Blackjack (25 page)

VISITING DAY
. Tiger waited patiently in line for her pass. She was dressed in a burnished-gold short-sleeved T-shirt several sizes too small, black spandex pants, and bronze spike
heels with black soles. Nobody was looking anywhere else: male or female, black or white, convict or guard.

“Prison’s prison, but that there is just plain wrong,” a black convict whispered to the man next to him as Tiger strutted past. “I knew there was still women out there, but this is downright ridiculous, bro. How am I supposed to look my wife in the eye, now? That woman could
always
tell when I was slip-sliding around. Now I’m in a place where she knows I can’t be getting any pussy. But I bet I got that exact same look on my face, right this minute.”

Tiger greeted Cross with a deep kiss and tight embrace. Her mouth stayed locked on his a long time. If the guard hadn’t been busy gaping at the wonder of spandex, he might have told them to break it off.

The Visiting Room was as racially divided as the rest of the prison. Cross escorted Tiger over to a corner, a move requiring them to walk the entire length of the room. Cross looked neither left nor right. Physical attacks can happen anyplace in a prison, but the Visiting Room was considered sacrosanct space—
any
excuse to cancel visiting privileges would be a victory for the guards and a defeat to all prisoners, regardless of color.

Cross slid into an empty space created by Brotherhood members. He sat with his back to the wall, virtually disappearing behind a human curtain.

On the other side of the large room, a young man who was once “Roscoe” from a disguised posse car spoke respectfully to a man known to him. Not personally, but as a trusted comrade of his own leader.

Roscoe left his gangbanger threads at home. He was dressed in a neat business suit, talking to a middle-aged black man wearing a tricolor African knit cap.

The man was one of obvious importance, as could be judged from the phalanx of on-the-alert convicts surrounding
him on all sides. He was deep in conversation with Roscoe when Cross and Tiger walked by. Not a flicker of recognition showed on either man’s face.

Cross took Tiger’s hand, pulled her into the corner with him. His eyes danced over the room as they spoke softly to each other. After a few minutes passed, he got up and approached a white guard.

Over the guard’s shoulder were the restrooms. Though they were once painted men and women, that paint had long since been worn off. And never replaced. It was common knowledge that the left room was for contraband transfer, the right one for sex. Only one couple at a time was allowed in either.

“You’re next,” the guard told Cross.

As a man and woman emerged from the restroom, arms around each other, Cross again took Tiger’s hand and walked her with him to the vacated spot.

Inside, he leaned against her, speaking only for her ear.

“They’re here,” Cross said. “No question. Got four more last night.”

“Save some for me,” Tiger answered, pulling her T-shirt up to her neck. Cross pressed her against the wall. The surveillance camera captured the groping, but not the mouth-to-mouth transfer, an exact duplicate of the “greeting” kiss they had used to test that same system earlier.

JUST WHAT
was transferred was not known until Cross had passed through three separate search stations before being allowed back to his cell.

Cross sat on his cot, smoking as if deep in thought, watching through veiled eyes. Suddenly, the entire wing was plunged into darkness. As the inmates cursed and the guards
tried to fight off panic, Cross removed a wafer-thin microchip from behind the back molar where Tiger had planted it with the tip of her tongue. After many rehearsals, he was able to open the back of the prison-issued radio working by touch alone. It only took a few seconds to insert the microchip.

BY THEN
, Tiger was on her way out of the institution. But before she stepped off the grounds to enter the parking lot, she was cornered by a guard who clearly spent a lot of time in the weight room—a state-of-the-art facility installed to help prison employees deal with the stress of their jobs. Another “working-class union victory” in a country where the salaries of prison guards are triple those of child-protection caseworkers.

“You look like a smart girl,” the guard leered, looming over Tiger. “I’ll bet you know how you could make it real easy on your man back there.” As if accidentally, his fingertips lightly brushed across her breasts.

“Really? How?” Tiger asked, wide-eyed and smiling sweetly.

“It’s easy. You
go
along; he
gets
along, see? You like to play games, honey?”

“I
love
to play games,” Tiger purred.

“Yeah? What’s your favorite?”

“Squash,” Tiger whispered, her lips twisting from come-hither to combat-snarl. The guard, instantly paralyzed and about to faint from the stabbing pain, futilely tried to pry her vise grip off his testicles—so recently engorged, but now in danger of withdrawing completely into his body.

As the guard slumped to the ground, still cupping his sack and mewling, Tiger walked off, her spike heels clicking a challenge to anyone else with bad ideas.

THE NEXT
morning, the surveillance cameras planted throughout the prison flashed various war-zone images. Roving gangs stalked the corridors, armed with a variety of homemade weapons. The level of organization was impressively military: one man walked point, the next men up carried the heaviest weaponry, the last man walked backward.

Even as the convict patrols were in motion, other prisoners were working on rearmament: carefully turning out shanks from any material possible, sharpening them down to needle points, wrapping their handles in tape.

Specialists were at work as well. One was twirling a glue-coated piece of rope through a pile of finely ground glass; another was fashioning a crude zip gun out of a length of tubing, a carved-wood pistol stock, and a thick rubber band for the nail that would serve as a firing pin.

“We only got two bullets,” the con keeping watch said to the gun-builder, opening his hand to show the tiny cartridges within, “and they’re .22 shorts. Tell the Sandman he’s got to be
close
.”

Some convicts were walking alone. One moved stiffly—the steel bar stolen from the weight room and now hidden down the leg of his pants hampering his movements. Another apparently unarmed warrior’s entire upper body was wrapped in “Convict Kevlar”—thick layers of dampened newspaper.

On the yard, a group of blacks practiced a complex set of martial-arts katas under the watchful eye of their instructor. The Aryans were neither planning nor practicing, they were already picking out potential targets. A lone Latino squatted as far away from the black and white crews as possible. He was delicately fingering a short length of razor wire, heavily tape-wrapped at one end.

WITHIN MINUTES
, any illusion of organization had disappeared. Close combat raged over every screen.

One camera showed a black man cornered by a group of whites. He held a two-pointed shank in one hand, poised to strike, but it was obvious he wasn’t going to survive the coming encounter.

Another showed a white convict taken out from behind by a pipe-wielding black.

The cameras were capable of zooming when hand-operated. Usually set to “automatic sweep,” now they were individually manned. A close-up showed a dark hand holding a small glass bottle with a rag wick. He lit the wick and threw the bottle into a cell, which exploded in flames. The camera did not reveal how the unseen firebomber had managed to get inside the Isolation Wing.

“Tell my Juanita I died a man …” one Latino murmured to his crew as they dragged him from a battle scene, his life bleeding away from multiple stab wounds.

A slim but hard-muscled Latino wearing a T-shirt knotted at the midriff over a pair of bleached jeans with the back pockets removed whirled in mid-stride, a curved piece of honed steel in his hand. “Come on!” he challenged an unseen menace. “I got what you want right here, don’t I? So come and take it,
puta
. You call me
maricón? Bueno. Quién es más macho, eh, puerco?
”

THE IIT
—the prison’s Internal Investigation Team—was standing outside a large cell, clad in full-body armor. One was shining a high-intensity lamp, the other taking
photographs. They paid no attention to the large group of black convicts in the background, perhaps because five other members of their team were facing that direction, their hands full of firearms which clearly failed to meet any “non-lethal” criteria.

Two fresh kills were hanging inside. Neither had a spinal cord; only one had even a fragmentary piece of a skull.

“Twenty-nine, documented,” the cameraman said.

“Damn! They’ve never hit in this wing before,” the man shining the light replied.

“Who knows?” The cameraman shrugged off the statement. “The pictures I take never come out anyway.”