“Now, you,” Turley said, “are in a better position. Out in front. You know game theory, Ronald?”
“Mr. Kasper,” Parker said.
Turley snorted. “What difference does it make? That isn’t your name anyway.”
“You’re right,” Parker said, and spread his hands: Call me whatever you want.
“Game theory,” Turley said, “suggests that whoever flips first wins, because there’s nothing left for anybody else to sell.”
“I’ve heard that,” Parker agreed.
“Now, we’ve got you, and we’ve got the others,” Turley said, “and you know as well as I do, we’ve got you cold. So what more do we want? What more could we possibly need, that we might want to bargain with you?”
“Not to walk,” Parker said.
Turley seemed surprised. “Walk? Away from this? No, you know what we’re talking about. Reduction in sentence, better choice of prison. Some of our prisons are better than others, you know.”
“If you say so.”
“Which means,” Turley said, “though nobody will admit this, that some of our prisons must be worse. Maybe a lot worse.” Turley leaned forward over the desk and the dossier, to impart a confidence. “We’ve got one hellhole,” he said, his voice dropping, “and I wish we didn’t, but there it is, where in that prison population you’ve only got three choices.” He checked them off on his fingers. “White power, or black power, or dead.”
“State should do something about that,” Parker said.
“It’s budget cuts,” Turley told him. “The politicians, you know, they want everybody locked up, but they don’t want to pay for it. So the prison administrators, they do what’s called assignment of resources, meaning at least some of the facilities retain some hope of civilization.” Turley leaned back. “One of you boys,” he said, “is gonna wind up in a country club. The other two, it’s a crapshoot.”
Parker waited.
Turley looked at him, getting irritated at this lack of feedback. He said, “You probably wonder, if the state’s already got me, what more can they want? What’s my bargaining chip?”
Parker already knew. He already knew this entire conversation, but it was one of the steps he had to go through before he would be left alone to work things out for himself. He watched Turley, and waited.
Turley nodded, swiveling slightly in his chair. “Those drugs you boys were after,” he said, “or medicines, I guess I should say, not to confuse the issue, where they’d really be worth your time and effort is overseas. But one of the reasons that distribution center was built in this area is because here we’re in the middle of America, you can get anywhere in the country in no time at all from here. But not overseas. We’re six hundred miles from an ocean or a border. Any ocean, any border. You boys were not gonna drive that truck six hundred miles. You had some other idea, and that other idea means there were more people involved. That’s what you can trade us. Where were you taking the truck, who was going to be there, and what was the route after that?”
Turley waited, and so did Parker. Turley leaned forward again, forearm on the open dossier on the desk. “No?”
“I’ll think about it,” Parker said.
“Meaning you won’t, not so far,” Turley told him. “But what about Armiston? What about Walheim? What about Bruhl, when he comes to?”
“If,” Parker said, because he wanted to know how bad Bruhl was.
Bad, because Turley nodded and shrugged and said, “All right, if. But he still could come through, he’s a young strong guy. The point is, you. You know these friends of yours, Armiston and Walheim. Is one of them gonna make the jump before you?”
“We’ll see,” Parker said.
Turley stood, ending the session. The uniforms stood straighter, away from the walls. Parker looked around, then also stood.
“Think about it,” Turley said. “If you want to talk to me, any time at all, tell the guard.”
“Right,” Parker said.
3
“It isn’t just this cell,” Williams said. “The whole place is overcrowded.”
Parker could believe it. The cell he was in, with Williams and two others, here on the third tier of a four-tier cage built inside an outer shell of concrete block, was eight feet by six, meant to house two short-term prisoners, but double-decker bunks had been put in to crowd four men into the space, and the court dockets were also crowded, so much so that inmates weren’t here for the month or two the architects had counted on but for eight months, ten months, a year.
This was a strange place because it was a prison and yet it wasn’t a prison. There was no stable population, no long-termers to keep it cohesive. Everybody was transient, even though the transit was longer and more uncomfortable than it was supposed to be.
This was the place before the decisions were made, so this was the place of hope. There was always that chance; a witness would disappear, the lab would screw up, the court would buy your lawyer’s argument. When this transient period was done, when your time in court was finished, you’d leave here, either for the street or to go deeper into the system, into a penitentiary, and until the last second of the last day of your trial you could never be absolutely sure which way it would go.
But because it was a place of hope, of possibilities, of decisions not yet made, it was also a place of paranoia. You didn’t know any of these guys. You were all strangers to one another, not here long enough to have developed a reputation, not going to stay long enough to want to form into groups. The only thing you knew for sure was that there were rats in the pop, people ready to pass on to the law anything they might learn about you, either because they’d been put here specifically for that purpose, or because they were opportunists, ready to market in pieces of information because it might put them in good with the authorities; push themselves up by pushing you down. And it would probably work, too.
So people didn’t talk in here, not about anything that mattered, not about what they’d done or who they were or what they thought their prospects might be. They’d bitch about their court-appointed lawyers or about the food, they’d talk religion if they were that kind, or sports, but they’d never let anybody else put a handle on their back.
The one good thing about all this isolation was that no gangs formed, no race riots happened. The Aryan Nations guys with their swastika tattoos and the Black Power guys with their monks’ hoods could glower and mutter at one another, but they couldn’t make a crew, because anybody could be a rat, anybody, even if he looked just like you.
In the cell with Parker were one black guy, Williams, plus an Hispanic and a white, Miscellaneous, neither of whom volunteered their names or anything else when Parker arrived and flipped open the mattress on the top bunk, right. Williams, a big guy, medium brown, with a genial smile and reddened eyes, was a natural talker, so even in here he’d say something; introducing himself when Parker was first led in: “Williams.”
“Kasper,” Parker told him, because that’s the name the law was using.
Neither of them had much more to say at that point, and the other two, both short scrawny guys with permanent vertical frown lines in their foreheads, said nothing and avoided eye contact. But later that day, their section got library time, and those two trooped off with perhaps half the tier to the library.
“Working on their cases,” Williams said, with a grin.
“Law library in there?”
“They aren’t readers.”