They ate on brown trays atop polished metal tables with rigid plastic spoons.
Tug picked at his taco, the meat stained brown, beside that a bread roll, the edges beginning to green. Each week a cluster of inmates took the center tables in the library and worked on a class action suit led by Larry Medeau, a former Kansas City lawyer who had shot dead his gardener in a dispute over bull thistle. Larry argued the food was so subpar it amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Cooper ran a book on how quick a judge would dismiss it.
“So they’re putting Tooms to death,” Tug said, picking corn from his teeth with a fingernail. “You see him when you head in there?”
Patch did not answer.
“Damn noble what you do. Quickest way to shed ignorance is to read a book. Strips it each page you turn, letting knowledge in, you know. You want your shell?”
Patch tossed it to him, glanced up and saw a couple of guys with Brand affiliation. They stood apart, sleeves pushed back over tattooed forearms, the inking crude, the shamrocks bright.
“You see them?” Tug said, still eating. He had not looked up or around once.
“I do,” Patch said, biting into his bread.
The men beside them stood and left, food mostly untouched.
“You disrespect them?” Tug said.
“A while back.”
“They don’t forget.”
“They’ll do it here?” Patch said.
Tug nodded. “Fish. Got to prove themselves. Same shit for thirty years now. Can’t blame them. Probably got the same sentence as you. Might as well serve it with some backing, right?”
“Right.”
Patch tried to keep eating, but his mouth dried out, the dough like gum as he swallowed it down with water, his hands shaking a little.
“Too late to do what they ask of you?” Tug said.
“Too late.”
Tug stood, nodded once and then moved on as they moved in.
There was a moment before it began when Patch felt the hall fall quiet. The high windows leaked the last of the day. A dozen pillars propped the roof, painted white and buried into a floor coated with specked rubber, the ingress of meals trodden in. One of the two looked young, maybe a teenager, fear in his eyes as they crossed toward him.
Patch knew he had options, none of them good. He could stand and run, but they would not forgive his slight, not forget that he once dared tell them no. Maybe he would see out another week, a week where he would lose the last of himself entirely. Lose the kid with the eye patch who came out swinging because it was in his blood. Likely in his daughter’s blood. He thought of the Barbarossa brothers, sailing flaming North African seas five hundred years before. The red beard Aruj fighting on when the Spanish sliced his arm clean off. Patch knew he could fight most, but knew he could never fight his own fate.
So when the kid pulled the sap from behind his back, when the big guy clenched his fist, Patch took a breath, picked up his tray and swung.