For that matter, Elkins had been important even in the prison. He was just a trustee working as a male nurse and orderly in the prison hospital. But he had money. He had connections inside and out and everybody knew it. When Fleck came out of isolation, he found he had a job in the infirmary. Elkins had done that. And Elkins had helped him with the big problem—how to kill three hard cases. All bigger than him. All tougher. First he’d started him pumping iron. Fleck had been skinny then as well as small. But at nineteen you can develop fast if you have direction. And steroids. Elkins got him them, too. And then Elkins had showed him how a knife can make a small man equal to a big one if the small man is very, very fast and very cool and knows what to do with the blade. Fleck had always been fast—had to be fast to survive. Elkins used the life-size body chart in the infirmary office and the plastic skeleton to teach him where to put the shank.
“Always flat,” Elkins would say. “Remember that. What you’re after is behind the bones. Hitting the bones does you no good at all and the way past them is through the crevices.” Elkins was a tall, slender man, slightly stooped. He was a Dartmouth man, with his law degree from Harvard. He looked like a teacher and he liked to teach. In the empty, quiet infirmary he would stand there in front of the skeleton with Fleck sitting on the bed, and Elkins would tutor Fleck in the trade.
“If you have to go in from the front”—Elkins recommended against going in from the front—“you have to go between the ribs or right below the Adam’s apple. Quick thrust in, and then the wiggle.” Elkins demonstrated the little wiggle with his wrist. “That gets the artery, or the heart muscle, or the spinal column. A puncture is usually no damn good. Any other cut is slow and noisy. If you can go in from the back, it’s the same. Hold it flat. Hold it horizonal.”
Elkins would demonstrate on the plastic skeleton. “The very quickest is right there”—and he would point a slender, manicured finger—“above that first vertebra. You do it right and there’s not a motion. Not a sound. Very little bleeding. Instant death.”
When it was time for him to go into the yard again, he went with a slender, stiff little shank fashioned of surgical steel and as sharp as the scalpel it had once been. Elkins had given him that along with his final instructions.
“Remember the number for you is three. There are three of them. If you get caught with the first one you don’t do the last two. Remember that, and remember to hold it flat. What you’re after is behind the bone.”
He had been twenty when he did it. A long time ago. He had yearned to tell Mama about it. But it wasn’t the sort of thing you could say in a letter, with the screws reading your mail. And Mama hadn’t ever been able to get away to come on visiting days. He felt badly about that. It had been a hard life for her and not much he’d done had made it any easier.
The liver had that burned taste. And the hamburger buns were pretty much dried out. But he didn’t like liver anyway. He only bought it because it was about half the price of hamburger. And it satisfied what little appetite he had tonight. Then he put on his hat and his still-damp coat and went out to make his call to Elkins.
“There’s not a damn thing I can do for you,” Elkins said. “You know how we work. After twenty years you ought to know. We keep insulated. It’s got to be that way.”
“It’s been more than twenty years,” Fleck said. “Remember that first job?”
The first job had been while he was still in prison. Elkins was out, thanks to a lot of good time and an early parole. And the visitor had come to see him. As a matter of fact, it was the only visitor he’d ever had. A young lawyer. Elkins had sent him to give Fleck a name. It had been a short visit.
“Elkins just said to tell you to make it four instead of three. He wants you to make it Cassidy and Dalkin and Neal and David Petresky. He said you’d understand. And to tell you you’d be represented by a lawyer at the parole hearing and that he had regular work for you after that.” The lawyer was a plump, blond man with greenish-blue eyes. He was not much older than Fleck and he looked nervous—glancing around all the time to see if the screw was listening. “He said for me to bring back a yes or a no.”
Fleck had thought about it a minute—wondering who Petresky was and how to get to him. “Tell him yes,” he said.
And now Elkins remembered it.
“That one was sort of a test,” Elkins said. “They said you couldn’t handle Petresky. I said I’d seen your work.”
“All these years,” Fleck said. “Now I need help. I think you owe me.”
“It was always business,” Eddy Elkins said. “You know that. It couldn’t be any other way. It would just be too damned dangerous.”
Dangerous for you, Fleck thought, but he didn’t say it. Instead he said: “I simply got to have three thousand. I’ve got to have enough to get my Mama moved.” Fleck paused. “Man, I’m desperate.”
There was a long silence. “You say this involves your mother?”
“Yeah.” In Joliet he had talked to Elkins a lot about Mama. He thought Elkins understood how he felt about her.
Another silence. “What’s your number there?”
Fleck told him.
“Stay there. I’ll make a contact and see what I can do.”
Fleck waited almost an hour, huddled in his damp coat in the booth and, when he felt the chill stiffening him, pacing up and down the sidewalk close enough to hear the ring.
When it rang, it was The Client.
“You dirty little hijo de puta,” he said. “You want money? You bring us nothing but trouble and you want us to pay you money for it?”
“I got to have it,” Fleck said. “You owe me.” He thought: hijo de puta; the man had called him son of a whore.
“We ought to break your dirty little neck.” The Client said. “Maybe we do that. Yes. Maybe we cut your dirty little throat. We give you a simple little job. What do you do? You screw it up!”
Fleck felt the rage rising within him, felt it like bile in his throat. He heard Mama’s voice: “They treat you like niggers. You let ’em, they treat you like dogs. You let ’em step on you, they’ll treat you like animals.”
But he choked back the rage. He couldn’t afford it. He had to pick her up right away. He had to get her to a place where they’d take care of her.
“I know who you are,” Fleck said. “I followed you back to your embassy. I get paid or I can cause you some trouble.” Then he listened.
What he heard was a stream of obscenities. He heard himself called the filthy, defecation-eating son of a whore, the son of an infected dog. And the click of the line disconnecting.
Standing in the drizzle outside the booth, Fleck spit on the sidewalk. He let the rage well up. He’d get the money another way, somehow. He’d done it in the past. Mugging. A lot of mugging to come up with three thousand dollars unless he was lucky. It was dangerous. Terribly dangerous. Only the ruling class carried big money, and some of them carried only plastic. And the police protected the ruling class. And now there was something else he had to do. It involved getting even. It involved using his shank again. It involved getting the blade in behind the bone.
Chapter Seventeen
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What I want to know, for starters,” Joe Leaphorn said, “is everything you know about this Henry Highhawk.“
They had met in what passed for a coffee shop in Jim Chee’s hotel, surrounded by blue-collar workers and tourists who, like Chee, had asked their travel agents to find them moderately priced housing in downtown Washington. Leaphorn had donned the Washington uniform. But his three-piece suit was a model sold by the Gallup Sears store in the middle seventies, and its looseness testified to the pounds Leaphorn had lost eating his own cooking since Emma’s death.