The four women ignored him, and continued to chat away.
Crutch moved to hit one of the women, then froze. He looked in Linderman’s direction, the expression on his face a mixture of savagery and pain. Like he could not help himself.
Linderman knew that what he was seeing was not real, yet it did not change his response. He ran toward the picnic table, intent on stopping Crutch.
By the time he reached the table, they were gone.
Chapter 37
Routines did not change inside a prison. It was part of the punishment.
At three o’clock, the inmates in Crutch’s cellblock were let outside. For the next hour, they could play basketball, smoke cigarettes, or do nothing.
It was the best part of the day.
Crutch stood eagerly by his cell door. He was filled with stress, and needed to go run around and stretch. He’d read how stress caused cancer and other fatal diseases. He didn’t want to get sick in prison. The care was terrible.
He’d expected to have heard from Linderman by now. Linderman’s unwillingness to accept his deal had surprised him. Didn’t Linderman want to know what had happened to his beloved child? Or was he going to stick to the rules, and not let Crutch get the best of him? Crutch didn’t see him holding out forever. Losing the thing you loved most in the world was never fun. That he knew for a fact.
The fat guard named Mickey approached his cell. He motioned for Crutch to step back, and the door electronically opened. He stepped in.
“Something wrong?” Crutch asked.
“Not a thing,” Mickey said.
He punched Crutch in the stomach. Crutch went down on one knee, gasping for air. “Asshole,” Mickey said.
“What’s wrong?” he gasped.
“You fucked up.”
“I didn’t do anything…”
“Tell that to the FBI. They were bugging the cell phones, listening to you. The shit’s going to hit the fan.”
Crutch took several deep breaths. “What’s going to happen?”
“Stand up. I can’t hear you.”
“Promise you won’t hit me again.”
“I won’t hit you again.”
Crutch pulled himself to his feet and Mickey punched him again. There was no truth inside a prison, just the same lies, told over and over. He went back down.
“Asshole,” Mickey said again.
Crutch wanted to kill Mickey. It wouldn’t be terribly hard – Mickey was fat and slow and wouldn’t see it coming. But Crutch first needed to find out the extent of the damages. He needed to know what he was facing with the other inmates.
“Tell me. Please,” he begged.
“Jenkins is reviewing what happened,” Mickey said. “Every guard who’s involved will either get fined, or fired, or both. The inmates who were involved will lose their privileges and it will go in their files. Everybody’s fucked because of you.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to screw up.”
“You’re sorry? Jenkins said you were talking to some whack-job in Fort Lauderdale who’s killing teenagers. You didn’t tell us you were a child killer, little man.”
Crutch felt Mickey’s hands gripping the sides of his arms. The guard pulled him to his feet and shook him. His round, pimply face was right there in front of him.
Kill him! the voice inside Crutch’s head screamed.
“Jenkins also said you were the sickest puppy he’s ever come across,” Mickey said. “That says a lot, coming from him.”
The inmates had started to file out of the cellblock. Mickey spun Crutch around and pushed him out of the cell. Crutch tried to put on the brakes. He needed to stay here, and think things out. Too much was happening at once for him to deal with.
“Come on,” the guard said.
“I don’t want to go into the yard,” Crutch said.
“You don’t have a choice, little man.”
Mickey continued to push him out of the building until they were standing in the blinding sunlight of the grassy yard, surrounded by hundreds of other inmates whose eyes seemed to catch on Crutch’s face and tear at the skin.
“Have a nice day,” Mickey said, walking away.
Crutch stood frozen to the ground. He thought about the metal shiv hidden in the hollow leg of his bed. He knew that many inmates carried their shivs for protection when they were in the yard. He had never felt the need to carry a weapon, convinced he could talk his way out of any tight situation.
Until now.
He couldn’t talk his way out of the web of lies he’d spun. They’d started the day he’d entered Starke, and had continued until a few short minutes ago, the facade of him being a soft-spoken Milquetoast easy for the other inmates to digest. But now the other inmates had been given a taste of the real him, and that was unacceptable even to their lowly standards. It was only a matter of time before they retaliated.
He was going to die.
The other inmates would gang up, and figure out the best way to kill him. They’d recruit another inmate who had nothing to lose, and give him the job. It would be like a badge of honor.
He scurried around the yard, looking for a place to hide. He tried to join several groups of inmates standing in tight circles, but was rebuffed each time.
“Get the hell away from us,” an inmate swore.
“Yeah – fuck off,” another warned.
He came to the basketball courts. A pick-up game was going on between a team of black inmates, and a team of white inmates. The white team couldn’t play worth a damn, but that didn’t stop them from throwing elbows and putting up a fight.
A crowd of white inmates stood beside the court, shouting encouragement to the white players. They were muscle heads, and spent their free time in the weight room, pumping iron. Crutch stood behind their broad bodies, and pretended to watch the game. For a few minutes, everything was good. Then, one of the white inmates spotted him.
“Look who’s here,” the inmate said.
The inmate was a bank robber out of Pensacola named Justin Hainz. Hainz had a nasty side that even the black inmates respected. Hainz grabbed Crutch, and put him in a headlock.
“Cut it out,” Crutch said.
“You’ve been a bad boy,” Hainz said.
“Haven’t we all?”
“Ha, ha.”
“Come on, let me go.”
“Hey guys, look who came for a visit,” Hainz said to the others.
The others formed a tight circle around the two, no longer interested in the violence taking place around the hoops. Crutch struggled to free himself.
“Let me go!”
Hainz threw him to the ground. Crutch landed on his back, and spent a moment trying to regain his senses. He looked up into a sea of hatred.
“Who wants him first?” Hainz asked the group.
“I do.” One of the blacks penetrated the group, and pointed at him. “Motherfucker ruined my business. Without my cell phone, I can’t talk to my runners no more.”
It was his neighbor, Leon.
“Come on, Leon, I didn’t mean to screw you up,” Crutch said.
“Doesn’t matter what you meant,” Leon said.
Leon raised his leg. Once Leon started kicking him, the others would join in. This happened often in the yard, the inmates pent-up rage turning into a feeding frenzy of violence. They would kick in his teeth and break his ribs and puncture his stomach and he’d go to the infirmary and never be the same. He wouldn’t die, but he’d wished he had.
Kill him, the voice inside his head said.
Crutch hesitated. So many times during his prison stay, the voice inside his head had told him to kill another inmate, or a guard. Just as many times, he’d refused to listen. It had been hard, but he had no other choice.
But the game had changed. Now, it was about survival. Killing so that he might continue to live.