by Thomas Pluck
“You killed him,” Leo said, raising the baton. “Same as if you pulled the trigger. You should’ve left the state. Knew he wouldn’t be able to handle it.”
“You’re next,” Jay wheezed.
Leo kicked Jay in the gut. “Stop following me, and stay out of Nutley.”
Jay fell to his back, covering his face.
“Learn, Joshua,” Leo said. “Learn.”
“My name is Jay,” Jay shouted, hunching in a protective curl.
Bobby Algieri dumped a sheaf of tickets on Jay’s chest. He hawked deep and spat before leaving.
Jay crawled to the Challenger. He gripped the curls of traffic summonses and used them to wipe the slick mess from his face. He slumped in the dirt and let the tickets blow away in the afternoon breeze.
“As-Salamu Alaykum,” Cheetah said, sporting his new kufti cap in the yard.
“Pork chops and bacon,” Jay replied. The sleeve of his shirt rolled up, flashing the Tyr rune of the Heimdall Brotherhood.
“So that’s how it is. All you white devils are the same.”
Ears perked and the yard watched.
“Save it for the ring,” Jay said. “You’re all show anyways, jumping around throwing punches for points like a bitch.”
Cheetah threw hard and Jay staggered. The hacks shouted warnings over the PA as they tussled in the dirt. The yard seeped closer, eager for blood, until a guard pocked the dirt with a rifle round.
Jay ran back to the Brotherhood, and Cheetah’s rep rose in rank as the Grape Street Crips, Sex Money Murda, and the Disciples put their force behind him.
Dante said they should settle it in the ring. He pitched high odds for the Cheetah, whose technical game impressed the purists. They called Jay a one-trick pony, a knockout artist who wouldn’t go the distance. Cheetah had a steel jaw and had never been sent wobbling to his knees, much less dazed against the ropes.
The Ragin’ Cajun against the Brick City Cheetah.
It was on.
As fight day approached, the air in the yard became electric. Cells were tossed and searched. Blacks ganged whites in the yard. Whites shanked blacks in the mess hall.
Verdad put silent protection on both Jay and Cheetah. The Latin Kings stood poised to eat any territory lost in the war. When Jay asked Okie why the warden didn’t call a lockdown, the old con laughed and scratched his chin. “Why you think? He’s betting too. So are the hacks. They know it’s gonna be one hell of a fight. Hear they’re gonna videotape it.” Okie flexed the arm with the copperhead tattoo, and the serpent flicked its tail. “We’ll be riding high.”
The morning of the fight, guards arrived at Jay’s cell a half hour before the mess hall, and escorted him there alone. He ate all he wanted, splattering a plate of scrambled eggs with ketchup and hot sauce, flanked by hacks loaded for bear.
A man sat across from him. He wore a brown suit with a badge on the pocket. The top of his head was bald as an egg, with a horseshoe of dusty hair around the back. Bristle broom mustache to match. He folded his pudgy hands and sat across from Jay on the plastic orange bench.
Jay smiled at Warden Jeffers through a mouthful of eggs.
“The natives are restless about your fight this afternoon,” the warden said. “You got the population all worked up over it.” His voice was thick, like he had a throat full of snot. “Your associates Dante Mastino and Leroy Kincaid have something planned.”
“Don’t know any Leroy,” Jay said.
“Your trainer.”
“Leroy, huh?” Jay chuckled. “I gotta rib him about that. We call him Okie.” He ate another forkful and washed it down with black coffee.
“I don’t give a damn what you call him, but you’re losing this fight. We haven’t had a riot under my tenure, and I plan to keep it that way. I know you’re playing both sides. Spoke to people at Annandale who told me you and Alfonse Plunkett were thick.”
“Alfonse? I don’t know no Alfonse.”
Warden Jeffers narrowed his eyes. “Let me appeal to you as a white man. We’re outnumbered here four to one, by people like the fellows who sodomized you. There are plenty who’ll gladly take their place, and I can ensure they have every opportunity to have a go at your scarred asshole.”
Jay lowered his fork.
The warden leaned closer, smiled wide. “So, give them a good show. Three or four rounds. Then eat a punch and play dead. Or they’ll be running trains on your ass until they call you the Lincoln Tunnel.”
Jay stared into the warden’s watery brown eyes. “Y’all kiss your mother with that mouth, or just use it to lick her dirty hole?”
The guards choked Jay with their batons and held him back. The warden bruised his soft hands on Jay’s hardened cheekbones and scuffed his patent leather shoes on his ribs.
Rene passed the word from cell to cell. The Ragin’ Cajun would throw the fight.
The air hummed as Jay climbed into the ring. Fresh stitches made a prickly third eyebrow on his forehead. Shrewd bettors pointed, and packs of cigarettes changed hands. The towers bristled with riflemen, scopes scanning the crowd.
Cheetah jumped and raised blue gloves. Black fists pumped in response. Jay slammed his red gloves together. A weak cheer rose, swallowed by jeering. Cheetah had three inches on him and resembled the lean cat of his name. Speed which had blossomed into rapid fire bursts on the heavy bag under Mack’s direction.
Okie rubbed Jay’s shoulders and smiled. He loved a good scam. They had communicated through Rene, choreographed their moves through sparring partners. A violent opera rehearsed to enrage its audience.
The bell rang, Jay charged in swinging and ate several of Cheetah’s stiff jabs. Cheetah racked points while Jay tagged the body hard. In the third, Jay bent Cheetah in half with a hook to the ribs, and the crowd leapt to its feet. Cheetah opened the cut over Jay’s eye with a flurry of blows. Okie stuffed it with Vaseline, and ironed his face with the end-swell. In the fourth Jay took a combo that sent him to his knees, and he wobbled through half the standing eight-count before the dour, pockmarked ref waved him back in. Half the crowd chanted his name when he raised his glove. Jay couldn’t make a middle finger with his hands taped, but he knew the warden would catch his meaning.
In the sixth, Jay clinched every chance he got. Bets changed hands. It was the longest fight the Ragin’ Cajun had ever fought, and the Cheetah hardly looked winded. In the seventh, Jay found a second wind, chasing Cheetah with combos, but was no match for the quicker man’s footwork.
Thirty seconds into the eighth, Cheetah caught Jay in a corner and teed off on his swollen face. The ref stalked over. Okie raised the bloody towel, looking as devastated as the boy about to shoot Old Yeller. The yard thundered with the stomp of a thousand brogans.
Jay clinched, ate a hook, and rebounded off the ropes. Launched an uppercut that put an inch of air between Cheetah’s soles and the ring.
A collective gasp sucked the air from the prison. Jay chained cross-uppercut-hooks and drove Cheetah to the ropes on shaky knees. The ref shoved Jay away. Cheetah tumbled, glove catching on the top rope. Bettors swore and pleaded.
The guards watched through their rifle scopes.
The glove slipped. Cheetah fell face first to the ring floor.
“Bullshit!” broke the silence. “Cheatin’ motherfuckers!”
The crowd rushed the ropes. Rifles cracked and tear-gas grenades popped and pinged. Okie tackled Jay into the corner as sirens wailed. The old copperhead laughed and dragged Jay through a phalanx of Latin Kings that had formed to protect them.
“You did great, kid. You should get a damn Oscar for that shit.”
Jay leaned hard on Okie’s shoulder. He knew he hadn’t acted, and neither had Cheetah. They had both gone full bore. Driven by hidden resentments and rivalries, disputes over the final count in their long-running poker game of debts owed and never repaid, inner fires kept smoldering by the uncrossable color lines of the prison yard.
What was meant to last five rounds went eight, until Cheetah
proved to himself that he could take out the friend who had once saved him. He’d long realized that Jay only had one speed, all or nothing, his strength and his weakness. In that moment, Jay mad-dogged him with a suicide punch, ensuring that Jay would never learn the downside to his strategy until the day he died.
The yard erupted into a thousand little skirmishes. Wing Four roared with anger. Toilet paper embers floated and swirled like blazing snowflakes from the top tier. Okie and Mack hurried their fighters toward the Secure Housing Unit. Hunters with scores to settle stalked the tiers. Their targets paced in anticipation, or sat empty-eyed in their cells, resigned to their fate.
Chapter 30
“Wouldn’t be doing this, but school’s starting soon, my little girl needs new clothes,” Herschel said.
Jay squinted through binoculars at the endless roll of traffic from the passenger’s seat of the beat-up green Crown Vic. They were parked in a hotel lot on Route 3, along Leo’s afternoon route.
“Plus she wants a dog. House on the block got robbed, and she says a dog’ll protect us. Wrote it up with statistics and everything, like it was homework.”
“Wish I’d had a dog, I was her age,” Jay said.
“Yeah, me too. If wishes were fishes, we’d all be in riches.” He sipped at a Coke leftover from their Popeye’s chicken haul. The scent of the carnage still lingered in the car. “Saw your ass on the news. Jumping in to save that girl.”
“Thought they blurred it out.” A black truck passed, and Jay checked the license plates. Not Leo.
“Real convenient,” Herschel said. “Making you the hero and all. How much you pay her to drive into that lake?”
“You have a doubting nature, Hersch.” Jay said. “Your mama should’ve named you Thomas.”
“Ha, that comes with the job. You get old ladies who play senile, say they left their money on the kitchen table. They go in to get it, and lock the front door on you. It’s easier to put them on the no-ride sheet than to call the cops over a fifteen-dollar fare.”
“I paid in advance. That should get me some points.”
“See, that’s compensating,” Herschel said. “Like when my daughter gets in trouble in kindergarten, she cleans her room before I get home.”
Jay scanned another license plate.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“You gonna tell me, or not?”
“Have you considered maybe that it was pure chance, me being there?”
“Ha,” Herschel said. “My cousin Errol, he’s a junkie. Stole his mama’s television more times than I can count. How his skinny ass carries the damn thing, I don’t know. What I do know is he’s always got a story. Some huge guy he owed, from when he was in County? He came knocking, said he was gonna beat his ass if Errol didn’t give him twenty dollars. That’s why he had to pawn your shit. And you can get it back, here’s the ticket. Thing about a junkie. They’ll steal your stuff, then help you look for it.”
Jay had heard a thousand stories like that inside. Some cons just had a way with reality, making it fit their needs.
“I ain’t no junkie, Hersch.”
“Didn’t say you were.” Herschel leaned back. “No Rutt’s dogs, next time. They went right through me. Had to pull into a gas station, dancing like Urkel all the way to—”
“There he is,” Jay said. “Left lane. Let’s go.”
“I see him.” Herschel pulled out of the lot, using a panel truck for cover. He merged in behind a kid in a hopped-up Civic and passed when the car slowed down. “Ha. Everyone thinks we’re the police.”
“Hang back,” Jay said. “He’s got good eyes.”
“Probably heard that loud-ass hot rod of yours.”
They followed the Denali toward to the Turnpike, where Leo cut to the truck lanes like before.
“Careful now. He slipped over to the car lanes on me last time.”
Herschel used tractor trailers for cover. “The lanes all go to the same place,” he said. “He does that, we can still follow him.”
They didn’t have to. Leo pulled into a service area five miles later.
Herschel hugged a truck’s bumper and followed it into the lot. Leo rolled to the truck’s side where rows of semis were lined up. The flat-roofed service building advertised Roy Rogers, Starbucks, and ice cream. Leo parked the Denali and walked toward the entrance.
“Find a spot where you can see the doors of the building,” Jay said, and checked his duffel.
Herschel found a corner spot with a good view. “Just taking pictures, right? I don’t want no trouble.”
“Just taking pictures,” Jay said. “Call me if he’s coming.”
Jay walked across the parking lot, wearing work clothes and a trucker cap. No one sees a working man, Okie had taught. Get yourself a clipboard, a hardhat, you can go anywhere. Any trouble, blame the boss who sent you.
Jay crouched between the Denali and the hedges with Tony’s lockout kit. It consisted of a rubber wedge to pry the door from the frame and a long extendable hook to pull the inside handle. According to manuals, the 2012 GMC Yukon Denali had no factory alarm system, and Jay had spied no aftermarket kit. A brick through the window would be easier, but that would ruin the surprise.
He stood on the running board and stuck the wedge in, muscled the door open a half-inch. Slipped the hook in and levered it toward the lock, like those claw games at the boardwalk where you fumbled to win a toy.
Jay felt a buzz in his pocket. He let the hook fall and checked his phone.
No calls. It was a phantom vibration.
He tried again. The steel scraped the paint inside the door jamb, and the hook slapped the seat. Jay took a breath and aimed the hook toward the handle. It tickled the plastic, wavering. Got it around the handle, pulled, and it popped off.
Jay swore under his breath. Closed his eyes, breathed his four fours to steady his hands. He opened his eyes and lifted the hook.
He blinked. The red button indicated the doors were unlocked.
Police got the worst security, Okie always said. We robbed more banks with cop shotguns we nabbed right out of cruisers than I can count.
Jay opened the door and sat on the plush leather seat. Okie never expected Jay to use his knowledge out in the world, but taught him to kill time. He would’ve laughed his ass off at all the time Jay wasted without trying the door handle.
Jay popped the glove box. Found the owner’s manual, nothing more. He frowned and flipped through the papers.
The phone buzzed in his pocket. No mistaking it this time. He ignored it and felt around under the driver’s seat, poked his head under the dash. Tugged at all the spots he’d learned to build hideaways. Some would never open without the car running. Or you had to press buttons in sequence, have the radio on. A good builder could put one anywhere, but Jay doubted an installer whose customers were mostly drug dealers would build one for a cop.
His phone buzzed again. Jay sighed and sank back to the seat. His hand fell on the console, and something sharp bit into his latex glove.
Sitting in the cup holder was the nickel revolver, snug in a pancake holster. Jay put it in a zip bag like evidence. Looked up and saw Leo crossing the parking lot.
Jay ducked into the footwell. The phone vibrated its insistent warning. Jay gripped the pistol through the plastic and waited for the door to open. Breathed slow. Imagined himself making Leo eat the gun like his partner. It would work, but Billy would know who did it, and come gunning for blood. No, he had to stick to the plan.
He counted five and peeked. The door didn’t open. He scanned the lot slow. Picked Leo up at the edge of the truck line.
Jay took a deep breath and flipped open the buzzing phone. “Well that was a thrill.”
“You’re crazy,” Herschel said. “Called you three damn times. Let’s get out of here.”
“Hang tight a minute.”
Jay exited the truck and low-ran toward the row of steel road dogs. The air thick with raw diesel and exh
aust spice. Leo headed toward a red-nosed semi towing an Old Dominion chassis. Jay came along the side of the rig and hunkered beneath the trailer, following Leo’s patent leather shoes. They paused before a pair of mustard work boots.
The air took on a new sulfur tang.
The men stepped onto the running board and disappeared inside the cab.
Jay took little steps, the thrum of the engines hypnotic. He gripped the mirror and pulled himself up. Froze as gator claws dragged along his spine.
He forced himself to peer in the driver’s window.
Leo sat in the passenger’s seat, legs wide. Pants at his ankles, baring ghost-white runner’s thighs. A trucker-capped head bobbed rapid between them.
With one hand Leo stroked the country boy’s neck. With the other hand, he slapped his own scarecrow face side to side, leaving cheeks red with welts.
The sight of his adversary bare and unarmored flooded Jay’s mouth with bile. He flipped open the phone and pressed the camera button.
Leo’s eyes snapped open and met Jay’s through the glass.
Jay hit the pavement in a sprint.
Herschel’s car wasn’t there. Jay ran serpentine through the rows of cars. “Dammit, Hersch!”
Two pairs of feet slapped the pavement behind him. The trucker hollered “Thief!” and clanged a tire iron along his trailer to rouse the troops.
Jay ran for a car with an open door. He could toss the bald driver and get the hell out of there. A car mirror clipped him as he rounded the row of cars. He raised his fist to throw.
“Get the hell in!” Herschel said.
Behind them the trucker came running with the tire iron. The tail lights on the Denali lit and tires shrieked as Leo reversed.
Jay dived into the cab’s musty rear seat.
The cab balked at the hard corners, wobbling on the sidewalls of its tires, transmission slamming into weak downshifts as Herschel floored the pedal. They crossed over the grass and squealed out the southbound exit with the Denali charging behind them.
“Move this heap! Want me to drive?”