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.
9
Tom 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.
10
Because 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.”