Blackjack Read online

  Percy maintained his watch, as talkative as ever. The blond man consulted a number of coded printouts.

  CROSS WENT through the Intake procedure with the bored-to-dullness face of a man walking a too-familiar road. What would not be familiar to a man whose life had always walked the same circle?

  The euphemistically named “Shower Room” offered nothing but a delousing spray. Cross waited as those possessions he was allowed to retain were scanned, standing under a gallows-humor sign which read:

  PRE-TRIAL DETAINEES TAKE NOTE:

  THIS INSTITUTION IS NOT RESPONSIBLE

  FOR THE LOSS OR THEFT OF ANY

  ARTICLES NOT CHECKED.

  Next was a routine “interview” with a serious-looking young man equipped with a clipboard, who asked his questions as a male inmate nurse drew blood from each man seated across from him. Cross simply shook his head no at each question.

  “You have to speak up,” the serious young man said. “Otherwise, I would have to look up to watch each answer. That would make this take a lot longer. Do you understand?”

  “It’s not complicated,” Cross said, softly, but in a meant-to-be-insulting tone. “If I ever have to answer ‘yes,’ I’ll say it. Otherwise, just assume it’s ‘no.’ So you won’t have to strain yourself to look up. Do you understand?”

  The young man’s flushed face revealed his reaction quite clearly.

  Cross was walked to a bank of individual cells, flanked by a pair of guards.

  “You stay in Iso for forty-eight hours,” one told him. “If you test out medically, you go into Gen Pop. You can get some of your stuff back then, too.”

  “Swell,” Cross said.

  “You gonna be a problem?” the other guard asked, tightening his hold on Cross’s cuffed wrists.

  “You treat a white man like this, who knows?”

  The guards exchanged a look, but said nothing.

  CROSS WAS lying on his bunk, hands behind his head, eyes apparently closed. From behind his slitted eyelids he saw the approach of a white man in a cut-off T-shirt, his bare arms covered in dark ink. The man watched Cross closely, seemed about to say something, then thought better of it. He reached inside his shirt, tossed something on the floor of the cell, and moved along.

  Cross didn’t stir for a long time, watching as a traffic pattern was established: a porter, moving his mop at jailhouse speed; runners with carts full of reading material; mace-equipped guards, always in pairs.

  Finally, Cross picked up the package from the floor of his cell. It was wrapped in a sheet of newspaper—one with the RACE KILLING headline. Inside, he found a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches. And, on a small piece of paper, the hand-printed words: “Your Brothers Are Here.”

  Cross opened the pack, shook out every single cigarette, lined them all up on his bunk. He carefully disassembled the cigarette pack, then split the individual paper matches. Precautions completed, he lit a smoke and kicked back on his bunk again, watching the smoke drift to the ceiling.

  NIGHT IN the Isolation Wing was no different from day. The range of occupants was staggering, but the hardcore thugs were sleeping as peacefully as they would at home. Back at home.

  Whining, frightened first-timers tried to deal with their anxiety by pacing nervously, nail-chewing, smoking. Some shrieked for help, others just shrieked.

  An NFL-sized black man sat quietly with his arms folded, deep in thought. Not pretty thoughts.

  A self-described “peckerwood” with a fifties haircut gripped the bars with his hands in the classic pose.

  A Latino was busily scratching a heart into the cell wall with a tiny scrap of metal.

  Some were crying, as silently as they were able. One paced, clearly contemplating suicide. Another was obviously blissed out on some kind of chemical.

  And some were doing a land-office business selling wolf tickets: “You messed with the wrong man this time, punk. When they rack the bars tomorrow, you’re dead!”

  One man screamed, “I’m not him!” Over and over.

  “Disciples!” a scrawny black youth shouted, more to bolster his courage than to claim his gang, none of whom were anywhere close.

  Outside the cells, a guard watched a bank of small-screen TVs, an earplug in his ear. Most of the screens showed various shots of the Isolation Wing, but only the one displaying some TV “reality” show had his full attention.

  TWO DAYS later, Cross was walked through a long corridor, now dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit. For reasons he didn’t bother to inquire into, his street clothing had not been returned as promised.

  Cross wasn’t the only convict in the line. An airlock door slammed behind each of them as one opened in front. This procedure was repeated until all the inmates had been moved to another section of the institution.

  “Welcome to Population, gentlemen,” a black guard clearly proud of his popping biceps called out, reading from a memo book. “Listen up for your cell assignments. Jones: 7-Down, Cell 12; Rodriguez: 6-Center, Cell 9; Arden: 4-Up, Cell 19: Maxwell; 3-Center …”

  The discharge area where the guard stood was shaped like the hub of a wheel. The eight spokes, each clearly marked with large numbers over its opening, were the various tiers to which the guard referred. Each spoke had 3 tiers: Up, Center, and Down.

  Guards ringed the perimeter. A hexagonal booth was set into the center of the hub, constructed entirely of bulletproof glass. Inside sat four guards, facing out, each wearing a communications headset.

  A mass of inmates had gathered to watch the new arrivals. The “mass” was actually several clumps, divided along racial lines, with an electrically charged space of hatred separating them. As the new arrivals were released to their various cell assignments, they almost magnetically gravitated toward their own racial groups, which absorbed them all until their faces were no longer visible from the center guard-booth. Then all the new arrivals were silently escorted back into the tiers.

  Walking next to Cross was a young white male, slender, with a short, once-styled blond haircut. As they entered the tier, a voice floated out:

  “Hey, pretty boy! Guess what, baby? You just got yourself a new daddy … starting tonight!”

  The kid next to Cross flinched involuntarily. Cross suddenly stopped in his tracks and slowly walked over to the convict who had yelled out the kid’s future.

  “You trying to say something to me?” Cross asked.

  “Why you asking?” the convict challenged, surprised at a response from anyone other than the young man he had been working on.

  “Why? Because, if you are, you’re in the wrong place.”

  “What?”

  “The Suicide Watch is over on the other side,” Cross said, deliberately locking eyes with the other man.

  That man started toward Cross, fists clenched. But he was intercepted by another white male—older, shorter, but with an air of authority. “Ice it, Tank,” the older man said. “He’s one of us.”

  Stepping between them, the older man whispered to Cross through the bars: “You’re the guy who blew up that nigger in D.C., right?”

  “That’s the charge,” was all Cross said.

  “RAHOWA!” the older man replied. “I’m Banner. Commander of the Brotherhood in this joint. This here’s Tank.”

  Cross held out his hand. “About time,” he said.

  The slender white kid slipped along the corridor to his cell; none of the gangs were watching anyone but Cross and Banner.

  “THIS YOUR house,” Banner said to Cross, gesturing with his hand as if ushering an honored guest into a reception room. The tier had been closed, so the individual cell doors were standing open.

  In fact, it was a cell. But, unlike the others, this one was not barren: a full set of toiletries sat on a handmade shelf below the mirror inset above the sink. The toilet itself had a seat made of some sort of thick woven material. The wall featured a couple of centerfold-style pinups. There was a knitted cover on the bed, with a fresh carton of cigarettes
sitting on the pillow. The cell gave every sign of having been meticulously cleaned.

  “Nice,” Cross said, whistling.

  “We take care of our own,” Banner said proudly. “We got a kite you was coming. And we got a lot of juice with the COs, so it was easy to hook you up in front.”

  “Very nice,” Cross said, taking off his shirt. His undershirt was sleeveless. Banner moved in close, making no secret of the fact that he was carefully examining the exposed tattoo.

  What Banner saw was a wooden cross. From one of the horizontal bars, a black man hung limply from a length of rope, a noose around his neck. The effect was both terrifying and chilling: a man lynched from a Christian cross. At the base of the cross, there was a series of lightning bolts … seven in all.

  “Damn!” Banner said. “I never saw one like that before.”

  “Never?” Cross asked, his tone just this side of threatening.

  “Well, I heard something about them … but I been down a long time. Stuff comes in from the World, you can’t always trust it.”

  Cross moved even closer to Banner, his face almost touching the other man’s. An intimately aggressive gesture, deliberately invading personal space.

  “White Night,” Cross said, very softly. “You ever hear of that? Be a good idea for you to ask around. Then come back and see me”—making it clear he was dismissing the other man.

  THE RIGID requirement that all prisoners had to be locked down each night by ten o’clock was apparently no deterrent to certain individuals.

  Late that night, Banner was standing next to a man whose body was covered in whipcord muscle, a pair of thick-framed glasses on his face.

  “White Night,” Banner ordered the other man. “No, I don’t know how to spell it. Just find out … and find out quick!”

  The man with the glasses walked back toward his cell, past a guard who seemed not to notice. Only the sharpest eyes could have detected a folded scrap of paper passing from captive to captor. And everyone was quite deliberately not watching.

  THE GUARD clocked out a few hours later. He drove to a nearby bar, and ambled over to the pay phone between the toilets in the back.

  His call was answered by a man in a quilted smoking jacket, royal-purple silk with black lapels. He was leaning back comfortably in an oxblood leather armchair, surrounded by walls of bookcases. An elaborately framed law degree hung on one bare knotty-pine wall. A bare brunette posed against another.

  The man hung up, then punched a button on a phone console. A light blinked in another location. A short, squat man in a room dominated by electronic gear picked up the receiver.

  “Yeah,” he said, in response to a snapped-out question. “We got someone deep inside, but he’s expensive. Real expensive. How high am I authorized to go?”

  “As far as you have to,” the lawyer instructed.

  “And you want it …?”

  “Now. Tonight. Understand? Tonight, or it’s worthless. I have to visit him tomorrow. And I need to have this information when I do.”

  The lawyer punched another button on his phone console, as if to re-emphasize who was in charge. The brunette recognized the gesture, and slowly slid her back down the wall. A trained dancer, she never broke eye contact with the lawyer as she slowly worked herself into an all-fours position on the plush purple rug.

  THE SHORT, squat man was on the phone, speaking urgently. “I don’t care what it costs. Yeah, it has to be tonight. Send it over the modem, encryption 44-A. I’m wiring the payment into your account soon as I hang up. It’ll be there in ten seconds. Now, go get what I asked for!”

  “Oh, I’ll get it, all right,” Percy said, after hanging up the phone on the other end. “Sucker.”

  THE NEXT day, a man who had exchanged an elaborate smoking jacket for a conservative but costly three-piece suit was seated across from Banner in a private conference room. The lawyer was talking; Banner was listening.

  “White Night. Night, like the opposite of Day. It stands for the time when every single kike on the planet goes down, and they take the muds and fags with them. Kristallnacht to the tenth power.

  “Nobody knows how many of them there are, but word is they’re the special enforcement arm for some of the leader-less cells. If this guy has seven bolts under the cross, it means he’s done seven hits. Not total—seven for White Night, specifically.

  “We picked that tactic up from the Russians. Tattoo IDs, I mean. Not just the usual ink, something you have to earn. This guy—Arden, right?—he’s an executioner. I don’t know what kind of backup he has in here, but one thing’s absolutely certain—he’s got total backing from the top. He’s going to expect cooperation. Absolute cooperation.”

  “Hey, thanks, man. You really came through.”

  “Fourteen Words,” the lawyer intoned, leaning forward to shake hands.

  Banner watched the lawyer walk out of the conference room, the expression on his face clearly disclaiming any sense of “brotherhood” with a man who memorized slogans but still charged full price.

  THE PRISON yard was clearly and sharply divided into sectors. There were, literally, lines painted on the concrete. The tower guards kept their weapons close to hand all the time. And in plain view.

  The Latino contingent was off to one side—cohesive, but seriously outnumbered. This wouldn’t be the case in Cook County Jail, but in the federal tank, where most of their tribe wasn’t gang-connected, just awaiting deportation, they were such a distinct minority that intra-ethnic fighting wasn’t even an option.

  Despite the summer heat, all sorts of recreational activities were intensely pursued: weight-lifting, handball, dominoes, men walking endless circuits around an oval track, some in pairs. Banner stood in a corner with Cross, a wall of white soldiers between them and the yard.

  “Truth is, the way things are now, us and the niggers, we both work the same rackets.” Brief glances showed the truth of his statement: unaffiliated inmates were being shaken down, cigarettes were changing hands for pills, a shank was hand-passed from one man to another, all the way down a chain, and all strictly by color.

  “We got this joint divided about in half, but even that won’t hold—they’ve been eating away at us over the past few years. All over the country. At least in the federal pens, that much I’ve seen for myself.

  “Used to be we had the whole dope thing wired. Guards wouldn’t mule it in for niggers, and their bitches can only carry so much at a time. But those days are gone. There’s a lot of major dealers doing time now—they got their own street sources. And don’t forget, there’s nigger guards now, too. So they pretty much can get whatever we can get.”

  “From what I hear, they’ve been getting some bodies.”

  “True enough. They took out that Towers guy right in his cell. No big mystery to that. Guards in here are just like cops on the bricks: there’s a price for everything. They most likely didn’t do any more than just leave that skinner’s cell unlocked.”

  “Why that one? You taking his kind in now?”

  “Hell, no! Way we figure it, the niggers just wanted to profile. Send us a message that no white man’s safe—they can get to us anywhere. That’s why we hit two of them the next day—that was our answer.

  “In here, it’s just like out there, only it’s coming on faster. Race war, that’s what I’m talking about. And only one race is gonna be standing at the end.”

  Banner’s words echoed as Cross watched plain-view violence being studiously ignored by custodial staff: everything from fistfights to Pearl Harbor knifings. Nothing had changed from the last time he was incarcerated—firebombing a cell, poisoning food, and battery-packing a sleeping victim are permanent fixtures of prison life. Doing lengthy time was always a multi-color fabric, and homicide its only binding thread.

  All conversation stopped as a flying wedge of guards stomped past, double-timing, shaking the ground with the pounding of their heavy boots. They were dressed in one-piece uniforms, body armor, and helmets with fu
ll-face visors, mirror-glassed to make individual identification impossible. Each officer carried a see-through shield, shaped so he could maneuver behind it, and a full belt of weapons, including illegal-voltage Tasers.

  But no firearms. Not inside the blocks. The Federal Bureau of Prisons’ way of saying “Never again.”

  “Goon squad,” Banner side-spoke to Cross, while looking in the direction the squad was running. “Must be some weird stuff going on over there again.”

  “What’s ‘over there’ mean?”

  “That whole block,” Banner answered, nodding his head in that direction. “Upstairs, it’s PC. Middle is for the psychos. Down is the Death House. Two rows of twenty cells each … with the Green Room in the middle.”

  “Green Room?”

  “Used to be the gas chamber, long time ago. Now it’s just an empty room. No executions here. For that, they have to move you to a Level Seven.”

  At the words “Death House,” a concrete-colored blotch semi-materialized high up on the wall behind the two men. As the goon squad moved in, “Death House” was repeated at below-human-threshold. Then …

  “Hit!”

  The guards began to club a prisoner repeatedly on his unprotected head, continuing even after the man slumped to the ground, blood running out of both ears.

  A mural flashed on the overlooking wall. The ace and jack of clubs appeared, then immediately vanished, leaving some convicts blinking. And the TV monitors blank.

  SEATING IN the prison mess room was as radically divided as on the yard, but all races had to pass through the same serving line.

  Tension crackled the air. No more perfect opportunity to plant a shank in an enemy’s back existed. The convict gangs deliberately ate in shifts—some designated to watch the backs of their comrades while they ate, after which they would change places.