The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(12)
“Rotten bastard’s looking for an excuse to put a bullet in me. Which we are not going to give him today. Just stay calm and pretend you’re a statue.”
The assassins were hauled off in cuffs, their victim on a stretcher already dark with old bloodstains. The wave of guards fell back like a navy blue tide. Then the alarm honked, twice in sharp succession.
The inmates unlaced their hands and got back on their feet. Cigarettes lit up. A basketball thumped, game back underway. Like one of those old westerns where a bad guy gets gunned down in the saloon, life went right back to normal the second the body was dragged out of sight.
Except that it didn’t. As I gazed across the yard, I caught a web of silent glances, shifting conversations, and furtive finger signs. A conversation happening all around me, riding on the arcane geometries of the prison grapevine, and I felt a shift in the wind.
“That,” Paul said, following my gaze as he dug out a fresh cigarette, “is a problem. Smoke?”
“No, thanks. What’s going on?”
“Remember how I said we were fresh out of lockdown?” Paul took a long, slow drag, exhaling thin gray smoke into the warm afternoon air. “Way I heard it, there’s beef between the Cinco Calles and the Fine Upstanding Crew. It’s a drug thing, some kind of Vegas turf battle. The Calles made peace with the Bishops, who used to be tight with the Crew, so you can imagine how well that went over.”
I knew the Cinco Calles, by their reputation and their colors at least. They were in a partnership with my friend Jennifer, and they’d turned an abandoned tenement by the airport into an urban fortress. She hadn’t told me about any turf battles, at least none that had progressed from shoving matches to bloodshed. Then again, if Nicky Agnelli was on the run or already in custody somewhere, all the gangs that used to pay him fealty would be looking to carve out their own little kingdoms.
Forget the Chicago Outfit. With Nicky gone, Vegas could tear itself apart without their help.
“Hear anything else from the outside?” I asked. “Any idea how bad it is on the streets right now?”
Paul shrugged. “Been in here for eight years. My grasp of current events is secondhand and sketchy at best.”
“So what was that about Jablonski?”
He glanced back, craning his neck as we walked along the track.
“Thing you need to understand is Rehabilitation Dynamics of America pays their staff bottom dollar. I’m talking twenty percent less than any regular prison guard in the state, and they’re not union. So you can imagine the kind of applicants they get.”
“Washouts,” I said. “The guys who couldn’t qualify to work at Ely State.”
“Right, or the ones too dumb or too sadistic to keep their jobs there. RDA doesn’t care. Their job is to keep this place filled to capacity, so they get that sweet, sweet taxpayer funding, and run it as cheaply as possible. Now, when one of the hives—or better yet, all three—go into lockdown because of a gang violence problem, that’s considered a high-hazard situation. Guard shifts double and run long.”
“Overtime,” I said.
“Overtime. And the ‘high hazard’ is watching a bunch of cons who are locked up tight in their cells. Safer shifts and a bigger paycheck for our just and valorous overseers.”
“Which means,” I said, sniffing out the scam, “the guards have an incentive to promote inmate violence. We kill each other, there’s a lockdown, and they get paid more.”
Paul snapped and pointed a finger gun my way. “Give that man a prize. And while a better-run prison would hire guards with, say, morals, character, and human decency, those aren’t qualities that RDA screens for. If you can pee in a cup and you don’t have a felony on your record, congratulations, you’re hired. I say again, RDA doesn’t care.”
“So why were you worried about Jablonski in particular? Besides that he’s an *, I mean.”
Paul looked behind us again.
“The whites in Hive C don’t want any part of this feud. Not our problem, not our fight. Well, that’s just not enough mayhem for our dear Correctional Officer Jablonski. One of the Aryan Brotherhood heavies got released last month, so Jablonski spread a rumor about how they’d found a hit list in his cell with addresses for the families of the Upstanding Crew brothers on our tier.”
“Hoping they’d lash out in reprisal.”
“Exactly. I overheard him gloating about it to another guard. So I sent a line to Marcus, the shot-caller for the blacks, and convinced him to pow-wow with Brisco and one of the saner AB guys. Cooled everything down—and since those ‘hits’ on the outside never happened, in a few days everybody knew Jablonski was full of shit.”
We rounded the curve of the track. Guards stood like sentinels up on the gun towers, afternoon sunlight painting their glasses the color of cheap tequila.
“And he knows you were the one who snipped the fuse.”
“That’s what I get for playing peacemaker. That said, having one pissed-off guard drawing a target on my back is still better than a race war.”
A convict near the fence caught my eye. His hair did, anyway, a fluffed-out shock of white that reminded me of Albert Einstein. He looked sixty-something, wearing a hangdog expression on his deeply lined face as he stumbled along, kicking at the ground and mumbling to himself.