Bronx Requiem by John Clarkson
To Summer Clarkson Savina
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m pleased to have an opportunity to acknowledge and thank the people who have supported and encouraged me in my writing efforts. First, thank you to my wife, Ellen, but those words seem terribly inadequate. Also, thanks to Dave Rutkin, who’s supported me every way he could think of, ever since the first book. Thank you, Josh Bank, for years of support and invaluable advice. Thank you, Mike Greene, Norm Siegel, Lorenzo Carcaterra, Dermott Ryan, Dave King, Franklin Tartaglione, Emily McCully, Liz Diggs, Billy J. Parrott, Richard McMahon, Nick Utton, Jamie McClelland, Richard Weininger, Victor Schiro, Dan Barrett, Deborah Brunetti, Ernie Boone, Robert Bidinotto, Craig White, Paul Faulds, Richard Guerin, Robert Stuart, Mark Luetschwager, Buddy Baarcke, Lydia Condrey, John Glendon, Tom Campbell, Steven Wiencek, Jeffrey Scott Beckerman, Frances Jalet Miller, Judy Collins, Sunny Solomon, Joe Hartlaub. And deeply felt thanks to Keith Kahla, my editor, and the team at St. Martin’s.
PROLOGUE
James Beck had about ten seconds before bones broke and blood hit the floor.
It was his fourth day at Clinton State Prison in Dannemora, New York, and Beck knew he was about to be robbed.
He’d been in lockdown while they finished his intake process. Now he walked in a line of inmates, slowly making his way up a stairwell leading to the cell assigned to him on the fourth floor in A block. In his left hand, Beck carried a brown paper bag holding personal supplies: toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, shaving cream, tobacco, and papers.
Clinton was Beck’s third prison. He’d been incarcerated for sixteen months. First in Rikers, then in Sing Sing. Long enough to know a new fish, a white guy, unaffiliated, holding a bag of supplies, would be a target.
Normally, there wouldn’t have been so many prisoners on the stairwell, but guards on the third floor had decided to stop everyone and search them for contraband. When they finally let the inmates back onto the stairwell, Beck found himself surrounded in a tight space where the guards on the landings could only watch the line of men above them or below them, but not both.
The two inmates who had planned the rip-off didn’t much care about what Beck carried in the paper bag. They wanted to know if the white-boy fish would give up his possessions without a fight. If so, they could feed off him forever.
Beck figured the man behind him would be the muscle. He had about fifty pounds on Beck. He’d do the grab. The one in front would do the snatch. Beck hoped he wouldn’t try to shank him first. It would be impossible to defend against a blade in such a tight space.
But Beck wasn’t going to wait to defend himself. He was going to hit first.
The moment the guard above looked away, Beck rammed his right elbow at the face of the big man behind him. But his attacker was already moving, too, trying to get one arm around Beck’s throat, the other around his chest.
Beck’s elbow banged into the bigger man’s right forearm, missing the face, preventing the chokehold, but not stopping the attacker from getting his other arm around Beck’s torso, trapping Beck’s left hand. As Beck kept ramming his right elbow at him, the big man lifted Beck off his feet as the inmate in front of Beck turned and fired a punch at Beck’s face.
Beck leaned back from the punch and drove both feet into the man in front of him, pushing all of his weight into the attacker behind. Beck and the bigger man fell onto the next inmate in line, knocking down him and three others. Beck landed on his attacker, whose head smacked into a stair with a wet, cracking sound, but he still kept his grip on Beck.
The inmate above grabbed the handrail and jumped up, trying to land both feet on Beck’s chest.
Beck kicked up at the man, catching him midair between the legs, doubling him over. He fell onto Beck, who shoved him off, broke the grip of the half-conscious attacker under him, and rolled away from the pile of fighting, flailing inmates. Beck grabbed the handrail and pulled himself onto his feet, shouldered and elbowed his way out of the scrum of fighting, stumbling, cursing prisoners.
Guards from above and below shouted and pushed their way toward the melee, calling for help on their radios.
Beck joined the rush of men exiting to the tier below, running into more guards who grabbed and shoved the inmates against the wall, yelling for them to spread wide and get their hands up.
Beck felt a fist smack into his kidney, nearly sending him to his knees, but he managed to get into position, head down, hands against the wall, unmoving.
It took about an hour to sort everything out. Nine men were sent to keeplock cells, including Beck, where they were locked down for two days while the prison staff investigated what happened.
Nobody claimed they had been in the fight. Everybody professed ignorance, or said something vague about a guy who fell, or maybe got pushed by another guy.
The COs had little doubt about what had happened. Beck’s supplies had been found on the steps. Clearly, the new fish had been attacked, but they couldn’t prove that Beck had fought back.
Normally, the guard staff might have decided Beck was a victim and let him off, but word had already come to Clinton that James Beck was a cop killer. So even though Beck stuck to his claims that he had no idea what happened and had committed no violations, because he’d lost his supplies they’d found him guilty of violating Rule 106.10: “An inmate shall not lose, destroy, steal, misuse, damage, or waste any type of State property.” Worse, they claimed it involved an assault and inflated the violation to a Tier III offense.