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Contents
Chapter 1: Five Percent
Chapter 2: A Pistol for Ringo
Chapter 3: The Getaway
Chapter 4: Full Disclosure
Chapter 5: Coffin Run
Chapter 6: Into the Future
Chapter 7: The Face of God
Chapter 8: Go to Zero
Chapter 9: Men and Boys
Chapter 10: Dead Game
Chapter 11: The Enemy of my Enemy’s Enemy
Chapter 12: Garbage Men
Chapter 13: Maniacs Like Us
Chapter 14: Mayhem and Death Ray
Chapter 15: Dreams in the Dollhouse
Chapter 16: Just One More Thing
Chapter 17: Unbreakable
Chapter 18: The Two Tonis
Chapter 19: Damage Control
Chapter 20: Living Through
Chapter 21: The Man Who Sold the World
Chapter 22: The Dark
Chapter 23: The Last Perfect Day
Chapter 24: Resurrection
Chapter 25: After the Apocalypse
Acknowledgments
About Stephen Romano
for
Bryan Geer
my first amigo on this wild escape
for
Rock Romano
my father, who still helps me get there
and, in order of appearance
John Schoenfelder
David Hale Smith
Ed Schlesinger
without whom . . .
Everyone wants to believe they can be saved. Everyone wants a ticket to the promised land. Everyone wants to know that they are the heroes of their own lives, that it all means something in the end, that they are righteous in the face of so many mistakes and sins.
Everyone wants to be resurrected.
A lot of us die very disappointed.
Toni.
I will resurrect you.
1
00000-1
FIVE PERCENT
My fist connects with the soft spot in Coolie’s right cheek, just above his lower jaw, and I hear teeth shatter under my knuckles. I hit him just the way you’re supposed to, arm straight out, wrist stiff like steel, all forward thrust anchored from the shoulder and popped like a coiled spring at my elbow. You turn your whole arm into a concrete piston when you do that. This guy, he’s big and all—but big doesn’t mean anything when you go straight for the face. A monster can’t grow muscles on his teeth. Giant guys who are used to victory by intimidation never expect it to come right at them like this, not ever. Coolie stumbles back all dazed, the knockout reflex working overtime. I hit him next in the throat, a jujitsu-style straight jab with my fingers. His windpipe closes with a sick crack and he loses all his air. When he drops the shank and reaches up to grab his throat, I kick him dead center, just below the belt. That cancels the fight. But just to be sure, and to make it nice and showy for the boys, I swing around again with the heel of my foot and something that looks like a big red tomato bomb explodes in the center of his face. He goes down on the dirty asphalt, dreaming about whatever.
The crowd goes crazy, like it’s a football game.
The smell of blood crawls up my nose, sharp and wet and stinging, like salt water dripping from a rusty razor. I never get used to that. I always avoid it.
But some things are inevitable.
Like the sweaty smiles of two hundred drooling, backstabbing criminal jerks, cheering your name because you know how to kick the ass of a guy twice your size. It’s surreal. Like something out of a movie. My name, over and over. And the hand claps, in time with the chant:
“Coffin! Coffin! Coffin!”
They clap like this when you go in, when you first walk down the cell block. Some of them spit on you. But they only yell your name out loud when you’ve earned respect. That’s when nobody messes with you. They’ve seen me jack up six guys in broad daylight, right on the yard, just like this. The tougher guys, the big mean black dudes, they don’t chant or clap. But they give you the high nod without a smile. That means you’re protected. That means this idiot at my feet will be servicing the gangbangers for six months in the showers. I’ll get a carton of cigarettes when I’m out of solitary. T-Jay is my sponsor here, a gnarled ebony giant with a cold fifty-yard stare and a mouth filled with jagged glass. I broke the arm of a dirty white boy who called himself Mentor, just after I got here. He was bigger than Coolie, all full of muscle, but it never matters. Boom. They’re down. Then they’re someone else’s bitch.
The hacks are already sounding the lockup bell, surrounding me on all sides, telling me we can go hard or easy. When a full-view fight like this breaks out on the yard, everybody goes back in the can for two hours. The guys are going quietly this time. A month ago, I had to take on three at once and there was almost a riot. Nobody’s in the mood for billy clubs and mace this morning. I give it up with my hands against the concrete, near the basketball stop. They grab my arms and hustle me off. Nothing too rough. They all know I have the cash to pay my way. I’ll get a week in the hole, but it’ll be easy. It’ll give me time to think. One of the hacks kicks Coolie in the guts to see if he’s still alive. I made sure he would be. I could have killed him, but I didn’t. This won’t even go down in the books as self-defense. A few extra bills will make sure nobody saw a thing. I can get word to the Fixer from solitary that I need the money. Second parole hearing in just three weeks. The record has to be clean. I’ll be denied early release, right on schedule. But six rejections later, by the letter of this place, I’ll be out. That’s what the Fixer tells me. So long as the record is clean.
And then . . .
When I’m back on the street, I’ll find Hartman and make him pay. I’ll look right into his eyes and I’ll tell him he should have killed me when he could have. He’ll look me in the eyes and beg me not to kill him. I’ve never killed a man before in my life.
I’ll kill him for you.
Toni.
• • •
This place is all concrete and corroded metal, almost a hundred years old, renovated once in the seventies. The kind of dungeon that still stands because someone got paid off. My cell is damp and stale. They always stick me in this one when I have to do solitary, because it’s close to the main block causeway, and I’m favored by the management. The walls reek of piss and semen and bad mojo. People get sick a lot because the plumbing is for shit and the water is brown. I never drink it. You can buy the bottled stuff for a buck in the commissary. Six bucks gets it delivered to the hole. Been living off Ozarka and Diet Coke for way too long.
Two years down.
I shouldn’t even be here.
Not down in the hole with monsters like Coolie and T-Jay.
The good news is that it’s a system set up like grade school compared to what I know how to navigate in the real world. They gave me thirty years. I’ll only be in for five. I’ve worked it like a pro, which is exactly what I am. They transfer you to the east side of the top tier with no cellmate when you have a clean record for a while, when you do good in trade classes and group therapy and play nice with others. I’ve been on the top tier since day one, even though my case file has Organized Crime stamped on it in large red letters. That only cost me six hundred bucks to set up. Little trips like this to the shock corridor are just vacations. Time to get things straight, to plan your n
ext move. You always have to plot everything. It all works if you let it. Once the design is laid out carefully, all the leads running end to end, it’s a puzzle that fits together, and the solutions are pure logic. Like a computer program. Like a time lock.
Like everything I know how to do.
• • •
They send a guy to get me, three days into my vacation. Strange. They never do anything ahead of schedule here.
The hack’s name is Merrick. He’s a skinny little weasel with a big red nose. I’ve known him for six months. He splits my money with four other guys his size. Merrick’s voice crackles trhough the tiny speaker, telling me to step away from the door and put my hands against the opposite wall. The noise is for show because of the TV camera in here.
His key tumbles the lock. I know exactly what the gears and metal rods look like as they move from place to place inside that big steel door.
I could open it using a wire coat hanger and some spit.
That’s why they have two hacks with SPAS-12 riot shotguns on the outer corridor. Not to mention that nasty PC-based access grid wired to the main causeway entrance with laser sensors spiderwebbed across the entire cell block. The grid relays to an orbiting satellite. It’s not the most sophisticated security system I’ve ever sussed out, but it’s enough to keep me in here. Even if I got through the shock corridor to the main causeway, the 50-cal machine guns on the wall would turn me into deep-fried grits faster than you could call me a dumbass. The guards all have iPhones now, like little pocket video games with custom applications that tell you exactly where to look when a con runs for the wire. It’s mostly muscle technology here. Big guns that keep people in line. Targeting systems. Maximum security. Like rigging a rusty old beaver trap with computerized heat sensors. I figured the escape odds once, and five years on the inside working the rehabilitation system was a far better bet. Fifty-seven men have been cut down trying to run from this place, and six of them were wireheads like me. One of them even had a plan all worked out.
Merrick enters the cell, cuffs my hands behind my head and tells me I have a visitor. I don’t say a word to him. I never say much to anybody in this place, not even in the classes, and especially not in group therapy. When you’re silent and dangerous, they always assume the worst. Merrick and the other hacks just know I’m smart.
I go quietly, even though I don’t want to, even though I don’t like surprises. Sometimes the hacks will deliver you right to the bull queers. That doesn’t happen when you pay the right guys. It doesn’t happen today.
Merrick marches me through the shock corridor and off the main causeway. A steel door with a lock older than I am clatters open and sunlight hits me in both eyes like a searing sucker punch. It’s seven thirty in the morning. The cons are all doing chow shifts in the mess hall. We’re moving across the yard now, towards the main administration building. Only trustees get to walk around in there, and I’m no trustee, not yet. I still don’t say a word.
A few more doors, a few more locks.
A long gray corridor that leads to a small white room.
In the center of the room is a woman smoking a cigarette at a brown table behind a wall of six-inch bulletproof glass.
• • •
She looks about mid-forties, green eyes, a shock of blonde hair shot through with elegant gray, brand-new suit jacket pressed like sharp black armor over a white shirt with a rigid collar, buttoned almost to her neck. An air of mystery looming in a halo around her face. Something familiar, something alien. Some papers spread on the table. An open briefcase at her elbow. Hard glints of metal in the briefcase, maybe a handgun.
On my side of the glass, there is a thick steel chair bolted to the floor that Merrick tells me to have a seat in. He cuffs my feet to the chair, through a loop that runs to a chain attached to the steel on my wrists. I could get free of the bracelets easy in two minutes. The leg irons would be a bigger challenge. By then, I’d probably be dead. So I settle in. Merrick leaves us alone together in the room.
The woman behind the glass doesn’t smile at me.
“I thought you’d look younger,” she says.
Her voice is focused like a laser beam, all precision syllables and cold logic through the cheap tin speakers that separate us.
I don’t say a word. She drags on her cigarette.
“It says in your file that you’re thirty-three years old. Is that true?”
I just look at her.
The lady smiles a little now, sensing my game. “Okay . . . you don’t have to talk to me. Not yet. But you’ll want to talk to me soon. I promise.”
She ruffles through the papers.
“You had a pretty clean record before you went in here. One arrest for drunk and disorderly in Dallas. Your case was dismissed on Deferred Adjudication, but you never had the charge expunged from your record, even after your time as a soldier. I wonder why a pro like you would allow that to stay on there.”
Never thought it mattered.
I was a kid when that happened.
It wasn’t real.
She sees me answer the question without saying a word and gives me a long, serious glare.
“Look, Mister Coffin, I know what’s going on here, and I respect it. Your very survival for the past two years has depended on the cultivation of a certain image. But there’s no camera in this little room today, no cons. I’ve gone to great personal expense to arrange a private audience with you and I need to know if I’m speaking to the right man.”
I sort of nod to her.
Yes, you’re talking to Elroy Coffin.
Yes, I’m the guy who went in for seventeen counts of armed robbery.
Yes, I only went in because I tried to kill a man.
Yes, everything in your silly little file is true.
More or less.
“Okay,” she says. Then stubs out her cigarette on the table in front of her. I notice the No Smoking sign behind her for the first time, and I almost smile.
She doesn’t smile at all.
“Let’s talk about family, Mister Coffin. Let’s talk about why you’re here. I understand what made you want to kill someone. It’s the same reason I’ve used my own personal fortunes to lobby against gun control and death penalty reforms in Texas. I believe in punishment, when the punishment fits the crime. I don’t believe in second chances when it comes to the loss of someone you love. Do you know who I am?”
No. But you’re going to tell me.
She smirks at the other end of her cigarette. “I’m what you might call a . . . concerned citizen.”
That’s really nice.
“My fortunes were made in the building industry, private sector. My assets are recession-proof. I could buy the lives of a thousand talented young men like yourself. And I have. But one thing money can never buy is family. The pain. You know the pain. You live in it here, in this place. You can never be free once that pain takes hold. No prison can compare to it.”
This lady has obviously never been in prison.
She’s also not a criminal psychologist—she’s a rich woman, a powerful woman. I would have known that before the first word left her mouth. The real question is: What the hell is a smart, tough cookie like her doing in a place like this? She could have sent an expert. A lawyer or a lackey, trained to deal with assholes like me. She either made those fortunes of hers by being really hands-on, or she’s not who she says she is.
But I don’t buy that. Not really.
See, the thing is . . . she’s right. About the pain. Nobody knows what the pain is like. Not until you lose it all.
Lose everything.
“I’m not just talking about the horror of lost family, Mister Coffin—I think you know what I mean. I’m also talking about very real pain. The bullet that went in your head. To be honest, I’m not only amazed you lived through all that . . . I’m also a little bit astonished that your faculties remain intact. You can still talk, right?”
I nod to her, almost shrugging.
“That’s miraculous. A nine-millimeter shot at such close range is usually lethal.”
Yes.
Yes it is.
“I’ve read your case files, studied your hospital psych reports. You made the wrong move because you were obsessed. When we become obsessed, Mister Coffin . . . all the best laid plans of mice and men go straight to hell. We see the prize just beyond our reach and it drives us mad.”
Yes.
Yes it does.
“The assault charges were nothing—they could have been bought. You had the money. Actually, I suspect you still have the money. They had you cold on the robberies. Why was that?”
You know already. You tell me.
“You were put here by the man you threatened. A man who was your own employer. The Travis County District Attorney’s Office knew you were set up. They even waved a deal in front of your face and you told them to go screw themselves. Those were your exact words. They wanted your father also and you wouldn’t roll over on him. I admire that. Family is very important to a person like myself.”
She pauses. A sly little smile crosses her lips.
“As a matter of fact . . . I’ve just come from a meeting with your father, Mister Coffin. He told me to say hello.”
Her words hit me like a wave, my eyes fill with shock.
And it just comes right out:
“Like hell you did.”
• • •
She’s one of those people who know everything. Every damn detail of my life, because she has the money to buy men like me. She reads the bullet points off like it’s the weekly plot synopsis for some soap opera, reprinted in boring English right out of the TV Guide. She knows about the five-man team my father put together more than ten years ago and the reputation we built, cracking safes and security systems. She knows how every generation does it a little better than the one before it.
Resurrection Express Page 1