Blackjack (26 page)

BACK IN
the Administration office, the IIT leader was making his report. “Chief, they took out a few more. Must have been
before
the riot jumped off. Same as in the shower room. Four men were in the rec cell at the end of the corridor. Playing cards, far as we can tell. All blacks. Probably UBG.

“Why they let this guy Camden live, we don’t know. We don’t have him registered as UBG, but we know he rolled with them. Still, he wasn’t a member. Never inked up, either.”

A studious-looking member of the IIT was holding a file in his hand. “I’ll tell you what was different about that one, Chief. He didn’t do it.”

“Do what?”

“The crime. Yes, I know, the whole joint’s full of innocent men. But it really looks like this guy Camden was outright railroaded. He was just a kid when he first came into the system—crime committed on federal property, some park, I guess. They probably only sent him here to send a message
to blacks on the street. There’s
nothing
in his file that connects him to that rape he’s doing time for.”

“I don’t know his case, just his charges. What are you saying, the whole thing never happened?”

“No, the girl was gang-raped, all right. And they got the guys who did it. Five of them, matter of fact. This guy Camden, like I said, he was just a kid at the time. He
was
hanging out with the men who committed that rape, but that was much earlier that day, a good nine hours before the rape went down.

“And get this: the woman herself—the
victim
—she even said as much during the trial. Pointed right at Camden and said he
wasn’t
one of the ones who raped her.”

“And he was
still
convicted?”

“I guess he was, although I’m damned if I can see how. No fingerprints, no DNA, solid alibi. This is one kid who never got a break.”

“He sure got one last night,” the Chief said, turning to address the entire IIT. “This has got to stop. I need all the shot-callers in here. And I mean now!”

INSIDE THE
conference room. At one end was the Chief, flanked by openly armed guards. At the other end: Banner, the middle-aged black man in the tricolor cap, and a Latino with three tears prominently tattooed on the right side of his face, just below his eye.

The Chief addressed all the convicts collectively. “This is how it’s going to be, from now on. I brought you men in here because the killings have to stop. They
don’t
stop, and I’d just as soon have you all gunned down.

“Now, you all know I can do that. Another escape attempt gone wrong, who’d be shocked at that? And there wouldn’t
be any of that ‘At-ti-ca’ bullshit, not this time. You
must
know we’ve got every one of your crews infiltrated. And that the security cameras see only what we
want
them to see.”

“You can’t fake—”

“Can’t fake
what
, Banner? Can’t fake a convict we
own
stabbing a guard? Why even fake it? And why would we miss a guard who was bringing in drugs … or maybe even pistol that ended up in another convict’s hand. You know, that same convict who
started
the whole escape attempt.”

“I believe you,” the black man said. “You people got Freon for blood.”

“You’re not wrong, Nyati. And I’d rather go that route than put up with
anything
that makes it looks like I can’t control my own house. If this is some stupid game to get the media on your side, it’s already failed.”

His eyes still on the black man, the Chief continued: “We’re telling nothing but the truth in here today. I’ll be dead-center straight. Nyati, at first we thought this was your gang’s work. It looked like one of your typical UBG moves. But now some of your own men have been hit, and in exactly the same way.

“And you, Ortega, maybe you thought your
carnales
could lay back, let the other colors cut their numbers. But when Montero and Rodriguez got done the same way, you knew you were in the kill-zone, too. There’s only one color that counts in here anymore. That’s red. Blood red.

“Banner, your guys took the whole first wave of hits—which was why we had it down to Nyati’s crew—but you’re not who we want, either. You might just be cold enough to sacrifice a few of your own crew if they were worthless to you—especially if they were working both sides; I already admitted that’s what
we’d
do, right? But you don’t have what you’d need to make
this
kind of bloodbath.”

The Chief fired up his pipe, taking his time about
it, emphasizing who was ultimately in charge. Then he launched into his prepared speech:

“Like I said, I’m being straight with you. With you
all
, and all at the same time. Why? Because I don’t want any garbage floating around the rumor mill. This way, if one man lies about what went on here today, the other two can call him on it.

“But this next part’s even more important: I don’t want
anyone
to think one of you is holding more cards than the other. I know there’s no such thing as equality—not in here, not out in the World. You can say ‘gangs’ or you can say ‘countries,’ no real difference. But one side’s
always
got the edge, and I can’t have convicts believing
any
gang has got more firepower than I can call up.”

The three gang leaders stood erect, arms folded in front of their chests, nothing showing on their faces. They knew the fact that they weren’t cuffed had been no gesture of respect—it was the warden’s naked display of power.

“I don’t care who started it, or why. But if there’s any more damn killing of any kind, this whole place goes on lockdown,” the Chief said, the very lack of inflection in his voice underscoring that this was no idle threat; it was a guarantee.

The Chief hand-gestured the three men to come closer to his desk. The guards parted to clear a space for them, then closed in behind. On either side of the Chief’s desk, the guard had been smoothly replaced by a man in a balaclava, holding a pistol in two hands, elbows braced against each body-armored chest.

Both men’s eyes had that soft, wet look any convict knew. If any of the gang bosses so much as leaned in the Chief’s direction, all three were chopped meat.

“Now, listen, and listen good,” the Chief told them, his voice both quiet and hard. “I didn’t say what I’m about to say, understand? Nobody here is ever going to
say
I did. The
cameras are on, but that’s just in case any of you want to play kamikaze. You never heard straighter talk from my side of the fence, and you never will.

“Okay, listen up. You think we don’t know about the dope coming in? Or the gambling, the loan-sharking, the pimping?
Any
of the rackets your crews run? You think we
haven’t
broken the codes in your letters? Listened in on your three-way calls? You don’t think we’ve got informers all over the place?

“But have we keep-locked any of you? No. Any other joint in the country, you’d all be in black-hole Ad Seg. In fact,” he said, pausing a little to let his words sink in, “you’ve all been wondering when we’re going to get around to that.

“Well, we were never
going
to. We’ve been letting you guys run your own rackets for a long time, haven’t we? You think we don’t know which officers are on your payrolls? There’s things you can’t use your own mules for—we know all about that. And the cell phones, too.

“But you couldn’t stand prosperity, could you? You had to go and break the contract. Some of your guys have done some nasty stuff. Okay, we know there’s always going to be a certain amount of killing inside a place like this. It happens. But not the way it’s happening now.”

The Chief puffed on his pipe a couple of times before he spoke again.

“That contract between us didn’t have to be signed for everyone to know what was on the paper. You get a whole lot of … privileges, let’s call them, and I get a nice, quiet joint. Not so quiet that it would make anyone watching suspicious, but
under control
. I lose that,
you
lose it all.

“We know you’ve got some of the tunnel system mapped. After lights-out, you’ve been doing whatever you want down there. Every crew’s got its own section, and nobody’s been stupid enough to make
us
carry a body upstairs to the blocks.

“So listen close. We’ve got enough space in the blackout rooms for all of you—not just the shot-callers,
all
of you. This is a federal institution, remember? So if space gets tight we can always use a little bus therapy to fix the problem.

“We can keep this whole place on lockdown for as long as it takes to break every racket, wreck every system, destroy every network—all the things you’ve invested years to build up.

“And if you make us go
that
far, we can even make a few bodies ourselves.

“By tomorrow, we’ll have
double
staffing in place. Every new man is going to be on loan from a cell-extraction team—and you know who gets recruited for
that
kind of work.

“You ever try to live on one meal a day? Especially when you’re afraid to breathe too deep with all the gas floating around?

“And that’s just the beginning. The public is
not
going to do a damn thing for you. There isn’t going to be any media sympathy. No little Web site is going to ‘report’ to the outside. Cyber-troops can’t do anything but post a bunch of silly crap anyway. Nobody’s going to take them seriously.

“Why do you think we don’t care about the cell phones? Even that piece of garbage Manson got his hands on one. Once it hit the papers, they had to take it away from that sick little freak. But nobody bothered
yours
, did they? Ever wonder why?

“That’s all about to end unless this
stops
. So—anybody got anything they want to say?”

“It’s not us,” Nyati jumped in first. “When we thought this maniac was just snuffing Caucs, we didn’t give a damn. But now that he did some of us, we want him as bad as you do.”

“It wasn’t any of my guys, either,” Banner said. “Hell, how could we get a man into the nigger wing anyway? You got the cameras, so you
know
it wasn’t us.”

Ortega shrugged his shoulders expressively. “We are in the middle,” he said. “Like always. And the killer has taken some of ours as well. Would we seek revenge? There is no choice—if we cannot protect our own, we are nothing. But we do not believe it was
any
prisoner doing all this.”

“Nobody knows nothing, that’s the way you want to play it?” the Chief said. “About what I expected. The problem is, I don’t think you’re playing. I truly believe you don’t know one damn thing about what’s been going down. But if I have to ask you again, and you
still
don’t know the answer, I will.”

CROSS AND
Tiger were inside one of the Visiting Room bathrooms. They stood derma-close, speaking at a level well below whispering.

“It’s time to tell me the truth,” Cross said. “All of it. Whoever’s doing whatever’s happening in here, it’s not something I ever dealt with.”