The Last Act: A Novel

by Brad Parks

  Especially before there was another surprise inspection.

  And so, once he had the operation at Rosario No. 2 running to his liking, he traveled north until he reached one of the tunnels New Colima had taken from Sinaloa. It had been dug into the bedrock deep under the Rio Grande and was wide enough to drive a truck through. At the midpoint of the tunnel, there was a farcical “border crossing.” It consisted of a large and thoroughly defaced photograph of the United States president.

  The tunnel outlet was near El Paso, Texas, in a warehouse that also operated as a very legitimate produce-distribution center. It was owned by a Texas-based corporation that was a subsidiary of a Delaware-based corporation, and it was all perfectly legal, apart from being a front for New Colima. American law enforcement had no clue.

  From El Paso, Herrera caught a plane to Pittsburgh and rented a car with a driver’s license and Mastercard that identified him as Hector Jacinto. Herrera did not bear much resemblance to the man, other than the Mesoamerican set to their eyes and brown skin. But in the Pittsburghs of the world, that was more than enough.

  He then drove to West Virginia, toward the prison where the banker was locked up.

  Herrera understood the rules of engagement: The banker had documents; the documents would be released if anything happened to the banker or his family; therefore, the banker was untouchable.

  It was a stalemate.

  But El Vio didn’t tolerate stalemates. And Herrera believed that he could find a way to break it.

  New Colima had contractors in America who had been keeping watch over the banker and his family—listening in on their conversations, following the wife in case she slipped up and went to the document hiding spot, that sort of thing. The contractors had been briefing Herrera regularly. Still, Herrera suspected they did not feel the same urgency to close this operation that he did.

  According to the contractors, the American prison backed up against a city park known as Dorsey’s Knob. Incredibly, there were no fences separating the park from the prison. The Americans wanted to build a wall on their southern border but couldn’t be bothered to enclose their own prisons.

  Herrera parked his car in a lot near a picnic area, then picked his way through the woods, up the hill, until he reached the top of Dorsey’s Knob. There, a high ridge provided an unfettered view down on the prison. He adjusted his binoculars and soon was seeing men in khaki uniforms, trudging through the neatly manicured grounds.

  Then he pulled out his phone and called one of the contractors.

  “I’m here,” he said in Spanish. Herrera’s English was fine. But cartel business was done in Spanish unless they were dealing with some monolingual American.

  “Where?” the contractor asked, also in Spanish.

  “Visiting our friend in West Virginia,” he said.

  Herrera could hear the sharp intake of breath on the other end. This was not what the contractor expected.

  Be unpredictable, Herrera thought. The wisdom of El Vio.

  “What?” the contractor finally spat, his alarm apparent. “Why?”

  “Because I work for an impatient man.”

  They never said El Vio’s name over the phone.

  “I understand that,” the contractor said. “We’re doing everything we can on the outside. And we have a man on the inside. It’s all in place.”

  “Who is this man?”

  “He’s someone who will get the job done.”

  “I want to talk to him.”

  “Are you crazy?” the contractor said. “We can’t get him to you without running the risk he’d be caught and sent to a higher-security prison, where he’d be no use to us. And we’re sure not going to take the chance of getting you to him. You’d compromise everything, and for what?”

  I get to stay alive, Herrera thought.

  “I need to be able to say I’ve inspected this matter personally,” he said instead.

  “And now you can. But you have to stop there. Our man has worked hard to get close to our friend. If our friend caught wind that our man was working for us, that would be over. You’d be setting us back months. You think the impatient man you work for would like that?”

  The contractor was right. Herrera knew that. But he hadn’t come all this way to have nothing to tell El Vio the next time they spoke.

  “Tell me who your man is,” Herrera said. “That will suffice for now.”

  “And you promise you won’t approach him?”

  “Yes.”

  The line was silent for a few seconds.

  “Fine,” the contractor said. “You say you’re there right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “On the hill above it.”

  “Which means you can see into our friend’s residence?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Then our man should be easy to spot,” the contractor said. “You can’t miss him. Just look for the biggest, blackest hombre in there.”

  CHAPTER 17

  The next morning, Frank Thacker delivered on his promise to tutor me on the finer points of prison bed making.

  He was a patient teacher, speaking to me in that bottom-dwelling voice, calling me “sir” the whole time. I was a dutiful student—not because I naturally was but because Pete Goodrich, the teacher, would have been. It was almost funny to see a man Frank’s size, with hands that could crush rocks, get fussy about smoothing a blanket.

  At breakfast, I thought about trying to engineer sitting with—or at least near—Dupree, but I couldn’t pull it off without making it seem forced. And after getting caught staring at him the night before, I didn’t want to push too hard. Dupree had to think the new guy was just another inmate.

  So I hung out with Masri, my new best friend, and quietly plotted ways I might be able to get closer to Dupree in the future.

  After the meal, I met with my unit manager. He was a ruddy-faced heart-attack-in-waiting named Mr. Munn, who noted that I was a history teacher and treated me to a long description of his passion for World War II reenactment. His “character” was a marine corporal whose greatest glory was that he pretended to fight at Guadalcanal, fake-winning a Silver Star for gallantry in imaginary action. Mr. Munn clearly had studied the battle in some detail. He also clearly had a social IQ of eleven.

  I must not have responded enthusiastically enough to his fantasy life, because he assigned me to work in the laundry room.

  This didn’t turn out to be a bad thing. As soon as I reported for duty, it was explained to me that this job, like most at Morgantown, was more make-work than actual work. We had fifty men to do what could have been accomplished by seven. So there was a little bit of loading machines, unloading machines, and folding what came out. There was a lot more goofing off.

  Some of the guys had invented a game, “wad,” that involved flicking wadded-up paper balls against the back of a desk partition and scoring points based on where they landed. The competition was spirited, especially because they were in the midst of a tournament—“the Wadley Cup”—that involved best-of-seven game matches set up in bracket style. Naturally, there was wagering involved. Both participants and spectators were betting what they called “cans.”

  The amounts were low, usually one or two cans. One of the matches was for five cans, and it got a little heated. At the end of the match, I sidled up to one of the spectators, an older guy with smallish glasses that gave him an intellectual air.

  “I’m new,” I said. “What’s with the cans?”

  “Mackerel,” he said.

  “What about it?”

  “They’re betting packets of mackerel.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The next match had already started, and his attention was now riveted to the action.

  “They’re like currency around here,” he said. “
We’re not allowed to have real money. The COs would confiscate it. We used to use tuna fish cans. But then they came out with the packets and those became the thing. We still call them ‘cans.’ They show up on the commissary list as ‘fillets of mackerel’ and they go for a buck twenty a packet. One packet is commonly understood to be a dollar. It’s how we pay each other. You want a guy to clean your room for you? The going rate is four cans a month. You want a haircut? Two cans. You want a guy to change the channel in the TV room because all the TVs are taken and you really want to watch a certain program? One can. You want a joint or a pack of cigarettes? That’s going to cost you ten cans.”

  “Mackerel packets,” I said again. “That’s crazy.”

  “Except you’ll never hear anyone call them packets. Just cans. Chicken of the Sea is the brand, for what it’s worth. And it’s not so crazy if you think about it. They’re so loaded with preservatives they probably last longer than your typical paper dollar. And unlike paper dollars, they have an intrinsic value, because you can eat them if you want to.”

  “Do people do that?”

  “Some guys, yeah,” he said, making a face. “Mostly the weight lifters, who need the protein. They smell terrible, if you ask me. But to each his own. Really, they’re like any currency, in that they have value primarily because we’ve all agreed they have value.”

  Around us, a large cheer erupted as one of the guys won his match. He celebrated with a round of high fives.

  “So that five-can match I just watched . . .”

  “Yeah, that was pretty heavy. I was a financial planner on the outside, so I speak with authority when I say the mackerel economy is remarkably stable and well regulated. We only get three hundred bucks’ worth of commissary a month, and we’re only allowed to keep three hundred bucks’ worth of commissary in our lockers. And if you read your handbook carefully, you’ll see you’re limited to thirty-five cans of any type of meat product at a time. So there are some rigid checks on inflation. The Brazilians should do so well. It means that five-can match you saw was worth, what, one-seventh of our available funds? Now, those can be replenished at the commissary, but even those five little cans represent roughly three percent of our monthly commissary allowance. Think of a man betting three percent of his monthly income on something.”

  “I hear you,” I said.

  “As you become familiar with the price structure, you’ll find that the market for services is on the low side, because all of us have too much time on our hands. On the flip side, the market for goods is higher, because we can’t exactly run to Walmart. You’ll figure it out. You need something in here, you pay for it with cans.”

  Then he added, “Cans make the world go round.”

  The next match was already concluding. Everyone was buzzing about cans being won and lost.

  Watching the excitement, I knew I had found my next hustle.

  * * *

  • • •

  Eating was definitely not a leisure activity at FCI Morgantown, nor did it invite casual conversation, so I had to wait until after shoveling down lunch to approach Masri, my new guru for all things illicit.

  I caught him about halfway back from the dining hall, sauntering along at an unhurried pace.

  “Hey,” I said, approaching him from behind.

  “Hey,” he replied.

  As I drew even with him, I saw he had his eyes closed.

  “Whatchya doing?”

  “Just breathing,” he said. “You can actually breathe here. Like real, fresh air that hasn’t already been in someone else’s lungs. It’s nice. You couldn’t do that at Hazelton.”

  “Should I come back some other time?”

  “No, no,” he said, opening his eyes. “What’s up?”

  “I think I’ve found what my caramel M&M’S are,” I said.

  The right side of his face pulled the rest of it into a grin. “Ahh, Grasshopper is growing up quickly.”

  “Have you heard about cans yet?”

  He tilted his head, so I filled him in on what I had learned about the mackerel economy.

  “I love it,” he said. “So what’s your hustle?”

  “Let’s smuggle in mackerel packets.”

  He smiled even broader.

  “It’s the perfect hustle,” he said. “Contraband that isn’t actually contraband.”

  “Exactly. Long as we keep it quiet and no one knows that we’re flooding Morgantown with cheap currency, we’ll live like kings.”

  And win friends. And influence people. Which was my real purpose. I don’t care where you went in this world—the theater, the boardroom, the laundry at FCI Morgantown—money was power. Whether that money came in the form of green dollars or silver fish packets didn’t matter at all.

  “I like it,” he said. “Partners?”

  He stuck out his right hand. I shook it.

  “Partners,” I said.

  “What’s our first step?”

  “Well, that’s where I’m hoping that, no offense, a more seasoned convict like you might be able to help me. How do people get stuff in here?”

  “Oh, there’s a million ways. Obviously, this is a larger item, so some of the more, uh, bodily methods of smuggling aren’t going to work.”

  I grimaced.

  “Oh, don’t get all prudish on me,” he said. “As long as you wrap it in plastic, it washes right off.”

  I shivered as he continued.

  “There was actually a guy at Hazelton who used to smuggle in joints in a hollowed-out callus on the bottom of his foot. His girlfriend would bring them in every Saturday. He got the cavity so big he could fit like three or four in there. The COs stripped-searched him thoroughly every time he returned from the visitors’ area, and he just stood there flat-footed and grinning.”

  “Okay, stop. You’re grossing me out.”

  “The other way you do it is you bribe a CO. But it takes time to develop that kind of relationship. And you can’t do it with fish packets. You need someone on the outside with real cash.”

  “I don’t think we need to go there,” I said. “Look around. This place doesn’t have fences. I’m sure there are guys in here who have figured out how to exploit that.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “You think some of your new friends might be willing to share the acquired local wisdom on this subject?”

  “I’ll work on it.”

  “The other issue is: Where do we stash it once we get it in? We’re only allowed to have thirty-five cans in our room at a time. I’m thinking on a bigger scale than that.”

  “And I like how you’re thinking,” he said. “But don’t worry where to store it. My work assignment is in maintenance. We have access to this warehouse. That place is like a stashing wonderland. There’s a chance of someone stumbling on it, but that’s the price of doing business sometimes.”

  “True.”

  “Do you have someone out there who can get us enough product to make our efforts worthwhile? I don’t want to do this for a grocery bag full of cans. I want, like, a whole flat of them.”

  “I can handle that part,” I said, thinking of how receipts for a flat of mackerel packets would look in the FBI’s asset seizure fund. “You just worry about how to get them in here without being caught.”

  CHAPTER 18

  It didn’t take long for me to slip into the rhythm of life at FCI Morgantown, a place governed by its routines.

  Wake-up was at six. They began calling breakfast at 6:10, with the units going in order of how they had performed at the last inspection. At seven or so, that inspection actually occurred. At seven thirty, I went off to the laundry for a few hours of barely working. Lunch call commenced at ten forty-five.

  After lunch and until the four P.M. standing count, I had free time, though Mr. Munn was already starting to get on m
e about taking vocational classes, which were offered in the afternoon. After dinner, which started at five, there was more free time until the final standing count at nine. We were confined to our housing unit after that. Lights-out was at ten. And, to be clear, “lights-out” was not a figure of speech when you were in prison. One moment you were sitting there, bathed in artificial illumination. The next moment, you were plunged into darkness. Some guys stayed in the television room or the card room until midnight or later. Not me. I needed my sleep.

  Then I woke up. And did the same thing all over again.

  My third day there, I was permitted my first commissary visit. I bought a lock for my locker; a Timex Ironman watch so I could stop asking other guys what time it was; a radio and earbuds so I could watch television; and, of course, mackerel packets, so I could participate in the informal economy.

  My fifth day there, I finally received my formal orientation, a long day of meeting various members of the prison administration. They talked a lot about reentry. “The day you get here, we want you to start getting prepared for the day you leave,” was something all of them said in one form or another. They also harped on contraband, as if I hadn’t heard enough about that. Drugs were a concern, of course. Cell phones—and, in particular, smartphones—were considered an even greater scourge, because they could be used by inmates who might be tempted to continue the very criminal ways they were being sent to prison to be cured of. If ever our eyes wandered across one, we were to turn in the offender immediately, or risk the awful wrath of prison administration.

  Noted.

  I usually talked to Amanda immediately after dinner. Though, to be honest, what should have been the highlight of my day was often a letdown. Our conversations were awkward, stilted, constrained by having to maintain the pretense of being Pete and Kelly, on the off chance someone was listening. Only in the vaguest terms could she tell me that her visit to Van Buren Gallery hadn’t gone as she hoped, but she couldn’t say why. It sounded like she wasn’t painting anything new. She was just trying to adjust to life “in California.”