Into the Fire(87)
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 And now he’d withdrawn to his guarded palace.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.