Blood in the Water (Kairos) (3 page)

1993 – Part One

“Lights Out!”

The guard’s voice echoed up and down the corridor as he called the announcement.  In due course the lights dimmed to nothing more than a sickly glow.  It was never completely dark, just as it was never completely quiet.  Samuel Carter had learned over the course of his various incarcerations to sleep despite the interruptions of both light and sound.  He was almost done with a six year sentence for Second Degree Battery.  It would have been less; the cops hadn’t cared too much about the junkie dealer he’d laid the beating on, and he’d only been using his fists, but this was his third strike.  He’d already done time for Arson and Witness Intimidation; now he only had a few months to go before he’d be home. 

He was going flat out.  He knew that the people with the power to grant him parole had no love for the type of life he led, the type of man he was.  This way he’d be ready to go full throttle from the moment he stepped outside the prison walls, no pussying around with parole conditions.  He hated that his wife, Moira, had to bring the kids to see him in prison, hated that those twice monthly visits were the only chance he got to see his children growing up.  There was a possibility he’d be out in time for his daughter’s tenth birthday and he was going to make every effort to make sure that he made it.

As the illumination faded, deepening the shadows in the small cell, Samuel tensed, ready for the inevitable.  He had been moved to a new cell that afternoon and now he waited for the predictable attempt at a beat-down or rape as he and his cellmate figured out who was top dog.  His own attitude was to leave everyone else well alone, if you didn’t start trouble you didn’t get trouble back.  He’d managed to keep body and soul whole so far during his sentence and had no intention of giving up now.  It wasn’t his first turn on the carousel.  He knew the routine well.  Still, he’d been relieved to see that his cellmate was a similar height and build, maybe even a little shorter, a little less wide in the shoulders, even if he did have youth on his side.

His new companion, for the next however long, was Latin in appearance.  Whether he had an accent or not, Samuel couldn’t tell, since the man hadn’t spoken in the ten hours that they’d been cohabiting so far.  The guard had called him Diego or some other Spic name when he’d roughly shoved Samuel into the cell.  No, Dias, that was it.  Not that it mattered; the guy would have to beat him to a pulp before Sam would submit.

The tramp of the guard’s footsteps faded away to be replaced by the constant low murmur, punctuated with snores, grunts, groans and whimpers; and Samuel waited.  A voice thick with a Spanish accent rose from the bunk below him.

“Relax
ese
.  Ain’t gonna bother you none.  ‘Less you piss the bed.”

Samuel couldn’t restrain the half chuckle that escaped.  “I ain’t that old, amigo.”

A grunt was the only reply.  Samuel turned to his side and fell into the closest thing to a state of sleep he could manage.

~o0o~

Samuel hated having the top bunk.  It was harder than impossible to sleep on since there was no way to block out any light and there was even less than zero privacy.  Not that there was a great deal of that anywhere in the cell, but being on the top bunk was like being under a microscope.  He was going to put up with it, though, at least until his cellmate got moved out, if he got moved out.  He hated the top bunk, but it wasn’t worth fighting over if he didn’t have to; and so far his cellmate had kept to himself.  Samuel didn’t see a need to create animosity where there was none. 

His day of backbreaking labor in the cotton fields that made up part of the prison farm and provided occupation for the inmates was over.  Whatever it was that they called food had been served and consumed for the evening meal.  Now he had an hour until the lights were dimmed.  He had nothing to do until then but read, and maybe write another letter to Moira.  His girl Ashleigh had written him about the plans for her birthday party; he owed her a letter too.  He collected the book he was in the middle of and some paper and a pencil and reclaimed his seat, careful not to disturb the man reading on the bed below.

They continued in their private activities for a while, silence reigning in their cell while the usual chaos held sway beyond its bars.  Samuel knew the man lying below him was going to speak when he heard him clear his throat.

“Name’s Eduardo,
ese
.  Eduardo Dias.”

“Samuel, Samuel Carter.”

“They call you Sam?”

“Only if they know me.  They call you Eddie?”

“Only if they don’t plan on keep breathin’.”

The silence resumed, but there was a small release in the tension that was a permanent undercurrent of life in prison.

~o0o~

Samuel and Eduardo did not speak as the guard escorted them back to their cell from the visiting hall.  It was rare that their visitation slots fell at the same time.  Samuel had been visited by Terry, his brother in the Priests MC, his Vice President and the current acting President while Sam was inside.  Samuel received one hour long visit a week.  They were generally arranged alternately with one being dedicated to Moira, either with or without the children, and the other being open to the club, although more often than not it was Terry sitting at the table waiting for him. 

Although the last sixty minutes weighed heavily on Samuel, he’d taken the time to notice Eduardo’s companion.  His visitor had been male as well.  A quick look at the body language and intense expressions had told Samuel that Eduardo was in the middle of an update on business, just as he was.  It hadn’t been so much of a personal or family visit.  He knew very little about his cellmate.  Samuel’s instincts for staying out of trouble had earned him a reputation as somewhat of a loner.  He didn’t participate in gossip and hadn’t seen the need to change that habit to get the skinny on Mr. Eduardo Dias.

The guard led them back into their cell and locked it behind them without speaking.  They both knew the routine and neither had any intention of making waves.  Both resumed their places on their respective bunks, in the midst of the detritus that they’d abandoned when their names had been called for visitation.  They had been cohabiting peacefully for a month.  Samuel was as close to calling Eduardo “friend” as he had been anyone during his incarcerations, but that didn’t mean that they’d shared a great deal of personal information.  Neither man had been inclined to gossip about the life they’d left outside the prison gates.  As they didn’t cause trouble, the guards were content to leave them be.  It made their jobs easier, two less out of thousands to deal with, and there were easier targets for the guards that reveled in making lives miserable.

Samuel was ruminating on the news Terry had brought.  The club was struggling to earn.  Some alliances had changed, some had fallen through and not been renewed.  Some had been the victim of the current persecution by various government agencies.  The club had been keeping a low profile while Samuel was inside, and that had left them vulnerable to the changes. 

In addition, Terry had borne news of Samuel’s eldest child, his son Dean, news that Moira hadn’t seen fit to tell him.  Terry knew that her view on the matter would be that since Sam was locked down and couldn’t do anything about the problem, there was no need for him to concern himself with it.  Samuel felt that it was one more nail in the coffin that housed his relationship with his children.  For the first few years of his sentence, his absence from his family hadn’t mattered as much.  The children had less concept of time and had minded what their mama had told them.  As they’d gotten older and begun to understand what it meant that their father was in prison and what it was that had put him there, their attitudes had changed.  Ashleigh, ever her daddy’s little princess, had become shy, but tried to hide it with a brittle excitement that hurt him to witness during her visits.  Dean, barely two years older, had become sullen and uncommunicative. 

Now Terry was giving him details of the trouble that Dean was getting into at school that Moira had withheld.  The boy needed his father at home.  As much as his brothers were trying to compensate for his absence, it wasn’t working.  The end of his sentence was in sight.  Samuel could almost taste his freedom.  He knew he had to keep a handle on the frustration that was bubbling in his blood.  He was impatient to get out, to take control, to be useful again.  He was needed, in his club and in his family.  He had been missing too long.  Now that it was a case of waiting out, rather than enduring, his time inside, Samuel found that the minutes crawled past with all the urgency of a comatose snail.

His book lay forgotten, the page lost, as Samuel twisted the aggravation around in his mind until Eduardo’s disembodied voice interrupted his musings.

“
Ese
, my brother, he tells me he knows your visitor today.”

Well that had his attention.  “Did he now?  Do I know your brother?”

“Unlikely,
ese
.  We don’t spend much time socializing on this side of the border.  But he tells me your brother is one of the Priests.  You ride with them too?”

“You could say that.  I’m at the head of the table, when I’m at it.”

“Really, that’s interesting.”

Samuel wasn’t sure where this conversation was going.  Somewhere benign, he hoped.  He needed to make his release date.  He didn’t need some grief over turf or agreements turning into extra months on his sentence.

“Why you interested, friend?”

“I hear Louisiana is your patch,
ese
.  Nothing moves through this state without your say so.”

“Yeah, that’s usually the case.  Nothing moving through the state much at all these days, though.  Feds are up everybody’s asses.  You need to take somethin’ somewhere?”

“My family, I think maybe you know the name, Rojas?  We have some interests that need some transportation.  I might have a proposition for you, Samuel, a project your club could help my family with.  You think your brothers might be interested?”

Samuel did indeed know that name, Rojas.  He hadn’t dealt with them personally before, but that didn’t mean he was ignorant about them.  It didn’t do to be ignorant about Colombian crime syndicates.  They’d never operated in Louisiana before and Samuel wasn’t sure how one of them had ended up here in Angola with him.  It was a question for the list, though.  For now, he wasn’t going to turn an opportunity down out-of-hand until he’d heard the details.

“You know how it works, friend.  They’ll have to take a vote on anything that involves the club.  You tell me what it is you have in mind, if I think it’s something we can get on board with, I’m happy to take it to the table.”

“I’m glad to hear that.  Let’s see if we can work together, huh,
ese
?”

“Yeah, let’s see.”

~o0o~

Eduardo had come through with the ‘details’ for Samuel.  The Rojas family moved people and drugs.  To get them into the States, they first transported them to Mexico, and then over the border into Arizona.  They’d lost that connection, and with it the one that continued the transportation into California for distribution across the continent.  They needed new lines of movement throughout the US.  They had a fresh distributor set up in Florida, far enough away to keep suspicion from looking at their old connections; but they needed to move their product from the border out east.  They were in the process of establishing a way into Texas, but they needed local assistance; and that was where they had asked Samuel to see if the Priests would entertain a partnership.

Samuel had just finished explaining some of the finer complexities of the deal to Terry and was running out of allotted visitation time.

“Terry, we bring the Rabids in from Texas, get them to meet the packages and bring them to us, we can get them from Texas to Florida.  There’s no other MC claiming I-10 as their turf.  It’s ours for the run.”

The Rabid Dogs MC of southern Texas had a longstanding friendship with the Priests.  As with all things outlaw, it was delicately balanced on a knife edge of comradeship and mutual benefit, but it had endured for more than thirty years thus far.  The same could not be said for the Satan’s Tail MC, which controlled the northern half of the Lone Star state.

“You don’t think the Tails are gonna have somethin’ to say about that, Boss?”