Blood Country: The Second Byron Tibor Novel

by Sean Black

  As business models went, free labor was hard to beat. And if anyone from outside questioned what was being done, there was an easy get-out. These people were criminals. After all, they were in prison, weren’t they? Work was a tried and tested way of rehabilitating criminals.

  But if the prisoners wouldn’t work? If they refused? Factories had fixed costs. They had components coming in at one end, being assembled and shipping out again at the other. Even a day’s lost production would cause major problems and questions would be asked.

  Shit rolled downhill. The warden would be getting pressure. In turn he’d be asking questions of Mills. Like whose idea it had been to get into a completely unnecessary dick-measuring contest with an old man. Never mind allowing it to escalate to a point at which all of the prisoners had stopped working.

  There was also the issue of money. Cops and judges didn’t behave in the way they did in Kelsen County without there being something in it for them. With everyone in it, and no one prepared to pay any attention to Thea Martinez, the lone objector, it was low risk. But a risk existed. If the Feds decided to take an interest in the lack of due process, and breaches of civil and Constitutional rights on an industrial scale, a lot of people would have a lot of explaining to do. So, the money offset the risk. When it dried up, it was a shitty deal all round.

  The warden’s next move would be crucial. He couldn’t afford to get it wrong. It occurred to Byron that what had started as yet another setback to any chance of escape might just be an opportunity in disguise.

  50

  ‘I’d like to speak with the warden.’

  The guard smirked at Byron through the slot in the cell door. ‘In case you hadn’t heard, he’s kind of busy right now.’

  ‘That’s okay. Just tell him I can get everyone back to work.’

  Back to work. The three magic words. Better than Open Sesame, or Alakazam, or clicking a pair of red shoes together three times and wishing you were back in Kansas.

  51

  Lauren Stanley had hoped to be the first person to arrive at the meeting. She wanted to secure a seat near the top of the table, next to the deputy director, who usually chaired the meetings, but Nick Frinz from the State Department had beaten her to it. A Yale and Harvard graduate, Frinz had scaled the heights as quickly as she had.

  ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ Frinz asked her cheerfully, as she sat down across from him.

  ‘Good.’

  Lauren liked to keep chit-chat to a minimum. That went double for Frinz, who was apt to turn the most harmless remark to his advantage.

  ‘How goes the search for Tibor?’ Frinz asked, all smiles.

  ‘It goes.’

  ‘You know they’re thinking of dropping him down the list?’ said Frinz.

  She did. It was why she had made sure to get here early to grab the prime seat that Frinz was currently occupying. Resources were scarce, and Tibor was no longer seen as high priority. That happened if someone went long enough without causing the government any further trouble. Like an elephant, they never forgot, but they always had bigger fish to fry.

  Tibor dropping down the list would be bad news for Lauren’s career. No doubt that was why Frinz was grinning at her, like an idiot. To him, it was a game. Nothing more and nothing less. ‘Yes, I’d heard,’ said Lauren, matching Frinz’s smile with one of her own. ‘I don’t think it’s going to happen, though.’

  ‘How come?’

  Frinz seemed temporarily thrown by her good-humored reaction to his needling.

  ‘Just a hunch,’ said Lauren, tapping the edge of the file that lay on the table in front of her.

  Inside was a picture of Tibor. It had been taken at a rest stop ten miles east of a town in south-east Texas called Kelsen. Two sightings in the same state, taken less than a week apart. It was more than enough to keep the search live.

  52

  The warden’s office door was firmly shut. Byron could hear at least three men, including Warden Castro, inside. For once, the warden wasn’t doing most of the talking.

  The two other men’s voices rose and fell. One was louder, and more vociferous, than the other. Byron didn’t have to be able to hear what was being said to get the gist.

  The door opened. Byron put his head down and studied the floor as the two men emerged. Both were white, in their late fifties, with the middle-age spread that suggested too much good living. He studied them from the corner of his eye as they sauntered out. One was Sheriff Martin. Byron didn’t know who the other was.

  Martin was dressed in civilian clothes: grey slacks, a lemon yellow polo shirt and black loafers. It was only seeing him up close that Byron realized the election posters he’d seen on the way into town must have been Photoshopped. If anything, Sheriff Martin was less becoming in real life. If beauty was only skin deep, in his case ugly went right to the bone.

  The other man was wearing a navy suit with a white shirt and red tie. His shoes were expensive Italian leather, polished to a high gleam, and he was sporting a Rolex watch. The way Martin fell in behind him as he strode out towards the visitors’ parking lot at the front, Byron could see that the second man was the boss. And the boss didn’t look pleased.

  Byron waited. No doubt Warden Castro was assessing the damage to his ass, the man who’d just left having chewed it out.

  ‘Davis!’ Warden Castro called from the office.

  Byron got up and walked inside. Castro was behind his desk, trying to look like a man in control of his domain and doing a poor job of it. He had bags under his eyes, and the air smelt vaguely of rye whiskey and vomit.

  Castro rose from behind his desk and jabbed a chubby index finger at Byron. ‘I hold you partly responsible for this, Davis.’

  ‘And which part would that be?’ Byron said. ‘Making inmates work in an unsafe environment? Beating the living shit out of an old man?’

  Castro’s voice rose. He probably felt pretty good for being able to shout at Byron when he’d just been shouted at. Shit rolls downhill. And keeps on rolling. Byron guessed he was nearer the bottom of the hill than Castro.

  ‘You came here to bitch at me and you can head right on back to the SHU. I asked you to deal with Romero. That didn’t mean becoming his best buddy and going native on me.’

  Native? thought Byron. Really? ‘That’s precisely why I’m the person who can talk to him and get him to tell the others to go back to work.’

  Castro blinked across the desk at him.

  ‘That’s what you want, right?’ said Byron.

  ‘You think he’ll listen to you?’ Castro sounded tentative. The idea of solving a dispute though dialogue and negotiation was certainly not the go-to solution for a man like him.

  Byron guessed that was what happened when you were used to getting what you wanted, when you wanted it, without being challenged. Over time it made for a narrow view of how the world operated. It was fine while it worked, but when the world stopped doing what you wanted it to do, what then?

  ‘I think he might,’ said Byron.

  Castro was still chewing the idea over. But at least he’d taken the bait.

  Byron took a breath. ‘You’ll have to offer him something in return for calling off the strike.’

  That seemed to go down less well. ‘I ain’t offering him or those other animals jack shit. You hear me?’ he spat across the desk.

  Byron could see where Mills had got the idea that everything involving the prisoners was some kind of dick-measuring contest. It was clearly the management ethos. Byron understood that, in a prison, boundaries were important. So was control. But it had to be tempered at times. All stick and no carrot was a recipe for trouble. Most dictators found that out eventually. Too late. But they found out.

  There was no point in arguing with Castro. Byron decided to circle back and come at it from a different angle. ‘This strike is a problem for you?’ he asked, feigning innocence.

  ‘Damn straight. We have people waiting on the stuff from the assembly plant, components stac
king up. The whole chain’s already jammed,’ said Castro.

  ‘How many days before it gets really serious?’ Byron asked.

  Castro seemed to study him. Who the hell was this guy? That was what he appeared to be thinking. ‘It’s already serious.’

  Byron hadn’t expected a straight answer. For all Castro knew, Byron was there to gather what intelligence he could to feed back to the prisoners who’d organized the strike. After all, hadn’t Byron taken the beating that Mills had intended for Romero? That alone was a huge question mark over whose side Byron was on.

  ‘Okay,’ Byron said, deciding to rephrase the question in a way that would draw Castro’s ire but that he would understand. ‘How long before they’re looking for a new warden to come in and sort it out? That’s usually how these things go. Get a fresh face in to make the offer that you could have put out there right at the beginning.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere, Davis. You can go back and tell your Commie pals that.’

  ‘They’re not my pals, Warden,’ said Byron. ‘I came here to see if I could help get this resolved because I want a favor in return.’

  Castro might not get reason and logic and negotiation. But naked self-interest? Byron was confident the man would be able to grasp it.

  ‘What’s the favor?’ he asked Byron.

  ‘I get the strike called off and you let me walk out that front gate as a free man.’

  The warden’s reaction wasn’t the one he’d been anticipating. Rather than curse or tell him to forget it, Castro threw back his head and laughed. He laughed so hard he started to cough. He pounded the desk with his fist. When he caught his breath again, he said, ‘Oh, Davis, you’re a comedian. You tell ’em to call off the strike and I let you stroll out of here?’

  ‘That’s the deal. If you want to end this and get everyone back to work. That is what you want, right?’

  ‘I think this conversation is over,’ said the warden.

  ‘Okay, but you know they have you over a barrel here? Most strikes are broken because the employer has deeper pockets than the workers. But you don’t pay these people, so that isn’t going to work. You could stop feeding them, I guess, but you need them able to work, and starving people have low productivity. Plus they may just call your bluff and run with a hunger strike if you do that. The way I see it, you have the problem and they have the time.’

  53

  The atmosphere bordered on festive. Prisoners lolled on their bunks, played cards, read and talked. In one corner the prison equivalent of a book club seemed to be discussing the rise of female erotica. More specifically, the wildly popular sub-genre, whose plots tended to revolve around misunderstood billionaires with strange sexual predilections and naive young women who blushed a lot.

  ‘See, I always knew that shit worked with bitches,’ one inmate was saying.

  ‘Only if you got the cash,’ retorted another.

  ‘No. The money is the icing. Dominance is the cake. Men got to be men. That’s what bitches dig,’ said the first inmate.

  Byron left them to debate the finer points of gender equality and power as it related to human sexuality. He walked over to his bunk, lay down and surveyed the scene.

  His first impression had been correct. The usual sullen, tense atmosphere had gone. Even Red and his buddies seemed to have caught the good mood. There must have been something about sticking it to Mills and Castro that overrode any bad feeling between the different racial groups. Even if the whites had only joined the strike because they didn’t want to work while the others stayed in the bunkhouse playing poker, their decision had created a bond. Battle lines had been drawn. Prisoners versus guards.

  Right now the prisoners had the upper hand.

  Things wouldn’t stay like this indefinitely, though. Whoever controlled Castro needed the factory open and work being done. They would make sure that happened. One way or another. No one smart enough to engineer a set-up like this was going to stand idly by and watch it collapse.

  Something would change. The only questions that remained now were what, and when.

  * * *

  The party atmosphere carried on through lunch. In the mess hall, Byron even noticed a couple of white inmates sharing a table with Mexicans. Almost as surprisingly, even the guards appeared happier. Mills was nowhere to be seen, but the guards supervising the meal seemed relieved to be inside the relative cool of the mess hall rather than out in the dusty Texas sun.

  Mills’s absence suggested that perhaps the warden was trying to take down the tension a notch. Or at least not make things worse. Byron hoped it stayed that way. The last thing the present situation needed was Mills on the rampage.

  After lunch the prisoners filtered out into the yard. They were greeted by a cloudless blue sky. Someone produced a soccer ball and an impromptu pickup game began. Byron stood in a corner and watched. For big, muscular men who did manual labor all day, some of the prisoners were skilled players.

  The game was raucous but good-natured. Prisoners waiting to come into it warmed up on the sidelines. Someone would get tired and another would take their place, jogging onto the ‘pitch’ like it was the Bernabeau in Barcelona or some other famous stadium. For a while it was hard to remember that they were all inside a prison ‒ or, as Byron had come to think of it, a semi-legal forced-labor camp.

  The game rolled on. The score ran into double figures for both sides. Players switched in and out. The guards watched, arms folded across their chests. One of the watchtower guards leaned over the edge, following the action below.

  After an hour, the heat became too much, even for the hardiest of the players. A break was called. A few minutes later the guards shepherded the prisoners back into the bunkhouses. They went without complaint.

  Some of the soccer players hit the showers. Others lay down for a nap. Cards groups and conversationalists reconvened.

  Byron lay down on his bunk, and closed his eyes. He didn’t fall asleep, but he let his mind rest, tuning out the noise around him until it was a dull thrum.

  * * *

  Half an hour later he heard the first voice being raised. It registered but he tuned it out. Then the tenor of many voices began to change. Their owners spoke more softly. There was a sharper rise and fall in volume.

  Byron opened his eyes. He turned onto his side and scanned the room. In one corner half a dozen Mexican inmates were deep in conversation punctuated by lots of finger jabbing.

  Sliding off his bunk, Byron stood up. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked Red, who was leafing through a girly magazine that had been passed around so much it was a wonder that any of the pages opened.

  Red’s eyes ferreted around the room. ‘Shit’s gonna kick off.’

  As answers went, it was hardly informative. Byron had already worked out that some of the prisoners were animated. ‘Because?’ he said to Red, struggling to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. Not that Red would register it.

  ‘Romero’s dead,’ said Red.

  54

  From the way Red gave Byron the news, it was as if Red and his buddies hadn’t been ready to do precisely what the guards had done to Romero. His mind had already excised the fact that not much more than twenty-four hours ago he had been on the guards’ side of the present conflict. Not only did he sound upset at the news of Romero’s death, he was outraged.

  ‘Fuck these punk-ass guards,’ said Red, a fleck of saliva spraying from his mouth. ‘Take away those billy clubs and that pepper spray and they ain’t shit.’

  ‘Do we know for sure that Romero’s dead?’

  That question was met with less certainty. ‘Well, no one’s seen the body or anything, but Hector over there,’ Red said, thumbing towards a group of Mexican inmates in the corner, ‘his wife works in the prison hospital and she heard the guards talking, so, yeah.’

  ‘So she didn’t see him either?’ said Byron.

  ‘Well, no, but she was a nurse back home and stuff so …’

  Byron walked past Red to
wards the bunkhouse door. He pushed through it into the yard. It was late afternoon. The searing heat had died down a little.

  By the time he hit the gate he could feel eyes on him, both from the prisoners behind and the guards in the watchtower. One of the younger guards stood by the gate. He hitched his thumbs into his belt as Byron approached. ‘What you want, Davis?’

  ‘Is Romero dead?’ Byron asked him. There was no point in beating about the bush. Either he was or he wasn’t.

  ‘Where’d you hear that?’ the guard said, with a smirk that could either have been confirmation or amused denial.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Is he or isn’t he? If he is, you boys better make sure you have your body armor on because there’ll be trouble. If he isn’t then someone needs to tell the men back there,’ Byron said, nodding back towards the bunkhouse. ‘Even the peckerwoods are spoiling for a fight.’

  The guard snickered, and Byron had to admit that the peckerwoods were unlikely to strike fear into the heart of any authoritarian institution, like a prison.

  ‘Look, Davis, if we had to run round stomping on every bullshit rumor that these idiots start, nothing would get done,’ said the guard.

  ‘Well, this is one that’s worth putting to bed,’ said Byron. ‘You might want to let the warden know.’

  The guard spat a gob of chewing tobacco onto the ground. ‘Wait here.’

  He walked towards the administration block. He took his time about it. The heat may have slowed him down, but Byron guessed it was another petty show of power.