Urban Renewal (13 page)

Other nights Cain just talked, his voice pitched very low
.

“The way I figure it, you’re in there somewhere,” the gang leader said quietly. “You, the real you, whatever that is. If you ever want to get out, we got to change your medication.” Cain reached into his pocket and took out two bright-blue capsules marked “T69” that he had “obtained” from the inmate-clerk who worked in the dispensary. “We’ll start you on these. I fixed them myself, replaced half of that tranq-out crap with Contac—that’s a cold medicine. We reduce your dosage gradually, okay? It could be a hard ride—let me know when you’re ready.”

Cain put the capsules back into his pocket and opened his book to read aloud from a collection of haiku
.

The next night, when Cain opened the book, Rhino opened his hand, revealing the capsules that had been put into his mouth that day. Capsules he had tongued to the side instead of swallowing them
.

Cain looked at the capsules. His nostrils flared slightly—the closest he got to a smile
.

“Good!” he said, standing up to give Rhino the reduced dosage. “Payback’s coming. Just be patient.”

Cain opened the book on his lap, and spoke as if reading from it, “The time does itself—we just have to stay alive inside it until we can make our move.”

Even after he was released from the chair, Rhino was careful to slump around as if he was both profoundly stupid
and heavily drugged. Once he became able to stay awake nights, he worked as Cain directed him
.

First the gang boss braided a string of dental floss. Then he wet the woven string and spun it slowly and carefully through an abrasive cleanser before setting it aside to dry. The string itself eventually became as sharp-edged as a piece of hacksaw wire. Inside Cain’s cell, the monster used his enormous strength to saw tirelessly, night after night. “We need them
all
sawed through,” Cain told him. “I could maybe get through with just two, but you’ll need them all.”

Some nights Cain read to him. Other nights he worked silently, braiding a much thicker rope from dental floss, or writing in some code he had devised. Cain’s cell held a large volume—a dictionary and a thesaurus bound as one, stamped “Property of Sterling YCF.” Although it was stolen from the prison library, its absence had gone unnoticed
.

Ace passed by regularly but kept his distance. A model inmate, he was too close to parole to attempt an escape
.

Cain was still reading aloud when Rhino finished—the bars were sawn through
.

“I like that one,” Rhino whisper-squeaked
.

Cain looked up in amazement, even more astounded at Rhino’s words than by the fact that the bars were already cut through
.

Another week passed. On the yard, Cain said to Ace, “See you in a few weeks, right?”

Ace nodded solemnly
.

Later that night, Cain said to Rhino, “Let’s do it.”

Rhino pulled the sawn-through bars aside as if they were strands of spaghetti
.

Ace, watching, touched two fingers to his right eyebrow, brought them to his heart, tapped twice, and left the cell as silently as he had entered
.

Cain secured the rope he’d fashioned from endless strands of dental floss and threw it down. He rolled a blanket lengthwise and tied it across his chest—even if he made it to the ground, there was still the razor wire atop the fence to negotiate
.

“I’m going down first because I’m faster,” he told Rhino. “If I don’t make it, you get back to your cell—they’ll never figure out how I got through the bars, and nobody’s gonna suspect you. Ace is still here, so no one’s gonna rat you out, either. But if you see me start up the fence, then make your move. Time you get to the fence yourself, I’ll have the blanket draped over the wire.”

Rhino put one huge hand on Cross’s shoulder. “Later,” he said, his voice a painful rasp
.

Cain put his hand over Rhino’s. “If you can’t make the fence, I’ll come back for you, brother.”

Rhino looked into the first eyes that had ever viewed him as human, and nodded his understanding
.

Cain turned away, slipped through the bars, and swung out on the dental-floss rope. He seemed to dance down the side of the building. The grass was wet with dew, further silencing his rush to the high fence, where he started his climb
.

Rhino watched. As soon as he saw that Cain had unfurled the blanket over the wire, he wrapped the rope through his fingers and moved ponderously out the window
.

Cain scrambled over the wire on the doubled-up blanket, dropped lightly to the ground on the other side, and vanished
.

Rhino felt the makeshift rope stretch with his weight
even before it snapped. He felt the ground rush up to meet him. He hit hard on his back and just lay there, unable to move, his head lolling to one side, seeing only darkness where Cain had been
.

For a few moments Rhino looked up at the stars, the same words playing over and over again in his mind:
“I’ll come back for you, brother.”

The empty darkness behind the fence seemed to answer him with a vast internal echo. Rhino felt himself slipping back to the bottom of the familiar lake. He felt the weight of the water and the thin, flickering light pressing down on him. He never felt his own tears as they welled up and coursed down his cheeks
.

Seven weeks later, Ace’s things were all packed. He was ready to go, his get-out papers in one hand. Rhino was back in his chair, drool once again wetting his chin. Now they used a syringe—no more capsules for this one
.

Ace stepped close to the monster’s ear, speaking softly but in a voice devoid of doubt. “I passed it down. None of the punks here are gonna come near you.”

After Ace left, Rhino’s protection stayed intact. It wasn’t long before some of the boys began the same games they had played before, in the other place. They urinated on him. They stubbed cigarettes out on his arms. They spit on him, and when they could, they tipped over his chair
.

But before the week was out, every one of those boys met with some sort of prison misfortune. Two were stabbed, one was clubbed with a battery-loaded sock, and another woke up to find himself in flames
.

“Word better be around by now,” a Puerto Rican with two tears tattooed on his right cheek told the group of five youths as they stood together on the yard. “Ace passed the reins to me—you all know that. That means we got to
carry
it on if we want to keep what’s ours. Anybody messes with that thing in the wheelchair, they messing with us. And nobody gets to do that, am I speaking the truth?”

Five fists came together in unspoken agreement
.

And no matter how deeply he sank into the Thorazine lake, no matter how many times they injected him, Rhino heard the same words, over and over
. “I’ll come back for you, brother.”

Months passed. Cain was officially listed as an escapee still on the run, although a better description would have been “vanished.”

Ace had abandoned any hope of earning an honest living. But prison had taught him a trade. A well-paying one
.

“I made sure nobody would mess with him, but I could give a fat rat’s ass about that monfucious, whale-scale pal of yours,” he sneered. “And this deal you got … it’s gonna cost us, big-time. You want to explain that to me, my brother?”

Cain nodded slightly, as though pondering the question. In reality, buying time. The bottom line, he concluded, was simple enough: he had to go back for Rhino. In some part of his work-in-progress mind, he understood that he had no choice
.

Just as he knew that Marlon C. Cain no longer existed, he knew that the freshly minted assassin standing before him wasn’t bound by any promise of his own. But even as a
teenager, the man who would be known as Cross for the rest of his life had known what buttons to push. He’d spent his whole life learning the lessons. And paid an immeasurable tuition before he passed the course
.

Cross had already paid a well-connected lawyer to track down Rhino’s institutional history. The monster had told the truth—he had never even been
charged
with a crime. The lawyer had told Cross that springing Rhino was a piece of cake—no court was going to tolerate what had been done to that “child.” But that could take years. And even though a much faster route was available, it would take a lot of cash to grease those wheels. More cash than Cross could hope to accumulate by his low-level, low-risk thefts
.

He had stared flat-eyed into the face of a lawyer who made his living representing truly deadly men. And the lawyer blinked. Obliquely, he told Cross that he was about to start trying a big criminal case. A mob guy was accused of shooting a rival. The mobster had a dozen people supporting his alibi, but there was this one pesky witness, a civilian who had been walking past when the street-side killing went down. If something were to happen to that witness, the case would collapse. And the lawyer then would have time to work on poor Rhino’s case. Pro bono, of course …

“When I first started to cut down his Thorazine, it was—”

“Yeah,” Ace interrupted. “I got that part. You needed those humongous arms to saw through the bars.”

“I told him,” Cross went on as if Ace hadn’t spoken, “ ‘I know you’re not a retard, and I know you’re not crazy. Just nod your head if you understand me.’ And he did. He nodded his head.”

“Ain’t that special?” Ace remarked sourly
.

Cross continued to hold Ace’s eyes, going on with his story. “So I asked him, ‘Do you hate them?’ And he nodded again.”

Ace didn’t say anything to that, keeping his silence because he knew what was coming next, the same question Cross had asked him during those first long nights in the Isolation Unit
.

“I asked him, ‘Do you hate them
all
?’ And Rhino nodded again. That’s when I said, ‘Then you’re my brother.’ ”

Ace looked away, then looked back at Cross, pursing his lips thoughtfully
.

“You got the address of that witness?” he asked. “Man like that, he’s probably fool enough to step on the third rail when he could have just taken a cab, specially with all that rain coming down like it is.”