors that led from the hallway into the pod. Once the inner door was closed, the outer door lock popped and Franco went into the hallway with Jace two steps behind.
—no dallying, Miss Jace—
“Dallying? Surprised you know a word that sophisticated, Sarge.”
—479 from 476…I got a free hand. Need it?—
Jace keyed her radio. “No, thanks, Davis.”
—10-4—
On the floor, and every floor throughout the secured part of the jail, was a mass of painted lines, each snaking with a different color toward a particular place. Franco put his feet on the red line, medical, and walked as quickly as the shackles would allow. They were around his ankles, about eighteen inches of chain between each foot; enough to walk but not enough to run with any speed.
—one moving to A Pod…one moving to medical—
“Franco, do me a favor and put your left shoulder on the wall, please.”
He did as Jace asked and they moved slowly toward medical. From down the hallway, Jace heard Graham and his inmate coming toward them. Clank clank, the sound of industrial jailing. The unmistakable sound of shackles. A sound that had bothered Jace, symbolic of so much, when she first started but that had since become just another part of the job. One of the many cogs that kept the machine moving.
When Graham and his prisoner came around the long curved hallway that defined this part of the jail, Jace noticed two things. First, Graham had his prisoner against the wall to his left also, which meant maximum room between prisoners. Secondly, she felt Franco’s anger instantly ratchet up. His body stiffened. His hands, cuffed behind him, clenched to fists, and his head rose, his chin out like a lance leading a soldier to battle.
Graham and his prisoner, who stared at the floor, were about forty feet away.
“Franco? Everything cool?” Jace asked.
“Cool as ice, CO.”
Thirty feet.
“Are we going to have a problem?”
“Cool.” His jaw tightened. “As ice.”
Twenty feet.
Holding his right bicep with her left hand, as she did with all prisoners she walked, Jace tightened her grip. “Heads up.”
Graham looked at her, ten feet away now, but didn’t seem to register the situation. Jace pushed Franco further to the left, using the wall to limit his options. “Don’t be stupid.”
“Cool as stupid ice, CO.”
The other inmate, his hair long and flopped over one eye, looked up, saw Franco, and grinned. His teeth, dingy white, bared and reminded Jace of a feral dog. “Think you can trash me?”
Franco laughed. “I trash you whenever I want, puto.”
“Graham, heads up, heads up.”
The deputy realized it just as his inmate broke free and dashed across the wide hallway. Jace raised a hand and put herself directly between the two men. Graham’s prisoner faked left and when Jace went that direction, he hammered back to the right, easily slipping around her.
The man slammed into Franco with a ferocious heat butt. Bone cracked and blood spattered both men.
—all call from control: Zebra Two. Repeat: Zebra Two. Hallway between medical and A. Hallway between medical and A—
The alarm exploded to life and the sound should have reverberated off the concrete and cinder block hallway. Usually it came back at Jace a thousand times, each more ear-p
iercingly bloody.
But this time, Jace, trying to keep two men from killing each other, never heard a sound.
CHAPTER 3
Jace kicked as hard as she could to the other inmate’s gut. He blew stale breath in her face and fell backward. When he tried to brace himself with his feet, drawing his right foot back as he would in an alley fight, the shackles pulled taut.
“Motherfucker.” He yelped as he fell backward, banging his head on the concrete wall before hitting the floor hard on his ass.
Franco laughed and raised a foot as high as he could to stomp the other man.
Jace yanked Franco’s right bicep backward, dragging Franco into her but putting him off kilter enough that his foot had to come down for balance. Then she slung him across her body toward the far wall. He hit it face first and left a bloody smear from his broken nose.
She raised a hand, finger out like a scolding second grade teacher. “Don’t. Move.”
Franco took a step and Jace immediately laid the outside flat of her hand hard against his neck. It was a brachial stun. She’d learned it in the academy yet had never used it. But with Franco focused on nothing except the other inmate on the floor, she hit Franco hard directly on the main nerve in his neck.
“Son of a—” and then he was down. Not incapacitated, not unconscious, but stunned enough that he focused on her now.
She hadn’t expected him to go down that quickly or easily. “Don’t even think about moving.” The other inmate was also on the floor, Graham hovering above him. “You, either.”
Graham’s prisoner was on his back, cuffed behind, and didn’t have much mobility. He kicked at Graham.
“Okay, we’re done. Watch him.” Jace nodded at Franco and went to the other prisoner. Grabbing the chain between the shackles, she hauled the inmate’s feet off the ground and dragged him toward A Pod, only a few steps away.
“Control from 479…A-Adam outer.”
The door popped and Jace hauled the inmate into the go-between. She slammed the outer door closed, leaving the prisoner stranded. Graham looked at her wide-eyed while Franco laughed and spattered his blood all over the floor.
“That was sweet, CO.” Franco wiped blood from his face. “Totally sweet.”
Jace keyed her radio. “Stand down…stand down. Situation secure. Repeat: situation secure.”
—all call from control…479 reports secure. Stand down. Zebra Two cancelled. Stand down—
She got in Franco’s face. “You told me we were cool.”
“Hey, CO, he started it. You saw it, he came at me. Broke my damn nose.”
“Uh…Salome?” Graham looked confused. “What do I need to do?”
He hadn’t been on duty long and she remembered being at a loss the first few times something violent happened. True violence, the kind she saw in the jails, was always quicker and more brutal, but much more banal, than most people realized.
From down the hall, she heard the quick steps of a handful of deputies.
“Get to your prisoner before Kleopping gets here.”
“Crap.” He headed for the outer door of the A Pod go-between. His inmate was still on the floor, though he’d twisted to his side. When Graham got to the door, he didn’t call for it to be opened. He left the prisoner alone and waited.
Jace nodded and gave him a thumbs up.
“CO? I’m going to medical?”
“Nah…broken nose doesn’t qualify.”
He shook his head. “Funny girl.”
A moment later, Corporal Kleopping came around the corner, leading a team of four deputies, all geared up for ERT duty. Jace braced herself and raised her hands.
“We’re good.”
Still they came, moving quick, their boots heavy on the concrete, echoed and amplified into an army. Heads and eyes moved back and forth, seeing everything, assessing every threat, looking for what might hurt them.
Please don’t put me on the floor.
Jace had been on the floor before. When the ERTs came into a situation, they slammed anyone who was standing to the ground. They took hard, violent, unquestioned control of a situation until they knew what was what.
Please don’t please don’t please—
“All good.” She hated the whine in her voice, the pleading. “Don’t need to—”
Kleopping came right at her, ballistic shield out like a talisman. His face was empty, his eyes hard on her.
“Wait wait.”
At the last second, he pulled up. Then he laughed. The three other members all stopped long before they got to her. They grinned.
“Thought you were going to the floor, huh?” Croft asked. “That’s funny.”
“She’d’a pissed herself.” Laimo sneered. “Or thrown up.”
A white hot heat blasted into Jace’s face. The first time the ERTs had put her on the floor, pressing her beneath their shields, she’d peed on herself she’d been so scared. The second time, she had vomited. Both times, she’d been staring into the eyes of a dead inmate.
“Laimo, shut up,” Kleopping said. “Instead of giving her grief, why don’t you applaud that she and Graham handled it?”
“Not me, boss, this was all Salome. Kicked this one—” Graham pointed to the inmate in the go-between. “And dragged him by the shackles into here, and slung that one into the wall so hard he couldn’t get up.” He grinned like a young boy. “Actually, it was totally cool. Ninja.”
“Idiot.”
“Laimo, you’re done. Back to booking.”
“Not a problem.” She turned and was gone in a breath.
Last one in and first one out.
It was what Rory always said about Deputy Sassy Laimo. Rory had what Jace thought of as a hate-hate relationship with Laimo.
Another pang of loneliness washed through Jace. She’d never work with Rory in the jail again. It was great for Rory but made Jace a little sad. Jace’s music, always jazz, had lost some of its fervor the last few weeks. From the speed and intensity of Charlie Parker’s alto sax down to the slower, deeper strains of Sonny Rollins’ tenor sax.
Kleopping yanked his helmet off. His hair stood at odd angles.
“You heard me call you off.”
“We came anyway. Thought it’d be fun.” He clapped her on the shoulder. “You did good. Anybody hurt?”
“Me.” Franco pointed to his nose. “I’m gonna sue that asshole and all y’all. You should’a kept us outta the same hallway.”
Jace turned to him. “And why would that be? Is it possible that’s your fight partner? Made you piss blood and gave you all those bruises?”
Franco opened his mouth then snapped it closed. “Ain’t knowing nothing about that.”
“Right.” She helped him up and headed them toward medical. “Control from 479…one moving to medical. Can you let them know probable broken nose?”
—10-4…well done, Salome—
She waved at the camera, listened to the deputies’ footsteps fading behind her as they went back to booking, and smiled.
She had done well.
Finally.
Click here to learn more about When the Lonesome Dog Barks by Trey R. Barker.
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Here is a preview of Accidental Outlaws by Matt Phillips, published by All Due Respect, an imprint of Down & Out Books…
“Mesa Boys”
Part One
“Saylor is my uncle,” Ronnie said. He pulled the tab on a tallboy. Beer suds floated to the surface. “You know, like, part of my family. He’s my mom’s brother.”
“What’s he ever done for you?” Marl said.
Ronnie shifted in a rusted lawn chair. He took a nervous sip from his tallboy. Next to him, Marl reclined on a black pleather couch and chewed a hand-rolled cigarette. They were out front of Marl’s prefab home talking get-rich-quick schemes. “He ain’t done shit for me.”
“My point,” Marl said. “There it is.” They both stared westward. The sun, deep in its pendulum arc, tinted the desert purple
and pink. “My favorite time of day, fucking sundown.”
Ronnie scraped the dirt with his Vans. He was cash-strapped. They both were, but Ronnie didn’t care for this scheme. Steal from family? Shit. Still, he wondered. “What do you think we could get for that Bronco?”
“Part it out, shit. We’d get top dollar over the internet—no questions asked either,” Marl said. “It’ll take some time, though. We part it out piece by piece. The sooner we steal the fucker, the sooner we start making money.”
“But how much?”
Marl shrugged. He scratched his month-long beard with dirty fingernails and yawned. “Ten Gs, probably. Over six months to a year.”
Ronnie took another sip from his tallboy. He didn’t like the family part, but the money part sounded pretty good. Ten Gs in six months. Split that two ways and it’s still half as much as he made last year at Cheap Subs—fucking sandwich art. “Five Gs each, that’s pretty fucking good.”
“That’s only one truck, too. This is what I see: we pull in a couple restored cars, yeah, the Bronco first. But then we see what else we find around town. Three, four cars. Shit, we milk that for a while and it’s steady money.” Marl lit his cigarette and crossed one leg over the other like he was at a business meeting or a legit sit-down. He blew smoke and eyeballed Ronnie.
“There’s that Shelby Mustang always parked near Save Coins,” Ronnie said.
“See, now you’re thinking. But no, not the Shelby. Too rare. We sell those parts and we’re done. Something like the Bronco, how that’s perfect is there are so many people who don’t give a shit where the parts come from. It’s an early seventies model. Real cherry, but a lot of people have those models. A lot of people work on them.”
Ronnie turned this idea over in his head.
On the one side, he needed cash and it had to come fast and soon. His professional sandwich artist position wasn’t cutting it. And Jennie, she was doing her best with the tattoo thing, but it took a while to build a regular customer base. The thing about Jennie, she was an artist. That meant she wasn’t happy doing anything else but art. Ronnie understood Jennie, so he understood that about her—he accepted it.