I lit up a cigarette and watched the stick-maker rolling up more newspaper. His buddy was carving another bar of soap with a plastic knife.
We heard the door open and I got up figuring it was Porter coming to take me to the phone, but it was Porter bringing in a new prisoner. Porter opened the door and this scrawny short blond guy with thick glasses stepped in and stared at us. Everybody was quiet because they all recognized him. This was the Piggly Wiggly murderer, for chrissakes. The guy shifted his eyes back and forth, magnified behind thick optics, giving him a nervous, owly look. He frowned and marched directly to a table at the back of the dayroom. Everybody at the table got up and left. The Piggly Wiggly murderer sat down with his back to the wall and stared at us. Everybody in the room stared back. Even the guy making the channel-changing stick stopped working to stare at this guy. Here he was, a guy who just a few hours ago blew away his boss and his friend to get their paychecks. The big question on most people’s minds was, how did he plan to cash the checks? This guy was so stupid it took your breath away.
I was staring at the Piggly Wiggly murderer when I heard Porter call me. I could make that phone call now.
“Patience?” I said.
“Are you okay?”
I was blinking fast, trying to hold on. “Patience. I want you to know that if you decide to divorce me, I really do understand. I mean, they said I might get twenty-five years.”
“Then I’ll wait twenty-five years,” Patience said. Her voice had the fire in it I’d come to respect when we ran our business together in Brooklyn. She’d been kind of shy when we first got to Brooklyn, but by the time we left she could take care of herself and keep fifty employees jumping, too. New York will do that to a person. “I’ll get you out,” she said. “I’ll find out who to call.” I nodded and croaked out “I love you” and said good-bye.
I walked along with Porter, feeling broken, back to the federal wing. I’d had it. Too much bad stuff for too long. How would we ever get through this? When Porter led me through the door, he noticed tears in my eyes. “My, my,” Porter said. “Your woman musta been real mad, eh?”
I didn’t answer. I walked into my cell and lay down on my shelf and pulled the ragged blanket up around my head. It is one thing to jeopardize yourself by taking risks, another to hurt other people in the process. I’d gone too far. I’d hurt Patience and Jack, my family, my friends. This pain was more than I’d felt in my life. Under the shroud of my blanket, I cried.
Two hours later, about seven that night, Porter told us our attorney had come.
John and I followed Porter along the hallway. Walking past an intersecting hallway, we saw Ireland, doubled up in pain, lying on the bare concrete floor. “Wait a minute, Porter,” John said.
“C’mon,” Porter said. “Keep moving.”
“That’s Ireland, our codefendant, Porter. He’s supposed to be in the infirmary, not lying on your stinking floor,” John said.
“The infirmary’s too crowded right now,” Porter said. “They’ll take care of him.”
John looked grief-stricken. As captain, his mission had failed, and now the enemy was mistreating one of his men. It was a heavy blow. Porter opened a door and told us to go inside.
The small room was filled with a table and four chairs. It was, however, a clean oasis in a filthy prison. There was a carpet on the floor and the walls were painted white. A man got up from the table, smiled at us, and said, “Dan Bowling. I’m your attorney.”
Bowling looked the part. He wore a tweed jacket over a sweater, a silk tie, tan wool slacks, and brown loafers. He told us he had graduated from Harvard Law School five years before, and his specialty had become drug cases. “I guess it’s because I’m the young attorney in the Charleston gang. Anyway, I get most of the referrals when we have a bust around here.”
Bowling told us our friends, meaning the team, had hired him, through another attorney, that afternoon, and he knew most of the details of the case by talking to the DEA. “You guys were caught with your pants down, that’s a fact,” Bowling said, laughing. “But you were caught by Customs agents, and that may be illegal search and seizure.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because only the Coast Guard can stop people in U.S. waters without just cause. They can stop you to inspect your boat for safety items and stuff. If the Customs people had seen you coming in from beyond the three-mile limit, then they could have stopped you. But they didn’t spot you until you were in the channel.”
“You think that can get us off?” John said.
“Naw. It just means we have a point to argue. We’ll make a motion that the marijuana, the evidence, was illegally obtained. If that works, they could still try you for the crime of smuggling and possession, but they wouldn’t be able to use the pot as evidence.” Bowling laughed. He clearly enjoyed his work. “Makes it tough for the prosecutors. Of course, the judge’ll never rule in our favor, but the threat might help. Might be able to negotiate something with it.”
“What about the missing five hundred pounds of pot?” I said.
“What?” Bowling said.
“Well, we had thirty-five hundred pounds on board. They claim we had three thousand.”
Bowling shrugged. “Well, two things: can you prove you had that much and do you want to increase the severity of your crime by doing so?”
“The count was an estimate,” John said. “We can’t prove how much we had.”
“Nor would you want to,” Bowling said. “Let it be, gents.”
We talked for about a half hour. John told Bowling about Ireland, wanted to know if he could get him taken care of. Bowling said he’d look into it. John said, “Great. And can you lend us ten bucks?”
Bowling smiled, got a bill out of his pocket, and handed it to John. “What’re you going to buy here?”
“Cigarettes, candy, coffee,” John said. “This place is the pits. They serve actual swill for meals. And look what they give us to wear.”
“Hey, boys,” Bowling said, “you guys are in jail in Charleston County, South Carolina. What do you expect?”
“How long?” John said.
“I’ll have you out in four, five days. No problem.”
They took Bob to a local hospital. He had a bad intestinal infection and stayed there overnight. When he came back the next night, he was pale but smiling. John and I gave him a box of instant-coffee packets we’d bought.
That night, at one in the morning, I woke up because somebody was pounding my shoulder. I looked up and saw a big black man, the guy we first met, leaning over me. He said, “Hey. You got any cigarettes?”
I fished out my pack from my pants pocket and handed it to the guy. He took about half the pack and returned the rest. “Light?” I handed him a book of matches and watched the flame light up his face. He was enjoying this. He threw me the matches and walked out of our cell.
We settled into a routine for the next few days. Time was measured by the passage of meals. Breakfast was usually watery grits, an egg, white toast. Lunch was often cold cuts and two slices of white bread. Dinner was invariably rice with some kind of meat: a hot dog, a hamburger patty, a piece of chicken. Between meals, I read. They had a short shelf of books including about ten Horatio Homblower novels. I’d never read them, so I did now. I read every waking moment so I wouldn’t have to think about being in a cage.
Two days later we were taken out of our cell, given our old clothes, which now really smelled like street garbage, and driven back to the courthouse to see the magistrate.
The magistrate set our bonds at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars each. Bowling objected, jumped up and said that the state of South Carolina had set our bonds for these same crimes at ten thousand dollars. A hundred and fifty thousand, Your Honor? As our hired advocate, Bowling put on a great show, turned to us and pointed out what nice-guys-gone-wrong we were (white, college-educated, middle class). The magistrate sighed, agreed to reduce our bonds to only seventy-five thousand each.