by Brian Parker
Morons. Branch didn’t want to spend another minute more on Sabatier Island than he had to. He’d made sure to only let the voices take over when it was time for the psych evals. The doctors were convinced that he had dissociative identity disorder—somebody with multiple personalities—and they’d petitioned for his release based on mental illness.
He let it ride and had been given word two months ago that he was earning his parole.
For eleven straight years, Branch had played it straight and narrow while he was incarcerated, spending his time at the gym and discussing employment options for the Banshees with influential inmates.
One of them, a man named Farouk Karimov, was sitting on a goldmine and Branch had signed up with him. He was scheduled to be released in thirteen months and wanted a hideout and a manufacturing facility set up by the time he got out.
Karimov had the formula and knowledge to create an extremely addictive street drug called synthaine. Branch had gotten to know him for the past year, weighing how much of what he said was the truth and what was simple bullshit. The kid had a plausible idea and Branch had decided to put his future in Karimov’s hands, signing on as his chief of security.
Branch carefully rolled his socks to keep the pairs together. He was extremely adept at using his prosthesis to accomplish gross motor skills—the big stuff, like lifting weights or catching a basketball. The fine motor skills were still a challenge sometimes and he’d destroyed more than a few of the plastic cups in the cafeteria learning to use the damn thing.
Anyways, Karimov knew how to make synthaine, an addictive liquid drug that could be administered in several ways, but the fastest and easiest was to just drop the shit on your eyeball. Apparently, the users saw Jesus when they were high, or some shit. The bums that he’d used as test subjects couldn’t get enough of the shit. Then, right before he was gonna go public with it, a cop came snooping around. Karimov panicked and attacked the cop to hide his secret. He beat the cop unconscious and destroyed the lab.
That landed him a two-year stint on Sabatier.
Branch finished folding his laundry and closed the bag. He glanced around the pod’s sleeping area, wondering if he’d miss this place. It’d been his home for so long…
He began to get nostalgic, thinking of all the good times he’d had in here. That one Christmas where he was able to jerk off by himself without anyone watching because everyone was at a play, fucking that little Mexican homo, Felipe, who had a pair of tits tattooed on his back, to relieve the pent-up frustration, and the hooch they made from toilet water and fruit from the cafeteria. He’d even miss the prison gym, with its stupid safety restraints on everything, designed to keep inmates from using the equipment as weapons. The constant contraband searches by the guards. The ban on cursing here in Cellblock Three. The constant surveillance of every movement. The fucking rats who liked to snuggle up in bed with you at night…
“On second thought, I ain’t gonna miss this place at all,” he muttered under his breath.
“What’s that?” Farouk asked from two rows of bunks over.
“I was just thinking about how this place ain’t changed me and what all those old-timers say about wanting to stay in here,” he replied. “I’m ready to go outside, eat a steak and fuck a real woman, not some prison bitch who gives away his body to stay alive.”
Karimov nodded. “I long for the touch of a woman…”
Branch laughed respectfully. Karimov was his new boss, had an apartment already set up for Branch and everything, so it wouldn’t do to piss him off. His new boss was as gay as the day was long, giving and receiving. Everyone knew it, but Karimov insisted it was only because he was locked up, that once he was out, he’d switch back. Yeah, right.
“Well, only a few more months,” Branch offered.
“Yes. Only a few more months and then we’ll be ready to start our little business venture,” he refocused the conversation, intent on keeping it from going down that road any further. “You remember our bargain?”
Branch turned his back to the cameras that he knew observed the pod at all times. “Of course I remember. I wouldn’t even have a place to live if you didn’t provide it for me, Farouk. I’ll get everything set up and ready to go for you to hit the ground running when you get out.”
“Good, my friend,” Karimov replied, placing a hand lightly on the big man’s back. “And good luck with finding something with the specifications I told you. Do you need me to remind you of what they are?”
“No,” Branch growled. “I’m not crazy, I just played that way for the docs so I could get released early.” He tapped the side of his head. “I’ve got it all up here.”
A familiar alarm sounded and the doorway above them opened. Two guards stepped onto the stairway. “Corrigan, your ride is here. Don’t do anything stupid for your last ten minutes in jail.”
He ducked his head and readjusted the duffle on his shoulder. “Alright, Farouk. I’ll see you in a few months.”
“See you around, brother,” Farouk said, waving at him.
When Branch’s foot thudded against the first step, Karimov called out to get his attention. “Branch?”
“Yeah?” he said, turning slightly at the shoulder, but leaving his body square against the stairwell.
“Leave my sister alone. She’s crazy.”
Branch turned completely at that. He hadn’t ever heard Farouk talk about his sister before. “I like crazy,” he replied. “We get along well together.”
An automated taxicab picked Branch up from the ferry transfer station after he’d made the transition across Chandeleur Sound. The little display in the door had his name blinking in red and the word “PAID” highlighted.
“Hmpf,” he grunted, not expecting a pre-paid cab to pick him up. He wondered briefly if Karimov had set it up or if the prison did it as a way to get released felons as far away from the shoreline as possible. Public relations would have a field day if somebody murdered someone within sight of the prison.
Not one to turn down a free ride, he got in and settled back for a ride over to the Easytown Dockyards where his apartment was located. It would take a while since there was only one way into Easytown by land.
Branch gazed idly out the window at the old city as the taxi drove along the busy roads. Not much, if anything, had changed in the time he was in prison. There may have been a few new floors added to the top of the skyscrapers downtown, but he wasn’t sure about that. He’d only had a passing interest in them as a kid. Besides, it seemed nearly impossible to add more stories to an existing building.
About the only thing that had changed was the sheer number of things in the sky. The vast majority of them were the police drones, like the fucking thing that had shot off his arm. They hovered at all the major intersections in the city and then, when the cab entered Easytown, they seemed to be placed on every block.
“Little bit of overkill,” he grumbled, his eyes falling longingly on one of the brothels beside the road. He didn’t have access to the money that Karimov promised him yet, so he’d have to settle on wanking it tonight.
Unless…
“No,” he grunted aloud, silencing the voice. He was just released from prison that morning. He wasn’t going to rape some poor girl on his first night out.
The taxi dropped him off at a ramshackle apartment complex near the Dockyards. The building was as old as the port itself, which suited him just fine. Cops tended to shy away from the more rundown parts of town, which also suited him just fine. They weren’t quite the same as cops, but he’d had enough of prison guards in his shit every moment of every day.
He trudged up the stairs to apartment 3R and stared dumbly at the lock. Karimov hadn’t told him how to get inside the apartment and he hadn’t remembered to ask. He reached out a tentative hand and jiggled the handle. Of course, it was locked.
Branch raised his prosthetic and prepared to smash it down on the handle. An instant before his hand touched the handle, the door opened an
d a thin brunette with dark skin stood there holding a vibrablade.
Her eyes went wide and she stepped back into a fighting stance that Branch recognized as well-practiced and deadly.
“Whoa, lady!” he said, taking a step backward with his hands up. “This is the apartment that I’m renting.”
“You’re renting?” she said. “I live here.”
“Ah… Are you Farouk Karimov’s sister?”
She relaxed slightly, but her eyes narrowed. “Yeah. I’m his sister.”
Branch stuck out his hand. The knife flashed instantly, slicing across his forearm faster than his eyes could track it.
“Jesus fucking Christ, you crazy bitch!” Branch shouted, clamping his prosthetic hand over the cut. “I was trying to shake your hand and introduce myself.”
She smiled. “I know. I was just letting you know where you stand with me. You will not attempt to touch me ever again. Do I make myself clear?”
He lifted his hand to examine the cut. It wasn’t deep, but it still bled profusely. “So, you live here too, huh?”
She appraised his large frame and then rolled her eyes. “My idiot brother couldn’t keep his mouth shut about our product, could he? Bragging to all the boys about how much money he’d have once we go into full production. Did you fuck him?”
“Come on, lady,” Branch said, looking left and right down the hallway. “You gonna let me in? This ain’t no way to run a business.”
“What would you know about running a business?” she asked, stepping aside and letting him in. “I’m the scientist that developed the formula and production method for the product.”
He closed the door behind himself and grunted. “Huh. Farouk never mentioned that you had anything to do with the synthaine. Come to think of it, he never mentioned you at all until this morning. My name’s Branch. I’m the new head of your security.”
She laughed and then said, “That’s funny, Mr. Branch.” She stopped laughing and hefted her knife. “I don’t need security.”
“Not yet, but if this drug gets as big as Farouk said it would, then you’ll need me and a lot more.”
She reached out and grabbed his prosthetic arm. “You’re a cripple! How are you supposed to do anything with half your useful appendages?”
“I, uh—”
“Shut up,” Farouk’s sister ordered. “I know someone who can give you a much better arm that will actually be beneficial for what you’re going to be doing for us. There’s a cute little flower shop off Fowler Avenue. Tell the owner that Tanaz sent you; she knows what I like.”
The woman smiled deviously, cupping Branch’s crotch in a blatant violation of her ‘no touch’ rule. She squeezed lightly, lifting her hand to feel the full size and weight of him before releasing him and turning away.
“You’ll do,” she said, beckoning with an outstretched finger over her shoulder.
“Maybe I ain’t wankin’ it tonight,” he grumbled as he dropped his bag on the floor.
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The Cigar Prince
By Martin Allen
There is, of course, a pecking order in prison, a way that the population orders itself according to rules that it understands. The structure being at once simple and more easily defined gave rise to much greater stability than was possible in the outside criminal world. While outside influence defined certain positions and hierarchies, because of the vulnerability of people such as wives and children, other positions of privilege and power were defined by way of utility. In other words, usefulness. If someone could find a niche they could find a place in prison society.
In Hal Chetfield’s case, it was cigars that defined his usefulness. He’d been able to obtain a number of Cuban cigars whilst on the outside and by means of modest bribery, he’d managed to have them brought onto prison grounds. He’d been fortunate in that there had been no real supply of such to the interior of the prison; the competition, such as it was, concentrated on the low price, high volume sale of cigarettes.
So it was, that while Chad Broker, Hal’s only competitor in the tobacco market, flooded the market with cheap goods, Hal distributed his product with care to discerning customers. Both men started to get very rich, a surprising start considering that Hal had been committed to the Louisiana State Penitentiary for attempting, what was widely regarded as either the most ironic, or the most stupid killings in history. He’d targeted clairvoyants, or at least those that professed such tendencies. He’d advanced an argument at court that they were either frauds—for if they were not, then surely he wouldn’t have been able to find them and kill them—or that it was technically a suicide. Had he been able to find a lawyer willing to advise him on such a course of action he would have realised that assisting a suicide was just as criminal an offence as murder, and as such, there was no mitigation at all. A point that the sentencing judge was keen to point out as he imposed life imprisonment for murder.
Far from being bitter, Hal had taken quite nicely to life in the maximum security prison, where he had found a meritocracy, of sorts, and he didn’t feel held back by the duplicity of others. Sure, prisoners—and even guards—lied, cheated, and stole, but at least they didn’t pretend to be virtuous while they did so. It was, for Hal at least, a calm and tranquil life. Others in the prison, of course, ran afoul of the unspoken code of conduct and had a much less peaceful time of it.
It was some years into Hal’s sentence, and shortly into his commercial enterprise, that his activities reached the attention of Vincent Giuffrida, a gang boss (since retired, mostly due to his incarceration), and he was summoned to a cell much like his own but attended by several guarding prisoners.
“I hear that you’ve been selling product in my prison,” Giuffrida growled. “I get a cut from Broker; you’re interfering with my operations.”
“Mr. Giuffrida, please. I’ve been here for years, we both know that I know how to operate in here. My sales are too highly priced to have an impact on yours. My customers are either guards, who get their cigarettes from outside anyway, or people looking for something special. They would spend that money on another highly priced option rather than cigarettes. Your operations focus on mass importation and low prices. Broker sees me as competition and wants me out of the way. You’ve known about the cigars for months, Broker has to be the reason that you’re looking this way now.”
“Yeah, he sounded pretty convincing too. Smokes is smokes, and if your stuff is selling where his ain’t, then that’s a place where I ain’t making money.”
“Then the solution seems simple, we remove the barrier to my operations. You win, I carry on and the only person pissed off is Broker ‘cus he can no longer come to you to do his dirty work for him.”
“What barrier? You lost me there, kid.”
“I give you a cut. In return, you can help me access areas of the prison that I don’t have the contacts to reach. You profit by accessing a new market, I profit by expanding mine and we can both possibly add new high-end products to my inventory to capitalise on this new phase of operations.”
Giuffrida chuckled, “Broker comes to me to shut you down and here you are, pitching me a business plan. Heh. Broker always was a creep, and you’re right. I didn’t see any reduction in my cut since you started doing your thing. I don’t know how you sell stuff that expensive in here, but you do it alright. Watch your back, kid. Broker might not come to me anymore, but he’ll still be open to trying other ways of working.”
Hal nodded, “I’ll keep an eye out.”
Days passed and the confinement of the prison did not affect Hal as it did the other prisoners; he could see them casting wistful glances at the river past the recreation yard. New arrivals often asked about the possibility of escape that way. They reasoned that perhaps the banks lined with sensors would not detect their passing, nor would the almost constant guard patrols. This delusion was shared until they asked the more experienced prisoners about why they had not made the dash and swim to sweet freedom.
When this predicable enquiry was received the recipients reacted equally predictably. They would roll their eyes and utter exactly the same one-word answer, “Alligators.”
Hal grew to appreciate the company of Giuffrida, for in their weekly meetings they shared a common affinity for the finer items that Hal could obtain with the man’s assistance. By virtue of choice accoutrements applied liberally and the promise of greater profits as their ‘luxury line’ expanded beyond the bounds of the block that had been the extent of Hal’s empire. However, such camaraderie had not come without a price. Broker had been promoted to be a lieutenant in Giuffrida’s empire, dealing with the bulk importation of goods that permutated the prison (cigarettes, mild recreational drugs, and cheap, probably poisonous, booze).
The prison suffered each late summer to autumn with heavy storms that lashed it to its very foundations. When such a storm hit, the prisoners would be confined to their cells for in the tempest they could disappear from visual range in seconds, and from auditory range immediately. This was not the only reason for such precautions, for every year, at least one inmate perished from the flash floods or was bludgeoned by airborne debris.
This year was no exception and a maelstrom of almost biblical proportions hit Louisiana State Prison. As the winds roared and whistled through the corridors prisoners were escorted under heavy guard when they were required for duty. For even in Louisiana’s flagship maximum security facility, the smooth running was dependent upon labour provided by the prisoners themselves. Billed as rehabilitation, it was, in reality, a cost-saving measure and little more than indentured servitude. Much of Giuffrida, Hal and Broker’s profits came from the pittances these men were afforded for their efforts. Hal, at least, had a second stream, from the guards themselves. With the prisoners confined, profits tumbled, but not nearly as far as the spirits of the prison populace themselves. Far from civilization and any semblance of comfort, the illicit goods smuggled into the prison served as their only release. As the lockdown continued, some of the more unstable prisoners in D-Wing had taken to howling at a moon only they could see. The cloud cover obscured any chance of seeing the real one.