I wake up on Thursday, take a shower, then skip breakfast and head for the locker room. Freddie’s already there, hanging our pressed uniforms in our metal lockers. Once upon a time, the lockers were a uniform gray, the color of pewter, but they’ve tarnished over the years and now have a mottled overgrown look, as if the victim of some exotic fungus.
“You ready, Freddie?” I ask. “You ready to go to work?”
“Bubba, I…”
“Don’t start that Bubba shit again. I have something I need you to do.”
“What is it?”
“This afternoon, two o’clock, Campbell is gonna be workin’ in the library. I want you to go there, talk to him, tell him that I know you snitched us out.”
“He’ll kill me.”
“For Christ’s sake, you’re gonna be in the library. You even enough, you get eighty-sixed.”
“Then he’ll get me later.”
“He’s already gonna get you later.” I put a foot up on the bench that runs in front of the lockers. “It’s your chance, Freddie. Your chance to be a man for the first time in your miserable life, your chance to stand on your own two feet.” I hold up a finger. “Plus, you can help yourself at the same time. Because I’m telling you, when Campbell hears what you have to say, he’s gonna be a lot more worried about me than you.”
Freddie thinks it over for a moment, the possibility of deflecting Campbell’s wrath onto me obviously appealing. If he gains an ally in the process, so much the better. “Whatta ya want me to say?”
“Tell Campbell that I put the pieces together on my own. I know he killed Spooky and snatched my product because he was the only one who had the opportunity. I know you snitched because… well, I know you snitched because you’re you. Likewise, because you’re you, when I threatened to shank your ass, you confessed. Those stitches in your ear and that bandage oughta be proof enough that I meant business.”
“And that’s it? Just that I admitted talking to him?”
“Yeah, you opened up because you were in fear of your life and now you’re trying to make it good by telling him the truth.” I put my arm around his shoulder, let my voice drop. “Campbell’s gonna ask you a lot of questions. He’s gonna want to know everything you said to me and everything I said to you. It’s only natural, right?”
Freddie nods. “Right.”
“So you tell him everything you told me about his threats and where he took you before he delivered them. The only thing you don’t tell him, Freddie, is that I asked you to come forward. That’s the one teeny-tiny thing you keep to yourself.” I give his shoulder a squeeze. “That’s gonna be our little secret.”
I go from Freddie to Warden Brook’s office. He tells me that he’s spoken to the two refs, and I guarantee him a win. We’re one-point underdogs by now.
“You’re not worried about losing Spooky?”
“You remember when you brought me here, Warden? You remember I promised you a championship? Well, tonight I’m gonna keep that promise.”
I know the warden bets on every game, always on the Tigers, even when I tell him the team’s so worn-out we’d get our asses kicked by the Menands High School Barracudas. He’s a fan is what he is, a former athlete who lives through his favorite team, which is us.
“So make room in the trophy case,” I declare, “because we’re bringin’ the cup home.”
My next stop is in the computer room, where I find my teacher, Cliff Entwhistle, hard at work. Cliff is a big-time gambler, but unlike Warden Brook, he’s willing to wager against the Tigers. Though I only bet with the team (and once threatened to crush the fingers of a skinny point guard I thought was shaving points), I don’t bet every game.
“What’s the word?” I ask him. “Out on the yard?”
“Without Spooky, Menands doesn’t have a chance.”
“Good, because I want to get a bet down.” I retrieve a pair of C-notes from their resting place in the crotch of my underwear and hand them over. If the coke deal had gone down as planned, it’d be a lot more, but I’m doing the best I can. “I guarantee a win here,” I tell him. “You can take it to the bank.”
Cliff nods. “Thanks, Bubba.”
“Don’t thank me. There’s something I need you to do. Like, right now.”
An hour later I make my way down a long flight of stairs to the furnace room. Two stories high and at least a hundred feet long, the room houses a state-of-the-art, fully automated boiler the size and shape of a diesel locomotive. It being May and warm, the unit is only producing hot water. Still, the steady hiss of the flame is loud enough for my purposes. I work my way along the north wall, the route taken by Campbell when he recruited Freddie, avoiding a pair of cameras mounted on the ceiling. The cameras use heat-sensitive film and are in place to detect fires.
The coal room, Campbell ’s office, is not as Freddie described it. I expect a large empty space, but the room is cluttered with discarded desks. There are desks upside down, on their sides, on three legs, desks piled one on top of the other. Desk drawers, heaped in a corner, rise halfway to the ceiling.
It’s now one o’clock. Freddie’s scheduled to make his confession at two. That leaves me an hour to find my product. Assuming it’s here at all, that Campbell doesn’t have another hideaway, that he didn’t take his prize home with him, maybe peddle the weight to a street dealer.
I begin to search, at first systematically, then more and more frantically as time passes. A pair of overhead lights don’t respond to a switch next to the door, and the only illumination splashes in through the open doorway. The desks are extremely dusty. The dust coats my throat and mouth as I work. When I run my fingers over my brush cut, it feels like I’m dragging them through mud.
Somewhere around one forty-five, I force myself to slow down. I tell myself I have one of those unforeseen problems that crop up from time to time, no matter how carefully I try to plan my activities. I tell myself they happen to everybody. It’s not God getting me, like I sometimes thought before I learned to control my anger.
I set out to draw ten deep breaths, each one slower and deeper than the last, just the way I’ve been trained. I don’t get past the fifth before I realize there’s another way, and if I’d only taken a moment to think before I started ripping desks apart, I could have saved myself a lot of work.
I’m standing just to the left of the door, looking for a good place to hide, when Campbell walks into the room. He is not alone. A dealer named Redmond Mitchell is with him. At the tail end of a ten-to-life bit, Red is also a veteran of New York’s maximum security institutions. His stay at Menands is theoretically the final step in his rehabilitation.
Coming from the intensely bright furnace room, neither Red nor Campbell sees me until I step in front of them.
“What’s up, guys? You lookin’ for me?”
Campbell is maybe five-ten. A layer of fat covers a much thicker layer of muscle on his heavy boned frame. At one time, I suppose, he was quite the brawler, an upstate redneck who would have been a convict if he hadn’t become a screw But now he’s nearing fifty, a hard drinker who maintains his self-image by terrorizing inmates, like Freddie Morrow, who are in no position to fight back.
Red is another matter. He’s younger, in much better condition, a man who maintained his personal dignity over many years in many prisons. I see Campbell glance at him, smiling, convinced that Red is an ally in this war. He’s wrong.
“Red,” I explain, “what I gotta do here is convince this dumb-as-shit screw to show me where he’s hidden my cocaine. Most likely, it’d be better if you weren’t here to see it.”
I know that Red’s not afraid of me. I also know that he’s got a release date for the end of the summer and the last thing he reeds is a serious beef. “No harm, no foul,” he says. “I’m not out no money and I ain’t got a dog in this fight.” He backs through the door, then asks, “You gonna win tonight, Bubba?”