1

You can’t chance it.

The thought comes to Axel the moment he wakes once again from this hot night’s fitful sleep. The dim tier light casts a cross-barred shadow on the wall. He has each time wakened with a start, not knowing what time it is or how long he has been asleep. Each time wakened to the hoarse snoring of his cellmate, to the mumblings and sleep whimpers from neighboring cells, once to the footfalls of a guard passing by on the iron walkway, doing the night head count. Each time wakened to the same fearful thought like a low voice in some dark corner of his mind.

You can’t chance it.

“Hey, old man, what say we bust out of this zoo?”

That was how Cacho had broached the idea. He was Mexican but spoke English well and with only a slight accent. They had known each other six weeks at the time, and Axel did not yet know that Ramirez was not his true surname.

He had laughed and told the kid to forget it. There was no way. He’d been in prison since before Cacho was born, and he had been privy to a lot of escape plans but never joined any of them. Always for the same reason. Because he knew they wouldn’t work. Only a handful of them were ever attempted, he told Cacho, and not one of them succeeded.

The kid gave him a pitying look. “All these years inside and you never once tried to bust out?” Axel’s advisory did not dissuade him nor diminish his confidence. He was sure there was a way out. “There’s always a way,” he said. “All we gotta do is figure it.”

The “we” made it clear from the start that he considered Axel to be in on it and was in any case counting on his assistance by way of information. Over the following weeks he questioned Axel daily, mining his extensive knowledge of the prison’s protocols and procedures, its routines, its personnel.

Axel answered his questions as well as he could. He didn’t see any reason not to. He knew the information would lead to nothing, that the kid would never devise a feasible breakout. The Q&A sessions were anyway a pleasant diversion from the daily tedium, and in the course of them Axel surprised himself with how much he had come to learn about this place where he had been for the last ten years—the last four of them as a trusty—far longer than in any of the other prison units where he’d served portions of his sentence.

Besides, he liked the kid, who was the sole exception he’d ever made to his longtime prison practice of befriending no one. All prisons abound with bravado, but hardcore optimism is generally in short supply, and he felt a benign amusement about Cacho’s confidence in concocting a successful break. Of course, the kid was only twenty.

His amusement gave way to incredulity when Cacho told him—on a late Saturday afternoon and not quite three months after his first mention of it—that the break was all set and would take place in nine days. It was a visiting day and the kid had seemed antsy ever since his weekly meeting with his lawyer a few hours earlier. For his part, Axel had been feeling low all day, as he always did on visiting days when his brother Charlie didn’t come to see him, never mind that Charlie had been there just two weeks ago and that each of his monthly visits was a daylong undertaking for him, having to fly from Brownsville to Fort Stockton, then rent a car for the drive to Zanco.

They had just finished their daily presupper jog around the perimeter of the exercise yard and were still winding down, circling the yard at a walk, when Cacho told him the plan was in place. Axel had stared at the kid’s wide smile and said, “Bullshit.” But when the kid explained the particulars—and told him his real name was Capote and his older brother was the head of a subgang of a major Mexican criminal cartel—his disbelief gave grudging way to absorption.

“And just how were you able … well hell, the lawyer, right?” Axel said. “Somoza? Through him, in the visits. You all the time telling me he’s working on an appeal.”

“How else, man? First time he came to see me he said to find somebody who really knows this joint and get him to tell me everything about how it runs, about the towers and the gates, especially everything about the bosses and the guards. Didn’t take long to know that guy was you—been here the longest, been a trusty for a while. You told me the sorta stuff he wanted to know, I told him, he told our guys, they went to work and put the thing together. Somoza brought it to me today. Jesus, Ax, just think, nine days, man. Each one’s gonna be a month long, know what I’m saying?”

The thing relied on bribery, the oldest and generally most effective of means, and usually the simplest. Axel favored simplicity. He had grown up among people who held it for a rule that the simplest approach was usually best, a view borne out by his own experience. But these bribes involved prison insiders, and that, Axel pointed out, was the plan’s flaw.

“You ought to know by now you can’t trust anybody on the inside. Not a convict, not a CO, not anybody.”

“I’m on the inside,” Cacho said. “I’m a convict. You too. You don’t trust me? We don’t trust each other?”

“Present company excepted.”

Cacho laughed. “Present company excepted. I love the way you college dudes are always covering your ass with fancy talk. You and my brother sound just alike.” In the kid’s estimation, Axel was a “college dude” by dint of having completed three years at a university. His brother, he had told Axel, had graduated from the University of Texas.

Cacho said there was no cause to worry about the inside guys. There were only four of them, and none of them convicts. “One civilian and three corrections officers,” he said, sardonically emphasizing the bureaucratic term for prison guards, “who are doing what is most correct for their greedy-ass pockets.”

He told Axel who the COs were and that all of them were already so deeply compromised they couldn’t back out without burning themselves too.

“You mean they already took the money?”

“I mean they already took the money,” Cacho said. “These hacks don’t get paid jack shit. Drop a few packs of Bennies in front of them, they slobber all over theirselves. They’d sell their fucking mothers for a hundred G’s.”

“They really got a hundred per man?”

“Somoza’s guy personally gave the money to each one. Said it was the same with all of them. Eyes about bugged outta their heads when they saw it. And they know if they break the deal they get their throat cut. If they break the deal and somehow find a place to hide, they get ratted to the cops, the feds, the press, everybody. They got no out, man. And check this … all three of the COs know who the civilian is, but each of them thinks he’s the only prison insider. The civilian, he knows there’s somebody else in it but don’t know who or how many.”

“Nice engineering.”

“I told you, my people don’t fuck around. It’s all set. Only a matter of waiting for the insiders’ schedules to line up. That’ll happen in nine days. Nine days! All we got to do till then is think about the fun we’re gonna be having in ten days. Now come on, gramps, before they shut down the chow line.”

He could have opted out any time. Could’ve said thanks but no thanks and stepped away from the whole business. But he didn’t. To the contrary, only a few days later, as they were discussing the details of the thing yet again, he heard in his own voice the same confidence as in the kid’s. The same note of conviction that the plan would not fail. And the conviction had held strong.

Until tonight. Until the thought came to him like a whisper on the first of his wakings on this final night before the thing takes place. The thought he’s had on every waking since.

You can’t chance it.

They’ll kill you or catch you. And if they catch you—

The cell block lights come ablaze and the PA blares the wake-up call.

It’s four o’clock. The daily commotion commences. The vocal din. The shrill chirrings of electric locks and the clashings of iron doors. The harsh squawkings of the PA. The customary cacophony.

The showers are open and breakfast will be served until 5:30. Then comes a cell head count. Then crews to their jobs at 6.

The day is here.