Keeplock: A Novel of Crime (17 page)

“Pete’s comin’ in with us,” Eddie said matter-of-factly. “He’s the last one. Now we’re ready.”

Tony Morasso’s confusion turned to fury. He raised shaking fists to his chest and turned on Eddie. “Nobody asked
me
,” he shouted. “How come nobody didn’t ask
me
?”

“Because you’re a bug, Tony,” I said, “and bugs don’t make decisions.”

“Why do you let him talk to me like that?” Tony spoke without looking at me. Small drops of spit flew off his tongue, spattering Eddie, who stared into Tony’s eyes without flinching.

“Pete’s comin’ in with us, cuz,” Eddie said calmly. “I didn’t ask you because I didn’t feel like it. What the fuck have you got to do with it, anyway? I’m runnin’ the show, here. Which is what I told ya when ya signed up. Now, I expect you to get along with Pete. Just like I expect everyone else to get along with
you.
I got too much to worry about to be a fuckin’ baby-sitter. If you got a problem, work it out with Pete. You understand what I’m sayin’?”

There was no profit in allowing Tony Morasso to pick his time and place. I wrapped a paper clip around a taut rubber band and let fly.

Ping.

The clip bounced off his forehead and landed on the floor. Just like the asshole in the subway, Tony stared down at the clip in disbelief.

“You fuckin’ bastard.”

Ping.

This one hit him in the neck and fell to his shoulder. He brushed it off like it was a cockroach, then spun on his heel to face me. His eyes were rolling wildly.

“You better cut that shit out. We ain’t in the joint now.”

His voice was so sharp it sawed its way into my brain. I started to flinch, then thought better of it. “I’m your baby-sitter, Tony,” I said. “And I wanna tell ya somethin’ out front—if you’re a bad boy, I’m gonna punish you. On the other hand, if you’re good, I’m gonna give you a cookie.”

He stamped his foot so hard the glasses rattled in the cupboard.

Ping.

“I want out. I want out. I ain’t doin’ this job with him in it.”

Dead silence. Every eye was fixed on Tony, including Annie’s. I could see the truth wash over him, penetrating his rage. There was no walking out. He was trapped.

Ping.

He rushed at me, his small blocky hands curled in front of him like claws. I have to admit that his contorted face and his high-pitched squeal were frightening. In most situations they would have given him an advantage, freezing his opponent for a split second. But I’d dealt with bugs before and I knew that self-control, if you can accomplish it without surrendering to the fear, gives you a big edge. I stepped to one side and kicked hard at his right leg. He went down head first and I jumped on his back, grabbed his hair, and slammed his face into the linoleum. I didn’t wait for him to acknowledge the pain. He was too far gone for that. I cupped my right hand and crashed it into his ear.

His eardrum must have been vibrating like a harp string. It should have hurt enough to catch his attention, but when I got off his back, he tried to get up. Fortunately, he was too dizzy to do anything but wobble forward. With all the time in the world, I curled my right hand into a fist, rotated my shoulder back and smashed him in the ribs. This time he stayed on the floor.

I walked over to the kitchen table and sat down. “Somebody say something about breakfast?”

“Comin’ right up,” Annie announced. Her face was flushed with excitement. If this little drama had gone down in a bar, I would have rolled out with Annie hanging on my arm.

Avi and John were already sitting at the table. Eddie came over and joined us, leaving Tony Morasso to consider the dynamics of the situation.

“I fucked up the eggs,” Annie announced, ripping the pan off the stove. “Anybody like burnt eggs?” She answered her own question by dumping the mess in the garbage and starting over.

“I can’t tell you how glad I am to have someone to talk to,” Parker announced. “I’ve been trying to show these guys how I got into the computer. It’s like teaching physics to an amoeba.”

“Later, John,” I said. “Let’s do it later.”

I was watching Tony carefully. He had struggled to his feet again, then staggered over to Annie. For a minute I thought he was going to attack her, she being the weakest person in the room, but when he turned back to me, he had a knife in his hand.

The room went silent. Except for the click of a revolver being cocked. Fortunately, the revolver was in Eddie’s hand.

“Put the knife down, Tony, or I’ll blow your fuckin’ heart through the back of your chest. Put it
down
.”

“You said no guns before we do the job.” Tony was on the edge of tears. “How come you got a gun?”

“Put the knife down, Tony. Or I’ll kill you.”

Eddie’s voice was rock hard. His eyes showed all the emotion of a preying mantis contemplating a butterfly. Tony put the knife back on the counter.

“See, it’s not hard to be a good boy,” I said. Tony tossed me a hate-filled look. “Remember what I told you? About if you were a good boy, I’d give you a cookie? Here’s the cookie.”

I held up the tiny envelopes of heroin, pinching them gently between my thumb and forefinger. He blinked several times, trying to process the information, then greed replaced the rage in his eyes.

When shrinks use the phrase “drug of choice,” they know what they’re talking about. Some addicts are natural dope fiends, others prefer coke, and still others are content to drink themselves into oblivion. I don’t know if the shrinks have devised a test to predict which individual will turn to which drug, but over the years I’ve noticed that the psychos almost always prefer heroin.

Tony Morasso was the most natural dope addict I’d ever seen. He’d never used heroin before he’d come to Cortlandt, because he hadn’t had the opportunity. Once inside, however, he’d taken to it like a duck to water. Not that he’d become an addict. Drugs of any kind are too expensive in the Institution. Unless you’re dealing yourself, it’s almost impossible to accumulate enough money to become addicted. But each month, as soon as his money order arrived, he’d convert it to cartons of cigarettes and trade the cigarettes for heroin. With Eddie, of course.

Eddie and I had devised a scam to get a small amount of dope into the Institution. We’d intended to use it ourselves, doling it out over the weeks between deliveries. I was working as an administrative porter at the time and one of my jobs was to sweep the visitors’ reception area, a large room where visitors were processed and searched before meeting their loved ones. Annie made the seven-hour bus ride to Cortlandt once a month, being sure to arrive on a weekend morning when the reception area was most likely to be crowded. She’d stand on line for a while, then stroll over to the water fountain, take a drink, light a cigarette, and throw the pack into a little wastebasket next to the fountain. Fifteen minutes later, I’d come by with a large black trash bag. In the course of emptying the wastebasket, I’d casually palm the cigarette pack. All prisoners receiving visitors are strip-searched, before and after they enter the visiting area. Administrative porters, on the other hand, receive only an occasional frisk, and no frisk was going to uncover the dope because Annie delivered it in a balloon and I shoved it up my ass at the first opportunity.

Eddie and I had occasionally shared the dope with a few of the cons on the courts, but we never told anybody where it came from or how much we had. There were too many snitches and, of course, the rule in prison is DTA—Don’t Trust Anyone. When Morasso’s turn came around, the tension dropped off him like a turd from a pigeon’s ass. You could almost see it splatter on the ground. After that first time, Tony had begged Eddie to give him more. He might have gotten it himself—it was more than available—but his relationship with the black and Spanish crews who controlled most of contraband was so bad that he was afraid to approach them. Eddie and I, understanding his plight, were happy to sell him a piece of Annie’s dope. At double the going rate, of course. When your motto is Death Before Dishonor, can you do less?

“No drugs, cuz.” Eddie finally broke the silence. “No drugs till after the job is done. That’s the rule.”

“It’s not drugs, Eddie,” I said, “it’s medicine. Tony’s a sick man, he needs his medication.”

I glanced at my companions. John Parker’s head was bouncing up and down. Even Mr. Stern had broken a smile. Eddie looked serious, almost grim. Maybe he was doubting the wisdom of recruiting me, as he’d doubted the wisdom of recruiting Tony Morasso.

“I think this is wise to give it to him,” Avi said. He’d never come close to losing his Israeli accent, though he claimed to have learned English when he was seven years old. “It is to be medicine as Pete is saying.”

“You think so, cuz?” Eddie asked the question seriously. Avi spoke so rarely that his words automatically carried weight.

“Yes, this I think.” Avi looked directly at Tony. “Give him or kill him. I do not care which.”

Tony didn’t react to Avi’s threat. He wanted release from the fury that dominated his life, to be able to sit peacefully in front of the television set and watch cartoons without having to jump out of his chair every few minutes.

“Give it to him,” Eddie said, finally. “Give him the shit.”

I tossed the envelopes at Tony. He caught several, but the rest fluttered to the linoleum floor. Tony fell to his knees and began scooping them up. He looked like a dog sniffing for table scraps.

“Do you have works? You got a point?”

He was asking for a syringe. I shook my head. “Just put it up your nose, Tony. It’ll work all right.”

We ate breakfast while Tony puked in the bathroom, forking eggs, bacon, and sausage into our mouths to the sound of his retching. Heroin is a poison. If you take enough, you die. If you take a little less, you throw your guts up and love it.

When Tony reappeared, he had less than no interest in breakfast. He went upstairs without bothering to say goodbye.

“I don’t like it,” Eddie said. “It ain’t the way I figured it.”

“I’d like to know what you did figure,” Annie said. She stood by the stove with her hands on her hips, all five feet of her. “I’d like to know why you brought Tony Morasso into this in the first place. The guy is a lunatic. Did ya think you were gonna get Little Miss Muppet?”

If anyone else had challenged him, Eddie would have jumped down his throat, but the soft spot he had for his old lady became even more obvious when he answered her meekly.

“We been all over this, Annie. We need him.”

“We need him like we need cancer.”

John Parker gave me an elbow in the ribs. “I think I’ve heard this song before,” he said to me. “Come upstairs and take a look at my equipment.”

“Are you propositioning me?”

“I mean my computer equipment.”

Even Eddie managed a grin. “You could do worse, cuz,” he said to me. “John ain’t bad lookin’. Put him in skirt, he could work the cell blocks.”

The truth was that I really didn’t give a damn about John Parker’s computer genius, but there was no way I could get out of it. We were all partners, now. I looked John over carefully. From his pepper and salt crew cut to his even features and firm mouth, he still came across as an eager junior executive about to make a presentation to the board of directors.

“Okay, but try not to make it too technical. One goddamned course doesn’t make me a computer genius.”

“You know something, Pete,” Parker said, standing up and moving toward the stairway, “the beauty is that it isn’t really technical. It’s military. It’s about finding a weakness and exploiting it.”

M
ORASSO WAS IN THE
living room of the upstairs apartment. He was sitting in a recliner, watching Popeye kick the crap out of his archenemy, Bluto. As we passed, he turned toward us. His eyes were empty.

“Pete,” he said. “I didn’t mean nothin’ before. I was like fuckin’ shocked when I seen ya face. Nobody told me you was comin’.”

What Tony wanted was more dope and he knew I was the only conceivable source. That’s why he was apologizing for getting his ass kicked.

“We had a lot of trouble between us when we were inside,” I said, “but now we have to put it behind us. The job comes first, right?” I watched his head bob eagerly. “The thing that’s good for you is that I gotta go back where I’m livin’ every night. If I don’t show up, this motherfucker of a P.O.’s gonna violate me. Now it just happens that my official place of residence is in the middle of a heavy dope neighborhood. As long as you don’t fuck up and get Eddie pissed off, I’ll take care of you.”

He grinned happily, then leaned over and threw up into a wastebasket. I shook my head in disgust. This was everything I wanted to avoid when I left Cortlandt. I could feel the anger starting to rise. If I let it go, it would own me.

Parker led me into the master bedroom. Aside from a small bed in the corner, it was filled with equipment. I recognized the computer, of course, but the rest of it meant no more to me than a pile of scrap metal.

“Something, isn’t it?” Parker asked. “One thing, Eddie didn’t cheap out.” He turned on the computer and waited for it to load. “No disrespect, Pete, but I gotta ask you to turn around. I don’t want you to see the access code. The others, Eddie and Avi, they wouldn’t know what to do with it, but you have enough knowledge to put it together. Especially with what I’m going to tell you about it.”

I turned without comment. Parker was playing it smart, smarter than I gave him credit for. If he was the only one who could access the computer, Eddie would have to make sure he stayed in one piece. That was another reason why Eddie had been so happy to hear from me.

“Okay, turn around and take a seat. This is going to be a long story.”

“Gee, and I was plannin’ to attend the opera.”

“Don’t be a wise guy.”

“That’s what
she
said.”

He answered by turning to the computer and pounding out a series of instructions punctuated by the inevitable beeps and boops. The cursor danced under his fingers for a moment, then the computer shouted, “Shut up and sit down, please!”

“Damn,” I said, taking the requested seat, “that thing talks like a human.”