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“Bubba, there was nobody within ten feet of that tip-out.”
“What can I say, Warden? I mean, nothin’ went right for me the whole game. Somehow I thought Spooky was there. I thought I saw him.”
“You’re so full of shit it’s leaking out of your ears. I can smell it, Bubba. It’s stinkin’ up my office.”
Ever the humble convict, I lower my head before disagreeing. “Swear on my mother, Warden. When I saw the tip go out of bounds I flipped out. Like, it’s the championship game and I’ve been fucking up and now I fucked up the worst of all.” I raise my eyes, meet his gaze. “You know what I’m sayin’ here because you been there, too. I took it out on the moron, all my frustration, everything he said.” I ball my fists, don the most fearsome scowl in my repertoire. “I wanted to kill him, Warden. I wanted to put the motherfucker down.”
I’m six inches taller than Warden Brook’s six-three, and, at 270, eighty pounds heavier. Still, he’s unimpressed by my ferocity. “You go
“Does that mean we’re playing?”
“If Spooky…” He pauses, starts again. “If the incident had nothing to do with the basketball game, I don’t see why we should punish the players and the fans. It doesn’t make sense.” He contemplates his hands for a moment. “As for the fight… well, you say he threw the first punch and he says you did. The officials didn’t see what happened and neither did anyone else who counts. I think the league’s go
So far, the conversation’s gone pretty much the way I expected. Menands is populated mainly by white-collar crooks: lawyers who raided a client’s trust fund, bankers who robbed their own banks, doctors who plundered Medicaid, boiler room operators who hung around a little too long. These are folks with money; they love to bet on sports and the persistent rumor is that the cons making book in the yard pay off to a certain deputy warden who pays off to Warden Brook. I don’t know if the rumor’s true, but when I finally respond, I’m definitely hoping.
“If you’re worried about the game, Warden, there’s something you might wa
“And what would that be?”
“Well, you could put a little bug in the ears of the officials. I’m not talkin’ about high pressure here. I’m talkin’ about very low-key so it doesn’t get around.”
“Bubba, you wa
“Okay, Warden.” I lean a little closer, drop my voice. “The way it looks right now, what with all the bad attitude out there, the first hard foul next week and somebody’s go
Though Warden Brook says, “Bubba, you don’t have a redeeming bone in your body,” his smile, as I read it, is purely admiring.
It’s after midnight when I’m finally hunkered down with Road Miller and Tiny Lee in the day area of our housing unit. There’s a forty-watt bulb over the door, enough light for the three o’clock count, but not enough for me to read the messages in my partners’ eyes.
“Talk to me,” I tell Road. “Tell me what’s on your mind. ’Cause I know you been thinkin’ about it all night.”
Roger “Road” Miller is our starting power forward. He’s a little too light for the position, especially on the defensive end, but he can elevate on the jumper and he rolls to the basket with determination. I’ve always wondered if Road’s mother deliberately named him after a white country singer. Road is ebony-ski
“Freddie is what’s on my mind,” he tells me. “As in Freddie fucked us.”
Freddie Morrow is the team drudge. He does everything from stacking the equipment to washing our dirty uniforms. I knew when I recruited him that he was the weak link in the chain, but I had no other way to get the coke out of the locker room.
“Freddie was sitting on the bench when Spooky went down,” I point out. “Plus, he hasn’t got the balls of a canary.”
“I didn’t say nothin’ to nobody,” Road insists, “and Tiny didn’t say nothin’ neither. We ain’t stupid enough to brag on our business, not when we ain’t done it yet.”
“What about Spooky?”
“No way.”
“And me? What about me?”
“Don’t be an asshole,” Tiny Lee declares. Tiny’s our point guard. He’s five-eight and doesn’t weigh more than 150 pounds. Meanwhile, he fears nothing. “If Spooky got whacked over some beef with another con, the coke would still be there. It wasn’t and that means somebody had to tell somebody else. There’s no way around it.”
We’re sitting at a rectangular plastic table bolted to the floor, on gray plastic chairs, also bolted down. We’re supposed to be in our bunks, but we’re the basketball team and the screws won’t bust us for petty violations.
“I don’t know about you guys,” I say, “but I want my coke back.”
Tiny says, “That or somebody’s blood.”
“No, Tiny. I want the coke, which, if you recall, we still haven’t paid for.” I rub my fingertips together, then sing, “Money, money, moneyyyyyyy.”
I came into the deal as part of an effort to turn my life around, an effort which included my anger-management and computer classes. Though I’d been incarcerated for a crime of violence, then passed four years in a very violent prison, my short stay at the Menands Correctional Facility presented me with an inescapable truth: when it comes to white-collar crime, the profits are long and the sentences short. And what I figured, when Tiny first approached me, was that if I sacrificed and worked very hard, I could accumulate enough capital to buy into a top-tier boiler room operation when I finally made parole.
“Oh, man,” Road moans. “I’m go
“Nobody talks to Freddie,” I tell him, a calculated act of disrespect. I’m Road’s partner, not his boss. “Let’s take a little time, take a look around. We got nothin’ but time, right? Time is what we’re doin’.”
Road smiles, cheered, perhaps, by my attitude. “Wha’chu thinkin’, Bubba? I know you schemin’ somethin’.”
“Look around you, Road, next time you’re in the yard. How many cons you think you’re go
Tiny has a terrible burn scar on the right side of his face, and he scratches it when he’s lost in thought. He’s scratching away now, and I lean in his direction as I continue. “You see Spooky’s hands, his wrists? You see any cuts? Spooky came down from Clinton, where you can get your ass shanked for brushing up against somebody’s shoulder. There’s no way he’d let anyone he didn’t trust get close enough to take him out before he could put up his hands.”
By this time, I have a pretty good idea who capped Spooky. What I don’t have is a way to get the coke back. I don’t know where it is, and this particular individual can’t be approached directly. I can’t lay my suspicions on my partners either. I have to keep them under control, especially Tiny, who’s liable to go off, do something stupid, get us all shipped out.
“Like I said, let’s take a few days, look around, see who’s out there. Meanwhile, come Tuesday’s practice, we’ll send Freddie a little message.”