Death Row Breakout (18 page)

Instead of unlocking more convicts to exercise, Sergeant Blair opened the gate for the Mail Room Officer. “Listen up,” the man called. “If you want this certified mail, you goddamn sign for it. I’m not having the Post Office gimme any more shit about it because some idiot doesn’t want to sign his name.”

Roger wondered what was behind the declaration. He started to read a
New Yorker’s
Table of Contents, with part of his mind aware of voices near the front. The figure of the Mail Room Officer passed Roger’s cell and stopped farther back. He then went the other way and disappeared.

After a minute or so, Rudy Wright called out, “Hey, Big Strunk.”

“Yeah, Rudy?”

“What does ‘judgement af…firmed mean?”

“It means you go home tomorrow,” called a previously unheard voice, eliciting a chorus of titters along the tier.

“Aw, man, quit jivin’,” Rudy said. “It’s bad news, ain’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s bad news,” Big Strunk said.

Instead of absolute loathing for Rudy, who was everything despicable by convict values as well as those of society, Roger found some pity for the stupid brute. His absolute ignorance made him somehow less culpable. He was, like everyone, more or less what he had been taught by the teachers of life. What was that hoary bromide? “To understand all is to forgive all.” That fell short of being a truth, but it came close enough to make him think. He could imagine Rudy’s childhood. If God had a scale that weighed what most convicts had inflicted to what they had suffered, no doubt their own suffering would outweigh what they had meted out. Roger felt a strange new compassion for Rudy Wright.

*

Days turned into weeks. Cutting the outer bars was excruciatingly slow. Only during exercise could they work on it. The bridge game was cover. Seated cross-legged on the floor, Jellico rested his back against the outer bars and used the piece of hacksaw when the gun-walk guard was on the other side. Al Salas and Charlie Jackson were over there. The water had been forced out of their toilet by placing a pillow over its top, sitting on it and bouncing up and down. Roger did the same on this side because the bridge game was taking place directly in front of his cell. When the water was out of the toilets, they had a ‘telephone’ to the other side. The moment the gun-walk guard started to move, Salas or Jackson sounded the alarm through the toilet, and Roger relayed it to Jellico. When Jimmy Rube, Big Strunk, Robillard and Roger came out to exercise, they did calisthenics on the tier. To the guards watching from the front, it appeared quite natural. They relied on the gun-walk officer to patrol the tier. Rudy or Jellico kept his head in the toilet. The moment the gunman moved on the other side, he got the warning and relayed it with a loud cough. Even though they might saw for only a few seconds in a whole hour, it was hard for Roger to believe that nobody heard the hacksaw – and even harder to believe that nobody snitched.

Then it was done. The breakout would come the next stormy night, when rain would hide the sound of the hacksaw on the window.

The storm came four days later.

“Tonight,” said Rube when they were out to shower.

“What about the hacksaw blade? It’s getting dull.”

“Oh, yeah. Why don’t you run down to the hardware store for a new one?”

“We’ll get it cut,” Strunk said. “We’ll have time, from midnight to eight in the morning. Nobody comes up here until they change shifts.”

“By then it’ll be broad daylight.”

“Oh shit! That’s right.”

For the first time, Roger understood that Strunk was a little bit retarded. A man who planned escape for eighteen months and never thought of when the sun would rise had to be retarded.

“We’ve got five hours for sure,” Jimmy Rube said. “I can chew through it in five hours.”

“Okay, five hours. That’s an awful dull blade and an awful thick bar.”

“So whaddya wanna do? Give it up? Go back to our cells?”

“Hell, no!”

“Wait and give ’em a chance to find the cut bars?”

“Nope.”

“So we throw the fuckin’ dice and hope for seven.”

“Don’t use dice as an example,” Strunk said. “I always throw snake eyes.”

“Who’s on duty tonight?”

“Sergeant Mencken and Deputy Dog.”

“Is that right?” Although nobody knew for sure, it was believed that Sergeant Mencken was the executioner, he who took the extra pay to dip the gauze bag of cyanide pellets into the bucket of acid, creating cyanide gas. As for Deputy Dog, his nickname bespoke his nature.

“Do you think he’ll make those check calls?”

“If he don’t, he’s in bad fuckin’ trouble,” Big Strunk said. “I don’t like the motherfucker anyway. He’s ready to kill me for a hundred and fifty dollars added to his paycheck.”

“Is that all they pay him?”

“That’s what I heard. They give him a day off, too.”

“He’ll make the check calls,” Jimmy Rube said. “What would you do if you had a knife at your throat… and the guy holding it was under a death sentence already?”

Sergeant Blair banged a big key against the front bars. “Grab a hole! Lockup!”

Roger and his partners looked at each other and nodded. As Roger passed Rudy’s cell, he grinned and winked and gave a slight thumbs-up signal. “Tonight,” he said, embarrassed for his duplicity. Rudy was the lowest form of scum, a pervert child molester and a stoolpigeon. Yet Rudy was the fulcrum of escape; his cell bars were cut and he could crawl out. Indeed, there was no way to stop him short of calling the guard. He was big and strong and could be useful to Big Strunk in the takeover. Still, Roger tasted his own hypocrisy. It was a trait he particularly despised.

Roger entered his cell. The security bar came down and he heard the cell gates being locked. He was urinating with one hand on the wall when the key turned in his cell. “G’night Harper,” said Sergeant Blair.

“G’night, Sarge,” Roger said, adding “goodbye, too,” in his mind.

Later, when Fast Eddie picked up the food trays, he commented, “Nobody’s hungry. I hope it ain’t the flu.”

“Naw, just not hungry,” Roger said, having barely touched the tray’s contents.

The shift changed. The 4:00pm to midnight crew came on. After the 4:30 count, the Sergeant passed out the mail. Roger got nothing. Richard Romero had eight letters. He had sharp, saturnine features and demonic good looks. Women wrote him from all over the world. Maybe I didn’t kill enough people, Roger thought. The wryness of his thought was belied by the surge of anguish he felt when he remembered what he’d done.

“Hey, Roger,” Rudy Wright called after the mail was passed out.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“They sent me an execution date,” Rudy said. “June fifth. That’s sixty-two days.”

“We go together. I got one for the same day,” came the seldom heard voice of Merkouris, who had killed his ex-wife, her new boyfriend and her nine-year-old son from a previous marriage. Afterward, he’d gone into a bar, ordered two drinks, “Bourbon for me. Scotch for my wife.” He then pulled her head from a hatbox and put it on the plank. The bar emptied. The cops came. The jury turned thumbs down on an insanity defense and now, fourteen years later, the appeals were over and the trial court had issued a death warrant. He was a hundred pounds heavier than when he arrived. Roger remembered, for he had been in the county jail when the trial was in progress.

“It’s gonna be crowded in there,” Jimmy Rube said. “Rabbit Carson got a June 5
^th
execution date.”

“Who’s Rabbit Carson?” someone asked.

“A dude over in the Adjustment Center,” Strunk said: then, “Hey, Rudy, maybe they’ll let you sit on Merkouris’s lap.”

Scattered laughter; silence from Rudy and Merkouris. Roger smiled. Sick shit, he thought, this bizarre talk of dates with death. Being on Death Row had a surreal aspect, a dream quality, something unbelievable. He’d imagined himself in prison, but not Death Row. It was part of the reason he’d chosen to heist drug dealers and pimps; nobody went to Death Row for killing scumbags. Nobody cared that they were dead – not that he had planned to kill anyone unless forced. As he leafed through the pages of events, he was unable to see where his decisions could have been different.

The flashing light told him the TV sets were turned on. He reached for the tiny earphones and the remote channel changer. It was his week to run things. He went through the channels and stopped on American Movie Classics. Brando and Karl Malden in “One Eyed Jacks”. All right; maybe it would take his mind off things for a couple hours.

Ten o’clock. Another movie, Astaire dancing through London in “Royal Wedding.” It made Roger ache to realize he would never see London, or anywhere else. Tonight’s breakout was barely possible. The odds against them were immense. If they got out, imagine the manhunt for a bunch of condemned killers. He envisioned every Peace officer for hundreds of miles joining the hunt. It would take a miracle to get away. Shit, it would take a miracle to get out. In fact, it was already miraculous that they had cut their way through two sets of bars under the nose of the guards.

Then he wondered how many would go. How many could they let go? They had never talked about how many were going or who would be let out of their cells. It was too late to talk about now – until after things started to happen.

The movie was going off when the elevator bell rang out. The shift was changing. After that things would kick off.

The TV went off. A minute later the tier gate opened. The flashlight beams bounced from bars and across concrete floors. The new shift was coming down the tier, taking the count. As the footsteps got close, Roger shut his eyes and felt the light flash momentarily into his cell. When he heard them go out his armpits were slick with sweat. He could see rain running down the high windows.

The outer door opened and closed. The whir of the elevator marked its descent. Nobody would come up until morning. It had to start quickly. It was going to take hours to cut that fat window bar with half of a used hacksaw blade.

A black shadow showed on the outer bars. A moment later the gun-walk guard went by on rubber soles. He looked at the cells and the figures under blankets. Nobody sleeping, Roger thought, not up here. What about the French death penalty: you never knew when it would happen. Nobody told you. They came for you in the night. Damn,
nobody
at all sleeps there, thought Roger.

Down the tier he heard the hollow whump of someone jumping his rump on a pillow over the toilet, driving out the water to open the phone line to the other side.

Maybe I should do that to hear what’s going on, Roger thought, and started to swing off the bunk. In the corner of his eye, a figure flashed by. Hey! It’s happening. That was Big Strunk.

“What the fuck’s happening’, man!” called one of the two Crips.

“Shaddup, asshole!” Jimmy Rube snarled softy – but loud enough to hear. “Don’t do no dry snitchin’, punk!”

“Say, man –”

Another figure flew past Roger’s cell, going the other way. It was Rudy Wright going to the Crip. Roger heard hissing words, then silence. His heart began to race. Pressing to the bars, off to the right he could see Big Strunk squeezing through his hole onto the gun-walk.

Rudy Wright returned, eyes white in his dark face. He had to wait, crouched down, behind Strunk, until the big man’s feet disappeared through the bars. Rudy stretched out and wiggled through, disappearing around the corner.

Roger listened. One yell and Sergeant Mencken would be on the phone. Squeezing the cell bars, Roger visualized Stunk and Rudy waiting at the rear for Deputy Dog to come back along the cells, retracing his routine patrol.

A half cry, stifled. A splat of flesh on flesh. Roger closed his eyes and held his breath.

No shout of alarm.

A minute. Another. A figure appeared. It was Strunk. He wore the guard’s hat, providing camouflage for his silhouette. He walked past Roger en route to the front. He’d taken the key to let him out. Rudy must be in the back with Deputy Dog. Roger could imagine Deputy Dog’s terror at being helpless and at the whim of a condemned killer. He could also imagine that every inmate on Death Row #1 was standing at the bars, precisely as he was.

A voice, “…oh God!” The crash of a chair going over. A moment later, Big Strunk called out, “Rudy! Rudy! Bring him up here.”

“Awright, awready?” Jimmy Rube called. “Hear it, Roger?”

“Does a bear shit in the woods?”

“Wha’s goin’ on, man?” asked one of the Crips.

As he spoke, the security bar went up. Big Strunk opened the outer gate and came onto the tier. Roger heard Jimmy Rube’s cell gate being unlocked, then Robillard’s. Strunk appeared. He had a Sergeant in tow. It was Sergeant Blair. The old man looked rumpled, his shirt askew, his hair mussed, a wild look in his eyes. As the key turned and Roger stepped out, he felt sorry for the old man – yet what could he do? Stop fighting for his life?

“Sorry, Sarge,” Roger said. It issued without volition. It was politically incorrect in the hardcore code where kindness was weakness in the minds of most.

“Here you go,” Strunk said, shoving Roger the .38 Police Special taken from the gun-walk guard. “You take the piece. You got the best sense. Watch. I’m gonna spring Salas and Charlie Jack.”

Strunk hurried toward the front, passing Robillard and Rube. They were at a cell. Rube was waving his arms.

“Let’s go, Sarge,” Roger said, touching his shoulder without shoving. They moved toward the front. On the right, outside the bars and mesh, Rudy passed them. He was pushing Deputy Dog.

The guard’s hands were behind his back, fastened with a belt. Rudy held onto that with one hand; in the other was the sharpened rod from the toilet bowl pushbutton. Its ice-pick point was aimed toward the guard’s jugular.

Is this really happening, Roger thought as he passed Rube, who was talking heatedly to Richard Romero, his face shadowed so it exaggerated the angles of evil. His eyes glittered and he sneered his scorn. “I tell you, mon, you better, mon. Six six six…”

Roger kept moving, the Sergeant ahead of him, out into the light of the service area. Robillard was already there. A picnic-sized table was under the window. Even standing on that it would not be possible to reach up to the window. Robillard was putting a chair on the table. Whoever started cutting the bars would stand on that.