Breakout (4 page)

“Fortunately,” Mackey said, “life is usually quieter than that.”

“We like it quiet,” Parker said.

“We do. Williams and Marcantoni might be good to talk to. They’re both facing hard time like you, both got stand-up histories.”

“Not the other two?”

“Clayton’s in on a Mickey Mouse,” Mackey said, “do a nickel tops. He doesn’t need alternatives. And Jelinek’s ratted people
out before.”

“Then we don’t talk to Jelinek,” Parker said.

T
here was the day Parker went on sick call, and the day he went to the library to work on his case, and the afternoons he spent
on work detail in the kitchen, a long windowless bright-lit space in the basement under the mess hall, with siren-alarmed
iron doors at one end where supplies were delivered.

The eleventh day, after the other two from the cell went off to work on their case, Williams got up from his bunk and tossed
away his magazine and came out to where Parker leaned on the railing to watch the movement down below. Williams said, “I hear
you know Chili Greebs.”

Parker shook his head. “Never heard of him.”

Surprised, Williams turned away to see what Parker was looking at down there. Watching the guards as they shifted their charges
around, he said, “Then why should Chili tell me to talk to you?”

“Probably,” Parker said, “it was after he talked with a friend of mine.”

“Would he be a friend of mine?”

“Not yet. His name’s Ed Mackey.”

Williams grinned. Now that the tension was gone, you could see where it had been. He said, “That’s the name I heard.”

Parker said, “Ed told me you’re all right, and he’d find somebody to tell you the same about me.”

“Now we know and love each other,” Williams said, “what next?”

“You’re facing twenty-five to life,” Parker told him.

Williams turned his head to look at Parker’s profile. “Your friend Ed got this on the outside.”

“Nobody gets anything in here.”

Williams shrugged. “And so what?”

Parker said, “I’m not good at prison.”

Williams laughed. “Who is?”

“Some are,” Parker said.

Williams sobered, looking away again at the scene below. “And that’s true,” he said. He sounded as though he didn’t like the
thought.

“I don’t think you are,” Parker said.

Williams shook his head. “I can feel myself gettin smaller every day. You fight it, but there it is.” He turned his head to
study Parker’s face. “You aren’t thinking about breaking out of
here.
”

“Why not?”

“This is not an easy place,” Williams said.

“Better than some,” Parker told him. “It’s transient, it wasn’t built to house this big a population, or for people to stay
this long. The system’s strained, and when I look around, they’re short some guards. A state pen could be tougher, and you’ve
already been beaten down for a few months.”

“Jesus.” Williams looked off. Beyond the mesh fence, out over the air, the concrete block wall featured long lines of plate-glass
windows that bore no relationship to the levels of the floors inside the cage. “I’ve been setting it aside,” he said. “Thinking
I’d wait till I was in a stable place, where I could be part of a crew. I bet a lot of guys figure that way.”

“I need the crew
here,
” Parker said. “That’s why I asked Ed Mackey to look around, find me somebody wasn’t going to rat me out.”

Williams shook his head. “Two guys? Is that enough?”

“I have a line on one more. Three should do it.”

“Depends what we do. Who’s this other one?”

“Do you know Tom Marcantoni?”

“Sounds white.”

“He is.”

“Then I wouldn’t know him,” Williams said. “I know you because we got a stateroom together.”

“When you see me talk to somebody,” Parker said, “that’ll be Marcantoni.”

Williams laughed. “You
don’t
do a lot of talking, do you?”

“Only when I have to,” Parker said.

T
om Marcantoni said, “Let’s play a game of checkers.” It was the first time he’d spoken to Parker, who had walked into the
game room a while after his conversation with Brandon Williams. So Ed Mackey had been busy.

“Fine,” Parker said.

The tables and chairs in the game room were metal, bolted to the floor. Marcantoni got a checkerboard and an open cardboard
box of men from a shelf on the back wall while Parker found an empty table and sat at it. Marcantoni came over to join him
and they started to play.

Parker waited, but for a while Marcantoni had nothing to say. He was a big man with a bullet head and a thick black single
eyebrow that made him always look pissed off about something. Now he looked pissed off at the checkerboard and had nothing
to say until he yawned hugely in the middle of a move, covering his mouth with the back of the hand holding the checker. Yawn
done, he blinked at the board and said, “Shit. Where’d I get this thing from?”

Parker pointed at the square, and Marcantoni finished his move, then said, “I can’t sleep in a place like this.”

“I know,” Parker said.

“It keeps me awake, this place, like a weight on my chest,” Marcantoni said. He frowned at the board, didn’t look directly
at Parker. He said, “Any time I’m in a place like this, when I get out, the first thing I do, I sleep for a week. It isn’t
a natural environment, this.”

“It isn’t an environment,” Parker said. “It’s a body cast.”

Now Marcantoni did look at Parker, peering at him from under that eyebrow as though looking out at a field from the edge of
the woods. “You got
that
right,” he said, then looked down at the board. “Whose move is it?”

“Mine,” Parker said, and moved.

Marcantoni said, “A friend of mine says I should talk to you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you know why?”

“Maybe,” Parker said, “we could figure out a way to get a night’s sleep.”

Marcantoni nodded, and jumped one of Parker’s pieces. “This game’s too easy,” he said. “Not like some games.”

“The harder games take more concentration,” Parker said.

“And more risk,” Marcantoni said.

Parker said, “You’re facing life. Not much risk left for you.”

Marcantoni sat back, ignoring the board. “You know things about me,” he said. “But I don’t know diddly about you.”

“Ask your friend.”

“I will. You’re thinking about a game for two?”

“Three,” Parker said. “It wouldn’t be a polite game. More a power game.”

Marcantoni looked around at the other inmates in the room, playing their games, reading their magazines. “A lot of mutts around
here,” he said.

“There are,” Parker agreed.

“You can’t be too careful.” Marcantoni nodded, agreeing with himself. “That’s why you had your friend check me out and then
go talk to my friend.”

“That’s right.”

“So you’ve got a third guy?”

“One of my cellmates. Williams.”

Marcantoni frowned, trying to place that, then said, “He’s a black guy.”

“Right.”

Marcantoni made a sour face and shook his head. “You wanna work with a black guy?”

“Why not?”

“Group loyalty,” Marcantoni said. “One of the first things I learned in life, stick with the group where there’s a chance
for loyalty. There’s never a guarantee, but a chance. A black guy doesn’t feel loyalty for you and me. He’d trade us for chewing
gum, and we’d do the same for him.”

Parker said, “I’ve been here eleven days. I got the population on this floor to work with. Like you say, a lot of it’s mutts.
Some of it, all they’re facing’s a nickel-dime, it’s not worth it to them, try a different game. From the rest, only two have
a reputation I can take a chance on. You, and Williams. He isn’t afraid to stand with you, so if you’re afraid to stand with
him I’ll just have to look around, try to find somebody else.”

“Instead of me, you mean,” Marcantoni said.

Parker waited, looking at the board.

Marcantoni sighed, then yawned again, then laughed at himself. “I’m groggy, is what it is,” he said. “Okay, fuck it, a new
experience. Get outa your neighborhood, meet new friends.”

“Good,” Parker said.

“King me,” Marcantoni said.

B
ecause of the black-white thing, it was hard for them to meet, make a plan. If a black guy and a white guy who weren’t cellmates
talked to each other, people would want to know why. The guards would want to know, and some of the inmates would want to
know. What have those guys got to talk to each other about? What’s going on?

The answer was to work out with the weights. Only Marcantoni had been doing that before, but now Parker and Williams went
over there, too, and could be in a little separate group without snagging anybody’s interest.

The first thing Marcantoni and Williams had to do was get a sense of each other. Lifting hand weights in alternate moves,
like walking up the air, not looking at anybody in particular, Marcantoni said, “I never had to rely on anybody your tone
before.”

“Same here,” Williams said. Seated on a wooden bench, weights strapped to his shins, he was lifting and lowering both feet
together, from the knee.

“Maybe we got something we can share,” Marcantoni said. “You got a religion?” Then he laughed at himself, lost his rhythm
with the hand weights, found it again, and said, “Never mind, you were brought up Baptist, I don’t even wanna know about it.”

“And you’re a fish-eater,” Williams said. “I could tell from your nose.”

“We don’t do that any more,” Marcantoni said.

Parker pressed a weighted bar up to his chest. “You don’t have to like each other,” he said.

Williams stood and jogged in place, the weights still on his shins. “But we have to trust each other,” he said.

Marcantoni said, “How come you trust Kasper, that’s what I don’t get. He’s a white guy.”

“He looks like a door to me,” Williams said. “I never did care what color a door was.”

Parker lowered the bar, lifted it again. “We ready to talk?”

“Let’s do it,” Marcantoni said.

Williams said, “The only way out is through the front building.”

“Well, you’re right about that,” Marcantoni told him. “This place’s only got two exits. The back comes here, and we don’t
get through or over or under those walls, and the front goes to the front building, with all the ways out.”

Parker said, “We can forget the kitchen. It’s under the mess hall and the only way out from there is kept solid locked, unless
they’re bringing supplies in or garbage out.”

“Some places,” Marcantoni said, “some guys got out in garbage cans. A little messy, but there you are, out.”

“Here they know about that,” Parker said. “They use plastic bags, and they back the compactor truck into the door opening,
toss in the bags, compress them right there, before they go.”

“Squish,” said Williams.

Marcantoni grinned at him. “That was funny,” he told him. “What you said.”

Williams grinned back. “You think so?”

Parker said, “The dispensary is in the prison building, down by the foot of the stairs, before any doors at all, so there’s
no point doing sick call.”

Williams said, “The laundry’s in the basement, across the way from the kitchen. Just as impossible.”

Marcantoni said, “If that leaves nothing but the visitors’ room and the lawyers’ room, I don’t see us doing it without a tank.”

Parker said, “’There’s the library.”

Marcantoni put the hand weights on the shelf, stood contemplating the other possibilities lined up there. He said, “What does
the library do for us?”

Parker said, “When you first go into the front building, there’s the mess hall on the right, and the first thing on the left
is the library.”

“Sure,” Marcantoni said.

“But it isn’t the first thing,” Parker told him. “Before that, at the very start of that wall on the left, there’s another
door.”

“Closed and locked,” Marcantoni said, and Williams, taking off his shin weights, said, “I’ve never seen anybody use it.”

Parker said, “It’s the way the guards come to work, a hall there next to the library, goes back to the offices. I
think
the way it works, the volunteer lawyer in the library, back in the stacks there where we’re not allowed to go—”

“That’s right,” Williams said. “You tell the lawyer what you’re looking for, he goes back and gets it, and you sign out for
it.”

“Back there,” Parker said, “I
think
he’s got a door to the guards’ hall, a side door. He doesn’t come around to the main corridor when he comes to work.”

Marcantoni, sounding surprised that he remembered this detail, said, “He doesn’t come outa there at all. When the library
closes, he locks the door from the inside, stays in there.”

“Goes out the back,” Williams said.

Parker said, “We should all talk to our friends on the outside, get what floor plans we can’t see for ourselves.”

“And a car and driver waiting when we come out,” Marcantoni said. “I don’t wanna be calling a cab.”

“When we get a route,” Parker said, “we’ll get a car.”

“Good,” Marcantoni said. “There’s one thing more. I was working on a better thing when I was nabbed on this thing. Half my
crew came in with me, they’re lost to me now. The rest will help us get out. But I’m gonna need cash, so I’ve gotta do this
other thing, right away. I want you two in with me.”

“Replacements,” Williams said.

Parker didn’t like where this was going. He said, “Is this something near here?”

“In the city, yeah.”

“It’s not smart,” Parker told him, “to break out of here, then hang around the neighborhood, pull a job.”

“It goes down easy,” Marcantoni promised. “And I can keep you both out of sight, for just a few days. Then you’re off wherever
you go, with cash in your pocket.”

Parker considered. He couldn’t expect Marcantoni to describe the job to him, inside here, but it wasn’t good to make a jump
into the unknown. Still, he needed Marcantoni. So he’d go along with it, and if it looked bad, he could make adjustments.