Read The Killing Floor Blues Online

Authors: Craig Schaefer

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The Killing Floor Blues (4 page)

BOOK: The Killing Floor Blues
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6.

“We’ve gotta do someth—” I started to say. Paul put his hand on my chest.

“No, we
don’t
,” he told me. “This is
prison
, okay? You want to survive this place? Here’s the best advice you’ll ever get: never get involved in other people’s fights. That makes it
your
fight.”

I wouldn’t have gotten there in time anyway. I watched as one of the attackers looped his arm around their target’s throat, hauling him back and off-balance. The other reached under his tied-off shirt and yanked out a shiv—a jagged spike of metal wired to a broom-handle hilt, cheap and nasty and built for violence. The blows rained down fast and frantic, punching the spike into the Latino’s chest and stomach and mutilating his tattoo, turning the Virgin Mary into a murder victim. If he prayed to her, it didn’t help him any.

A klaxon whined from the gun towers, shrill as fingernails on a blackboard and loud enough to set my teeth on edge. Paul dropped to his knees and hissed, “Down! Do exactly what I do!”

I followed his lead, kneeling on the jogging track and lacing my fingers behind my neck. Around us, from one side of the yard to the other, everyone—including the two assassins—was doing the same. The killer dropped his shiv and knelt down beside his victim’s corpse, waiting patiently as the hive doors burst open and uniforms flooded the yard. The klaxon fell silent.

“Don’t even breathe funny until they give the all clear,” Paul warned in a low voice, “and if you’ve got an itchy nose, live with it. Seriously, I can see the tower behind you. Jablonski’s up there and he’s staring right at us.”

“Us? Why? We had nothing to do with it.”

“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 asshole, 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.

“What’s his story?”

Paul followed my gaze. “Oh, the Prof? Guy’s harmless. Totally nutty, lives in his own little world, but good psychiatric drugs just don’t fit in RDA’s budget.”

“The Prof?”

“Short for professor, I think. Not sure what he’s in for, but he’s been here longer than anybody can remember.” Paul paused, frowning. It was the same frown he’d made when I showed him the dates on my paperwork.

“What?”

“I’m…certain I was here when they brought him in,” Paul said slowly, brow furrowed. “Could swear I remember Brisco pulling his jacket and checking him out. But I know he was here before me…forget it. Never mind, just ignore the poor guy. He’s crazy.”

Maybe so
, I thought.
Then again, the way this day’s been going so far, I’m not too sure about my sanity either
.

I needed to keep an eye on the Prof.

“Heads up, three o’clock.” Paul lowered his voice. “Ray-Ray’s coming.”

Ray-Ray was the bullet-headed con who had led me to Brisco when I first arrived. He nodded his head over one broad shoulder, back toward the picnic benches by the hive wall.

“The man needs to see you.”

Brisco sat flanked by his hangers-on. And Simms. There was another spot at the table, wide open just for me, but I didn’t sit down. Until I knew which way the wind was blowing, I wanted to stay mobile.

“I’ve been told,” Brisco said, his gaze swinging between me and Simms, “there was a problem on the tier earlier.”

Simms didn’t make eye contact with him. I did.

“No problem,” I said. “I think we understand each other now.”

“Is that right?” He looked at Simms. “Do you
understand each other now
, Simms?”

Simms shrugged and stared down at the table. Eloquent.

“Settle it up,” Brisco told him.

Simms set a plastic bag on the table and shoved it my way. A couple of Hershey bars and a bag of potato chips nestled inside.

“It’s fine,” I said. “I don’t need it.”

“Faust,” Brisco said. “When things are finished in here, they’ve gotta be
finished
, you understand? Lingering resentments, insults that don’t scab over—these are the things that can get a man killed.”

“I’m over it.”

“We don’t know that. And Simms is trying to make amends.” Brisco gestured at the bag. “So settle it up, and make us all feel better.”

I took the bag.

“Thanks,” I told Simms. “We’re cool.”

He muttered something that sounded like a thank-you and gave Brisco a sheepish side-eye. I noticed a fresh bruise on his chin that I couldn’t remember giving him.

“My boy Zap says the warden tried to get you to rat,” Brisco said. “He says you didn’t give an inch of ground.”

I glanced around the table. Quiet faces, hard eyes, but the blanket hostility I’d first felt was ebbing away. Now I was more of a curiosity, a new dog at the pound. Maybe friendly, maybe the kind that might bite.

“What happened was between us,” I said. “Simple as that.”

Two of the guys in Brisco’s entourage had my attention, as discreetly as I could manage. They were twitchier than junkies gone two days without a fix. I got the feeling they had something to say and didn’t want an audience when they said it. So I walked away from the table and gave them plenty of lead if they felt like following me.

Sure enough, I turned around at the edge of the fence and there they were. Hovering ten feet back, locked in a silent argument. One wore the tattoo of a skeletal eagle on his meaty bicep, its black claws extended as it swooped in for the kill.

I knew that insignia. Blood Eagles. One-percenter outlaw bikers.

And I owed their boss a whole lot of money.

7.

“You’re Daniel Faust,” one of the bikers said, like he wasn’t so sure.

“That’s what they tell me.”

“Jaysus, man,” the other said in a voice tinged with an Irish brogue, letting out a gasp of relief, “we thought you’d
never
get here. Did Winslow get you inside?”

Of all the greetings I’d expected from the Blood Eagles—a vicious stomping being first
and
last on the list—that wasn’t one of them.

“To tell you the truth, I’m still working out how I got here.”

“He told us you guys had a deal. I mean, the stories about you are true, right? You handle the…the weird stuff?”

The “weird stuff” being underworld code for, well, the
weird stuff
. In other words, my average Tuesday. It all came back to me as I remembered my last sit-down with Winslow. I’d been backed into a corner, going up against a fanatic half-demon cult called the Redemption Choir. I needed wheels and a gun. Winslow sold me both, at one hell of an inflated price, but at the time I wasn’t in a position to argue.

He’d asked, then, if I thought I was “going inside.” This was long before the Chicago situation, but I’d been facing a shaky firearms charge and Harmony Black’s all-star cop coalition was dogging me all over Vegas.

“I’ve got a buddy inside right now,”
he’d told me.
“Friend of the MC. Needs a little help. Your kind of help.”

Then he’d laid out his terms. If I remained a free man, I owed him cash, and a lot of it. If I went behind bars, and I could help his buddy out, we’d be square. I had completely put the offer out of my mind. After all, no way I would end up in prison, right?

Right.

“Lucky for you,” I said, “it looks like I might be stuck here for a few days. What’s going on?”

“I’m Jake,” the biker with the eagle tat said, then nodded at the Irishman, “and this is Westie.”

We shook hands like gentlemen.

“I got transferred over from Ely with three other guys,” Westie said. “Overcrowding, they said. That was three months ago. Today? I’m the only one left. We’re getting whittled down, one by one.”

“They’re not the only ones,” Jake added. “Two of my brothers got it, too. Two of the biggest badasses in the whole MC, gone just like that.”

“When you say ‘gone’…”

Westie took a deep breath. “It started with T-Bolt. My cellmate. One night, I wake up to hear the door rattling open. Then suddenly there’s a big-ass flashlight in my face. Damn CRT bum-rushed us.”

“Cell Reclamation Team,” Jake explained. “Guards trained to go in if a con barricades himself in a cell. Riot shields, padded armor, and pepper spray. They work in teams of four.”

Westie looked to the fence, his gaze distant.

“Yeah, but we sure as hell weren’t starting a riot. We were
sleeping
. They keep the light in my eyes, tell me not to move a muscle if I don’t want to eat a Taser, and they grab T-Bolt. And that was the last time I saw him. Have you met Zap? He’s a trustee, got his fingers in all the warden’s records. He checks it out, and get this: it was written up as a standard ‘housing change order.’ Says T-Bolt got moved to Hive B, with no reason given.”

“Same deal with my brother Sledge,” Jake said. “Got cut up in a scuffle with the Mexicans. Three measly stitches. Two nights later, guards grab him and hustle him out of the cell. Same paperwork, Zap said. Transfer to Hive B. I was awake, man. I saw them drag Sledge out. He had a
bag
on his head, like it’s goddamn Guantanamo Bay in here.”

I wasn’t sure what all this had to do with me, but they had my attention. “So what’s the word from Hive B?”

“There isn’t one,” Jake said. “Hive B’s been in lockdown for a little over a year. The whole damn thing. No word in or out. Guards get rotated between hives, but they won’t help.”

“Did I hear you right?” I asked. “They’ve been keeping an entire wing of prisoners in their cells for over a
year
? Is that even legal?”

Westie spat into the dust. “Said it was because of a riot. Wasn’t any damn riot. One day they just sealed it up like a tomb and that was that.”

“It gets weirder,” Jake said. “This has been happening like clockwork for a couple of months now. Once a week or so, middle of the night, CRT rolls in and one of us gets dragged off. I just spent a couple of days in Ad Seg after a fight. Down in the hole, my next-door neighbor came from Hive A. According to him, the exact same thing happened in
his
hive for about three months before it suddenly stopped.”

“And started in up Hive C,” I guessed. “Like they didn’t want to snatch too many people from one place. Better to keep the panic down.”

“That’s right,” Jake said.

“So what do you think this is all about?”

“You got me,” he replied, “but…Winslow says you can
do
things. I mean, we all heard stories about that thing with his sister…”

Jake shot a nervous glance over his shoulder. I noticed Brisco had his eye on the three of us. He still held court at his picnic table, surrounded by his entourage, but he couldn’t help glancing our way.

“What does Brisco say about all this?”

“Nothing,” Westie said, “and we’re not supposed to talk about it either. He thinks if we make waves, it’ll just make things worse.”

Jake snorted. “Brisco’s scared as shit. This isn’t something he can deal with, and he knows it. And that makes him look weak. So he’s playing ostrich, hoping the whole mess will just go away if he ignores it long enough.”

Great
, I thought.
So if I swoop in and start playing detective, it’ll look like I’m trying to show him up. That doesn’t bode well for my health
.

On the other hand, what choice did I have? Bad enough I was trapped in here, but now I could wake up with a bag over my head and a one-way transfer to a hive in permanent lockdown. Brisco might have felt safe sticking his head in the sand, but I was a little more proactive when it came to staying alive.

“All right,” I said, “here’s the deal. I’ll check it out and see what I can learn about your missing friends. But as far as anybody knows, I turned you down flat. In fact, we never had this conversation. When Brisco or one of his guys asks—and they
are
gonna ask—you came over to talk about the debt I owe Winslow.”

“A lot of these guys would sleep easier knowing you’re on the job,” Jake said.

“And I
wouldn’t
sleep easier if Brisco thought I was making him look like a chump. I need to be discreet about this.”

Easier said than done in a prison where guards were watching my every move. Guards who, according to Jake and Westie, were neck-deep in this whole mess. There were a hundred ways to die behind bars, and I kept discovering brand-new ones.

I went back to my cell. I needed what little privacy I could get to come up with a plan of attack. That didn’t last long. The sound of a truncheon rapping against the bars jolted me from my thoughts.

“Faust,” a guard at the cell door said, looking dead-eyed and bored. “You’ve got a visitor.”

He walked me off the hive, down corridors of slab rock painted pea-soup green. I swallowed my excitement, breathed deep to slow my pounding heart, and took mental notes. We paused at two checkpoints along the way, waiting as he flashed his ID and a guard on the other side flipped a switch to make the gate rattle open.

I counted guards and guns. Studied the consoles we passed and whether they needed keys or cards to operate. Checked for mirrors, windows, and blind spots as I built up my mental map of Eisenberg Correctional.

Every iceberg has cracks. And every prison has a weakness. If I stayed sharp and kept my eyes open, I’d find my way out.

All that faded away, though, as we stopped beside a painted stencil reading “VISITOR CENTER” in big block letters. A visitor was a lifeline. A visitor meant my friends had found me.

A visitor was a taste of home.

I held out my arms in a T pose, and the guard patted me down from neck to toe. It was a thorough job, down to making me open my mouth and wriggle my tongue from side to side while he flashed a penlight across my tonsils.
At least it wasn’t a strip search
, I figured. At that moment, it didn’t matter. Anything to get me through that door.

The visitor center wasn’t much to write home about. Just a stark white-walled lounge with a scattering of round tables and cheap folding chairs and a couple of vending machines humming in a corner alcove. A sign plastered to one wall screamed out the rules in two-inch-high letters.

  1. No physical contact.
  2. No passing of materials between convict and visitors.
  3. Only visitors may operate the vending machines.
  4. No items from the vending machines may be taken back to the hives.
  5. Visitations may be terminated at any time at the supervising officer’s discretion.

A few men sat spread out at the tables with heir visitors, talking in hushed tones. I saw wives, children, a toddler who had to be pulled back before she could clamber into her daddy’s lap. Family. Not my family, though. I glanced around, trying to spot my visitor, hope soaring. Then I saw her, flashing an eager smile my way.

“Well, hello, lover.”

Nadine.

BOOK: The Killing Floor Blues
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