Eighteen months later.
OUT OF GUILT AND BASIC CROOK SOLIDARITY, MORTY got Coop the best lawyer he could afford, which basically meant he could dress himself and read the charges, but not much else. Coop didn’t like Ferthington, the lawyer, the moment he laid eyes on him. The guy smiled when they first shook hands. Coop didn’t trust lawyers who smiled too much. “Smiling lawyers are fatalists and you’re the fatality,” an old con had once told him. Looking at Ferthington’s eyes, Coop felt like shark chum.
When he told him about it Morty opened his hands, groping for words. “Maybe it wasn’t fatalism. Maybe it was irony.”
“Oh, that’s better. Ironic time passes much faster than regular time.”
In the end, Coop didn’t get the chair (not that he was going to). But the judge was friends with the Bellicose family and sentenced Coop to ten years’ hard time.
Ferthington smiled as the bailiffs led Coop out of the courtroom. It wasn’t fatalism or irony. It was the smile of someone not bright enough to know that he’d been as useful in court as a trout with a speech impediment. Coop started to shout something, but one of the bailiffs helpfully jammed a nightstick into his side, doubling him over and thereby saving him from the extra time the “attack” would have added to his sentence. Maybe I should have gotten the cop for a lawyer, he thought as he lay in the back of the prison bus, nursing a bruised kidney.
At least the other soon-to-be inmates were impressed that Coop had already been in a dustup with a guard, so they left him alone.
And while it wasn’t the finest moment of his career, at least it covered up how entirely freaked out he was to be back in a bus on the way to jail.
The prison didn’t have a name. Just GPS coordinates and a Viking rune that translated roughly as “Seriously, would you take a look at these dumbfucks?”
Inside, the jail was known as Surf City because of how close to the ocean it wasn’t. Surf City was in the high desert and most of it was underground. This kept it out of the public and, more important, the press’s eye. No need to feed the crackpot industry by letting regular saps get wind that, yes, magical thieves, sasquatches, and succubi were all real and on a bad day just as likely to steal your Prius as suck out your soul.
When Coop got the notice that he was going to be released after serving only eighteen months, it was a mystery to him, and he didn’t like mysteries that involved his skin and bones. At first he thought the prison had gotten his file mixed up with some other con’s, but when the warden convinced him that no, it was really Coop who was getting out, he kept his mouth shut and his eyes down, which meant a certain amount of banging into things, but better safe than sorry. Still, the whole thing bothered him. Even with good behavior, he should have been a good three years from a parole hearing.
In the two weeks between being told he was getting out and the time of his release, Coop went from puzzled to suspicious, back to puzzled, then even more suspicious, and finally, he settled into a nice long stretch of grim paranoia. Maybe he was a lab rat in a prison psych experiment and when he reached the gate to get out, the warden and all the guards would shout “April Fool’s!” and drag him back to his cell.
“Good luck, Coop,” said Rodney, his cellmate, as he was packing up.
“Luck? Why do I need luck? Did you hear something?”
“Relax,” Rodney said. “It’s just an expression, like ‘see you around’ or ‘take it easy.’ It doesn’t mean nothing.”
“Right,” said Coop, trying to sound cool or, at least, a dignified level of panicked. “Nothing. But you didn’t hear anything, did you?”
“Not a thing.”
“Okay.”
Rodney put out his hand to shake as Coop prepared to leave. Rodney was one of the many things Coop wouldn’t miss about prison. It wasn’t that Rodney was a bad guy. In fact, he was a fine cellmate. He knew when to keep his mouth shut and he never touched any of Coop’s stuff without permission. Beyond that, Coop didn’t know exactly what Rodney was and he was too polite to ask. He knew that before jail Rodney had haunted a swamp out by Cienega Grande and he got the feeling that he’d had some kind of drive-in horror-movie run-in with a vanful of idiot city kids over a spring break weekend. What Coop was most acutely aware of was that Rodney smelled like a garbage dump dry-humping a slaughterhouse in the large intestine of a sick elephant.
Coop stood there for a few seconds staring at Rodney’s hand, just long enough that it become uncomfortable for both of them. Rodney was withdrawing his perpetually damp mitt when Coop reached out and shook it. Rodney beamed at him with his moss-colored teeth.
“Take care of yourself, Rodney,” said Coop as he walked out of the cell.
He waited until he was at the end of the tier before sniffing his fingers. It was like his hand was made of liverwurst that someone had forgotten under a moldy sofa.
On his way out, Coop made sure to shake hands with every guard in his cell block.
Then, just like that, it was over and he was out. After all his paranoid fantasies, the walk out of jail was almost anticlimactic. He was outside the gate in the same blue suit he’d had on the day he’d been convicted. It was just a little baggier now.
Coop walked to the bus stop under the blasting desert sun and sat on the bench with a plastic bag that held all his worldly possessions. No one had told him how often the bus came by, but he wasn’t going to move his ass until it did. He wished he’d been able to eat breakfast. Or dinner. But his stomach had been too jumpy and the last thing he wanted was to be sick on release day. Still, sitting there in his too-loose clothes, state-issued sneakers, and prison haircut, he’d never felt more like a loser con in his life.
A black Corvette sped up the two-lane road in front of the prison and squealed to a stop, leaving twin streaks of rubber on the asphalt. Half the body was Bondo-painted black in an attempt to match the rest of the car, which just made it look like it was slowly turning into an alligator.
“Hey, jailbird!” yelled the driver.
Coop lowered his head to see who was inside. The driver pushed a button and rolled down one of the side windows.
It was Morty. He was only a few years older than Coop, but already starting to go gray. He wore a red corporate-style pullover, chinos, and loafers. Coop thought he looked like the assistant manager at an Orange County Burger King. Morty beamed at Coop as he leaned over and opened the passenger door.
“Hop inside. I’ll drive you to town, Jesse James.”
Coop sat there for a minute before getting up. He started for the passenger door, stopped, and went around to the driver’s side. Morty got out and opened his arms to hug him. The two men embraced. Coop moved them around a little so that Morty’s back was to the prison, shielding him from anyone who happened to be watching from inside. When he was sure he was safe, Coop kneed Morty in the balls. Not hard enough to double him up. That would attract too much attention. Coop tagged him just hard enough that Morty dropped back down on the driver’s seat seeing stars and trying to catch his breath. Coop went back around the car and got on the bus, which was just pulling up. As Morty watched him go, all he managed to say was “Urgh . . .”
It was four hours back to L.A. The bus was empty except for Coop and a couple of cons he didn’t recognize. Tough guys from one of the prison werewolf gangs, by the look of them. Coop stared out the window, watching the complete lack of scenery roll by, conspicuously not looking at the wolf crew, hoping they noticed his extreme inattention.
The bus dropped them on Seventh Street near Pershing Square. As it rumbled off, a blue Ford SUV pulled up, blasting black metal on the sound system. Coop didn’t know what band, but he recognized the style because it sounded like a gorilla stuck in a clothes dryer. Between the shaggy, headbanger lycan driver, the haze of weed rolling out the side door, and the broken side window, the SUV could not possibly have looked more stolen. Coop had to admire the wolves’ complete lack of giving a shit when he noticed that they’d noticed him noticing them. One of the gang who’d been on the bus stuck his butt out of the side door and dropped his pants, waving his human ass as the rest of the gang gave Coop the finger. The van sped off trailing a thick ganja fog, taking the gangsters away to party with friends, while Coop knew all he had going was a date with a single bed in a one-star hotel room, with overfriendly roaches and a TV stuck on the Weather Channel.
He heard a car honk from up the street. When he turned, Coop saw Morty in the Corvette about half a block behind him. He got out of the car and waited on the sidewalk, but didn’t get any closer. As Coop walked over, Morty took a step back.
“Don’t go getting all Rowdy Roddy Piper again,” Morty said. “Who do you think got you out of jail early?”
“You got me in in the first place.”
“And I got you out.”
“How? You don’t know anybody. I don’t know anybody and you know even less people than me.”
“That’s because you’re antisocial. You should get out more.”
“I don’t want to know people. They get you arrested.”
Morty ignored the remark and looked around.
“Not the people I know. They get you unarrested.”
Coop shook his head and turned to go.
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“You kind of have to,” said Morty.
Coop stopped.
“Why?”
“That’s how I got you out. I told him you were good for the job.”
“You know what I’m good for right now?”
“What?”
“Not talking to you.”
Coop jaywalked through traffic to a bus stop across the street. Digging in the plastic bag, he came up with enough change for the fare. When he turned around, Morty was right beside him.
“You just said it yourself, you don’t know anybody. Where you going to go?”
“Away from you and your shifty friends.”
A bus arrived and Coop started onto it, then stepped down.
“You have a cigarette?”
“Sure,” said Morty. “Here. Keep the pack.”
“Gee, the whole pack?” said Coop. “I guess this makes up for everything.”
The door closed and the bus rumbled away with Coop on it.