Luis got very heavily into it. Luis was grateful to Henry, not just for the nose candy, but for protecting him. Nobody put the hit on him anymore because there was Henry and nobody wanted to fuck with Henry McGee. Some of them figured Henry had turned Luis into his woman, but it wasn’t like that. It was just friendship, and Henry got good, really good, absolutely fine shit that put you on the moon or something.
Henry would watch him get his turns at night, taking the stuff up his nose. Luis liked it that way, not freebasing, not doing some of the other silly things you could do with it. Shit, it was like smoking unfiltered cigarettes — just do it. And Henry would see Luis get weaker and weaker.
Henry wanted him to kill someone, and Luis had to be weak enough to do it and strong enough to follow through on it.
Luis had a homemade knife and it was good enough.
Two days before the hit, Henry told him what he wanted him to do and told him he couldn’t have any more shit until he did it.
Luis practically pleaded. Henry gave him one little line the first day, but that was that, just out of the goodness of Henry’s heart.
The hit was a small man, smaller than Luis, named Giorgio Fontanelli. Fontanelli was the clown of the outfit guys, the runner and the gofer — and the pimp when it came down to it. He got the girls, got the coffee, went out for pizza. Once, in a comic weekend at a nearby motel on one of their frequent weekend furloughs, the guys mated Fontanelli with a 250-pound hooker named Sweet Sue. It would have made you die laughing. The woman practically smothered Fontanelli.
Fontanelli worked on the garden. It was a good job if you had a feel for the soil and growing things, because you could grow just about anything in this part of Pennsylvania. Fontanelli grew tomatoes as big as this. He would like to have been a truck farmer in New Jersey, but his uncle and his brother and everyone else were employed by a different firm in a different line of work, and so he had gone into the mob the way some Irish kids become cops, because there’s an inevitability to it you don’t fight.
Luis worked on the garden project as well. It was noted in his file he had been a migrant laborer, and the guidance counselor at the prison thought it would be good for Luis’s self-esteem to do work he was good at. It was not noted in his file that he hated it, even if he did it well. He felt the first pains in his limbs now from all the stooping; he would end up like his father. But in the joint.
“I don’t understand, Henry, why I got to kill him?”
“It’s kill or be killed in this life, Luis,” Henry McGee said. He spoke as calmly as a teacher. “But, actually, you just got to pretend to kill him.”
Henry said it that way, just slow and simple.
Luis shook his head. He wanted a rush right now real bad. It was the empty time of evening when they were all watching Leave It to Beaver reruns, and the tiers were full of noises made by caged men.
“What I gotta do it for? I don’t get it, Henry.”
“Bless you, Luis, you don’t have to get it.” Henry spoke in a country voice with a wide smile. It was his way. “I got a favor asked me and I said I’d do it. It’s a fucking joke, Luis, don’t you get it? Like the time they put Giorgio on that fat whore out at the motel. A fucking joke, but he won’t know it till I step in and end it.”
“I don’t like to mess with dose guys. Dose guys is by themselves, they don’t let no one fuck with them.”
“Ain’t no one fuckin’ with them, Luis. Don’t I tell you straight? I been taking care of you, boy. Don’t you feel a lot better about everything?”
“I feel better with some of that,” Luis said, not pointing.
Henry nodded. “So you want to do me this favor, Looey?”
“What you want me to do?”
“In the garden. You just pretend to go off your nut out there, and you swing your hoe at Giorgio.”
“Shit, I could get shot doing that.”
“I’m gonna be right there. Don’t you worry. I’ll grab your hoe and wrestle you down, and we’ll watch the little guinea shit in his pants. Mr. Anthony is gonna be out there, all the guys. It’s a joke.”
Luis had two more lines and felt better about it. Henry was his friend. Henry was a tough dude, and he wasn’t no fag, so he never asked Luis for anything. Henry was the kind of guy Luis wanted to meet on the outside, someone who had it together, someone who could show Luis how to do the thing right. Like a father.
Luis reasoned it through that night.
It went just right.
Giorgio very nearly got clocked by the sharp edge of the hoe, because Luis was higher than the Empire State Building when he took his swing.
Henry saw to that. Not the white lady this time but the standard tees and blues, and it just about put Luis over the moon.
When Henry knocked him down, it was just the way he planned it.
Don Anthony wasn’t there. He heard about it later. It was no joke to him.
He called Henry to conference that night and explained that the world was a matter of favors. Luis was sleeping soundly in his own cell, dreaming his cocaine dreams. Luis was a friend of Henry’s. Henry should ice him. That was a favor, Don Anthony explained.
Henry very nearly could not keep the excitement out of his eyes.
4
The plan was to get Henry McGee out of Lewistown prison, which would not have been very difficult. Don Anthony lived in the federal prison as though it was his summer home. He had his friends around him; he had women when he wanted them; always there were pasta, cards, and telephone calls to the sports betting people in Las Vegas. As Henry had observed, why would Don Anthony want to escape from that?
The escape was planned for October 19. It was a variation on the hidden-in-a-laundry-basket theme. The simple plans always worked best. The escape was planned for Sunday, so that it would take the authorities nearly a full day to realize Henry McGee was gone.
Henry earned his escape by dint of $450,000 and by killing Luis Miranda. Luis’s death saddened him for at least thirty seconds because he and Luis had been close. He killed Luis in his sleep as a favor to Luis. He pushed a pillow over Luis’s face and pushed down until there was no breath in the thin body. Someone found him in the morning before breakfast, and his death was attributed to substance abuse because an autopsy revealed the presence of great amounts of cocaine in his system.
The neatness of the murder — as well as the quickness of it — pleased Don Anthony nearly as much as the thought of $450,000. Don Anthony, who specialized in interstate theft, particularly theft from airports, was probably worth $10 million. But money was more than a way of life, it was a way of counting. If Henry McGee had been a paesan, Don Anthony would have made him pay anyway.
The trouble with the escape plan was that it came too late.
On October 14, federal marshals came for Henry McGee. They prepared him for travel. They put leg irons on him, so that he could only walk with small, waddling steps. They handcuffed him with heavy metal. And then they took him out of Lewistown prison.
All his belongings were sent with him. They found the homemade knife and confiscated it. They did not find the cocaine. At least, none of the search party acknowledged finding cocaine, and Henry thought they had just confiscated it for their own use.
Henry McGee was taken by car to Philadelphia International. The plane to Chicago departed at seven P.M. He asked one of the marshals why he was being taken to Chicago, a place he knew nothing about. The marshal suggested he shut the fuck up. The flight took ninety-four minutes, and the plane descended through bumpy clouds to land. It was raining in Chicago. The marshals walked Henry through the long, glittering corridors of O’Hare Airport to a gray government car parked in a no-parking zone at the lower level. The marshal opened the back door and guided Henry in, putting his hand on Henry’s head so that he would not bump it on the door frame. The gesture was humane, but there was something very threatening about it as well, because it made the prisoner feel the hand of the guard, which reminded him of his manacles and his utter helplessness.