Breakout Read online

  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.

  4

  The 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 req
uest 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.”

  “California,” Sherman said, “will argue that their murder charge takes precedence.”

  “But I’m here,” Parker said. “That should take precedence. We can argue it.”

  It was clear that Sherman didn’t want the work involved; it was too pleasant to think of this case as a simple one, a fellow here today, on his way to California tomorrow. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

  “You can do something else for me,” Parker said.

  “Yes?”

  “There’s a woman doesn’t know what’s happened to me. She’ll worry. I don’t want to phone her from here, or write her through the censors, because I don’t want her connected to me, don’t want to make trouble for her.” He pointed at the briefcase. “You’ll have some paper in there, and an envelope. I want to write her, so she’ll know I’m still alive, and put it in the envelope, and address it. I’ll ask you to put the stamp on it and mail it, and not show it to the people here. I won’t ask her to do anything illegal, this is just so she won’t worry, but I won’t get the law complicating her life.”

  Sherman looked away, toward the guards at the doors, the prisoners’ door and the lawyers’ door. Then he looked at Parker and nodded. “I can do that.”

  “Thank you.”

  What Sherman gave him was a yellow lined sheet of paper from a long legal pad, and a pen, and an envelope with Sherman’s office address on it for the return. Parker wrote, ’This place is called Stoneveldt. I’m here as Ronald Kasper. Get me a mouth I can use.” No heading and no signature. He folded the paper, put it in the envelope, sealed it, wrote “Claire Willis, East Shore Rd., Colliver’s Pond, NJ 08989” on the front, then said, “You got Scotch tape in there?”

  “I think so.”

  Sherman rooted around in the briefcase, came up with a roll of tape, handed it over. Parker taped the flap, then folded a length of tape along all four edges. Now it couldn’t be opened without leaving traces. He pushed the envelope and the roll of tape over to Sherman, saying, “I appreciate it. I’ve been worried about her.”

  Sherman looked at the envelope. “New Jersey. Long way from here.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d have been better off staying there.”

  “I didn’t know that then,” Parker said.

  “No.” Sherman tapped the return address on the envelope. “If your friend has questions, she can get in touch with me.”

  “She probably will.”

  Putting letter and tape away, Sherman said, “We haven’t talked about the arraignment. I assume you want to plead not guilty.”

  “Sure. When is it?”

  “It’s scheduled now for a week from Thursday.”

  Parker frowned at him. “That long? For an arraignment?”

  “The courts are really quite clogged,” Sherman told him. “But it doesn’t matter that much, whatever time you do in here counts on your sentence.”

  “Yeah, there’s that,” Parker said. “And it gives us more time to argue the extradition thing. They can’t start that until after the arraignment.”

  “We’ll do what we can,” Sherman said. “Do you have any other questions? Anything else I should do? People to contact?”

  “No, if you just send that to Claire so she knows I’m alive, then I won’t worry about things.”

  “Good.” Sherman stuck his hand out. “Nice to chat with you, Ronald.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Sherman.”

  They both stood, and Sherman said, “See you at the arraignment.”

  “Right,” Parker said, knowing he’d never see Mr. Sherman again.

  5

  The first week is the hardest. The change from outside, from freedom to confinement, from spreading your arms wide to holding them in close to your body, is so abrupt and extreme that the mind refuses to believe it. Second by second, it keeps on being a rotten surprise, the worst joke in the world. You keep thinking, I can’t stand this, I’m going to lose my mind, I’m going to wig out or off myself, I can’t stand this now and now and now.

  Then, sometime in the second week, the mind’s defenses kick in, the brain just flips over, and this place, this impossible miserable place, just becomes the place where you happen to live. These people are the people you live among, these rules are the rules you live within. This is your world now, and it’s the other one that isn’t real any more.

  Parker wondered if he’d be here that long.

  The stolid regularity of the routine helped in this process of turning the inmate into a con. In Stone-veldt, the day began at six, when the cell gates were electrically rolled open, loudly, but then nothing happened until seven-twenty, when everyone on three was to line up by the door to the stairs. It was opened, and in single file they thudded down the flights and through the corridor with the white line on the floor into the main building and on into the mess hall there. They arrived at seven-thirty and had to be out by seven fifty-five. The inmates on four had breakfast there at seven, those from two at eight, and those on the ground floor at eight-thirty.

  After breakfast they were trooped back up to their floor, but the cell gates were left open, and there was a game room with playing cards and board games and a television set down at the opposite end from the stairs. This was the time when those who felt sick could be escorted to the dispensary.

  At ten-thirty they were led downstairs again, but this time down the long concrete floor between the outer wall and the ground floor cells to iron doors at the rear that opened onto the exercise yard. Armiston wasn’t on the ground floor, those cells being given to the nondangerous sad sacks, the drunk drivers, domestic disputes, deadbeat dads. The exercise yard, enclosed by high unpainted concrete block walls, was packed dirt, with a weight-lifting area and one basketball hoop.

  Three’s lunch period was twelve forty-five to one-thirty, and afternoon outside time three-thirty to four-thirty. Also in the afternoon was the time when the prisoners could go off to the library to find something to read or to work on their case.

  Morning and afternoon, after breakfast and after lunch, a group of names was called on the loudspeaker, and those cons went off on assignments. The way it was structured, everybody was given work to do, a half day three times a week, in the kitchen or the laundry or paint detail or mopping the floors. Skilled men fixed toilets and television sets. During those times, Parker found people to talk with, get a sense of, remember for later.

  Dinner six-thirty to seven-thirty. At nine, everybody had to be back in his cage. The cell gates rolled shut. The lights went out.

  6

  The fifth day, the loudspeaker said, “Rasper,” and the guard said, “Lawyer visit,” but it wasn’t wrinkled Jacob Sherman, looking to duck the work of fighting extradition. It was an older man, Asian, hair sleeked back and flesh gleaming, who rose in Armani and pastels on his side of the table. “I am Mr. Li,” he said, and extended a card without being asked.

  The card was full of names and addresses, all in blue print on ivory, with “Jonathan Li” in gold on the bottom right. Parker put it away and said, “You’ve got me now.”

  “Transfer complete.” Li was amused, not by Parker in particular but by his own entire life; it made him easy to be around, but suggested there were circumstances when he might not be completely reliable. “We should sit,” he said. “For the quiet.”

  They sat, and Parker waited, watching him. His smoothly sheathed forearms on the tabletop, wrists delicately crossed, Li leaned a bit forward as he talked, to keep the conversation within their space. “Your friend Claire wants me to assure you she
’s fine.”

  “Good.”

  “And that she expects to see you soon.”

  “We can only hope,” Parker said.

  “Oh, we can do more than hope,” Li told him.

  “I understand California wants me,” Parker said.

  “California must wait its turn.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Oh, yes,” Li said. “My professional opinion is, you should not leave this place until you want to leave this place.”

  ’That’s good,” Parker said.

  “Also, as you may know,” Li went on, “if you are to have any visitor other than immediate members of your family, you must put in the request yourself, from this end, and the authorities will or will not approve of it. Unfortunately, you have no immediate family nearby—”

  “No.”

  “—but it happens that your former brother-in-law is working on a construction job not terribly far from here and would be happy to have that opportunity to visit you while you’re in confinement.”

  “My former brother-in-law,” Parker said.

  “I believe at one time he was married to your sister Debby.”

  Parker had no sister Debby. He said, “Oh, sure.”

  “So your former brother-in-law, Ed Mackey—”

  “Ah,” Parker said. That was more real than sister Debby.

  Li smiled at him. “Yes, I thought you’d be pleased.”