by Jack Lively
The young cop parked in front of the police station. The detective got out of the vehicle and jogged across the street. I watched him get swallowed into the station.
I figured it was a good time to sleep. So, I closed my eyes and pictured a HALO jump at night. Throwing myself into the dark, then arching and relaxing and falling through the nothingness. It was not a realistic dream. I didn’t land. There was no land. There was only air and nothing else. Nothing to break the spell of free fall. And no hundred and fifty pounds of gear on my back either. Somewhere in that free fall place, the older detective got back in the Ford. I registered that event. I even registered him speaking to the younger cop when he got back in. He said, “They’ve got a room in the barn for us.” Registered, the way a CCTV camera records something that happened so that it can be played back later.
When the Ford pulled into a driveway up in the woods, I was awake and alert. The sign out front read ‘Port Morris Correctional Facility’. It was a big sign planted into a flower bed. But it was a little late in the season for flowers, and too dark to appreciate them even if they had been in bloom. The Port Morris Correctional Facility was all corrugated cladding and painted red, which accounted for what the detective had called it, ‘the barn’.
When the older guy opened the door for me, I got out. The detective was wearing a pancake holster clipped into a brown leather belt. It was a full-size Glock 22 in .40 caliber. No fancy grip, no tricked-out barrel modification. A plain vanilla standard law enforcement weapon. My hands were cuffed in front of me.
As I stepped out of the Ford, I visualized how I would take his weapon, kill him, and then the younger cop. Then I could take their vehicle. I estimated the task could be completed inside of a minute. Between fifteen and thirteen seconds, give or take. Closer to the upper estimate if I verified the kills, lower if I was content with a double tap and no verification.
But I was innocent, and innocent men don’t pull those kinds of stunts. I stood outside of the car, looking down at the detective’s puffy face. His hair was combed neatly in a side-part. He eyes were watery blue and his fleeting glance wanted desperately to stay out of trouble.
The detective said, “You’ll spend the night here. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
If this had been Chicago, or LA, they would have put me in the box immediately, looking for that confession. But this was not Chicago, LA, or Detroit, it was Port Morris, Alaska, and the cops were tired. I said nothing. Just looked at him.
He looked away, coughed once and said, “Oh, so you’re a tough guy huh?” He jerked his head to the red building. “Wait’ll you try that with those fellas in there. You won’t be so tough after that, buddy.”
I said nothing.
The younger cop came around the vehicle. He verified that my hands were cuffed before daring to speak to his colleague. “Guy giving you a headache, Jim?”
The older guy shook his head. “Thousand-yard stare is all.”
The younger guy looked at me. I looked at him and he looked away quickly, like he’d seen something forbidden. They walked me into the processing area, handed me over and left. Then I was alone with a room full of prison guards. I wondered if they were planning to make me breakfast. I was getting hungry.
Sixteen
I counted four corrections officers.
All four were staring at me. Not smiling. Not staring at me because they thought I was a famous actor. Two of them were young, two of them were not. None of them carried firearms, but each had a yellow Taser gun clipped alongside a radio to the front of a stab vest. Radio handset up high at the collar, opposite the dominant hand. Taser centered above the solar plexus, a chunk of yellow plastic, butt oriented to the same hand. The two young guys were clean cut and eager. One had black hair, the other was blond. Eager like they had a shot at going up the ranks, maybe competing to become warden one day. The other two looked faded and gray, like they’d given up on that idea a long time ago, like the concept of ambition was a distant memory.
The young black haired guy was in charge. He was preparing the paperwork at a clean white desk. He turned his arm to look at a wristwatch, scowled. Looked over at the blond young guy, who was standing there looking at me, hands crossed in front of him, with a fresh brush hair cut. The blond guy shook his head. The one in charge shook his head, it was contagious. Something was not right. I figured it was me.
I was wrong.
The door banged open and two more guards came into the processing room. New to the room, but not new. They were veterans, like the other two older guys. But these two looked worse. Worse in the sense that they looked like they’d never had any ambition to go up the ranks, because they had never intended to play by the rules. They looked like bad apples.
One of the bad apples was around forty and unnaturally jacked for his age. Which meant a diet of steroids with his Wheaties. His sleeves were rolled up, prominently displaying tattoos down the forearms. One side was a killer whale, the other a shark. Very original. I figured him for an ex-fisherman who either couldn’t hack it anymore or had become persona non grata on the fleet for some reason. The other guy was slim with a goatee. He wore a uniform that was a couple of sizes too large.
The clean-cut young guy in charge looked up at them. “About time, don’t you think, Gavin? Shift starts at one in the a.m.” He looked at his watch demonstratively. “It is now two a.m. and two minutes.”
The slim guy with the goatee must have been Gavin, and Gavin was the leader of the two. He said, “Sorry lieutenant, we got stuck in traffic.”
This was such a ridiculous claim that the lieutenant kind of gagged at it. He was about to say something, but one look at the smirking officers was enough to stop him. The young lieutenant just shook his head and looked away. The slim, smirking guy smirked harder and looked at his friend.
The clean-cut guys walked me through processing. They put my jacket, loose change, wallet and the laptop backpack in a cardboard box. They took my finger prints and photograph, and put a bedroll in my hands. I was led into the prison through a series of security doors. I figured we had gone halfway deep into the place when the two guards stopped me in front of an open door. The cell was big enough. Bigger by far than I might have expected. But this was Alaska, and space wasn’t an issue. The cell contained a bunk bed, a toilet with no seat, and a sink. All stainless steel.
The guard closed the door, a thick sound. Then his keys scraped and clanged for several moments.
Then I was alone, sitting on the lower bunk.
I ran through the sequence of events since that afternoon, beginning with the third bite of that burger, and ending with the prison cell door closing. When I was satisfied that I had it all straight and correct in my mind, I tipped myself over and lay down on the thin mattress. I didn’t bother with the bed roll, which I had dumped on the floor. I closed my eyes and was instantly asleep.
I had been asleep for an hour and twenty minutes when I heard keys clicking and scraping again in the cell door. I swung myself up on the edge of the bed. Two silhouettes entered, backlit by the corridor fluorescents. The first guy was slapping a baton into his palm. The second guy slumped against the wall behind him. The two bad apples, the big guy in front slapped the stick into his palm again. He said, “Keeler, you’re outta here. They’re transporting you up to Juneau.”
The older detective had said that we would talk in the morning. It was his investigation. I couldn’t think of any reason why I would be transported to Juneau, about three hundred miles away. It was a trip that would involve several boats, wheeled vehicles, or an airplane. I wasn’t buying it.
I said, “No, they’re not. And no, you’re not taking me.”
The guy said, “Not your call, pal. Get up and ready, we’re taking you now.”
The guard behind him unclipped his Taser. He was the one named Gavin. He said, “Let’s just Tase him. He’s already resisting.”
A Taser is a stun gun device that shoots two wired darts. Once both projectiles get
into the skin, the device releases a 50,000 volt charge which connects up between the two steel darts through the muscle mass between them. The result is intense muscle spasm, pain, and momentary paralysis. I figured the Taser was the least of my problems. The big guy was standing in the way of the skinny guy with the Taser. I figured there was no time to lose.
I launched off the bunk, using my left leg to push out horizontally, like a catapult. At the same time, my right leg cocked and released into the big guy’s left knee. I felt the knee give, and he grunted. I bumped up against him the moment his knee caved and he dropped. With my right hand I pulled the Taser from his stab vest. The big guy was slow to react. I pushed him off and aimed the Taser at the skinny guy. I pulled first, and the two darts shot out at 180 feet per second. One of the darts hit him in the neck and embedded. The other hit his stab vest, bouncing off uselessly. Those things need both darts to embed in skin, so I was out of luck. The skinny guy named Gavin had his Taser up. There was a pop as he pulled the trigger and the firing pin pierced a compressed air cartridge. Then, a whoosh as the darts came at me.
Next thing I knew I was thrashing like a fish out of water.
Seventeen
The big guy cuffed my hands behind my back while I was immobilized. Five seconds later I was raring to go. Gavin said, “Calm down, buddy. We’re only taking you to the other holding cell for the transfer. It isn’t our idea, orders from above.”
I said, “Orders from whom?”
He said, “The prison warden. Just came through. They want you up at Juneau by end of day tomorrow. The transfer happens in the a.m.”
“So why not leave me alone here?”
“Not our call. Maybe they got someone else for the room.”
I said, “Not happening.”
The big guy was massaging his knee. He blew air through his lips. “What a pain in the ass.”
Gavin had his Taser up and reloaded. He said, “You want another load of this?”
I said, “Bring it on. Just makes me more likely to want to kill you.”
“Last warning. I’m gonna juice you up good this time.”
I shrugged. The slim guy discharged his Taser. The barbs hooked into my rib area and the muscles spasmed. It was unpleasant, but the second time I was ready. It was only pain, and pain can be overcome. I would have ripped the darts out with my hands had they not been cuffed behind me. There was too much slack in the line to use my body and tug them out. The guy sent the electricity down the line for a good ten seconds, more than enough to put most people down. I rode it out until the battery ran down. When he was done I felt bad, but not as bad as I’d have felt if I had capitulated.
The big guy said, “Had enough now? Ready to cooperate.”
I said, “I don’t think so. I won’t be cooperating.”
The slim guy pulled the wires sharply and the barbs tore out of my flesh. There were now four wet and bloody smudges on the shredded front of my shirt. Gavin looked at me with his mouth open, panting. He said, “Screw this guy. He can have the damn room. Right?”
The big guy said, “I guess so. Not our problem if he thinks this is fancy real estate.”
The slim guy said, “Pal, you’re going to realize that we were only ever trying to do you a favor by moving you. Now you’ll have it the way you want it, the hard way.”
I said, “Is that right, what was it going to be otherwise, the easy way?”
He said, “You got a point. It was always going to be the hard way, but you chose extra hard, with cheese.”
As they left the cell, the big guy said, “So long.”
The cell door closed. I was alone again, in the dark. I had a sense of impending doom mixed with the growing excitement that always precedes combat. The move to Juneau was a ruse. Those two had wanted me out of the cell for something else, which wasn’t ever going to be a yoga session, or a group meditation, a tea making ceremony, a seminar on contemporary art, or anything else supposedly good for my health.
Fifteen minutes later there was the sound of someone fussing with the lock. The cell door opened once more, spilling light from the corridor. There was a pause, then three new men walked in, blocking the light, and ducking their heads as they entered the doorway. They came in one at a time, lining up. The silhouettes were considerably larger and taller than before, and the figures bumpy with accumulated prison muscle, like plastic action figures. After the third silhouette had ducked his head through the threshold, the cell door closed with a hard clang and keys scraped and clinked. The cell darkened.
So this was the extra hard way.
It came to me, why the guards had wanted to move me to a different room. It must have been for the view, so that they could watch what was about to go down. Here they had a very poor angle and dim lighting. Maybe they had another room, larger with a two-way mirror. Maybe they were supposed to film the whole thing. The three guys stood in a loose arc on one side of the cell.
I stood up from the lower bunk. My hands were still cuffed behind me.
All three were bare-chested, which was their way of showing off the severe tattoos inked into over-pumped muscle. I could see in the half light that it was all about the swastikas, the German crosses, and the number 1488. Given the swastikas and crosses, I figured 1488 was some kind of white supremacist code. The three hulking beasts were not speaking. They were just standing there watching me.
Like a story book definition of scary.
But not for me.
I wondered who these people thought they were dealing with. Maybe they thought it was going to be easy to beat me to death, like a Roman colosseum with three experienced gladiator slaves and a lion going up against a one-legged librarian and his pocket mouse. But it wasn’t going to be like that.
The United States Joint Special Operations Command brings together rough boys from the various branches to form assault teams. They get them from Delta, and the top SEAL teams. But there is always a combat medic attached. Which is how I came to work with the brutes from SEAL team six. Those guys are smart, and like all of us, they receive the highest level of combat training known to humankind, ever, in the entire history of the species. But what really sets SEAL team six apart from the rest, is the fact that they are born killers with more than their share of natural aggression. Born killers smart enough to have made it into the top squad tasked with legalized and glorified murder. For them it was like Christmas every day.
And every day in SEAL team six begins before dawn with fight club.
Fight club is like the movie, bare knuckles brawling. But it isn’t fake brawling with skinny Hollywood action stars, it’s brawling with the most elite killers the world has ever seen, before breakfast. Since I had been attached to JSOC for around four years, I had more than a thousand fight clubs under my belt. We had all loved fight club, but then again we were all professional killers.
These small time prison losers didn’t come close. But it would be better without handcuffs. So, I decided to bait them.
I said, “It isn’t white of you to beat me down with my hands tied behind my back.”
The guy in front looked around at his friends. He said, “What do you know about being white? You’re what we call a race traitor. We aren’t just going to beat you. We’re going to beat you slow, from every angle, on every part of your body. Until the sun rises. That’s how much time we got. Until dawn, which makes it how many hours?” He looked around, but white supremacist prisoners don’t wear watches. “Whatever. We got enough time. I will personally push your button when I see the first ray of light. How’s that for me being a nice guy?”
I said, “It’s even worse than being a race traitor. You’ll live the rest of your lives as race cowards. You won’t deserve to call yourselves white people. Is it truly white to beat a man with his hands tied behind his back?”
The three guys shifted from foot to foot, rippling their gym muscles. They knew that I was baiting them, and they didn’t like it. Three on one, the odds looked overwhelmingly
good. But what if it got out, that they’d beaten a guy with his hands cuffed behind him? Maybe they’d be seen as brutal and remorseless. Maybe they’d be seen as cowards. Maybe one, maybe the other. Maybe all three would keep quiet about it, but maybe not. There were the prison guards to consider.
The guy in back spit against the wall. He rapped his knuckles five times on the cell door. A minute later the door was opened. He said, “Need to uncuff him.”
I could see the slim guard’s silhouette in the door. He said, “Need is a four-letter word.”
The guy in back said, “Just do it.”
Five seconds later, a key came skidding across the concrete. I put my boot heel down to stop it. The door clanged shut again. I sat on the floor and picked up the key, behind my back. I stood up and looked at the three guys.
The one in front was the biggest, and likely the more aggressive. He was grinding his teeth together and it was making a noise. I realized that they were all grinding their teeth, which probably meant that they were on some kind of speed. Amphetamines, the bread and butter of white supremacist gangs. It was weird to see three prison Nazis in the half light, grinding their teeth. The triple mouths glowed coldly in darkened faces.
We were getting closer to the moment of truth and they were nervous, as most people are before a violent encounter. Nervous with good reason, I thought. Behind my back I was unlocking the cuffs, quietly. When I had them off, I kept them behind my back, and put the four fingers of my right hand through the twin steel rings, like a set of brass knuckles. My thumb slid the key into my back pocket. I said “I can’t get them off by myself. I need you to help me do it.”
The guy in front said, “What do we got to do, kill you with kindness?”
I said, “Just get these things off me and I’ll beat you down.”
The guy grinned, his teeth flashing brighter in the dark. He stepped forward, arm extended. “Let me see that.”