Short-term focus.
It was a profoundly depressing feature of life in the prison that increasingly he caught himself thinking like his fellow inmates. Adaptive behavior, Sutherland would have tagged it. Like finding himself masturbating to cheap porn, something he’d also done his share of since Florida’s penal system had swept him up into its clammy embrace. Best, he’d found, to simply not think about it at all.
So he stepped out of the Guatemalan’s cell and went casually back down the B wing thoroughfare, right arm held slightly bent. Under his sleeve, the chill of the monofil strip warmed slowly against his skin. Gray nanocarb scaffolding rose on either side of him, holding up three levels of galleries and the tracks for the big surveillance cams. The wing was roofed in arched transparency, and late-afternoon light sifted down into the quiet of the hall. Most of general population were out on Partnership work projects, paying their debt to society into Sigma’s corporate coffers. The few who remained in B wing leaned off the galleries in ones or twos, or stood in small knots across the hall floor. Conversation evaporated as he passed, eyes swiveling to watch him. On the lower right-hand gallery, a grizzled longtimer called Andrews stared down at him and nodded in fractional acknowledgment. Suddenly, despite the sunlight, Carl felt cold.
It wasn’t the coming fight. Equipped as he now was, Carl was reasonably sure he could take Dudeck without too much trouble. The Aryans either weren’t hooked up outside the prison or just hadn’t done their research; all they knew about Carl Marsalis was that he talked funny for a nigger, was up from Miami on some foreign-national retention loophole, and, at forty-one, was old. Possibly they thought he was some kind of terrorist, therefore foreign and a coward who had everything coming to him. Certainly they believed that lean-muscled tat-covered twenty-something Jack Dudeck was going to rip his shit apart, whoever he fucking was. That nigger had to learn some respect.
It wasn’t the fight. It was the creeping sense of the trap that came with it.
Three months in this corporate newbuilt shithole, before that five weeks in the Miami High Risk unit. No trial, no bail. Release assessment dates set back time and again, access to lawyers refused. Appeals and diplomatic pressure from UNGLA summarily thrown out, no end in sight. He could feel the time getting away from him like blood loss. There was an ongoing investigation that no one was prepared to talk about but Carl knew it had to do with Caracas and the death of Richard Willbrink. It had to be. Relations between the UN and the Republic had never been great, but there was no way the Florida state legislature would have held out against major diplomacy for the sake of a single low-grade vice bust that already screamed entrapment. No, somewhere in the processing when the fetal murder team took him downtown, his documentation had tripped a high-level wire. Connections had been made, whether in Langley or Washington or some covert operations base farther south, and the national security beast was awake. Ghost agencies were looking for payback, cold covert vengeance for one of their own; they were going to make an example of Carl Marsalis, and while they tried to assemble the necessary legal toys to do it, he was going to stay safely locked down in a Republic prison. And if he shanked Jack Dudeck today as he fully intended to, they might not be able to pin it on him, but it was still going to put him back into Close Management and provide the perfect pretext for another lengthy extension of holding time, maybe even a subsidiary sentence. More than a few times in the last month he’d awoken with a panicky shortness of breath and a dream-like certainty that he would never get out of this place. It was starting to look like premonition.
He locked down the fear, siphoned it carefully into anger and stoked it up. He stopped at the B wing gate and raised his face for the laser. The blue light licked over his features, the machine consulted its real-time records, and the gate cracked open. He paced through. The chapel was left and halfway down a fifty-meter corridor that led to kitchen storage. Surveillance would have him for twenty-five meters along the passage, would see him turn in through the impressively sculpted genoteak double doors, and that was all they would know. Carl felt the mesh shudder online, jerky and grating with Louie’s substandard griego chlorides.
All right, Jacky boy. Let’s fucking do this.
The chapel doors gave smoothly as he pushed them, oozed backward on hydraulic hinges and showed him twin rows of pews, also in genoteak. The furniture sat like islands on the shine of the fused-glass floor. The interior architecture soared modestly in echo of a modern church. Angled spots made the altar rail and lectern gleam. In the space between the rail and the first row of pews, Jack Dudeck stood with another, bulkier Aryan at his side. Both wore their corporate prison blue coveralls peeled neatly to the waist and tied off. Sleeveless generic gray T-shirts showed beneath. A third shaven-headed weight-bench type, similarly dressed, hauled himself up from his slumped position between two pews halfway down on the right. He was chewing gum.
“Hello nigger,” said Dudeck loudly.
Marsalis nodded. “Needed help, did you?”
“Don’t need me no fucking help to carve a slice off your ass, boy. Marty and Roy here just wanted to make sure we ain’t disturbed.”
“That’s right, nigger.” The gum chewer squeezed out between the pew ends, eyes screwed up in a grin, voice leaning hard on the insult. Carl tamped down a flaring rage and thought about hooking out those eyes with his thumbnails.
Lock it down, soak.
It was depressing—the same timeslip sense of loss at his reactions. Over the last four months, he could track his own change in attitude toward the antique racial epithets still in wide use across the Republic. Nigger. The first couple of times, it was disconcerting and almost quaint, like having your face slapped with a dueling glove. With time, it came to feel more and more like the verbal spittle it was intended to be. That his fellow blacks in general population used it of themselves did nothing to stem the slowly awakening anger. It was a locally evolved defense, and he was not from there. Fuck these Republicans and their chimpanzee-level society.
Lock it down.
The gum chewer came ponderously up the aisle toward him. Carl moved to the right-hand bank of pews and waited, nailed the approaching Aryan’s gaze as he came level, watched the man’s eyes for the move if it was coming. He figured boot to shin and elbow uppercut to chin if he had to, left-side strikes. He didn’t want to show Dudeck the shank ahead of time.
But the other man was as good as Dudeck’s word. He brushed past with a snort of contempt and stationed himself at the door. Carl moved down the aisle, feeling the mesh now like arousal, like the juddering of bad brakes. It wasn’t ideal, but the tidal power of it would do. He stepped out from between the two last pews and faced Dudeck across five meters of fused glass. He lifted his left hand in a casual gesture designed to lead the Aryan’s attention away from his right, rejoiced silently as Dudeck’s eyes flickered to follow the move.
“So, birdshit. You want to run me your rap now?” Carl burlesqued a Jesusland comedy drawl. “The South will rise again.”
“South already risen, nigger,” blurted the big Aryan next to Dudeck. “Confederated Republic is the white man’s America.”