by Caro Savage
She was leaning on a balcony and appeared to be doing very little else apart from that. She was probably as bored as Amber was. She seemed like a decent sort, relatively speaking, and Amber didn’t like to see nice people getting picked on. If it had happened once, it could happen again. The bullies were like that. If you weren’t part of a group, then you were fair game. She made a mental note to keep an extra eye out for Bailey’s well-being.
Amber reached forward to the keyboard and switched that particular camera to the spot monitor. She tilted the camera towards Bailey and zoomed in, studying her face, observing her with mild interest, realising that she had no idea why Bailey was even in here…
24
Bailey stood on the landing doing what most of the inmates did best – lounging. It ranked as one of their top activities. There was an art to it, she’d discovered, to be able to stand around and be casually engaged in nothing in particular.
But she was lounging with a purpose, using the architecture of the prison to her advantage. From her position at the centre, she could see down all four wings.
She was propped nonchalantly against a metal balcony, the cold iron surface beneath her hands worn smooth by generations of inmates who’d been doing the same kind of thing. She craned her head slightly to peer downwards.
It didn’t take her long to identify Keisha standing on the landing below at the far end of C-Wing, just where Seema had said she would be. It wasn’t hard to spot a drug dealer when you knew what you were looking for. As a police officer, Bailey’d had plenty of experience in that area.
She watched as a string of different inmates approached Keisha, smiled and greeted her with a handshake. And always something passed between them, transferred via the handshake, so subtle and fast that it would have been easy to miss if she hadn’t been paying attention.
Keisha was putting on a pretty good act of lounging, her hands tucked in the pockets of her jogging top, but Bailey knew that those pockets contained more than just a pair of hands.
Bailey pushed herself off the balcony and moved along the landing to get a closer look. She’d learned covert surveillance techniques as part of her undercover training. Really, though, all it came down to was being as observant as possible whilst remaining as inconspicuous as possible. Fortunately for her, the inmates’ general predilection towards lounging made it much easier for her to blend in and disguise her actions.
She observed another inmate walk up to Keisha, exchange a few inaudible words and a handshake. Watching closely, she saw the inmate casually palm something into her pocket, most likely a small package of drugs that had been concealed within the handshake. The exchange was quick and furtive and over in less than five seconds.
Bailey marvelled at Keisha’s audacity. She was blatantly dealing drugs under the noses of the prison officers, although, admittedly, there were only two per landing.
More interestingly though, when it came to putting a face to the name, Keisha’s face belonged to one of the inmates in the group of bullies who had harassed her in the canteen a few days earlier. She was the black one in the group. As Bailey was learning, it was a small world in here.
She waited until Keisha had finished dealing with the inmate before deciding to act. Pushing herself off the balcony, she walked to the end of the landing and descended the metal staircase to Keisha’s level. Looking around, she saw a male prison officer approaching, his shiny black shoes clumping along on the concrete floor. She waited until he had passed her and then made her move. She trotted up to Keisha and leant on the balcony next to her.
Keisha looked her up and down suspiciously with her hard cold eyes. If she recognised Bailey from the altercation in the canteen, she didn’t show it.
‘I want to buy some weed,’ said Bailey quietly.
‘How much?’
‘An eighth.’
‘Ninety quid.’
‘Ninety quid!’
Bailey was stunned. That was more than four times the street price for an eighth of an ounce of marijuana.
Keisha shrugged and looked away as if to say take it or leave it.
‘All right,’ said Bailey.
‘Have you got cash?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s not allowed, is it?’
Keisha snorted in contempt as if she had said something stupid. ‘Cigarettes then. From your canteen account.’
‘It’ll take me a while to get that many.’
‘You can have it on credit.’ Keisha’s face twisted into a mean-looking sneer. ‘But if you lose it or get it confiscated, you still have to pay. Just remember… when it comes to paying, you always pay, because there’s nowhere to hide in here and it won’t take us long to find out where you live.’
Bailey was in no doubt that this would be the case. She smiled at Keisha, shook her hand, pocketed the weed and walked off.
25
Bailey stood beneath the showerhead and let the streams of hot water wash the grime of the prison off her. She had finally got some decent shower gel from the prison shop and it made the uncomfortable experience of communal showering marginally more tolerable than it had been before.
She blinked the soap out of her eyes and glanced casually over her shoulder at Keisha, who was standing just a few metres away.
Since buying the drugs, Bailey had been surreptitiously shadowing Keisha, gathering intelligence on her movements, the people she associated with and what she got up to on a daily basis. It transpired, as she’d suspected, that her core associates consisted of the group that she’d encountered in the canteen – the gold-toothed one, the oriental one and the big lumbering one.
Their primary activities appeared to consist of selling drugs and collecting debts, with some intimidation thrown in for good measure. As far as she could ascertain, the gold-toothed one seemed to be in charge of this illicit enterprise.
She was standing over there right now, next to Keisha, facing away from Bailey, soap suds running down her firm, boyish form. They were chatting furtively about something and Bailey was curious to know what, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying under the roar of the water and she didn’t want to get too close in case the gold-toothed one spotted her and decided to pick on her again.
She flicked the excess water from her hair and was about to leave the shower room when she noticed something unusual about the pair of them. The gold-toothed one had a distinctive tattoo etched at the base of her spine, and Keisha had an identical design in exactly the same place.
It consisted of three playing cards fanned out. The one on the front was an ace of spades, with a black A in the top right corner and an inverted A in the bottom left corner. The spade in the middle of the playing card was depicted in the form of a dagger clutched in a skeletal hand, behind which leered a malevolent grinning skull. The top right corners of the other two cards showed only the letters B and C respectively, drawn in the same font as the letter A.
A, B, C…
The workmanship was clean, intricate and masterful. With all the tattoos in here, it would have been easy to write it off as just another tramp stamp, but the longer Bailey looked at it, the more certain she became that it carried some sort of significance.
A.B.C.
The letters evidently formed some kind of acronym, but what did it stand for?
She snapped out of her trance, realising that she’d been staring at them a little too long. Thankfully they hadn’t noticed. She left the shower room, turning the letters over in her mind, analysing them like a cryptic crossword clue. If they contained an answer she was determined to find it.
26
The soft pulse of dub emanated from the stereo, the air was thick with layers of marijuana smoke, and origami animals littered the cell.
Bailey stood in the doorway and surveyed the three stoners sitting slumped in the smoky gloom. After a few moments, Kay noticed her, squinting up at her with red-rimmed eyes through the grey miasma. There was a look of blankness, then slowly recognition seeped i
n.
‘It’s you again,’ she said. ‘The one with bad taste in Jean-Claude Van Damme films.’
Seema looked up. At the sight of Bailey, her face broke into a smile.
‘Got any more interesting film facts?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said Bailey. ‘But I do have some weed if you want a smoke.’
She pulled the ninety quid bag of weed out of her pocket and dangled it in front of her. Kay eyed it hungrily. Bailey tossed it onto the table and Kay scrambled sharply for it, pulled it open and took a deep sniff.
‘Mmm… sensimilla…’ She looked up at Bailey. ‘You arrived at exactly the right time. I was just about to skin up.’
She held up some rolling papers which had already been stuck together to form the basis of a joint. Shovelling a large pinch of Bailey’s weed into it, she added a few token strands of tobacco from a pouch of Golden Virginia, rolled it up, licked the gummed edges of the paper and sealed it into a tight cone-shaped joint which she then held up for the approval of the other two.
‘Seven out of ten,’ said Seema.
‘An eight surely?’ said Kay. ‘What do you think, Mel?’
‘Uh?’ Mel didn’t appear to be paying attention. She blinked and looked at them vacantly, scratching her frayed afro.
‘Forget it,’ said Kay, placing the joint in her mouth and sparking it up. She took a deep drag, then passed it to Seema, who took a drag and then passed it to Mel. Mel took a drag and held it up to Bailey.
Bailey looked at it. She couldn’t very well refuse it, seeing as she’d come here with a bag of weed to a cell full of people who spent most of their day smoking it. It would look odd, if not downright suspicious, if she didn’t partake of it too.
So she plucked the joint from Mel’s fingers and put the damp roach-end between her lips and took a large puff. But she didn’t draw the smoke down into her lungs, holding it instead in her mouth and throat, blowing it out a few moments later.
It would have been both easy and fun to participate a little more wholeheartedly. But it was never a good idea to get strung out on drugs while undercover. If you were strung out, you could make mistakes, screw up an operation or even make an error that could turn out to be fatal to you or someone else.
‘Want to see something funny?’ said Seema.
Bailey shrugged and nodded.
Seema turned to Mel. ‘Hey, Mel, did you know that the universe goes on forever?’
Mel’s face slowly screwed up into a painful frown as she attempted to comprehend the fact. For a while, her eyes were stuck in an odd squint.
‘That does my head in,’ she said. ‘Why would you say something like that?’
Seema and Kay collapsed into paroxysms of laughter.
‘Aren’t you worried the screws might come in here and catch us?’ said Bailey. ‘I mean, it’s not exactly subtle… the smell and everything.’
They looked at each other and shrugged indifferently.
‘You know what,’ said Kay, ‘I think the authorities turn a blind eye on us smoking weed because it makes us behave. You don’t see us committing crimes or starting riots. We’re just sitting here and chilling out, not causing trouble to anybody.’
She tossed the bag of weed to Mel.
‘Roll us a joint, Mel.’
Mel picked up a pack of rolling papers and plucked out several sheets. Her long brown fingers manipulated the papers with a fluid dexterity as she fashioned the foundations of a large joint, her tongue darting out to lick the gummed strips to glue them together.
‘She’s the best joint roller in here,’ said Seema. ‘Papercraft is her forte. Hence all the origami animals.’
Bailey watched her skin up, silently impressed by her casual expertise. Here was a master at work, one whose vacant demeanour belied a genuine aptitude for the task at hand.
After she’d finished packing the dope in, Mel rolled it smoothly into a long tight cone, gracefully twisting the loose paper at the end into a neat point which sealed the joint. She tore a piece of cardboard off the pack of rolling papers and rolled it into a roach, which she inserted into the other end. She held the joint up for them to see.
‘Nine and three-quarters,’ said Seema.
Mel smiled proudly.
‘I still think mine was an eight,’ muttered Kay.
The first joint came round to Bailey again. There were now two joints circulating and the air was denser than ever with smoke. The poor ventilation in the cells, courtesy of the prison’s outmoded design, didn’t help the situation.
Despite attempting not to inhale directly from the joints, she couldn’t help but passively smoke what was fairly potent marijuana, and she was starting to feel quite stoned. She had that distinct fuzziness at the edges of her consciousness, accompanied by a noticeable disruption to her linear thinking patterns. It was quite pleasant, she couldn’t deny it.
The high quality of the marijuana was evidence that those importing the drugs into the prison had good contacts on the outside. Hopefully, her undercover operation would shed some light on who those contacts were.
‘Talking of Van Damme movies, have you seen Death Warrant?’ said Seema, blowing out a long stream of smoke.
Bailey shook her head.
‘I can’t believe you haven’t seen it,’ said Kay. ‘I thought you were a Van Damme fan. It’s definitely in his top five. Do you know what it’s about?’
‘No.’
‘It’s about this cop that goes undercover in a prison. Are you sure you haven’t seen it?’
Bailey was seized by a sudden paranoia. They were all staring at her and they no longer seemed to be smiling. Did they suspect? Why would they suddenly mention that? Was it a coincidence or were they making a point? Did it seem obvious to them that she was an undercover police officer? Was this some kind of test?
Black tendrils of anxiety wormed their way through her thoughts as her stoned mind frenetically generated all kinds of unpleasant possibilities. Dope paranoia was like that; once the fear gripped you, it was extremely hard to get rid of it. She fought to stay calm, to not show any signs of panic.
Three pairs of red-rimmed eyes bored into her. Time seemed to dilate, slowing right down as it often did in a stoned state. Her heart was beating hard and her mouth was dry. Very dry. She needed water. Why were they all staring at her so intently? She then realised that they were still waiting for an answer from her.
‘Uh… yeah, I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen it. I think I’d have remembered.’
‘Imagine that,’ said Seema slowly. ‘Being an undercover cop in a prison. You’d be fucked if people realised who you actually were.’
‘What kind of person would want to do that anyway?’ said Kay. ‘You’d have to be a bit mad in the first place to want to try and pretend to be someone else. You’d have to be loopier than Mel. Isn’t that right, Mel?’
Mel blinked and looked at them as if seeing them for the first time. Despite staring hard at Bailey, she’d actually been zoned out elsewhere. Kay and Seema laughed.
‘We call her Crazy Mel, don’t we, Mel?’
‘Why’s that?’ asked Bailey.
‘Because she’s crazy,’ said Kay, as if no further explanation was needed.
‘Mel’s not crazy,’ murmured Mel.
‘Then why do you talk about yourself in the third person?’ said Kay.
Seema frowned. ‘Stop being mean.’
‘Yeah stop being mean to Mel,’ grouched Mel.
Bailey began to relax again, her anxiety receding slightly now that she was no longer under the spotlight. The mention of Death Warrant had turned out to be nothing more than just an innocent film reference.
She glanced at her watch. Time was finite and she’d come here for a reason. Now that they appeared to be relatively at ease in her presence, she decided it was time to steer the conversation in a more productive direction.
‘You know… I keep seeing this tattoo around,’ she said. ‘It’s like these three playing cards with th
e letters ABC on them.’
Their smiles disappeared abruptly and the atmosphere in the cell instantly became cold and serious. Kay and Seema swapped glances. They looked frightened. Bailey had obviously touched on something.
‘I just wondered what it meant,’ she said.
‘It stands for Ace Blade Crew,’ said Kay quietly, looking around warily as if the walls had ears.
‘Ace Blade Crew?’
‘They’re a gang. You sure don’t want to mess with them. As the name suggests, they all carry shanks. They’re psychos, especially that Toni, the one with the gold tooth. She’s banged up for murder. Apparently it involved a machete.’
It sounded like they were more dangerous than she’d realised. A prison gang. Interesting.
‘What do they do exactly?’ Bailey asked.
‘They run all the drugs in here,’ said Kay. ‘They have a monopoly on it. Anyone else would have to be stupid to start selling drugs, unless they had some kind of death wish.’
‘The less questions you ask about them, the better,’ said Seema.
‘I just want to know who to watch out for, y’know, for my own personal safety,’ said Bailey. She paused for a moment. ‘I don’t want to end up like Poodle.’
At the mention of Poodle, Kay’s lip curled in contempt.
‘Poodle had drug debts. She was always in debt. These junkie scum always are. I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if they did it to teach her a lesson.’
Bailey nodded with interest. She remembered Keisha’s warning about the consequences of not paying back debts. The Ace Blade Crew sounded like the kind of people who didn’t shy away from violence. Had she already found Alice’s killers?
‘Fuck, man, but I heard she was like… all mutilated,’ said Seema.
‘Just like Mel’s cellmate,’ said Kay. ‘What was her name again? Ally or something? She didn’t last very long, did she?’