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Freddie nods. “Right.”
“So you tell him everything you told me about his threats and where he took you before he delivered them. The only thing you don’t tell him, Freddie, is that I asked you to come forward. That’s the one teeny-tiny thing you keep to yourself.” I give his shoulder a squeeze. “That’s go
I go from Freddie to Warden Brook’s office. He tells me that he’s spoken to the two refs, and I guarantee him a win. We’re one-point underdogs by now.
“You’re not worried about losing Spooky?”
“You remember when you brought me here, Warden? You remember I promised you a championship? Well, tonight I’m go
I know the warden bets on every game, always on the Tigers, even when I tell him the team’s so worn-out we’d get our asses kicked by the Menands High School Barracudas. He’s a fan is what he is, a former athlete who lives through his favorite team, which is us.
“So make room in the trophy case,” I declare, “because we’re bringin’ the cup home.”
My next stop is in the computer room, where I find my teacher, Cliff Entwhistle, hard at work. Cliff is a big-time gambler, but unlike Warden Brook, he’s willing to wager against the Tigers. Though I only bet with the team (and once threatened to crush the fingers of a ski
“What’s the word?” I ask him. “Out on the yard?”
“Without Spooky, Menands doesn’t have a chance.”
“Good, because I want to get a bet down.” I retrieve a pair of C-notes from their resting place in the crotch of my underwear and hand them over. If the coke deal had gone down as pla
Cliff nods. “Thanks, Bubba.”
“Don’t thank me. There’s something I need you to do. Like, right now.”
An hour later I make my way down a long flight of stairs to the furnace room. Two stories high and at least a hundred feet long, the room houses a state-of-the-art, fully automated boiler the size and shape of a diesel locomotive. It being May and warm, the unit is only producing hot water. Still, the steady hiss of the flame is loud enough for my purposes. I work my way along the north wall, the route taken by Campbell when he recruited Freddie, avoiding a pair of cameras mounted on the ceiling. The cameras use heat-sensitive film and are in place to detect fires.
The coal room, Campbell ’s office, is not as Freddie described it. I expect a large empty space, but the room is cluttered with discarded desks. There are desks upside down, on their sides, on three legs, desks piled one on top of the other. Desk drawers, heaped in a corner, rise halfway to the ceiling.
It’s now one o’clock. Freddie’s scheduled to make his confession at two. That leaves me an hour to find my product. Assuming it’s here at all, that Campbell doesn’t have another hideaway, that he didn’t take his prize home with him, maybe peddle the weight to a street dealer.
I begin to search, at first systematically, then more and more frantically as time passes. A pair of overhead lights don’t respond to a switch next to the door, and the only illumination splashes in through the open doorway. The desks are extremely dusty. The dust coats my throat and mouth as I work. When I run my fingers over my brush cut, it feels like I’m dragging them through mud.
Somewhere around one forty-five, I force myself to slow down. I tell myself I have one of those unforeseen problems that crop up from time to time, no matter how carefully I try to plan my activities. I tell myself they happen to everybody. It’s not God getting me, like I sometimes thought before I learned to control my anger.
I set out to draw ten deep breaths, each one slower and deeper than the last, just the way I’ve been trained. I don’t get past the fifth before I realize there’s another way, and if I’d only taken a moment to think before I started ripping desks apart, I could have saved myself a lot of work.
I’m standing just to the left of the door, looking for a good place to hide, when Campbell walks into the room. He is not alone. A dealer named Redmond Mitchell is with him. At the tail end of a ten-to-life bit, Red is also a veteran of New York’s maximum security institutions. His stay at Menands is theoretically the final step in his rehabilitation.
Coming from the intensely bright furnace room, neither Red nor Campbell sees me until I step in front of them.
“What’s up, guys? You lookin’ for me?”
Campbell is maybe five-ten. A layer of fat covers a much thicker layer of muscle on his heavy boned frame. At one time, I suppose, he was quite the brawler, an upstate redneck who would have been a convict if he hadn’t become a screw But now he’s nearing fifty, a hard drinker who maintains his self-image by terrorizing inmates, like Freddie Morrow, who are in no position to fight back.
Red is another matter. He’s younger, in much better condition, a man who maintained his personal dignity over many years in many prisons. I see Campbell glance at him, smiling, convinced that Red is an ally in this war. He’s wrong.
“Red,” I explain, “what I gotta do here is convince this dumb-as-shit screw to show me where he’s hidden my cocaine. Most likely, it’d be better if you weren’t here to see it.”
I know that Red’s not afraid of me. I also know that he’s got a release date for the end of the summer and the last thing he reeds is a serious beef. “No harm, no foul,” he says. “I’m not out no money and I ain’t got a dog in this fight.” He backs through the door, then asks, “You go
“I guarantee it.”
“Thass good, man. ’Cause I took the points big-time.”
Red steps into the furnace room and his footsteps are instantly masked by the hiss of the boiler. He might be lingering a few feet from the open doorway, or he might be on the moon. Campbell stares up at me and I stare down at him. I wonder if he’s looked through my file, tried to get an idea of who he was up against. But, no, careful is not his style. Freddie told him about the coke and he wanted it and that was all she wrote. When he found Spooky in the locker room, he could have backed off, or busted Spooky and taken the credit. But he was already counting the money, already holding it in his sweaty palm.
“Where’s my product, Percy?”
The shiny white surface of his bald scalp slowly reddens. Most likely, in his entire career, no con ever spoke to him this way. But then, in times past, he always had plenty of backup. Now he’s on his own. He can’t call for help, even if he could make himself heard over the din of the furnace, without everything coming out. Spooky, Freddie, the cocaine, everything. Officer Percy Campbell is helpless.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Yablonsky.”
“You can do better than that.” I watch his hand inch toward his back pocket. It’s pathetic, really. “You wa
Credit where credit is due, Campbell’s right hand dives into his pocket and he snarls, “See you in hell, ya Jew bastard.”
Despite the epithet and the made-for-TV dialogue, death is not on today’s agenda. First because I’m not a killer, and second because Officer Campbell’s body would draw far too much attention. Most likely, he’s already a suspect in Spooky’s murder.
I grab his wrist, pin his hand in his pocket, then put all 270 pounds into a looping right that makes a sound like a bat slammed into a watermelon as it crashes into his chest. His eyes roll up, his legs wobble, then fail him altogether. He drops to the floor and stops breathing.