by J. L. Abramo
“Eat my shit, Oldham,” a prisoner shouted.
Catcalls and threats followed Dana to the end of the block. They were still calling when the main door slammed shut behind them with a loudly satisfying bang. The sound stopped abruptly, as though some had snapped off the radio. Silence fell on Dana and JR.
“Morning, JR,” another guard said, one eye on his video display, one eye on his newspaper.
Dana leaned over the desk. The camera images were black and white, one of the screens had a line through the middle of it, another was snowy. But he saw men lined up in cells like a child’s toy soldiers about to march from their box.
“Got a little paperwork, Dana,” JR said. “Follow me.” When they were in a conference room, JR sniffed. “You smell that?” Books and manuals lined the walls, florescent lights cast the room in a soft blue-white glow. A table and matching chairs dominated the middle. “That’s free air.”
“No such thing. There are all kinds of traps.”
“Well, at least you won’t be inside.”
“I’ll be in the World, JR. Maybe just as bad.”
The warden and Captain Woburn entered and took seats. Dana stood.
“I am terribly sorry about everything you’ve endured,” the warden said. “If it were within my power to turn back the clock, you would have the life you had expected, Mr...uh...”
“Oldham,” Captain Woburn said.
“Yes.” The warden nodded and slid some papers toward Dana. “Sign these and you are free.”
Receipts for his personal items when he had gone inside, along with a letter explaining how they had been lost during the previous years.
“I apologize for their misplacement, Mr. Bozeman. The warden at that time did not expect you would ever need those items, it was a life sentence, after all. I’m sure they were handed out to the corrections officers.”
“Probably so,” Captain Woburn said. “You know how COs are, they’ll take whatever they can get, right, JR?”
“I...uh...I suppose that’s true.”
“How much of my stuff did you snag, Captain?”
Woburn shrugged. “It was so long ago, how can I possibly remember when one loser came in and dumped his stuff on the desk? I mean, there’ve been so many over the years, you all blend together after a while.”
“Mr. Goldman,” the warden said, handing Dana a pen.
As simple as a few signatures. Dana took his copies and headed out the door, but turned back to the warden. “It’s Oldham, you asshole.”
“Excuse me?”
“My name.”
“Oh, right, certainly. My mistake.”
When they were at the front doors, JR said, “No cons use these doors, Dana. Even if they get out, they use the gates.”
“I’m not a con.”
“Nope.” Woburn stuck his hand out. “Just another used up loser.”
Dana shook it. “Aren’t we all?”
“Believe it or not, I hope it works out for you.”
Dana nodded. “You remember what you said?”
“I say it to everybody.” Woburn held open the door. “Usually it’s true.”
“Not today,” Dana said.
“Not today.”
The morning sun hit him square in the face and dazzled him. He stood on the grass and lifted his face to the sky. The air smelled of the highway and the evergreens in the mountains surrounding town, buried beneath a harsh layer of the stale stink of prison. He could have stood there forever, letting the sun warm him and the air clean him, but finally, he brought his face down and opened his eyes.
“I hate to say this,” JR said. “But I’ll miss you, Dana.”
“Same here, JR.” Dana offered his hand. “Listen, if you get the chance, drop a line on Trexler. To MS13 or the Bloods or whoever; I’ll cough up a dime for it.”
JR grinned. “I can’t do anything too terribly nasty, Dana. Payback for this morning?”
“For a rape that the warden and Woburn said never happened.”
JR stared at the mountains surrounding the prison. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Then JR was gone and Dana was alone. The air slowly cleared of the stink of the prison until it was almost pleasant; sweet with just a hint of high summer and of a nearby running creeks.
“I bought the Caddy back from Geezer. Thought you might like to ride with the top down.” Forty feet away, his brother leaned against the car’s front panel and twirled the keys. It was a 1964 convertible Caddy, pearl white, polished chrome, white wall tires. “Couldn’t find blue dice,” Del said. “Had to settle for green.”
“Blue...green.” Dana smiled. “I don’t really care.”
“He wanted a fortune for this thing. I told him it was for you, that you were getting out. He bitched about lawyers fucking everyone over and sold it back cheap.”
“Getting screwed has its uses, I guess.”
“Absolutely.” A dusky-skinned girl spread across the back seat and grinned. “Welcome home.”
“I’m not home yet, Marcille.”
“Just about. Besides, you’re not in there anymore and that’s the next best thing.” She leaned over and puckered.
He kissed her chastely but in that moment he felt her and tasted her. She was grown-up. No longer the gawky little girl who’d come to visit him at the prison and always asked why he was there. No longer the slightly sullen teenager who said she’d rather have been anywhere else and yet still came once a month like clockwork. She was grown-up, breasts full, hips wide. She had traded her straight lines for an hourglass and slipped right inside it. Her eyes, always large, were bright when she hugged him. “I’m so glad to see you.”
“Me, too.” Del looked at his brother thoughtfully, then bit his bottom lip. “Rufus come by? Drop a line or anything?”
Staring back at the walls, Dana shook his head. “Maybe he didn’t hear.”
“He’s an asshole. Shouldn’t have left you alone.”
“Lighten up, Marce,” Del said. “He’s family.”
“Family who hasn’t bothered with family since they nailed Christ up. And don’t call me Marce.”
In the discomfort, no one spoke. Eventually, Del cleared his throat and held out the Caddy’s keys. “Let’s get this part on-going. Wanna spin her?”
Dana shook his head.
After holding the passenger door for Dana, Del climbed in the driver’s seat. “I got you a room at the Newton Hotel, just like you asked, but I’m telling you, you can stay with us as long as you want. We got room.”
“Three bedrooms in the new place, Unc,” Marcille said. “Two bathrooms.”
“I guess the promotion fits you pretty well, doesn’t it?”
“Fits me and my little babygirl like a glove.”
“UPS is paying him enough now he can’t afford to quit.” Marcille laughed. “He’ll be there forever. They have complete control now.”
Del shook his head. “It’s not like that. Really. It’s a good job. I dig it.”
Dana patted his brother’s shoulder. “Good for you, Del. I appreciate the offer, and I’ll be over a lot for dinner, I forgot how to cook anything except toast or macaroni and cheese out of a box, but I think I’ll just stay at the Newton Hotel.”
“You want to be alone?” Marcille asked.
Who knew the answer to that, but Dana was sure he needed a place to escape. He chuckled at the irony. “I don’t know. I’ll just have to ease back into the World, a little bit at a time.”
“Good plan.” Del jammed the key into the ignition.
The rumble of the engine surprised Dana. The feel—the seductive power—of cars had slipped from his memory. Like so many memories, he had the fact of them, but the flavor was gone, like a painting in a window that had gone yellow, bleached to nothingness by the sun. Beneath his fingers, the dashboard was smooth and polished. He touched the steering wheel his brother held so casually, fondled the green dice, caressed the stick shift. He wiggled his butt in the seat. His feet sprea
d along the floorboard.
Del laughed. “Did I tell you, Marce? You’re my baby, this is his.”
Grinning, Dana nodded. “My very own baby, looks just like me.”
“They all look the same to me,” Marcille said. “Big brutes that use too much gas and tear up the environment. Do you know how many used tires there are in dumps across the country? And batteries, let’s not even talk about batteries.”
Del said, “I can’t believe you’re my daughter. It’s like I found you somewhere. Jeez, an Oldham who doesn’t like cars.”
With a twinkle in her eye, Marcille pinched her father’s cheek. “There are a lot of ways I can’t believe I’m your daughter.”
Ahead of them was the cracked blacktop, faded yellow lines like a child’s crayon lines. Behind them were cracked cellblocks and faded orange jumpers. Ready to leave but fearful of leaving, Dana glanced at the prison. The doors had closed, the guards walked the walls, trustees mowed the grass. Back to business. Dana Oldham, prisoner 51C349 was gone, get his cell cleaned and ready for the next guy.
“Go, Del.”
Del jammed the accelerator and the car shot onto the highway. Around the first bend, Dana lifted his face over the top edge of the windshield. The wind pressed against his face, curled around his ears and flapped the collar of his knit shirt. Soft blue hung above him, dotted with clouds and even as he breathed deeply, taking in the scent of farm country summer, he couldn’t get rid of the tang of piss and blood, the reek of stale bodies. It was as though that stink had gotten into his nose the way prison had gotten into his blood.
Yet even as the miles churned away beneath the car, he couldn’t shake the feeling that if he popped the trunk open right now, Captain Woburn’s guards would be there, waiting to take him back inside. It didn’t matter that he had his freedom papers in his pocket. What mattered was that he was out and no one ever left that place.
“Unc?” Marcille asked. “What’s first? Seeing as you got your life back and everything.”
Dana took a deep breath, tried to stomp out the stink of prison and concentrate on the sweetness of the day. “I need to light a couple of candles.”
Back to TOC
Here’s a sample from Gary Phillips’ 3 the Hard Way.
What 3 the Hard Way is:
Malcolm Cavanaugh Bleekston, MC Bleak, McBleak, enjoys hobnobbing with the one percenters and stealing from them. In The Extractors, he puts his life on the line to take a greedy man’s gain while wondering if his girlfriend sees through his façade.
Ned “Noc” Brenner is a drifter with an unusual skill set—he’s an extreme athlete good at whatever he does be it MMA fighting to riding a motorcycle off a mountaintop. After winning in an all-night poker game, this sets in motion a series of events in The Anti-Gravity Steal where Noc must use all his abilities to prevent wholesale destruction.
Part Shaft and part Batman sans the cowl, Luke Warfield, a philanthropist with a black ops background, the Essex Man, goes on the trail in 10 Seconds to Death of the villain who killed his foster father and uncovers not only ghosts from his past, but must stop a deadly plan of mass slaughter in his own backyard.
THE EXTRACTORS
A McBleak heist story
CHAPTER ONE
Malcolm Cavanaugh Bleekston hung upside down. He was suspended by three thin steel cables connected to a belt rigging buckled around his waist. Like a mutant bat, Bleekston hovered before a heavy floor model safe, a Mosler, circa the 1920s. It was five feet tall and more than two feet wide. The safe was case hardened, and its box was made of five-inch thick forged iron walls. Slowly, methodically, his fingers manipulated the dial of the combination lock. Magnetically attached to the face of the safe near the dial was a flat, rectangular device that on first glance might be mistaken for an iPhone. A wire led from the object and split into inserted ear buds.
The gadget attached to the safe was a kind of sonar instrument. Like an electronic stethoscope, the device amplified metallic clicks from within the iron box. Bleekston listened for contact points, as when he reached a notch in the series of wheels in the lock mechanism. He listened for a certain set of sounds as he worked the dial in practiced increments. Being upside down didn’t enhance the experience and was, in fact, a challenge to concentration given the blood flowing to his head. That was the point of the exercise, to see if he could ignore the distraction of being in an awkward position yet crack the safe.
On a nearby end table, his actual iPhone vibrated, and he was pretty certain he knew who it was. He’d return Bunny’s call when he was done—if he got done. Shutting his eyes, fighting a sensation of lightheadedness, he moved the dial back then forward again by a millimeter. There. A wheel notched into place. That was number three of the seven-wheeled lock. He opened his eyes and removed the pencil he’d clamped between his teeth. He made a notation on a piece of cardboard taped to his wrist of which number he’d stopped the dial on then continued. The fourth notch was easy to locate, but five seemed to elude him for interminable minutes. In his practice lab, that didn’t matter so much, if you overlooked the hanging upside down part, but in a practical environment, time was the enemy.
Bleekston re-focused, shutting down discomfort and any other sensation save for being in this moment and applying his knowledge. To untrained ears, the sounds from within the safe could easily be heard to be the same, with only slight variations in pitch and intensity. But to a safecracker worth the moniker, each sound was distinct, one from the other. A pin dropping into place versus that pin merely scraping along metal, the turning of gears at the further end of the spindle, each had its own sound characteristic sound and from experience, Bleekston knew them intimately. He derived the fifth alignment. After making a note of the dial position, he continued.
While his capillaries continued to expand inside his head from hanging upside down, Bleekston commanded himself to tune in, embodying the analogy that his receiver was drifting, becoming static-filled. He must have clarity. It took another eight minutes, but he got the next number. Then the next and swaying slightly, metering his breathing to compensate for the blackness edging his brain, he blew a stream of warm air from his lungs as he heard the tumbler notch again. One left. But he was feeling too woozy, more inclined to simply keep his eyes closed and go to sleep, let the peace that only the envelope of darkness could grant take him away. Breathe in and breathe out. His arms went slack, and as if drained of blood and fluids, he remained unmoving, swaying only slightly on his tether. How inviting it was to remain like this forever.
“Damn that,” he muttered, rousing. He took in lungfuls of air to momentarily loosen the bands tightening around the perimeter of his skull. Shaking his head briefly, Bleekston bore down, gritting his teeth and forcing his eyes to focus. At first, he missed it, but something told him he should reverse the dial. He did so and heard the sound, or at least he hoped he did. Was he getting too loopy? Did he imagine the wheel dropping into its notch because he was running out of time to remain conscious? He smiled thinly.
“Don’t over-think and therefore defeat yourself, son. Any lock inherently has its flaws as, by definition, it’s meant to be opened by key or by combination,” had been one among several admonishments from an old box man he’s trained with in the past. His observation was true for mechanical and electronic locks—though his specialty, given the time period he operated in, was mostly the former and not the latter.
Bleekston held his breath and stilled his body inside and out. He turned the dial in micro movements of its diameter. There it was. It hadn’t been wishful projecting or hallucinating. He tried the combination he’d derived and heard the click of the lock being released. He then raised himself on the cable, doing a sit up in mid-air. He paused for several moments, his torso in an upright position while his head cleared. He then unhooked and put his feet on the floor. Bleekston turned the latch on the safe and opened the heavy door on sufficiently oiled hinges. A satisfied smile creased his face.
He turned awa
y and on the end table, retrieved his phone, and after twisting off the cap of the Double Six vitamin water bottle, he took a healthy gulp. Tapping the phone’s screen, he checked the text message from Charles “Bunny” Sawyer. It read: McBleak, Lady M invited me to tea this afternoon to discuss the re-do of her living room and study. Will take plenty of pics. Out.
Bleekston, sometimes called M.C. Bleak but mostly now referred to as McBleak by his friends and those not so inclined to like him, disposed of the message. He, Bunny, and less than a handful of others of a rigidly proscribed cadre used encrypted phones and switched them out regularly, but they left as little as possible to chance or discovery. Some within the grouping only knew one or two others in the circle while McBleak was the only one to know them all. He realized this was both a strength and a weakness. But there was no getting around the need for someone to have an understanding of the totality, of who was what. For it was certainly the case that in the past, and no doubt in the future, he’d have to be able to coordinate one or more of these people in the execution of a specific strategy.
The shower he took invigorated the sinewy-built, over six-foot man. He then toweled off in the compact, unadorned living quarters portion of the two-story building. Constructed in the early 1920s like the safe, the red-brick structure had several incarnations from the Anapos hydrant and sewer pipe factory to its last use as the headquarters of a high tech start-up in the mid part of this century. That company of tatted and pierced twenty-something vegetarians had touted the next big thing in apps. The enterprise’s two principals, one of them barely past thirty, were already veterans of past successful trendy ventures.