Blackjack (23 page)

“Nice,” Cross said, whistling.

“We take care of our own,” Banner said proudly. “We got a kite you was coming. And we got a lot of juice with the COs, so it was easy to hook you up in front.”

“
Very
nice,” Cross said, taking off his shirt. His undershirt
was sleeveless. Banner moved in close, making no secret of the fact that he was carefully examining the exposed tattoo.

What Banner saw was a wooden cross. From one of the horizontal bars, a black man hung limply from a length of rope, a noose around his neck. The effect was both terrifying and chilling: a man lynched from a Christian cross. At the base of the cross, there was a series of lightning bolts … seven in all.

“Damn!” Banner said. “I never saw one like that before.”

“Never?” Cross asked, his tone just this side of threatening.

“Well, I
heard
something about them … but I been down a long time. Stuff comes in from the World, you can’t always trust it.”

Cross moved even closer to Banner, his face almost touching the other man’s. An intimately aggressive gesture, deliberately invading personal space.

“White Night,” Cross said, very softly. “You ever hear of
that?
Be a good idea for you to ask around.
Then
come back and see me”—making it clear he was dismissing the other man.

THE RIGID
requirement that all prisoners had to be locked down each night by ten o’clock was apparently no deterrent to certain individuals.

Late that night, Banner was standing next to a man whose body was covered in whipcord muscle, a pair of thick-framed glasses on his face.

“White Night,” Banner ordered the other man. “No, I don’t know how to
spell
it. Just find out … and find out quick!”

The man with the glasses walked back toward his cell, past a guard who seemed not to notice. Only the sharpest
eyes could have detected a folded scrap of paper passing from captive to captor. And everyone was quite deliberately
not
watching.

THE GUARD
clocked out a few hours later. He drove to a nearby bar, and ambled over to the pay phone between the toilets in the back.

His call was answered by a man in a quilted smoking jacket, royal-purple silk with black lapels. He was leaning back comfortably in an oxblood leather armchair, surrounded by walls of bookcases. An elaborately framed law degree hung on one bare knotty-pine wall. A bare brunette posed against another.

The man hung up, then punched a button on a phone console. A light blinked in another location. A short, squat man in a room dominated by electronic gear picked up the receiver.

“Yeah,” he said, in response to a snapped-out question. “We got someone deep inside, but he’s expensive. Real expensive. How high am I authorized to go?”

“As far as you have to,” the lawyer instructed.

“And you want it …?”

“Now. Tonight. Understand?
Tonight
, or it’s worthless. I have to visit him tomorrow. And I need to have this information when I do.”

The lawyer punched another button on his phone console, as if to re-emphasize who was in charge. The brunette recognized the gesture, and slowly slid her back down the wall. A trained dancer, she never broke eye contact with the lawyer as she slowly worked herself into an all-fours position on the plush purple rug.

THE SHORT
, squat man was on the phone, speaking urgently. “I don’t care
what
it costs. Yeah, it
has
to be tonight. Send it over the modem, encryption 44-A. I’m wiring the payment into your account soon as I hang up. It’ll be there in ten seconds. Now, go get what I asked for!”

“Oh, I’ll get it, all right,” Percy said, after hanging up the phone on the other end. “Sucker.”

THE NEXT
day, a man who had exchanged an elaborate smoking jacket for a conservative but costly three-piece suit was seated across from Banner in a private conference room. The lawyer was talking; Banner was listening.

“White Night. Night, like the opposite of Day. It stands for the time when every single kike on the planet goes down, and they take the muds and fags with them. Kristallnacht to the tenth power.

“Nobody knows how many of them there are, but word is they’re the special enforcement arm for some of the leader-less cells. If this guy has seven bolts under the cross, it means he’s done seven hits. Not total—seven for White Night, specifically.

“We picked that tactic up from the Russians. Tattoo IDs, I mean. Not just the usual ink, something you have to
earn
. This guy—Arden, right?—he’s an executioner. I don’t know what kind of backup he has in here, but one thing’s absolutely certain—he’s got
total
backing from the top. He’s going to
expect
cooperation. Absolute cooperation.”

“Hey, thanks, man. You really came through.”

“Fourteen Words,” the lawyer intoned, leaning forward to shake hands.

Banner watched the lawyer walk out of the conference room, the expression on his face clearly disclaiming any sense of “brotherhood” with a man who memorized slogans but still charged full price.

THE PRISON
yard was clearly and sharply divided into sectors. There were, literally, lines painted on the concrete. The tower guards kept their weapons close to hand all the time. And in plain view.

The Latino contingent was off to one side—cohesive, but seriously outnumbered. This wouldn’t be the case in Cook County Jail, but in the federal tank, where most of their tribe wasn’t gang-connected, just awaiting deportation, they were such a distinct minority that intra-ethnic fighting wasn’t even an option.

Despite the summer heat, all sorts of recreational activities were intensely pursued: weight-lifting, handball, dominoes, men walking endless circuits around an oval track, some in pairs. Banner stood in a corner with Cross, a wall of white soldiers between them and the yard.

“Truth is, the way things are now, us and the niggers, we both work the same rackets.” Brief glances showed the truth of his statement: unaffiliated inmates were being shaken down, cigarettes were changing hands for pills, a shank was hand-passed from one man to another, all the way down a chain, and all strictly by color.

“We got this joint divided about in half, but even that won’t hold—they’ve been eating away at us over the past few years. All over the country. At least in the federal pens, that much I’ve seen for myself.

“Used to be we had the whole dope thing wired. Guards wouldn’t mule it in for niggers, and their bitches can only
carry so much at a time. But those days are gone. There’s a lot of major dealers doing time now—they got their own street sources. And don’t forget, there’s nigger guards now, too. So they pretty much can get whatever
we
can get.”

“From what I hear, they’ve been getting some bodies.”

“True enough. They took out that Towers guy right in his cell. No big mystery to that. Guards in here are just like cops on the bricks: there’s a price for everything. They most likely didn’t do any more than just leave that skinner’s cell unlocked.”

“Why that one? You taking
his
kind in now?”

“Hell, no! Way we figure it, the niggers just wanted to profile. Send us a message that no white man’s safe—they can get to us anywhere. That’s why we hit two of them the next day—that was our answer.

“In here, it’s just like out there, only it’s coming on faster. Race war, that’s what I’m talking about. And only one race is gonna be standing at the end.”

Banner’s words echoed as Cross watched plain-view violence being studiously ignored by custodial staff: everything from fistfights to Pearl Harbor knifings. Nothing had changed from the last time he was incarcerated—firebombing a cell, poisoning food, and battery-packing a sleeping victim are permanent fixtures of prison life. Doing lengthy time was always a multi-color fabric, and homicide its only binding thread.

All conversation stopped as a flying wedge of guards stomped past, double-timing, shaking the ground with the pounding of their heavy boots. They were dressed in one-piece uniforms, body armor, and helmets with full-face visors, mirror-glassed to make individual identification impossible. Each officer carried a see-through shield, shaped so he could maneuver behind it, and a full belt of weapons, including illegal-voltage Tasers.

But no firearms. Not inside the blocks. The Federal Bureau of Prisons’ way of saying “Never again.”

“Goon squad,” Banner side-spoke to Cross, while looking in the direction the squad was running. “Must be some weird stuff going on over there again.”

“What’s ‘over there’ mean?”

“That whole block,” Banner answered, nodding his head in that direction. “Upstairs, it’s PC. Middle is for the psychos. Down is the Death House. Two rows of twenty cells each … with the Green Room in the middle.”

“Green Room?”

“Used to be the gas chamber, long time ago. Now it’s just an empty room. No executions here. For that, they have to move you to a Level Seven.”