"Warden on the pound," a loudspeaker announced.
The compound was a low-slung collection of dull yellow buildings with wide grassy areas between. Spokes of sidewalks led from one to the other. No bushes, trees or other vegetation. Nowhere to hide. There were a few men moving about, obviously inmates because they were dressed in faded blue instead of the guard's brown. They were not being escorted. One might think of a poor man's college campus until you lifted your eyes to the towers and the sight of long-barreled rifles reminded you.
"We're headed to the machine shop," Bowe said, moving swiftly, but not hurrying. "Mr. Moticker has been the senior mechanic for some time."
The warden's long legs made it difficult to keep up without looking like you were trying.
"One never runs across the pound," he said over his shoulder. "The sharpshooters are trained to sight in on anyone running and the guards are taught to run toward the towers if they are in danger so the shooters can take out any assailants."
I knew the philosophy, but the feeling of gunsights on my neck still made the muscles in my back tingle.
"Besides, it makes the inmates uneasy to have to wonder where you are running to and for what reason," he said with a smile that did not indicate anything funny. "Information is a valued thing inside."
It sounded like a warning, and I took it as such.
The machine shop was made up of three open bays and part of a second floor with glass-fronted classrooms. There was a yellow fire engine parked in the far bay and a handful of men were clustered around a rear bumper intently watching an inmate with a welding torch.
The guard who came to meet us was in a brown uniform but his sleeves were rolled up and there were black grease marks on his forearms and hands. He and Bowe spoke for a minute, too low for me to hear. The guard nodded and walked back toward the group.
"Thirty minutes is all I can give you, Mr. Freeman," Bowe said. "There's an inmate count at two o'clock and we keep a very tight schedule. I will collect you when you're through."
I thanked him and watched the guard tap the man with the torch on the shoulder. The inmate raised his face shield and turned to look our way. He handed his tools to another inmate, gave some instruction, and walked across the shop. He was a thin, jangly man. The points of his joints stuck out at his shoulders, elbows and knees. When he got close I could see the gray in his hair and a jagged white scar that crawled through one eyebrow and then over the bridge of his nose. I knew that he was thirty-seven years old. He looked fifty.
"Warden, sir," Moticker said, addressing the superintendent first and then turning to me. "Mr. Freeman, sir." We shook hands and his grip seemed purposely weak.
"Can we do this outside, sir?" Moticker said to the guard, who nodded his head. Only then did the inmate lead me out to a concrete slab just outside the raised, garage-style door. We sat on our heels in the sun but also in full view of the bay.
"How you doin', Harlan," I started.
"I'm okay, sir," he said, taking a single cigarette from his shirt pocket and lighting it with an old-style book of cardboard matches. He took a drag and cut his eyes into the bay.
"How's the family?"
"I see my son on occasion. He's got hisself close to graduatin'," he answered, letting the smoke out slowly. "My wife, well, we got divorced a few years back."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"I never did get to thank you for helpin' with the transfer, though," he said, looking me in the eye for the first time.
We were both silent, having run out of manners.
"I'll just get to it," I finally said. "I'm not a cop anymore, but I'm working a case out of Florida that has to do with an insurance investigator named Frank McCane."
I watched his eyes jump to mine without a movement of his head.
"I know he was a bull here for some time and your years overlapped some before he was, uh, dismissed. I was hoping you might tell me something about him."
"Ol' Milo," he said, a grin coming to his face. "An insurance man, you say? Ain't that a hoot."
Moticker took another slow drag and smiled with a set of bad teeth.
"You're familiar?"
"Oh, anybody who was around then is familiar with Milo," he said, lowering his already soft voice. "Mean sombitch and king of the pound, too. But that's a sore subject round here now, Mr. Freeman."
"I can appreciate that. But the record isn't too clear on his dismissal," I said. "I need a sense of the man without going to someone who might have been a friend or might get back to him."
This time Moticker's pale eyes stayed on mine, the eyes of a man with nothing to lose, but also one who rarely came across the opportunity to gain anything close to payback.
"McCane ran every damn thing in here at one time," he started. "He had a piece of the inside drug trade. He decided whose homemade buck got confiscated an' whose got sold. He controlled the inventory coming in and out of concession.
"Anybody had money, he squeezed 'em. Anybody had anything, he dealt it. Didn't matter what color or what kind. Pure mean and pure greedy, Mr. Freeman, that's the sense of that man."
Moticker finished the cigarette, carefully snubbed it out and put the butt in his pocket. He cut his eyes to the shop again.
"Milo was running the drug trade. Had other guards bringing the stuff in and then flushing the packages down the toilets before they came on the pound," he started, barely whispering.
"He knew the pump station. Would plug the thing by flushing an inmate shirt at the same time. Then he'd order one of the cons down into the station to clear it. Guy would go through the shit while the shooters and assistant warden just watched him get down in there and he would stuff the drug packages in his pockets and then come up with the shirt.
"Hell, nobody was gonna frisk that boy all covered with stink, and he'd get sent to the showers and later pass the dope off to Milo for a cut."
He refocused his eyes on the group of welders inside and seemed to reshelve the memory. "He was the kind of man who knew how to use people and still make them feel inferior," he finally said.
"The kind of man who might be involved with murder for money?" I asked.
The inmate seemed to roll his answer around in his mouth for a while.
"Not by hisself," he said. "Milo wouldn't be that dumb."
Moticker stood up and for the first time I could see a con's deviousness in his face.
"They'd be hell to pay if that ol' boy came back here as an inmate," he said, a crooked grin playing at his lips. "Hell to pay."
I could tell the possibility left him with a vision that could keep him warmly amused for a lot of boring nights on his bunk.
"One thing," I said. "Why Milo?"
He looked quizzically at me.
"The nickname?"
"Oh, hell, that was his own," he said. "Character out that old war movie Catch-22. Milo Minderbinder was the guy that was doin' all the underhanded dealin' getting' hisself rich off the war. McCane loved that."
We went back inside the shop and I shook his hand.
"Hope things work out," he said, and I wished him the same.
21
I sat on the hood of my truck, waiting for twilight, second-guessing my trust, and shooting holes in my own plans.
I'd ground out the possibilities during the flight back from Georgia and wasn't sure I hadn't wasted a bunch of time and Billy's money just to satisfy my need for logic. As the plane had lined up its approach several miles to the west of the West Palm airport I'd stared out on the unbroken sawgrass of the Everglades. Acres and acres of still untouched land glowing gold in the low sunlight. I missed my river. I wondered why I was not back on it, paddling, listening to it.
I had used the river to try to bury the memory of two bullets fired during a stickup on Thirteenth Street in Center City, Philadelphia. The round fired by a sixteen-year-old punk on the sidewalk had caught me in the neck, boring through muscle on its way through. The second round, mine, dropped a twelve-year-old accomplice as he bolted out the door behind his friend. The sidewalk vision of his small face and skinny, quiet chest had gouged my dreams ever since. Out of the hospital, I'd taken a disability buyout and moved from the city streets where I'd grown up the son of a cop. I wanted out and I wanted different. I'd sworn off the cops, but today I was back out in the northwest section of the city, watching the light leak out of the alley and then the trees. I'd turned another corner and wasn't sure why.