In twenty minutes she was out, having exchanged the mop and pail for the bulky manila folder that rested in her bag.
She paused at a phone stand and pretended to make a call while she flipped through the file. She found the address she was looking for and walked quickly back to the subway. After a ten-minute wait, she got on board an old Number Four train heading toward Brooklyn.
Rune liked the outer boroughs, Brooklyn especially. She thought of it as caught in a time warp, a place where the Dodgers were always playing and muscular boys in T-shirts sipped egg creams and flirted with tough girls who snapped gum and answered them back in sexy, lazy drawls. Big immigrant families crammed into narrow shotgun tenements argued and made up and laughed and hugged with hearts full of love and loyalty.
The neighborhood that she now slipped into, along with the crowd exiting the subway, was quiet and residential. She paused, getting her bearings.
She had to walk only three blocks before she found the row house. Red brick with yellow trim, two-story, a narrow moat of anemic lawn. Bursts of red covered the front of the building: Geraniums, sprouting everywhere – they escaped from flowerpots, from terra-cotta statues in the shape of donkeys and fat Mexican peasants, from green plastic window boxes, from milk containers. They bothered her, the flowers. Someone who'd appreciate flowers like this was probably a very nice person. This meant Rune would feel pretty guilty about what she was about to do.
Which didn't stop her, however, from walking onto the front porch, dropping a paper bag on the concrete stoop and setting fire to it.
She rang the doorbell and ran into the alley behind the house and listened to the voices.
"Oh, hell… What?… The boys again… That's it! This time I call the cops… Don't call the fire department. It's just…"
Rune raced up the back stairs and through the open kitchen door. She saw a man leaping forward fiercely and stomping on the burning bag, sparks flying, smoke pouring out. A chubby woman held a long-spouted watering can, dousing his feet. Then Rune was past them, unnoticed, taking the carpeted stairs two at a time. Upstairs she found herself in a small hallway.
First room, nobody.
Second, nobody.
Third, chaos. Six children were staring out the window at the excitement below them, squealing and dancing around.
They all turned to the doorway as Rune walked into the room and flipped the light switch on.
One of them cried, "Rune!"
"Hi, honey," she said to Courtney. The little girl ran toward her.
A chubby boy of about ten looked at her. "What'sis? Jailbreak?"
"Shh, don't tell anybody."
"Yeah, right, like I'm a snitch. Got a cigarette?"
Rune gave him five dollars. "Forget you-"
"-saw anything. Right. I know the drill."
Rune said to Courtney, "Come on, let's go home."
She pulled the girl's jacket off a hook and slipped it on her.
"Are we playing a game?" the little girl asked. "Yeah," Rune said, hustling her out into the corridor,
"it's called kidnapping."
The prison yard was segregated.
Just like the city, Randy Boggs thought, hanging out there at nine the next morning. Just like life. Blacks one side, whites the other, except on the basketball half-court.
The blacks were mostly young. A lot were do-rags or stockings over their hair or they had cornrows. They stood together. Strong, big, sleek.
Yo, homes, quit that noise.
Wassup?
Mah crib. I ever tell you 'bout mah crib?
Hells yeah.
The whites were older, crueler, humorless. They looked bad – it was the longer, unclean hair, the pale skin. They too stood together.
Black, white. Just like the city.
A lot of the men were exercising. There were weights here though the hierarchy didn't allow for democratic use among all prisoners. Still, there were always push-ups and sit-ups. Muscles develop in prison. But Boggs hadn't made a fetish of exercise. Doing that'd be an acknowledgment of where he was, and what he was. If he didn't stand in line for the thirty-pound dumbbells then maybe he was somewhere else. Maybe he wassomeone else.
"Amazing grace, how sweet thou art…"
An a cappella black gospel group was practicing in the yard. They were really good. Boggs, when he first heard them, wanted to cry. Now he just listened. The group wouldn't be together much longer. They'd walk in two months, four months and thirteen months respectively.
"I once was lost but now I'm found…"
The singers started a second verse and someone nearby yelled, "Yo, shut the fuck up."
He smelled fireplace wood smoke. He tried not to think of the last time he'd sat in front of a fireplace. Thought about that girl from New York. The little girl with the big camera.
He sat quietly. He smoked some though since he'd been in he'd lost his taste for smoking. He'd lost
his taste for a lot of things. He sat for five minutes thinking about the girl, about the story, about prison, about the sky before he realized that the prisoners he'd been sitting with were no longer next to him.
Boggs knew why they'd moved and he felt his skin crackle with fear.
Severn Washington was sick. Got the flu bad, was puking all night, and was in the infirmary. If Boggs knew it everybody knew it.
He looked around the yard and saw the man immediately. Juan Ascipio was back.
He wore a red headband and a fatigue jacket over his jumpsuit. Two other prisoners walked beside him. Boggs had no idea why Ascipio wanted to kill him. He was a newcomer, a dealer who'd been convicted of the assassination of two rivals. He wasn't a big man and he had a face that when it smiled might make children comfortable. A kind face, the sort you want to please. But the eyes, Boggs had noticed, were grinny-mean and chill.
The three of them stopped about fifteen feet from where Boggs sat, next to a tall wall of red brick. Ascipio said, "Yo, man. Here. Now."
Boggs looked at him but didn't get up.
Ascipio pointed to a small shaded area out of sight of the towers. The prisoners called it Lovers' Lane.
Ascipio stepped into the nook and unzipped his fly. "Yo, man, I'm talking to you. You deaf, or what?"
His friend said, "You, man, on your fucking knees. Gonna turn you out, man, turn you out. You do that an' you'll live. Big nigger ain' here to save your pretty cheeks."
The other: "Come on, man. Now!"
Boggs looked back at them. He said, "Don't believe I will." He measured the distance to the nearest guard. It was a long, long way. The other inmates were all studying very important things in the opposite direction from Boggs.
This's going to be bad.
Ascipio spit out, "Don'tbelieve you will? Motherfucker say he don't believe he will?"
Then Boggs's eyes lowered to his own right hand, which rested on his knee. He glanced down at it. Ascipio followed his gaze.
A long fingernail.
It kept growing. One inch, two, three, four, six. Boggs looked back into their eyes. One by one, his head swiveling.
Seven Washington had given it to him last night, this piece of double-strength glass, a clear stiletto honed on one side so sharp it would shave hair. The handle was taped. Metal-detector-proof. The fingernail could do the most damage glass could ever do. Boggs had said, "Would Allah, you know, approve of this?"
Washington had reassured him, "Allah say it's okay to fuck up assholes try to move on you. I heard Him say that personally."
Ascipio laughed. "Put that 'way, man. Get you pretty white mouth over here, man."
They'd get him on his knees, then the other two would hold him and Ascipio would beat him to death and then they'd find the body in the laundry room, where the official word would be he'd died by falling down the stairs.
Boggs shook his head.
Ascipio said, "Three of us, man. More, I want. That" – he nodded at the knife – "that do you shit."
"Man," one of the others growled at the insubordination.
Boggs didn't move. The blade blasted light off its point.