They don’t call him the warden, as it turns out, because to their mind, Willacy isn’t a prison. It’s a “privately managed detention facility,” and he’s the goddamned CEO. I wonder if the inmates — or “detainees,” or “involuntary guests,” or whatever the hell they call them — would agree. Maybe they could register their nomenclature-based complaints on their comment cards once their stay was finished.
We never call things what we mean anymore. The obtuse language somehow makes the sharp edges and harsh angles of life easier to swallow. A candy-coated shard of jagged glass that’s sweet on the public’s tongue before it tears apart their insides. A pat on the back with one hand while the other steals our wallets or our souls. And people are all too willing to let it happen, because any insulation from the big and scary that surrounds them is welcome, no matter how obvious a lie it proves to be.
Whatever they call the guy, they were understandably reluctant to patch me through to him, at least until I mentioned I had information on a planned break-out for one of their inmates. The corporate shill manning the phone — who called himself a “public liaison” when he answered — didn’t sound like he believed me. Maybe if I called it an “unplanned departure,” he would have. Instead I offered up a name — Javier Guerrera. And a time — midnight local.
Amazing what name-dropping a Xolotl Cartel lieutenant will do. Because if there’s one thing a big, soulless corporation recognizes, it’s another big, soulless corporation. And make no mistake, the only thing keeping the Xolotl Cartel off the Fortune 500 is the nature of the products they peddle.
The warden answered without so much as identifying himself, instead barking a gruff, “Who is this? Where are you calling from?” And I’m pretty sure, given the lag time before I was connected, there were a dozen or so people listening in on the call, some no doubt intent on tracing its source.
Let ’em, I thought. Ain’t a security camera around with a sight-line on this payphone, and in the unlikely event they manage to track down the kid whose body I’m tooling around in, all the way in little old Guam, anything he tells ’em is gonna make him sound all cuckoo crazypants.
Instead of answering him, I bleated: “Oh, God — they’re here!” and dropped the receiver. And then, mentally fixing on the voice I’d just heard on the other end of the receiver, in some bland office in some bland facility in a broad, flat patch of brown and gray just off Route 77 in Texas, I threw myself at him with all I had.
For a moment, there was a tinny, echoing nothing — like dropping off from anesthesia — and next thing I knew, I was in a tipped-over faux-leather office chair, tasseled loafers aimed soles-to-ceiling, and the back of my head smarting something fierce from where it smacked against the institutional vinyl tile floor. Been happening more and more of late — the body-hopping was getting easier, the force previously required now enough to knock folks back. Even the subsequent meat-suit nausea hasn’t been so bad, I think. But as soon as the thought arced across my mind, Mr. CEO here’s stomach revolted, and I barely made it to the dented metal trash bin beside his desk before his lunch of enchiladas came up.
It was just past 7am in Guam when I dropped my quarters into the payphone. That made it 4pm or so Texas-time. Sunlight slanted oven-hot through vinyl-blinded windows. Beyond them, ten enormous pill-shaped Kevlar tents studded the three football-fields of fence-looped gray dirt in two rows of five, with paved paths bleached pale gray linking them together like a circuit board. At the outside end of every oblong structure, nearest the perimeter fence, was a small paved yard — some empty, some milling with brown-skinned men. If there were women, they weren’t housed within sight of my new meat-suit’s office, which appeared to be housed in a low-slung building of more quotidian design than the tents outside — less funky marshmallow prison, more dull-as-dirt industrial park.
I couldn’t help but notice it was surrounded by razor-wire just the same.
Ortiz. Larry Ortiz, so said the nameplate on his desk, at any rate. If I had to guess, I’d say the Ortiz was to appease the critics of the facility, who claimed its very existence was racially motivated — and the Larry was to appease the white-faced white-hairs who kept on funding it and didn’t want anybody “too ethnic,” in their parlance, to be in charge. A portly man in a too-tight dress shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, and iron-creased jeans. The lone picture on his desk showed two smiling kids, a smiling wife, and a round, graying, florid man in a Stetson and cowboy boots, a chambray shirt and jeans.
Me, I figured.
I considered paging Ortiz’s admin or secretary or whatever, but I didn’t know if he had one. Plus, his office phone was so damned complicated, I couldn’t figure out how. So instead, I marched straight out of his office, and declared to the perfume-drenched pile of teased-up Texas hair and tits behind the desk outside, “I need to see Guerrera. Now.”
I half-expected her — or the guards she summoned to escort me — to ask me why. To tell me we had three Guerreras in custody, and they didn’t know which one I meant. To flat-out refuse to take me to him. But they didn’t.
Sometimes, it pays to be the boss.
Nor did they take me to his cell. They brought Guerrera to me. Or rather, had him waiting in an interrogation room when I arrived — handcuffed to a table, an empty chair opposite for me. There was no cop-show two-way mirror. Just a table, two chairs, a corner-mounted video camera, and one very frightened man. And then me.
The two guards who’d escorted me made to enter the room, but I waved them off without a word. They took up posts in the hall, on either side of the door, which I promptly shut.
Guerrera did not look well. His skin was pale and sheathed in sweat. His exposed flesh had the look of having been picked at, his forearms furrowed with fingernail scratches, a constellation of tiny half-moons on his cheeks a scabrous red. His hair was a mangy shock of white, as if he’d been pulling it out in clumps. His eyes darted around the room — vigilant, paranoid. His fingers drummed a rat-a-tat atop the metal table. Sitting still — being chained — was torture for him, it was clear. His finger-tapping soon spread to his feet, and as I fixed my gaze upon him, he began to rock back and forth, his breath coming so quickly through gritted teeth I actually worried for his health.
Then I remembered he was human garbage, responsible for no shortage of deaths, dismemberments, and drug-dependencies in his tenure with the Xolotl Cartel.
It helped, a little.
I approached the table. He watched — nervous, rapt — as I dragged the cheap metal chair over to the corner of the room, its legs squealing against the painted concrete floor. I said nothing to him, nor he to me. Then I climbed atop the chair and, after a moment’s fiddling, yanked the wire out of the security camera. His eyes went wide with fear of a different sort. Immediate, explainable. Human in origin. In his mind, I was a bad man, here to do bad things to him. Guerrera understood that all too well. Though usually, he was on the other side of the table. Or the ax. Or the flamethrower.
The man had quite the colorful file. Made whatever scared the piss and pigment out of him twice as oogly-boogly in my mind as I might have thought it otherwise.
When I returned from the corner, leaving the chair behind and circling the table toward him, he spat and said, “I tell you nothing.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “You don’t have to.”
My hand found his chest and reached inside. As my fingers wrapped around his corrupted soul, his eyes widened yet further — his face a mask of pain and disbelief.