Breakout (2 page)

“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.

I
t 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.”

“They aren’t lawyers, either,” Parker said.

Williams grinned again. “They’re dumbfuck peons,” he said. “Like you and me. But it keeps them calm. They’re working on their
cases.”

Yes, it was the dumbfuck peons who’d gone off to work on their cases, but Parker could tell the difference between them and
Williams. The whole pop in here was in white T-shirt and blue jeans and their own shoes, so it shouldn’t have been possible
to say anything about people’s backgrounds or education or anything else just from looking at them, but you could tell. The
ones who went off to work on their cases wore their clothes dirty and wrinkled and sagging; their jaws jutted but their shoulders
slumped. Looking up and down the line, you could see the ones who were brighter, more sure of themselves. You still couldn’t
tell from looking at a guy if he was square or a fink, but you could make an accurate class judgment in the snap of a finger.

Parker would usually be as silent in here as the other two, but he wanted to know about this place, and the sooner the better.
Williams, an educated guy—no telling what he, or anybody else, was in here for—clearly liked to take an interest in his surroundings.
And he also liked to talk, about the overcrowding or anything else that wasn’t personal.

Parker said, “A couple others came in with me. I’m wondering how to get in touch with them.”

Williams shook his head. “Never happen,” he said. “I come in with another fella myself. I understand he’s up on four, heard
that from my lawyer.”

Parker hadn’t been reached by a lawyer yet; that was the next necessity. He said, “So my partners are gonna be on different
floors.”

“It’s a big joint,” Williams said, “and they do that on purpose. They don’t want you and your pals working out your story
together, ironing out the little kinks. Keep you separate.” Williams’ grin was mocking but sad; knowing the story but stuck
in it anyway. “They can go to your pal,” he said, “tell him, Kasper’s talking. Come to you, say, your pal’s talking.”

Parker nodded. They had the cell doors open this time of day, so he stepped out and leaned on the iron bar of the railing
there, overlooking the drop to the concrete floor outside the cage. Heavy open mesh screen was fixed along the face of the
cage, top to bottom, to keep people from killing themselves.

Parker stood there awhile, watching guards and prisoners move around down below, and then he went back in and climbed up to
sit on his bunk. Williams was in the lower across the way. He looked up at Parker and said, “You’re thinking hard.”

“I’ve got to,” Parker said.

T
he second day, the loudspeaker said, “Kasper,” and when Parker walked down the aisle past the cages in the cage to the gated
stairwell at the end, the guard at the metal desk there said, “Kasper?”

“Yes.”

There was another guard present, standing by the stairs. He said, “Lawyer visit.”

The first guard pressed the button on his desk, the buzzer sounded, and the second guard pulled open the door. Parker went
through and down the stairs, the second guard following. The stairs were metal, patterned with small circular holes, and loud
when you walked on them.

At the bottom, Parker and the guard turned right and went through a locked barred door into a short broad windowless corridor
painted pale yellow, with a black composition floor. A white line was painted down the middle of the floor and everybody walked
to the right. There was a fairly steady stream of foot traffic in the corridor, because this was the only way in to the cells;
prisoners, guards, clerks, a minister, a doctor.

One more guard seated at a table beside one more barred door to be unlocked, and they could go through into the front part
of the building, with an ordinary broad corridor down the middle of it, people walking however they wanted. The doorways from
this corridor had no doors. The wide opening on the right led to the mess hall, which took up all the space on that side.
The first doorway on the left was the library, with the inmates in there lined up in front of the electric typewriters, waiting
their ten-minute turn to work on their case. The doorway at the far end led to the visitors’ room, and the doorway halfway
along on the left was for lawyer visits.

“In there,” the guard said, and Parker went through into a broad room with a wide table built into it that stretched wall-to-wall
from left to right. At four-foot intervals, plywood partitions rose from the table to head-height, to create privacy areas.
Chairs on this side faced the table between the partitions, numbered on their backs. Three of the chairs were occupied by
inmates, talking to people across the table, lawyers presumably, blocked from Parker’s sight by the partitions. “Number three,”
the guard said, and Parker went over to chair number three. In the chair on the other side, facing him, was a black man in
a brown suit, pale blue shirt, yellow tie, all of it wrinkled. He wore gold-framed glasses and his hair was cropped short.
He was looking in the briefcase open on the table, but then looked over at Parker and said, “Good morning, Ronald.”

“Good morning.” Parker sat facing him and put his forearms on the table.

“I’m Jacob Sherman,” the man said, “I’ll be your attorney.”

“You got a card?” Parker asked him.

Surprised, Sherman said, “Of course,” and reached into his suit-coat pocket. The card he handed Parker showed he was alone,
not with a firm. Parker looked at it and put it away.

Sherman said, “I wish I had good news for you.”

“I don’t expect good news,” Parker said.

“George Walheim,” Sherman said, and paused, then, seeming embarrassed, said, “had a heart attack. He’s in the hospital.”

A heart attack. Walheim hadn’t expected things to go wrong. Parker said, “So that’s two of us in the hospital. Is Bruhl still
alive?”

“Oh, yes,” Sherman said. “He’ll be all right, eventually.”

“Is Armiston in here?”

“I really wouldn’t know,” Sherman said. “He’s being represented by someone else.”

So that string was gone. The four down to two, the two separated. Parker didn’t think he could work this next part single-o,
but how do you build a string in a place like this? He said, “How long, do you think, before trial?”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Sherman said.

Parker said, “You don’t think a
trial
is gonna happen?”

“Well, California is certainly going to request extradition,” Sherman told him.

“No,” Parker said. “We fight that.”

Sherman seemed surprised. “Why bother? You’ll have to go there sooner or later.”

Any other environment they put him in would be worse than this, harder to handle. Particularly if he was in a jurisdiction
where he was known as someone who had both escaped and killed a guard. He said, “I’d rather deal with the local issue first.”