Into the Fire(91)
Bedrosov tilted his head back and examined Evan. He was an extremely still man, so every move seemed freighted with significance. “If that’s the case, if Casper attacked you, I will let it slide. Be sure not to initiate any violence on your own during your stay.”
Evan nodded, but Bedrosov remained motionless, the picture of control. His eyes were unblinking, reptilian. Evan had read once that there were more psychopaths in business than in any other field. The man before him seemed a perfect case study.
Evan started to back out.
“You seem vaguely familiar,” Bedrosov said. “Have I seen you somewhere?”
A tingle of heat moved through Evan, dampening his undershirt with sweat, the electronic wristband sticking to his skin. “Not unless you service your car at the AutoZone at Washington and Hoover.”
Bedrosov said nothing. He just stared.
Evan lowered his gaze as if intimidated and backed the rest of the way out.
47
Kill You Tonight
The next hour was like the one before and every one before and every one to come, stretched out in front of Evan like the horizon. He’d been in a few holding cells and interrogation rooms, even done a short stint in a Moroccan prison. He understood jail time. Institutional life was not unlike his early childhood. Warehoused like wine in a barrel, overheated and overripened, drying out or filling with acid.
He stayed in his cell, adding layer after layer to his brittle newspaper cone and trying not to think about just how thin the needle was that he had to thread to pull this all off.
Lunch was bologna with a green tinge, greasy french fries, and an orange sugar drink he couldn’t make himself finish. He sat at the same table with the same outsiders, trying to stop his vision from rolling like an old-fashioned TV. His head felt full of soup.
As they streamed back to their cells afterward, he noticed several inmates stuffing crumpled newspapers down their collars.
Evan said to the gray-haired inmate at his side, “What are they doing?”
“Padding they undershirts against stickings,” the man said. “Shit’s going down. Soon.”
“What shit?”
The man cocked his head, looked at Evan sideways. “Son, don’t you know?”
Before Evan could respond, the man peeled off toward his cell.
* * *
Screened rec areas formed the backside of the top floors. As the inmates were let out from the stairwell into the semi-open zones, Evan realized that he’d forgotten what real air tasted like. He sucked in a few lungfuls, hoping it would help clear his head. The men spread out among the basketball courts and the weight-lifting turf. Industrial screen rimmed the building’s edge. There was no good sniper vantage from any of the surrounding buildings.
He’d checked.
Bedrosov sat on a weight bench until a runner brought him a cell phone. Then he made call after call, and the deputies either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
Evan walked carefully around the screened perimeter, eyes on the ground, searching for anything useful. Balled up by the trash can was a foil pea of a chewing-gum wrapper. He crouched to pick it up, and the change in elevation brought the pain between his temples to a high hum. He squatted there a moment, catching his breath.
A skeletal crackhead leaned against the trash can, hugging his knees, pant cuffs tugged up to show what looked like a staph infection in the open wound on his shin.
Evan said, “You need to get to the medical bay.”
The man stared at him with sunken eyes, his gaze dizzyingly vacant.
That’s what time on the inside could do to you.
The possibility of failure curled around Evan’s brain stem, and he shook it off. Defeat was too awful to even contemplate.
He rose and glanced over at Bedrosov on the bench making phone calls, running his empire with impunity. Evan wondered if he was putting out another contract on Max Merriweather. If so, the only way to void the contract was to make sure there’d be no one around to pay it.
The whistle blew to signal the end of rec time, and Evan turned to go, nearly bumping into a huge inmate he didn’t recognize. A ruinous mountain in jailhouse blues, acne scars so severe they looked like burn marks. “You the boy who hurt Casper.” The man smiled, revealing a gleaming gold incisor. “We gonna kill you tonight.”
A wave of light-headedness swept through Evan, and he had to step to the side to right his balance.
“Okay,” he said.
* * *
At four o’clock sharp, Evan returned to his meet spot with Joey at the base of the stairs. He was en route to the shower, his towel and chunk of soap in hand. He paused a moment beneath the camera and ran his hand across the back of his neck, a subtle gesture that would go unnoticed by any current or future observer. He rubbed his neck five times, calling for her to glitch the surveillance system in five hours.
The newspaper cone, drying upstairs under his sheet, had been growing steadily throughout the day. He hoped it would be ready by nine.
He hoped everything else would be ready, too. Including his concussed brain.
Walking away, he stumbled a bit. He hoped Joey wouldn’t notice. Continuing on into the showers, he stripped with a few other inmates and stepped under the lukewarm drizzle. His scruff had grown longer, approximating a beard, and he longed for a shave. He didn’t duck his head beneath the stream, staying alert. Even the moderate heat of the water brought his temperature up, the symptoms simmering back to life. The room tilted one way and then the other, a slow-motion seesaw. He sagged into the wall, willing the static to clear from his brain.