Higgins shook his head: “You can’t bargain for your son.”
“Then what the hell can I do?”
“Let him do his own life.”
“You telling me, no transfer for him?”
“That’s the way it has to be.”
“Thought we defined our own possibilities.” Lucus stood. “Are you through with me—sir?”
“We’re through, resident.”
Lucus walked to the door, turned back. “Answer me one question, sir?”
“Maybe.”
“Why do what you do? Every day, come in here, locked up just like us, with us. Bucking the admin, the law, and the Word and the attitudes: Why you do it?”
“I got kids too.”
Lucus nodded as he opened the door. “Too bad.”
Clock on the wall facing the sergeant’s desk: 1:52. Hour and a half to go.
Close that door behind you, thought Lucus, then said: “Hey, sergeant, got some book work to do. Can you cut me a library pass? It ain’t my regular day till tomorrow.”
Sergeant Wendell wrote the pass without bothering his boss behind the closed door. Wendell knew about Lucus and his Help the Homeless Project, all the grants and reports.
The library filled the second floor of the recreation complex. Lucus shivered as he hurried through the outside fenced tunnel from admin building to the rec. Couldn’t help himself, he turned his face up to the cold sun as if to kiss the sky like he was a free man with a future. His exhaled clouds floated through the chain-link fence. The blade hugged his arm.
Inside the rec, Lucus glanced at the standing-room-only crowd of orange jumpsuits watching a soap on the prison’s big-screen TV that the Feds had confiscated in a drug bust. Cons laughed and joked, but soaked up the story about a beautiful blonde in slinky dresses. Lucus couldn’t spot that face in the crowd, but he knew it was there.
The guard at the library door blinked at Lucus’s pass with eyes that coveted first-floor duty where he could watch TV too.
The A-Designate con working as librarian stood by the checkout desk, stacking books on a delivery cart to be rolled along the tiers. Another A-Designate replaced books on a shelf. Three residents sat at tables, surrounded by law books and yellow legal pads.
Over in the corner, reading at his Thursday table: James Clawson. The Man.
An orange tent loomed in front of Lucus: Manster, the only creature in the institution bigger than Cooley. Manster stayed out of chains because whatever he wanted from another con, the other con gave up. Outside, Manster had pistol-whipped a cop to death.
“I’m here to see the Man,” Lucus told Manster.
“Maybe.” Manster kept his eyes on Lucus, coughed to get the Man’s attention.
The three other iron men between the Man’s table and the world made a space for their ruler to check out the petitioner. He read to the end of the paragraph, glanced through the orange jumpsuits, and let Lucus fall into his eyes.
“How you doin’, J.C.?” said Lucus.
“Lucus the lone wolf,” replied J.C. “Join me.”
J.C. picked up some chump’s pink commissary pass, used it as a bookmark for the page he was reading, then closed the volume. He turned the book so Lucus could see the cover: a picture of a suit-and-tie dude with a cocked sword in one hand and a briefcase in the other. The book’s title read: Corporate Samurai—Classic Japanese Combat Principles for the 21st Century’s Global Business Economy.
“Are you still reading, Lucus?”
“When I got time.”
“You know what the underlying fallacy of this book is?” asked J.C., who was working on his MBA, correspondence and good-faith-in-your-prison-jacket style.
“Ain’t read it.”
“You don’t need to. Look at the cover.”
The suit with a briefcase and a sword and a going-places face.
“Give a twelve-year-old a dime and a nine,” said J.C., “and he’ll punch a dozen red holes in Mr. Global Business Corporate Samurai before that sword even gets close.”
A national gang once sent a crew from Angel Town to Death City to “negotiate” J.C.’s outfit into their fold. A freezer truck carted the five gangbangers back to L.A., dumped the meat in their hood.
“Business ain’t my thing,” said Lucus.
“It’s the wave of the future,” counseled J.C., who was down on a drug kingpin sentence running longer than any life.
“I’ve got something for you,” said Lucus.
“Ah.”
“But I need something too.”
“Of course you do. Or you wouldn’t be here. Respect and such, you’ve been smart about it. But it’s always been Lone-Wolf Lucus.”
“I’ve had bad luck at partnering.”
“Perhaps prison has taught you something.”
“Oh yeah,” said Lucus. “Deal is, there’s trouble coming down. You run most of what moves inside here.”
J.C. shrugged.
“Trouble comes down,” said Lucus, “all the politics buzzing outside, the admin will tighten the screws, and that’ll crimp business, be bad for you.”
“The innocent always suffer,” said J.C. “What ‘trouble’ has made you its prophet?”
“There’s a hit on, likely for this afternoon. The guarantee is it won’t be quick and clean, and you don’t need any out-of-hand mess tightening the screws on your machine.”
“What’s the ‘guarantee’?”
“I am.” Risk it. Maybe he knows, maybe not. Maybe he gave the nod, maybe he just heard the Word and let it melt in his eyes.
“The hit’s on my boy—Kevin. He got drunk, got in a stupid beef over a basketball game in the yard. Trash flew, couple pushes before some guards walked by and chilled it down. Dude named Jerome’s claimed the beef with my boy, and Jerome and his Orchard Terrace Projects crew gonna make it a pack hit.”
“This is just a beef? Not turf or trade?”
“Nothing ever stays clean, J.C. You know that. The Orchard Terrace crew does my boy, it’ll make them heavy—balance of power shifting don’t do you no good.”
“Unless the teeter-totter dips my way,” said J.C.
“Far as I know, you ain’t in this.”
Gotta be that way! Or …
J.C. sent his eyes to one of his lieutenants.
“Lucus’s punk runs with the Q Street Rockers,” said the man whose job it was to know. “Wild boys. Orchard Terrace crew, they been proper, smart.”
J.C. sat for a moment. Closed his eyes and enjoyed the sunshine streaming through the grilled window. “You’re in a hard place,” he told Lucus.
“Life story.”
“What do you want from me?” asked J.C.
“Squash the hit—you could do it, no cost.”
“Everything costs. What’s in that play for me?”
“Your profits stay cool,” said Lucus.
“Your concern for my profits is touching.”
“We got the same problem here.”
“No,” sighed J.C., “we don’t. If I squash the hit, then I tilt the teeter-totter. Why should I become the cause instead of just one of the bystanders? Your boy picked his crew—”
“It’s a neighborhood thing, he didn’t pick.”
“He didn’t grow up,” said J.C. “Now, if he runs to me out of fear, wants to join up … I’d be signing on a weak link. I’d gain more if I fed him back to the Orchard Terrace boys—then they’d owe me. Better to be owed by lions than to own a rabbit.”
“I figured that already.”
“What else is in your column of calculations?”
Fast, everything’s rushing so fast, too fast.
“You quash the hit,” said Lucus, drawing the bottom line, “I’ll owe you one.”
“Well, well, well. What would you owe me?” asked the man with a wallet full of souls.
“Eye for an eye. One for one.”
“Eye for an eye plus interest.” J.C. smiled. His teeth were white and even. “You really aren’t a busi
nessman, Lucus.”
“I am who I am.”
“Yes. A gray legend when I walked in here. Lone wolf and wicked. You mind your step, never push but never walk away. Smart. Smarter than smart—schooled.”
“I’m worth it.”
“You ever kill anybody, Lucus?”
“I’m down for five murders—plus.”
“My question is,” said the man whose eyes punished lies, “have your hands ever drained blood?”
“Nobody ever quite died,” confessed Lucus.
“Quite is a lot.” J.C.’s smile was soft. “I know you’re standup. You’d keep your word, wear my collar. But the fit would be too tight. And down the line, who knows what problems that would mean?”
Lucus felt his stomach fall away. His face never changed.
“So … I can’t help you. Your boy’s beef is none of my business—either way, I promise you that. He makes it clean, I’m not in his shadow. But his future is his future.”
Lucus nodded. Pushed his chair back from the table slowly and felt the meats close in by his sides, ready.
“Whatever happens,” said Lucus, “remember I gave you heads-up, fair warning. Nothing coming your way from me. Or my boy.”
“We’ll see,” J.C. shrugged. “If we’re square on that, we’re square.”
On his way out the library door, Lucus checked the clock: 2:01. Less than ninety minutes until the turnout in the yard.
What was left was the hardest thing.
Lucus found them in the TV room, backs to the wall, street cool—running their mouths and eyeing beautiful people on the tube.
“Well, what’s up here?” said one of them as Lucus neared.
Brush past that fool like December wind.
Look at yesterday’s mirror—a young man against a wall, thick hair with no gray, taller and flatter muscles, no scar across the bridge of the nose, but damn: a mirror.
“We gotta talk,” Lucus told the apparition.
“Say what?” said the young man. Lucus smelled pruno on the boy’s breath. Fear in his sweat.
Fuck your fear! telepathed Lucus. If you can’t kill it, use it and ride it smart! But he said: “Say, now.”
“Old man,” answered his son, “anything you got to say, you say it right here, right now, in front of my bros.”
“I thought you grew up to be enough of a stallion you didn’t need nobody to protect you from facing your old man.”
Catcalls and laughs bounced off Lucus—bounced off him and hit his son. Lucus knew they were all measuring Kevin, seeing how he’d handle this. Wondering if maybe Lucus could wolf their bro down. And if the old man could do it …
Kevin knew all this too, sensed Lucus. Damn yes: My son ain’t all fool.
“Well, shit!” said Kevin. “You been worrying ’bout talking to me for nineteen years, you might as well get it off your back now.”
Kevin swaggered out of his crew, headed toward an empty corner by the moth-eaten pool table whose cues and balls hadn’t been replaced after the last riot. Pressed his back against the wall, made Lucus turn his eyes from the distant crowd.
Good move! thought Lucus. “We haven’t got much time.”
“You never did have the time, did you?”
“I never had much choice. Your grandma didn’t want to be bringing you down to no lockup, get you thinking that was just another part of family life, and your mother—”
“She’d have sold me for a nickel bag.”
“She did what she could by you, got you to her mother. Gave up the only thing she ever loved all-out.”
“I should drop by the cemetery, spray tag Yo, thanks! on her stone.”
“Don’t throw your shit on her grave.”
The chill in Lucus’s voice touched his son.
“Why’d you two go and have me anyway?”
“Wasn’t what we were thinking of,” answered the father.
“Yeah, I know. A little under-the-jackets action sitting in chairs in minimum security’s visitor hall.”
“Least you know who your father is.”
“Hell of a family that gives me.” Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know who the hell you are. You’re the big Never There.”
“Nothing kept you from catching a bus out here when you turned eighteen, signing the visitor’s log, calling me out.”
Kevin shrugged: “I figured I’d make it here soon enough.”
There it is, thought Lucus. Got to tend to business! But he said: “Outside … you got a woman?”
Kevin looked away, said: “They’s all bitches and whores.”
“Thinking and talking like that,” said his father, “no wonder you’re in prison. No woman who’s worth it will stick around you when you got that attitude.”
“Yeah, well … no ladies no how was beating down my crib door.” Kevin looked at his father; looked away, said: “That woman Emma, works down at the dry cleaners for them Koreans. She calls herself your wife.”
“We ain’t got no law on it.” Lucus shrugged, prayed for the clock not to tick. “Her old man died in a bust-out, I got to know her through that. Phone calls, letters. We understand each other.”
“You don’t even have minimum-security visiting privileges. The glass stays up when she visits you. What’s she see in it?”
Lucus shrugged. “Safe sex.”
Made him laugh!
“We got no time,” said Lucus. “There’s a hit on you today. Likely in the yard.”
Kevin blinked: “Jerome said—”
“Words are weapons! Ain’t you learned that?”
“You ain’t been my teacher, so you can’t give me grades.”
“If I’d been learnin you, you wouldn’t have got drunk, got in a chump beef over yard basketball! And if you had run up against it, you would have done it right.”
“Yeah? Like how?”
“Like you’d have kept it personal! Man to man. Walked into Jerome’s crew and called him out—put him on the spot. Then you’d have had a chance.”
“What chance did I ever have for anything?” hissed Kevin. “You think I’m chump enough to ask him—”
“You don’t ‘ask’ for anything from anybody!”
“Force a throw-down, strap our arms together, toss the blade on the floor, and—”
“And you got an even chance! You let it buck up to you dissing him and his whole crew, you got a war, not a battle.”
“I got my own crew!”
“Yeah. There’s more of the other dudes, and the guys on your side would never sell anybody out. Or dodge getting cut up. They gonna die for you.”
“That’s the way it is.”
“If that’s the way it is, this wouldn’t be Plea-Bargain City.”
“So what do you want me to do, Mr. Smart-Time Con?”
“You got one chance. Go to the admin. Feed them a pruno still: Robinson, Building 2, Tier 2, in the bus the auto mechanics practice on. Trade that bust for a crash transfer to—”
“You want me to rat? You a fool? That’s evil! And suicide!”
“No, that’s smart. Robinson wants to kick the juice—like you need to. He knows lockdown cold turkey is his only way. I already cut a deal with him. You just gotta make your move—and right now.”
“You’re one treacherous mother,” said Kevin.
“Believe it.”
“But I go to the Farm, the Orchard Terrace guys—”
“They got no crew there.”
“They will.”
“That’s tomorrow. You’re scheduled to die today. With the time you done, keep your jacket clean and when the courts make the admin thin the herd, you’re prime for early release. Could be outta here in a year. Besides, we’ll fix tomorrow when—”
“The Farm boys would know I ratted.”
“Not if Robinson puts out the Word how you two tricked the admin.”
“My crew would cut me loose.”
“No loss.”
“They’re all I got!”
�
��Not anymore.”
Lucus heard the babble behind him; knew a hundred eyes were checking them out. Knew the clock was ticking.
“You just don’t understand,” said Kevin. “If I run from—”
“You’re not running from, you’re running towards. And don’t tell me I don’t understand.”
“I just gotta do what I gotta do. If what’s gonna happen’s got to happen, that’s just the way it’s gotta be.”
“Kevin?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t hand me bullshit street jive. That’s all hollow words you stack up in front of your face to keep from seeing you’re too lazy or too stupid or too scared to walk smart. What’s gotta be, gotta be—shit: You sit there where the ‘be’ shit is, you ain’t being stand-up strong, you’re making yourself the most powerless chump in the world.”
“You don’t get it, do you, old man?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Just because I done a lot of wrongs don’t mean I can’t do one right.”
“Why this? Why me?”
“You’re what I got,” whispered Lucus.
Kevin pushed off the wall. “See you.”
“I can save your life!”
“No, you can’t,” said his son. Nineteen-year-old Kevin spread his arms out like Jesus. “Besides, what’s it worth?”
And he walked away. Strutted toward his bros.
Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, Lucus went back to his cell.
Jackster and H.L.S. were there, waiting out the last few minutes before yard time.
Nobody said anything.
Soon as Kevin got sent to the institution, Lucus put the few pictures the boy’s grandmother had grudgingly sent him in a paperback book where, like now, he could flip through them without a ritualized search that might betray his heart. With those childhood snapshots were pictures that Emma had somehow scissored from high school yearbooks for both years Kevin had attended.
Lucus glanced at his cell walls. Pictures of wide outdoors. Pictures of Emma—she sent him a new one every three months. Who says we can’t grow old together? she once told him through the phone and glass in the maximum designates’ visitation room.
Couple minutes to go, Lucus leaned on the bars. Stared nowhere.
“What you doing?” asked Jackster.
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