Strega - Andrew H. Vachss [8]
I don't abuse the privilege—never stay on the phone for more than a minute, no long–distance calls. I put a slug into the pay phone—another slug answered.
"Yeah?"
"It's Burke. Tell your boss I'll meet him tonight on the third shift."
"I ain't got no boss, pal. You got the wrong number," he said, slamming down the phone. The Strike Force is making all Italians nervous these days.
The "third shift" means eleven at night to seven in the morning, just like it is in prison. When you're doing time, you learn that each shift has its own personality. The first shift, the joint is on its best behavior; that's when the visitors are allowed in and that's the only time the Parole Board comes around. The jerkoff therapists and counselors and religious nuts all make their appearances on the first shift too. The second shift is where you settle all your disputes, if you're serious about them. Prison fights only last a few seconds—someone dies and someone walks away. If the guy you stab lives, he's entitled to a rematch. And the third shift is where you check out of the hotel if you can't stand the room—that's where the young ones hang up in their cells. Prison's just like the free world: bullshit, violence, and death—only in prison it's on a tighter schedule.
Maybe you never really get out of prison. I don't have bars on my back windows—the fire escape rusted right off the building years ago except for the stairs to the roof—and Pansy was ready to discuss the ethics of breaking and entering with anyone who might show up—but it was another day coming on and my only goal was to get through it.
Inside the walls, they don't leave you with much. That's why the body–builders treasure their measurements more than any fashion model.
You can die for stepping on another man's little piece of the yard—or on his name. You either stand up to what they throw at you or you go down—it's that simple. In prison, you go down, you stay down.
The redhead was a standup broad. She didn't like doing that number in the park, but she went the route for her kid. She did the right thing—it made what I did right too. I'd never see her again. I didn't want to—the whole thing made me think of Flood.
Until Flood came along, I had survival down to a science. Like the redhead, she had a job to do, and I got brought in. She took her share of the weight and carried it right to the edge.
Flood was a state–raised kid, like me. "I'm for you, Burke," she told me just before she went back to another world. I was okay before I met her—I knew what I had to do and I did it. You don't miss what you never had. But ever since Flood, the pain floats around inside me like a butterfly. When it lands, I have to do something to forget. A piece of that song Bones used to sing in his cell late at night came to me:
I wish I had a dollar,
I wish I had a dime.
I wish I had a woman,
But all I got is time.
"Maximum Security Blues," he used to call it. Bones wasn't used to big–city jailing. He'd done most of his time down in Mississippi, on the Parchman Farm, a thirty–thousand–acre prison without walls. They didn't need walls—a man can't run faster than a bullet. Bones said he got his name years ago when he was working the dice circuit, but we called him that because that's all there was of him—he was about a hundred years old, as sharp and skinny as an ice pick. Bones did things the old way—he'd be so respectful to the guards with his thick Southern voice that they'd never listen to what he was really saying.
One of the young city blacks didn't listen so good either. Bones was sitting on a box on one of the neutral courts in the Big Yard, playing his battered six–string and singing his songs. The young stud came up with his boys, all dressed in their bullshit back–to–Africa colors, "political prisoners" one and all. I didn't know mugging old ladies