Mortal Lock (18 page)

“Yeah.”

“And that’s all we’re asking for,” he said. “A little discipline.”

“But none of our—”

“Only thing is,” he said, talking right over me, “we’d kind of like to do the discipline ourselves. I mean, you do whatever you think needs to be done. But, when that’s over, we get our turn. Fair enough?”

“If one of the Vikings did anything like that, I would—”

“Not one,” Baron James said. “At least two. Probably three, but we’ll settle for two.”

“Who are you saying jumped your man?”

“I just told you,” he said.

“You said Vikings,” I said. I knew, if I backed off, even a little, we were all done. “I asked you, which ones?”

“How would Chango know your boys?”

“Well, you said—”

“I said Vikings. I didn’t say which ones. That’s for you to find out. And deal with.”

“There’s no way any of—”

“This here is Wednesday,” Baron James said. His voice was soft, but it was ice cold. “We give you until Sunday night. Now, your boys, they seen us talking for a while now. Seen us talking like men. No screaming and yelling. Calm and cool, am I right? So, when you go on back, what you tell them is, the Mystic Dragons thinking about making you Vikings an affiliate club. You know what that is?”

“Yeah. But I thought you guys only took—”

“Times are changing,” Baron James said. “This color thing, it put a lot of good men in the ground. And a lot more in the penitentiary. There ain’t no money in it. The Mystic Dragons, we got plans. There’s all kinds of rackets going on in the city, and we’re going to take our place, soon enough. This is a big city, and we entitled to our piece of it.

“Now, the only way we make the right people listen is behind
numbers. Big numbers. What we got to do is consolidate,” he said, like he loved the word. “We can’t be fighting each other all the time; what we get out of that? So, that’s what you tell your boys.”

“But you’re not really …”

“What I just tell you, that’s the stone truth,” Baron James said. “Everybody be doing this, you see soon enough. Even the Chinaboys, way downtown, they stepping past color when it come to business. Us, too. We reaching out to the little clubs … no offense … to bring them in. You don’t get to be Mystic Dragons, but you get to be with us; you understand?”

“I think I do.”

“But you know the rules,” he said. “And the toll you got to pay. You got to give us the boys who stomped Chango.”

I didn’t say anything. I knew more was coming.

“Sunday night,” Baron James said, “we pull up to the curb, just like now. We get out, just like now. You walk over to us, just like now. Only, Sunday night, you have two men with you. The ones we want.” Baron James looked at me. His eyes were green—I never saw that on a colored, before. “Everybody gets in the car,” he said. “The car takes off. Later, when you come back, you president of an official Mystic Dragons affiliate.”

Baron James leaned in, close to me. “Only, when you come back, you come back alone.”

5

We started that same night. First, I put out the word—all the Royal Vikings had to come in, emergency. Then I questioned every single one of the boys.

Little Augie and Bunchie helped me. Sammy, too. I knew it couldn’t have been any of those three, because they had all been with me the night Chango got stomped.

Everybody denied doing it. I expected that. What I didn’t
expect was that I couldn’t tell which ones were lying, the way I usually can.

Even in our own little piece of the city, you didn’t see Royal Vikings out by themselves too often. We had our clubhouse, the candy store, the corner; that was about it. The school had dances at night, sometimes, but that was too far out of our territory for anyone to go alone. And, if you did go alone, it would take a lot of heart to fly colors. Sammy might do it, or Little Augie, but not the rest, I didn’t think.

And Baron James had said it was at least two men.

The clubhouse had a backroom. We used it for initiations, and for when we got the debs to come down. That night, we used it for the interrogations.

We all suspected these particular two boys might be guilty. They were real tight with each other, partners, and we figured they might be plotting to move up in the organization. But even after Sammy hurt one of them pretty bad, they wouldn’t admit anything.

By Friday night, I knew I wouldn’t have anyone I could give to Baron James.

6

I got my men together, and I told them how it had to be. I talked for a long time before I was finished.

“What happens to us?” Little Augie asked. He was talking to me, but I knew he was speaking for the whole club.

“The Mystic Dragons don’t know any of our real names,” I said. “Not even mine. Just Hawk. The first thing, the jackets have to go. I mean, burn them. The Royal Vikings are done. Once this is over, the only one the Mystic Dragons are going to be looking for is me.”

“You sure you want to …” Sammy said.

“What choice is there?” I told them. “I’m not going to play
Judas on guys who didn’t do anything. If we want to keep our little piece, here, we’d have to go to war against the Mystic Dragons. That’s crazy; we’d all be wiped out in a day. I’m the president; I know what I have to do. I got people in Chicago. Soon as it’s done, that’s where I’ll go.”

“The hell with that,” Little Augie said. “Just go. Tonight.”

Little Augie was a good man. I was sorry to lie to him, about having people in Chicago. But the whole club was there when I was talking, and I wasn’t sure of them all. I knew the Mystic Dragons would be around right after I took off, asking questions, and I couldn’t take a chance that one of them wouldn’t turn rat, if they got scared enough.

“No,” I said. “The way I have to do it is the only way. They’re going to get me, anyway. I might as well have a name.”

“Where are you going to get a real pistol?” Bunchie said. “Nobody around here has one to sell.”

“The same place we get our jackets,” I said. “The guy who makes them up for us, I heard, if you bring the right money, he can get you anything. Now, everybody, put up your coin. Tomorrow, I’m going shopping.”

7

I didn’t blink when the old man in the shop told me it would be three hundred dollars for the pistol and the bullets. I told him I’d leave the money with him, come back in a couple of hours. He looked at me for a minute, then he said, “That’s not how it’s done. You want the piece, you wait right here for it. Understand?”

I said I did. Right then is when I started to understand a lot of things. Like why people call a pistol a “piece.”

The old man picked up the phone and said something in Italian. I didn’t speak it, but I figured what it was about.

When he hung up, he looked at me. “You’re getting bigger,” he said. “All the time.”

“I’m almost eighteen,” I told him.

“I mean your … ambitions,” the old man said.

“Oh. Like what I just—?”

“Sure, that. A business expense. And I see you’ve been recruiting, too. Outside the tribe. Very smart. All over the city, you can see, that’s the trend among … businessmen.”

I think I knew it right then, but I gave myself a minute to make sure I was under control. Then I asked the old man, “What do you mean, outside the tribe?”

“The last bunch who came in here for your jackets, that was a surprise,” he said. “I never saw Spanish boys in your … organization before.”

8

Right after that, I straightened things out with Baron James. We agreed on the tolls. I paid them, and the Mystic Dragons never moved on the Royal Vikings.

The pistol the old man sold me worked perfect. The only way I could use it was by calling for a one-on-one, so the cops found out pretty quick it was me who aced Junta.

I thought, maybe, the Renegades wouldn’t testify against me … you’re not supposed to. But they did. By the time the court was through with me, I was doing The Book. That’s what they call a life sentence … from throwing the book at you, I guess.

When I got to prison, I came in with a name. Not just from what I did—there were plenty of guys who had a body up there. But I was the first white guy inside who had friends in the Mystic Dragons, just like Baron James promised. It made me kind of a leader in there, even that young.

I see the Board again in another year. Maybe they’ll cut me loose this time. I’ve got a perfect institutional record—I know how to do time.

I’m only forty-two years old now. It’s not too late for me to get my little piece of the city.

for Matt Kinney

A malevolent fog reduced the morning sun to a hazy, rancid-butter splotch. It descended as it always did: inexorably, until it merged with the prison walls to form a sea of the dullest gray.

The inner gates opened, and the yard slowly came to life. Convicts moved in intricate patterns; some to their own territory, others to the no-man’s-land where the unaffiliated were allowed to congregate. The boundary lines were invisible to outsiders. To the prisoners, they were as clear as the concertina wire that topped the surrounding wall, occasionally glittering in sunlight like a necklace of razors.

Domino players set up their tables, weight lifters assembled their iron, joggers started on their first circuit. A few men began limbering up on the handball court, their gloveless hands marking them as veterans of the sport.

Only the shadowy shark of sudden, explosive violence moved freely across the boundaries, swimming silently through the tight clusters of convicts. A lethal shape-shifter, never motionless, it would stop only to strike.

The yard was a border town on the edge of a frontier that few of its residents would ever cross. And now it was open for business. Bets were placed, debts collected, sex threatened, plots hatched.…

One of the last cons to enter the yard was an elderly man, so old he had become an ancient, unnoticed relic. He moved glacially, his
back bent from the weight of his Life-Without term. His destination was a tiny patch of stone-hard dirt, in a corner that never saw the sun.

The old man was mostly bald, with only a fringe of bleached-out white hair remaining. The eyes behind his taped-together, steel-rimmed glasses were the color of denim after a thousand turns in the laundry.

As the old man settled into position in front of his patch, a guard strolled by, a muscular young man with a military haircut and a bodybuilder’s biceps.

“What’re you up to, Pop?”

“Ah, you know me, Rico. I’m planting my seeds, like I always do.”

“Yeah, I know. What I meant was, how are you feeling?”

“Pretty good, son. All things considered. What about you?”

The guard stepped closer to the old man. He rotated his head on his thick neck as if to get out a kink, scanning the yard in the same motion. Satisfied, he began telling the old man about how his dumb-fuck brother-in-law had gotten himself in trouble. Again. And how that made his wife so upset she wasn’t fit to live with. Again.

“But if I say one word about that useless slug, she gets mad at
me
. So what am I supposed to do?” the guard finished, five minutes later.

The old man nodded sympathetically, knowing no answer was expected.

The guard watched the yard with hands behind his back and his chest expanded. Playing his role. “So, you still won’t let your granddaughter come for a visit?” he said.

“You know how it is when girls come here, Rico. She’s been through enough.”

“But, Pop, I know she wants to—”

“It’s better this way,” the old man said, closing the subject. For today.

After the guard moved off, two men passed by where the old man was working. They were both in their late twenties, cold-eyed and prison-complected. One nodded curtly to the old man, as if deigning to acknowledge his existence. The old man nodded back—just a meaningless movement of his head.

The two men kept moving, walking the track around the outer yard in a leisurely circuit as they did every day. They walked in perfect synchronization, shoulders almost, but never quite, touching.