"It got away from me," Remo told him without emotion.
"That how I feel about my life, Jim. But you still owe me one."
"Sure," Remo said flatly. He felt like shit.
"Just don't be waiting long for payback. Sparky own my ass, you know."
"Who's Sparky? Your lawyer?" Remo wondered into the air. He might as well have been communicating with the dead. Popcorn's next words told him that he was.
"Sparky's the chair, man. I walk the line next month if my appeal don't stick. They tell you when you're going?"
"I'm not going," Remo said flatly.
"Do tell. I used to think that. The Man lets you think that for a while, him and his lawyers. After a while you get to believin' it yourself. Then they take it away from you an inch at a time. That's the bitch of it. One day you be flyin', the next you're scratchin' in the dirt at your own damn feet, thinkin' that the only way out is to dig your way out. But either way you slice it, you be diggin' your own grave."
"I'm not going," Remo repeated.
"You figure 'cause you was once a cop, you got the juice. That it?"
"They won't fry me. They didn't fry me in Jersey. They won't fry me down here."
"Maybe so, Jim. But in this hole we in, Florida juice got a whole 'nother meanin'. It ain't orange and they gotta strap you down before you can get the benefit of it."
"They can't transfer a man from one state to another and fry him. My lawyer will see to that."
"I'm with that. My lawyer's my last hope too."
"They won't fry me," Remo repeated. And suddenly he remembered why he had felt so uncomfortable sitting on the hardwood chair in the Warden's office. Electric chairs were always built of nonconducting wood.
A door buzzed down the passageway distantly. Another buzzed. And each time, the buzzing was louder as Control opened door after door. Then there came the clear, unmuflled sound of footsteps.
The guards stopped outside Remo's cell. They were the same guards as before.
"Today's shower day, Williams," one said, sneering. Remo looked up from his bunk with dull eyes. He stood up. "Why not?" he muttered.
This time they didn't cuff him as they brought him out from the cell.
"Am I the only one who gets to wash off the dust?" Remo asked.
The guard showed fierce teeth. "The others are already getting nice and clean for you, Soap Boy. Now, get moving."
Remo walked slowly past the range of death-row cells. He met each glance in his direction boldly.
This time there were no catcalls or jeers. In a way, it was a bad sign.
They walked past the control booth at the prison crossroads, called Grand Central, where the watch commander buzzed them into the shower area. Remo stripped under the watchful eyes of the guards and stepped into the communal shower.
Dozens of pairs of hard eyes drank in his lean, tigerish muscles, his athlete-flat stomach and oddly thick wrists. Remo ignored them and stepped under the hot stream of an unoccupied shower head, lathering himself with a dirty bar of soap that stood melting in a gutterlike shelf that ran under the shower heads the entire length of the room. He rubbed some of the lather into his brawn hair, scrubbed furiously, and, aware of the eyes on him, stepped back under the hot water until the last of the lather ran into the floor grates, to be carried away to the kind of freedom Remo hadn't known since he was half his current age.
As Remo started for the door, a man stepped in his path. He was white and built like a pregnant linebacker. His thick face was as expressionless as the Hoover Dam, except for the Fu Manchu mustache that had gone out of style when Gerald Ford was in the White House and a tiny dab of hair under his lower lip called a pachuco tuft. His black hair splayed all over his forehead, dripping dirty gray soap lather. He looked like a Klingon with a bad hairpiece.
"You the new Dead Man?" he growled.
"The name's Remo."
"Yeah. That's you. Dead Man," the man muttered as if Remo wasn't there. Then louder he said, "I hear you were a cop."
Remo said nothing. There was a phrase in the joint: Do your own time. It meant to mind your business and stay out of trouble. Remo decided he was going to follow it. He let his gaze drop to the man's soap-matted chest hair. Not in submission, but because the man was so much taller than Remo that Remo simply let his eyes rest at their natural level. He made his hard face still, betraying no emotion, neither weakness nor challenge.
"I used to eat cops," the man taunted. "You tell 'im, McGurk," someone shouted. McGurk leaned into Remo's face. His breath was sour. Like week-old buttermilk.
"Maybe I'll eat you." When Remo didn't reply, McGurk said, "Then again, maybe it'll be the other way around. I could protect you, cop. If you treat me right."
At that, Remo's gaze lifted. His eyes seemed to retreat into their deep sockets. Their expression was unreadable.
"You do for me and I'll do for you," MeGurk said, low-voiced. "What d'you say?"
"I say," Remo said flatly, "that your breath smells like you've been sucking on an elephant's teat. Maybe you should stick with satisfying yourself that way."
McGurk's jaw dropped, making his pachuco tuft bristle.
The only sound in the room for a long time was the shower heads ejecting relentless streams of water. Then a man released an explosive bark of a laugh. Another sucked in his breath. They moved in on Remo and the giant called McGurk to see what would happen next. Behind the big man, Remo could see the guards watching through the square window. Abruptly they turned their backs, and Remo knew there would be no help from them.
"All you swinging dicks stay out of this," McGurk said. He looked down at Remo. Remo met his gaze unflinchingly.
"I'll give you a choice, cop," McGurk said in a taut voice. "Your mouth on my jones right now or my shank in your gut."
"If you're packing, prove it," Remo said calmly. McGurk spread out impossibly big hands and said, "No pockets, friend. But I'll get you in the yard."
"Then I'll see you in the yard," Remo said, pushing past the man and pulling open the door faster than McGurk could react.
Remo grabbed a towel off a rack and began drying himself as the obviously disappointed guards separated and took up positions by the outer door. The odor of stale sweat was a permanent stench in the room. The others drifted out, naked and sullen, and claimed their towels. When they were done, they threw the towels into a laundry cart and put on their clothes slowly, as if donning the blue state-issue dungarees made them less, not more, civilized.
As Remo reached for an identical uniform, one of the guards said, "No prison blues for you. Here." Remo accepted an apricot-colored T-shirt. He pulled it over his head, and realized what it signified. Every man on the row had worn one. It was the badge of the condemned.
They formed a line, with Remo in the rear. The guards buzzed the door open and they walked out single file, their shoulders almost touching the right wall as they right-angled around corners until they passed the multiple-tier cellblocks surrounding Grand Central. The men ahead of Remo filed into their cells. They were general population. Remo continued on, alone, into the Q Wing, death row.
At a signal, the ranges of cell doors rolled open. The simultaneous clangor was deafening.
Remo walked toward the beige corridor to his open cell, just short of the last cell on death row.
A rough voice called after him, "In the yard, cop." After the cell door buzzed shut with a temporary finality that Remo never got used to, he spoke a question into the air. "Know a con named MeGurk?" Popcorn's voice was wry. "Yeah. He's the dude they call Crusher. Ain't that a comic-book name, man? Crusher McGurk. They say his first name's Delbert. "
"Faggot?" Remo wondered.
"Yeah. Real butch. Why you ask? He take a shine to you?"
"Yeah."