That was all in the past. A different breed in prison now than what you can get on the outside. Things were soon going to get a lot easier for Lombard’s boys, or harder, depending on how you looked at it.
I closed my eyes and listened for whether the moaning had started up again. It hadn’t. Nothing but a dead, uneasy quiet. And far too much of it.
It was eleven o’clock when a guard dropped off the street clothes I had on at the time I was arrested all those years ago. I shed my prison dungarees and tee shirt, and put on my old clothes instead. My shoes, while dusty and scuffed, still fit. Nothing else did. My pants hung loosely on me, as did my shirt and leather jacket. I could’ve used a belt, but I guess they were holding that back until I was officially released. Still, it was good to be wearing my own clothes again. I was leaving the cell for the last time, and the only thing I took with me was a large envelope stuffed with papers. Nothing else was worth the bother.
While I was led through the cell block to the administrative wing of the prison, the guard escorting me made an offhand comment about this being my last day.
“Last hour, actually.”
We walked in silence for a minute, then he muttered out of the side of his mouth, “No fucking justice.”
I turned to give him a look. He was in his late twenties, about the same age as my youngest son. A big, awkward-looking kid with short blond hair, a pug nose and wide-set eyes. His flesh hung as loosely off him as my clothes did me, and it had the same color as boiled ham. There was something familiar about him, and I realized what it was. He looked enough like one of the guys I had taken out to be his son. I asked him what his name was and that startled him, alarm showing in his pink, fleshy face.
“For Chrissakes,” I said, “I just want to know if you’re related to Donald Sweet.”
He shook his head.
“How about any of the other guys I, uh, had business with?”
Again, slowly, his head moved from side to side.
I looked him up and down, feeling a bit of my old self coming to the fore. “Shut the fuck up, then,” I said. “And show some goddamned respect to your elders.”
He stared straight ahead after that, his eyes glazed, his mouth having shrunk to a small, angry oval, and enough red seeping into his cheeks to make his flesh now more the color of a piece of bloodied ham. We walked in silence, and it wasn’t until we arrived at my caseworker’s office and I was halfway through the door that he remarked how maybe I didn’t find justice in prison but that the streets knew how to take care of rats like me. I closed the door behind me, not bothering to turn around.
My caseworker, Theo Ogden, sat amongst the clutter of his small windowless office. He squinted at me from behind his thick glasses, and from the uneasy smile he gave it was clear he had overheard the guard’s comment. “Mr March, I apologize for that,” he said.
“I’ll be hearing a lot worse soon,” I said.
“Maybe so, but it was still uncalled for.”
I shrugged it off, and took the chair across from his desk that he gestured for me to sit in. Theo was about the same age as the guard who brought me to him, but was much smaller both in height and weight, and the complete opposite in demeanor. Like the other times I’d met with him, he appeared disheveled and harried, and the suit he wore was about as big on him as my old clothes were on me.
After the way our last meeting went I wasn’t expecting much, but the son of a gun surprised me by finding me a job cleaning a small office building in Waltham and renting me a furnished one-room apartment within walking distance of where I’d be working. The hours were going to be from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m., Monday through Saturday. I guess at that time the building would be empty except for security, and the building’s tenants wouldn’t ever see me, but still, I was amazed he was able to find anyone willing to hire me, even if it was only cleaning toilets and mopping floors. Theo had me starting my new job tonight, figuring I could use the money, and he stepped me through a budget he had drawn up – which showed how much I’d be taking in each month through public assistance and my job and what my expenses would be. It would be tight, with me hovering just above the poverty line, but it didn’t much matter. If I ended up on the streets, it would still be better than where I’d spent the last fourteen years. And besides, I didn’t expect to be around long enough to worry about it, not with my family history, and certainly not with Lombard’s boys out there waiting, and maybe twenty-eight other families who might want to beat them to the punch.
Theo had finished walking me through the budget, and was now staring at me uneasily while he pulled at his lower lip. I knew he was deliberating whether to broach the same subject we had discussed the last few times we met. I saved him the trouble and told him I had no interest in leaving Massachusetts.
“Mr March, you should consider it,” he said. “Even at this late date, I could arrange it if you let me.”
“What would be the point? If someone wanted to find me bad enough, they’d track me down wherever I ran to.”
“But you’re making it so easy for them…” He stopped to take off his glasses and rub his eyes. With his glasses off he looked like a scrawny teenager who could’ve been president of his high school chess team instead of a prison caseworker who had to spend his days dealing with people like me. He put his glasses back on, ageing fifteen years in the process. His expression turning grave, he told me, “I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but the news has been running a lot of stories about you, and someone released a recent photo – one that was taken when you arrived here from Cedar Junction. People out there know what you look like, Mr March. I can’t imagine it being too safe out there for you.”
I handed him the envelope I had brought with me, the same one that was delivered two weeks ago filled with court documents outlining the five wrongful-death suits that had been brought against me, all filed by the same attorney. A perplexed frown took over Theo’s features as he looked through the legal papers. Once it fully dawned on him what they meant, he looked up at me, blinking.
“There must be some way to work around this,” he said.
“There isn’t,” I said. “And as you can see I need to be at the Chelsea District Court in three weeks for the first of the lawsuits. They have to know I’m broke and that they’re not going to collect any money. The lawyer’s not doing this on a contingency basis, and he sure as fuck isn’t doing it out of the goodness of his heart. Someone has to be paying the legal bills, either the families or, more likely, some other interested third party who arranged this. And probably for no other reason than to keep me from leaving the area.”
Theo stared intently back at the paperwork, trying to figure out a way around the court appearances I was required to make. There wasn’t any. I didn’t have the money for the traveling back and forth if I were to move out of state, and even if I did it wouldn’t have mattered. As soon as I was back in Chelsea for any of the court dates I’d be right in Lombard’s backyard. Of course, I could’ve been making it sound more sinister than it really was. The lawsuits could’ve been filed for no other reason than to allow those families to have their day in court. But the expense of it made that seem unlikely. I took the papers from Theo’s hands. It didn’t much matter – if nothing else those lawsuits made it a quick argument between the two of us, because even if I could’ve I wasn’t about to leave the Boston area. I wasn’t sure why that was, at least nothing I could articulate, or really get a firm grip on. Of course I could’ve simply used the excuse that outside of my time in prison I’d lived my whole life around Boston and wasn’t about to leave now, and that I was also hoping to re-establish contact with my kids. There was some truth to that, but there was something else, kind of a vague feeling that I needed to stay in the area. I just didn’t know why exactly.