Troubled Waters (13 page)

This was her first time behind bars sober. It didn't look or feel a whole lot better, but at least she hadn't tossed her cookies. The blessings of sobriety.

She'd been half asleep, her mind replaying the scene on the dusty dune road, a childish rhyme ringing in her ears.
All of us went out to play; Rap and Dana ran away
.

Rap and Dana ran away
.

Rap and Dana

got

away
.

Rap and Dana. How far away had they been? A half mile at most. So why did Walt stop her before she reached the shore? Every cell in her body told her Walt had been tipped off, that he'd known she'd be on the dune road. He could have had all of them; he could have had the boat. Could have had whatever Rap had hidden in the boat.

Jan was under no illusions about Joel Alan Rapaport. She remembered the grass runs to Ann Arbor when they were students, the fine coke he'd bring from trips home to Long Island, the 'ludes he handed out like cough drops. It was impossible for her to believe all his crossings to Canada were clean. So why had the feds let him get away?

Or did the question answer itself? They let him get away. They wanted him to get away. Rap had always believed in plowing profits back into the business; maybe he'd paid off Koeppler, or someone even higher, to leave him alone and grab the van instead of the
Layla
.

Jan barely noticed the squat, middle-aged matron who stepped into the cell with an air of hostile authority. She was slow to realize that the woman with her was a fellow prisoner, and that the matron was going to leave her here, in the cell.

I don't need company, damn it. I have to think
.

“Hi,” the newcomer said shyly, “my name's Marie.”

“I'm Jan.” Nothing more; no indication that conversation would be welcome. She turned her eyes toward the sand-colored cinderblock wall.

Rap and Dana got away. Why?

Bits and pieces of whispered conversation, hastily shushed when she came near, slipped into her consciousness. Dana had mentioned a “factory” hidden somewhere in the boonies. Something about illegals in trailers, people she wasn't supposed to know were there. What were Rap and Dana doing besides transporting political dissidents?

“Uh, do you mind if I smoke?” The voice was small, childlike. Jan barely looked at her cellmate as she nodded her okay. She took out one of her own, lit up. Smoking helped her think, helped keep her hands from nervously twisting her long hair.

“I've never been arrested before,” the young woman on the opposite bunk said. “I guess I'm a little scared.”

And you want me to be your Big Sister
. Forget it. You got your troubles; I got mine.

Thanks to whoever had dropped a dime, she and Ron were under arrest, Miguel was dead, and Pilar and Manuelito faced deportation. Back to El Salvador, not just Mexico. Back to where General Duarte had sworn to execute them so the whole country would know what happened to academics who spoke out against the regime.

Who the hell could do such a thing?

Rap and Dana got away
.

“It wasn't my fault. Really.” Marie seemed intent on telling her little story. She leaned forward on the bunk, her pale skin tinted fluorescent-green, her platinum hair wispy.

Jan hated wispy little child-girls. Especially ones who figured nothing was their fault.

“I mean, it was my boyfriend's idea.”

“Look, could you do me a favor and maybe shut up?” Jan dragged on her cigarette. God, she sounded like Ma Barker. The experienced con talking to the new kid, setting her straight about life in the joint.

“If that's the way you want it.” Marie turned her head toward the door, her shoulder-length hair shimmering in the eerie light. Dark roots. No surprise; people really didn't have hair that color. But somehow the dark roots made Marie human. A real person, not a doll.

“You work in a beauty parlor?” Jan asked.

“Howdja know?” Marie turned back, her face animated. “I'm just a shampoo girl now, but my friend Patti says I've got a real flair for hair. She did my color.”

“Looks great.” Jan was sorry already that she'd opened communications.

“So what are you here for?”

Jan pulled out another cigarette from the pack in her pocket. “Long story.”

“Yeah, well, I bet it wasn't your fault either,” Marie said. “Like me believing my boyfriend when he said the old guy signed the check over to him. Instead of which Joey's ripping the guy off, stealing his Social Security check right out of his mailbox. Which is two kinds of federal crime right there. And just because I went with him to the grocery store to cash it, they think I was in it with him. Is that fair?”

Fair. She wants to talk about fair
. Was it fair that Miguel was dead? Was it fair that somebody wanted her ass in jail—that somebody
used
her, set her up?

Heat flooded Jan's face; she shook so badly she leaned against the cool cinderblock wall. Her teeth chattered; her sweat turned to ice on her clammy skin.

“Hey, you okay?” Marie asked. “You detoxing or something?”

Jan shook her head. She'd never felt like this before.

Or had she? Yes, it came back now. The night she pulled a knife on Hal, the night she decided he'd hit her for the last time, she'd been filled with this fury.

Fury. Like one of the Furies. Avenging women who—who avenged. Who fought back, who didn't let themselves be used as pawns in anyone else's game, who destroyed out of sheer, purifying rage. That was Jan: a Fury stripped of all emotion except the healing fire of rage.

It didn't matter anymore who had tipped off Koeppler. It didn't matter why Rap and Dana got away. What mattered was that she was through, finished with being used.
Whoever dropped that dime better look out
.

Fire filled her soul.
Because when I find out who did it, I'll—

“Would it help to talk about it?” Marie leaned forward, an eager light in her pale blue eyes. A light Jan recognized in her newly transformed state as a Fury. It was the light of avarice, of consuming curiosity, of betrayal.

“Why?” Jan rapped out the word, hard as a boxing glove. “So you can run to Walt Koeppler with whatever I say?”

She stood up and began to roam the cell. Looking up at the ceiling, peering into corners. “Or has he got this place bugged? Huh? Which is it?”

Jan strode to where Marie still sat on the edge of her cot, swinging one leg. “I ought to slap it out of you;” she said, her voice harsh, “but that would only give them more ammunition.”

She sat back on her own bunk, motionless, wordless, arms crossed over her thin chest. Inside she seethed like a pressure cooker, her thoughts hissing, steaming, raging. They'd done it again. Just like last time. Just like when Kenny died.

They wouldn't get away with it this time.

It was no surprise that within five minutes the matron came back and removed Marie.

Where there's a will, there's a way
. Words to live by. Words Walt Koeppler lived by. Okay, so Marie had failed. Marie, who'd conned confessions out of some pretty tough broads, had been made in thirty seconds by this leftover hippie. But there had to be someone she'd open up to. He'd considered letting her see the boyfriend, the guy in the wheelchair, but decided that was too obvious. It was then that routine paid off, the way he'd always told rookies it would.

She had a visitor. Not her lawyer; Sobel hadn't been around yet. And there were problems, legal problems even Koeppler wasn't ready to face just yet, with monitoring conversations between lawyer and client. But where was it written in the goddamn Constitution that a prison visit with a civilian was sacred?

He nodded at the guard who'd brought in the request. “Put them in room six,” he said. “And turn up the volume on the mike, okay? I don't want to miss a whisper.”

Jan walked into room six on rubber legs. Harve Sobel. It had to be Harve, her lawyer. Her lawyer and Dana's father.
Rap and Dana got away
. Could she trust Dana's father to represent her? She'd wrestled with that problem for the better part of last night, but still hadn't resolved it. Harve was a good lawyer, the best, and he believed in the cause, but if Dana had dropped that dime, she couldn't afford to trust him.

On the other hand, if Dana had turned informer, Harve would disown her.

Her breath whooshed out with relief when she saw her sponsor, her AA lifeline, sitting on the other side of the Plexiglas partition.

“Ritamae,” she breathed. “Thank God it's you.” She looked long and hard at her sponsor's black-coffee skin, her thick shiny hair, her bright magenta lipstick. The one person in the world she could truly trust.

“God, if there'd been a bar on the women's side of this prison,” Jan laughed, “you'd be looking at one fallen drunk.”

“Honey, I been in jail myself. It's a damn good thing they got no bars behind bars.” Another reason she was grateful to have Ritamae as a sponsor. She wasn't some yuppie drunk who'd come down to the jail afraid to get dirt on her white gloves. She'd walked the same walk.

Ritamae had known fame; she'd been a Vandella for about five months, until booze and dope ended her dreams of Motown glory. She'd done time in a Michigan prison before coming home to Toledo. “If only I'd known—” Jan began.
If only I'd known someone was selling us out
, she wanted to say. But what if Ritamae thought she was paranoid? What if the one person she trusted didn't believe her?

“Uh-uh,” Ritamae interrupted, shaking her head violently, “don't be talking that trash, girl. None of that ‘if only' crap. Jan, girl, you cannot change that man's death. He is gone, honey, the cops done shot him right in fronta your face.”

Jan dropped her eyes to hide the fury—no, the Fury—who lived inside her now. Last night, alone in the cell, she'd punched her pillow, screamed without noise into its meager softness, like a dried-up breast. She'd pounded her fists till the knuckles were raw into the hard-spring mattress and pictured Walt Koeppler dead, bloody dead with hundreds of stab wounds from the kitchen knife she'd used on Hal.

“Look,” Ritamae said, her tone brisk, her voice devoid of accent. Over the phone she could have passed for white. “You got a lawyer, or what? I can get on the phone and find someone from the Program if you—”

“Harve Sobel is my lawyer,” Jan said. Like saying the rosary, she'd repeated the words over and over after her arrest, to any cop who came near her. “Harve Sobel is my lawyer.” Words like charms to keep the vampires away.

But could she trust Harve? Could she trust Dana's father? Could she trust Dana?

She already knew she couldn't trust Rap.

“I've heard them talking,” Jan said, staring into her sponsor's deep brown eyes. “Just bits and pieces, but I know there's some kind of factory somewhere. And there are more refugees, but I don't know where they are either. Rap—he's the guy with the boat—I think he deals drugs. But I don't know where he gets it or what he does with it. All I know for sure is there's a whole lot more going on than I knew about. They used me. They fucking used me.” Jan's voice rose and her throat ached with tears she wouldn't shed.

She paused and took a deep, ragged breath. “Not only that,” she went on, more calmly, “somebody tipped off Koeppler. Somebody told him we'd be out there. Just like before.”

Ritamae's brow creased in a frown. “What you mean, like before?”

Jan felt light-headed; she'd said forbidden words, told secrets, named her suspicions, and she was still alive. “Like when my cousin Kenny—” She broke off and swallowed hard. “Somebody called the cops then too, and we were all arrested and Kenny died.”

Ritamae pursed her lips. “This Kenny,” she said, “how long ago the boy die?”

“Thirteen years ago,” Jan said, almost dreamily.

“Then what the fuck you messing with it now for?”

Jan looked up, fear flooding her. All sense of safety had fled with her sponsor's accusing tone. “But—but Koeppler stopping the van, knowing just where we were—it's the same thing all over again. Somebody tipped him off. Don't you see, it's the same informer, still working, still selling us out.”
Please, God, please
, she prayed,
let Ritamae see this. Don't let her laugh at me
.

Ritamae stared ahead, a black Buddha. A seer staring into an African fire for visions.

“Way I see it,” she said at last, “this shit is not where you need to be at right now. You need to worry about it later.”

Jan melted with relief. “Later like the Ninth Step?”

Ritamae laughed. “Girl, eighty days ago you thought the Big Book was a telephone directory, now you quotin' it at me like a Bible-thumpin' Baptist. I'll tell you when you ready for the Ninth Step and don't you even be thinking about it until then. Got that?”

Jan nodded, but some of last night's fury welled up and came out her eyes and burned into Ritamae.

“Honey, you ain't thinkin' about no Ninth Step,” her sponsor pronounced, her tone a warning. “You thinkin' about paybacks and that is in no way the same thing. Hear?”

Jan heard. She didn't like it, but she heard. Her sponsor sat on the other side of the visitors' table, talking too loudly into holes that didn't let the sound through. Jan felt caged. Caged by the cramped, ugly quarters and trapped by Ritamae's clarity. Caged by the truth.

“The Ninth Step,” Ritamae shouted into the holes, “is about asking forgiveness for what you done to others. Not about carrying grudges for what you think they done to you.”

Jan nodded. She felt her face go stiff. Wood-stiff, like a little puppet. The same face she used to wear when Sister Mary Whoever would call her into the office and ask how things were at home. She'd wear the wooden mask and nod and say quietly that things were fine and she didn't know what Sister meant. All the time knowing, her inner face burning with shame, that somebody'd seen her daddy drunk again.