As Evan eased forward into 121 B-Pod, he was enveloped by a dull roar of background noise, a wave about to break. The unit smelled like death, the decay of organic matter deteriorating, uncleaned and unnourished.
The wall at his side held painted instructions with green arrows: COURT, VISITORS CENTER, RELEASE.
He couldn’t help but note that they all pointed opposite the direction he was walking.
Two levels of rooms overlooked a central bay with bolted-down picnic tables sprouting up at intervals like brushed-metal mushrooms. The circular tables sat only four at a time to keep commiserating to a minimum, and they were occupied now. Punks and jockers, hustlers and cell lieutenants with muscle-swollen joint bodies—Evan could read the dominance hierarchy from their postures and positions. A few inmates dotted the stairs and catwalk, watching Evan’s entrance with casual menace. The deputies stayed safely behind the glass, the prisoners left to police themselves. If the deputies did come in, they’d come with full riot gear, pepper spray, and stun grenades.
The walls were stained with water damage from the sprinklers, white paint bubbled out from the concrete. Dousing the two hundred or so prisoners jammed into the fifty cells was a common anti-fire, anti-riot, and anti-agitation technique.
From Joey, Evan knew all the camera positions and sight lines in here, when to lower his head and when to turn his face. She could glitch the cameras now or wipe the footage later, but he didn’t want to make more work for her than necessary.
He kept on across the bay toward the stairs. An ACLU flyer fluttered by his head: Do you not have a bed? Floor sleeping is a violation of your rights! He noted the thickness of the paper, the dab of tape connecting it to the concrete. Passing a table of men playing poker, he next considered the playing cards, how they might be repurposed as something useful. He came up blank. Two prisoner-workers distinguished by yellow jumpsuits slid a bucket around, slapping mops across the floor. Evan did a quick mental breakdown: wooden mop handles, metal band wrapping the head, brackets holding the wheels, shatterable yellow plastic.
Promising.
A wide doorway led to the showers, another to the dayroom, where a television blared a talky news show. The screen was mounted behind armored glass, elevated above a few dozen chairs. Evan noted an assemblage of prisoners whose profiles he’d memorized with Joey’s help, the Armenian Power heavies he’d assumed would be closest to Benjamin Bedrosov. They sat in a cluster around a chair centered beneath the television—the best seat in the house. Evan couldn’t see the face of the man occupying the privileged position—just part of his shoulder and an arm—but he sensed immediately that it was the man himself radiating a nimbus of influence.
One of the men with teardrops inked at the corner of his eye—Argon Sargsyan, aka Teardrop—noted Evan’s gaze across the bay and stood abruptly. A few of his compatriots rose as well, forming a human shield that blocked Bedrosov completely from view.
Evan averted eye contact quickly and mounted the stairs. An old inmate sat on the landing, scratching his neck and reading a newspaper. A zoo-house musk hung over the second floor. Evan moved up the catwalk, counting down the rooms.
He arrived at Cell 24.
He entered.
Two bunk beds at either side, a metal commode with a concave sink dimpling the top of the toilet tank, a window the size of a shoe-box lid with a browning miniature fern on the shaded end of the sill. The reek was stronger in here, a fight-or-flight hormonal dump shoved through pores and sweated into dank bedding. Contributing to the stench, a bulky bearded man around six-four crouched over the commode. His pants and underwear were dropped and pulled free of one shoe so they wouldn’t tangle his ankles if someone tried to jump him. His wristband was coded H for highly dangerous. Evan couldn’t retrieve his name, but he recalled his alias, Casper, earned for his ability to vanish from crime scenes. His magic powers had run out recently.
On the top bunk, skinny legs dangling like a puppet’s, sat a nervous tweaker whose profile Evan hadn’t reviewed. He pegged the guy as a lowest-level offender, probably possession or trespassing. A patchy beard sprouted along the man’s jawline, and his eyes jerked sporadically. He twisted his hands in the rag he wore that used to be a shirt.
“Welcome … um, hi, hi, hello, welcome.” The tweaker tilted his head, reading the name on Evan’s wristband. “Paytsar was my uncle’s name. You got any ramen?”
“No,” Evan said.
“We got a extra bed still, which is a treat, a real treat, since Gonzo is laid up in the medical bay. He got shivved with a pencil, so they put us on lockdown and took all our shit. Hot plates, lighters, matches—everything. And now I can’t make my ramen no more.”
Casper wiped himself once and rose. “Shut the fuck up ’bout your ramen, Monkey Mouth.”
“It’s like cash in here, man,” Monkey Mouth whined. “Better’n cigarettes.” He broke off a dry strip of noodles from the cake in his lap and sucked the end. “It’s my last one, don’t have no more. Got two cigs, but can’t light ’em, can’t smoke ’em. No money on my card. Most of the phones is broke, so you’re gonna wanna spring for cell minutes from one a the big shots.”
The top bunk on the right was unoccupied, a mattress folded in half. Evan entered the tight space and flipped it open. He pulled the sheet neatly over the filthy mattress, hiding his soap and toothbrush beneath and then smoothing out the wrinkles as best he could. Three folds of the threadbare towel took it to pillow thickness. He set it down atop the sheet, perfectly centered.
Casper sidled up to his side, breathed down on him. He dragged a dirty hand across Evan’s sheet, bringing up folds in the fabric.
Evan stared at the mussed sheet but remained impassive, readying to protect his head if a blow came.
“You’re gonna sleep on the floor,” Casper said.
Evan thought back to all those years as a kid sleeping on the floor between bunk beds at Pride House Group Home. He wasn’t going to do it again.
He ignored Casper, straightening the sheet once more. Then he ran his fingers along the metal rails of the top bunk, checking the soldering for a loose bead of metal he might be able to strip off. No luck. He checked the posts as well.
Monkey Mouth rattled on, “Look, Paytsar, fighting’s against the rules. If you have to, though, stick to body blows. Don’t lump up anyone’s head too bad. Plus, there’re sharper bones in the face, right? They’ll get you abrasions on your knuckles, which the screws see and then, fuck. And if they ask you anything, you’d better hold your mud, ’cuz it ain’t good in here for snitches. It ain’t good at all.”
Evan said, “Noted.”
He moved to the window, Casper shadowing him. A single piece of tempered glass cemented in place with no handle or rail. Evan felt for any vulnerable metal around the sill, but it was just a concrete lip holding paint flakes and dust and nothing else. The precast cell was a seamless block cemented in place. No bars, no bolts, nothing usable. He eyed the plant, but it rose from a Styrofoam cup that was useless for repurposing.
He kept part of his focus on Casper, idling in his blind spot, but Casper didn’t make a move.
From the control room, deputies couldn’t see into the cells. There were no cameras in here, but even so, if Evan sent the guy out on a gurney in his first minute, it could compromise his mission objectives.
Survive, kill Bedrosov, escape.
When he turned, Casper blocked his way. “Give me your shoes.”
Evan said, “They won’t fit you.”
“I didn’t ask if they’d fit me.”
“Let’s get this clear right now,” Evan said. “I’m not sleeping on the floor. I’m not giving you my shoes. I understand you’re bigger than I am and that H stamped on your wristband probably serves as a pretty big badge of honor for you in here. But I want you to look at me. Look at me closely. And ask yourself: Do I look scared?”
He stared up into Casper’s bearded face. Unblinking.
Ten seconds passed. And then ten more.
Casper exhaled into Evan’s face, settled his shoulders. He raised a meaty arm, pointed at one of the bottom bunks. “That’s my Cadillac. You fuck with it, you so much as breathe on it, you’ll be dancing on the blacktop. Got it?”
“Got it,” Evan said. “Same goes for my stuff.”
He started out.
“I know your type,” Casper called after him. “You’re a cell warrior. All tough talk in here. We’ll see how you do out on the floor, fish.”
Evan headed back downstairs, giving wide berth to the guy on the landing buried in his newspaper.
As he reached the main floor, the workers wearing yellow jumpsuits were just getting buzzed through a security door. A tempered-glass wall gave the deputies maximum observation of the pod with minimum exposure to the inmates. The deputies took the mops and the bucket, examining them thoroughly for missing parts, and then patted down the workers themselves.
So deploying a mop-based weapon was out. Evan needed another plan.
Actually, he needed several plans. As of yet he’d succeeded only in the easiest aspect of the mission: getting arrested.
He worked his way to the center of the bay to get a clear view into the dayroom.
The center chair was now empty, a throne awaiting the king’s return.
Evan looked up along the catwalk, spotted two Armenian Power lieutenants standing watch outside the door to Cell 37. Clearly, Bedrosov moved with impunity throughout the jail. And now he’d withdrawn to his guarded palace.
Evan shifted his gaze to the overhead lights. The bulbs were well out of reach even from the catwalks, recessed behind bolted panes. No getting his hands on the glass, then.
Turning away, he drifted into the dayroom. A few men slumped in chairs, spaced out, arms crossed, resting dick faces on. No one was smoking, not after the deputies had confiscated lighters and matches in the wake of the shiv stabbing, but the room still reeked as if the tobacco had climbed into the walls. On the too-loud TV, the news cycled a story on President Victoria Donahue-Carr, the same panelists masticating the same tidbits about her assumption of the office and her predecessor’s untimely departure.
Standing here breathing stale cigarette smoke surrounded by gangbangers, rapists, and murderers, he found himself considering again just how much he looked forward to ending this mission and beginning a different life.
He sensed someone approaching fast and turned, hands rising in an open-hand guard, one foot sliding back to set his base.
It was Teardrop.
He lunged at Evan, swinging for his face.
Evan flinched away hard, arms rising to cage his fragile head, his brain already aching in anticipation of impact.
But Teardrop stopped the punch mid-swing, brayed a staccato roll of laughter at Evan’s overreaction. “Jumpy, ain’t you, bozi tgha?”
Teardrop was Evan’s size and build, the start of a scruffy beard pushing through sallow skin. Evan felt an impulse to deliver a bil jee finger jab to his trachea, but if they fought out here in full view of the cameras, he’d be hauled off to solitary and miss his shot at Bedrosov. Teardrop was in for a parole violation, coming to the end of a ten-day flash. If history were a guide, he’d be out a few weeks and then back in, out and in, living between worlds until a bigger bust hooked him for good.
He squinted, the pair of teardrops at the corner of his eye squirming like slugs. An ugly cut on his chin had scabbed over, sutures poking out through his stubble like the bristles of a caterpillar. “You taking an interest in Bedrock?”
“Who?”
“I saw you looking,” Teardrop said.
Half hidden by the shirt collar, a tattoo rode the hollow of Teardrop’s neck, the pinwheel of the Armenian eternity sign, the center of the swirl beckoning like a bull’s-eye.
“Did you,” Evan said.
“I did.” Teardrop jammed a finger into Evan’s chest at the junction of his arm. “Watch. Your. Step. Bozi tgha.”
He spit on the floor and knocked Evan’s shoulder as he walked off.
Evan gave him some distance and then started back to his cell.
Over by the main door, a sheriff’s deputy was feeding newspapers through the hatch to the men in the yellow jumpsuits, whom Evan took to be the pod leaders. A lineup of prisoners waited as the papers were distributed according to some predetermined pecking order. One paper was run up to Bedrosov’s cell.
They were quickly gone.
Evan looked through the glass at the yellow bucket and mops. Out of reach, every rivet and screw accounted for. His thoughts rumbled, searching out a new angle.
He started for the stairs. The old inmate on the landing had moved on to today’s L.A. Times, the earlier one folded beneath his ass. Evan stood over him until he looked up.
“I’d like a section of the newspaper.”
“Three sausages for sports and entertainment. Two for the front page.”
“What’s the cheapest?” Evan asked.
“Dunno. Shit, lifestyle, prolly. One sausage.”
“I don’t have a sausage.”
“No shit, fish. You just walked in. Tomorrow morning you’ll get breakfast sausage.”
“I need the paper now.”
The man studied him with jaundiced eyes. Then he withdrew the folded section from beneath him and handed it off.
Evan said, “Pay you tomorrow.”
“You’d motherfuckin’ better, fish, or I’ll take it out your ass.”
Evan carried the lifestyle section to his cell. Casper was gone, but Monkey Mouth lay sprawled on his top bunk, talking at the ceiling. “—never called never called couldn’t give a damn about me rotting in here—” He paused only to suck on his last bit of ramen.
All in all, not an enviable existence.
The cell was dark, a bit of streetlamp yellow leaking through the tiny fixed window. Evan took advantage of the relative privacy. He worked his thumb into a slight tear in the wall-facing side of his mattress, enlarging it. No springs, only stuffing. He snapped his soap into thirds, extracted the staple from his heel, and sank it into one of the pieces of soap. Then he stored that hunk and one other inside the tear and firmed the mattress once again to the concrete wall.
Focusing on the newspaper, he removed the centerfold and tore it down the crease. After stashing the excess pages beneath the mattress, he brought the single sheet over to the sink atop the toilet and doused it. Then he sat cross-legged on his upper bunk, hunching so the ceiling brushed the top of his head. Starting at one corner, he rolled the page as tightly as possible, pressing all the space out of each turn. His fingertips cramped with the effort of mashing every millimeter of the damp newspaper as tightly as possible. It took a solid fifteen minutes to roll the single sheet into a long cone. Then he climbed off the top bunk, sprinkled some more water over the flimsy cone, and smoothed it again and again and again until it was a single solid stick of newsprint rather than a bunch of compressed layers.
All the while Monkey Mouth rattled on and on, snatches of phrases bumping across the contours of a terrifying inner landscape.
Casper came back in before curfew and Evan lay down on his upper bunk, placing the slender cone of newspaper between his arm and the wall so it could dry in the open air.
Casper clanked around, making plenty of noise. Then he took an endless leak, watered his dying plant—a losing battle—and kissed it good night. At last he settled into the bunk beneath Monkey Mouth, who was still motoring. “—and he made me, and I was so little, and he tasted like dirt—”
Casper kicked the bottom of Monkey Mouth’s bunk hard, causing him to bounce up so high he nearly struck the ceiling. “Shut the fuck up!”
Monkey Mouth whimpered and settled down onto his mattress facing Evan. His eyes were wide, terrified, and his lips moved as rapidly as ever. But he made no sound. He was looking at Evan but not looking at him at all.
“G’night, fish,” Casper said.
His big frame shifted around on the mattress a bit more, and then there was quiet.
In the pin-drop silence, Evan stared at the smooth ceiling above his face. Tried not to think about the men he was locked in here with. The forged steel and concrete surrounding them. The chain-link and razor wire beyond that.
He’d smuggled inside nothing but himself. He was his own Trojan horse.
He thought about Max across the city in Lincoln Heights, maybe sleeping, maybe not, but just as alone as Evan was here. That was his tether to the outside world, his purpose that would have to carry him through this hell and out to the other side.
He placed one palm on his chest, the other on his stomach. Closed his eyes. Tried to find a tranquil place inside himself, a place that looked a lot like an oak forest outside a two-story Virginia town house. Ceaselessly clear sky. Air crisp enough to sting the throat. Waving leaves and solitude and the calls of hidden birds.
He was at the brink of sleep when he sensed a stir in the air. He came fully awake just in time to spot Casper standing over his bunk, his massive fist looming.
It hammered Evan in the temple, his head flying across his makeshift pillow and smacking into the concrete wall.