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  “Even surprised,” Parker said.

  “As I understand it,” Li said, “you and your brother-in-law have been partners in business enterprises in the past, and he believes you might be interested in a similar business enterprise once your current legal problems have been resolved.”

  “He’s probably right about that,” Parker said.

  Li also had a briefcase, like Sherman, but his was on the floor and was much more glossy and polished. Dipping into it, Li came out with a thin sheaf of forms. “This is the application,” he said. “I’ve filled in Mr. Mackey’s part.”

  Parker took the form. He hadn’t expected anybody else to take a hand in this. “I’m looking forward to seeing Ed,” he said, meaning it, then looked at Li: “I understand the arraignment’s next Thursday.”

  “Oh, I don’t think we’ll be ready by then,” Li said. He seemed comfortable with the idea.

  Parker said, “We’ll delay it?”

  Li unfolded his wrists to open expressive hands, like lily pads opening. “You are, after all, the client,” he said. “I believe you’re in no hurry to alter your situation, in regard to these charges and so on. Am I right?”

  “You’re right.”

  “I thought so.” Rising, putting out a hand to shake, he said, “I won’t take up any more of your time unless I have news.”

  Shaking that firm hand, Parker said, “There won’t be news for a while.”

  “Only your brother-in-law.”

  Parker grinned. “I’m looking forward to that.”

  7

  It looks to me,” Ed Mackey said, “as though you zigged when you should have zagged.”

  “There was a local hand,” Parker said, “dumber than he had to be.”

  Mackey nodded. “I read about it in the local papers.”

  This was a different place from where he’d met with the lawyers, farther along the same corridor in the same building, a more open place like a cafeteria, with bare metal tables and metal chairs, and soda and snack vending machines in a row on one wall. There were family groups and single visitors, with a steady surf sound of conversation, guards walking around but nobody standing over you.

  The rules in here were few and simple. The prisoners were not to put their hands under the table, and no object of any kind, not even an Oreo cookie, was to pass between a prisoner and any visitor, not even an infant. To break either rule was to be removed from the visitor room immediately and strip-searched; and probably to lose visitation rights, at least for a while

  When Parker had been led in here, Mackey was already seated at a small square table away from the vending machines and the loudest family groups. Mackey, stocky, blunt-featured, and blunt-bodied, didn’t rise but grinned and waved a greeting. Parker went over and sat with him, and when Mackey said he’d been reading the local papers, he asked, “You reading up on more than one thing?”

  “Not around here.”

  “Good.” Parker frowned at him. “I didn’t know you’d be in this part of the world.”

  Mackey laughed. “I didn’t know you’d be here either,” he said. “You wanna know why I’m here?”

  “Yes.”

  “There was a fella we used to know named George Liss.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And because you were there, too,” Mackey said, “I’m still alive.” What he didn’t add, not in a place like this, was that Liss was not still alive, and Parker’d done that, too.

  So Mackey felt he owed Parker one, because in truth Liss had tried to kill them both, and in saving himself Parker had saved Mackey as well. Parker didn’t keep scorecards like that, but he didn’t mind if Mackey wanted to. He said, “I appreciate it.”

  “De nada,” Mackey said. “Anything I can do to make life a little brighter?”

  “One thing now.”

  “Sure.”

  “This is all transient,” Parker told him. “The whole population, everybody moving through. Tough to get a read on anybody.”

  “You need histories,” Mackey suggested.

  “And if it’s somebody I can talk to,” Parker said, “then I need a friend of his on the outside to tell him I’m all right.”

  Mackey wore a zippered jacket, and now he took from its inner pocket a memo pad and pen, which attracted the attention of a guard. The guard watched, but Parker kept his hands flat on the table and Mackey leaned back, pad on the palm of his left hand. “Go,” he said.

  “Brandon Williams. Bob Clayton. Walter Jelinek. Tom Marcantoni.”

  Putting the pad and pen away, Mackey said, “This is tricky. Very roundabout.”

  “All I got is time,” Parker said.

  That was the seventh day. Two days later, Mackey was back, looking pleased. “Brenda says hello,” he said. Brenda was his lady, had been for a long time.

  Parker said, “She with you?”

  “Always,” Mackey said. “She’s never far away. She’s somebody else saved my life once.”

  “You must be a bad risk,” Parker said.

  Mackey grinned. “Not if I keep hanging out with the right people.”

  Some years ago, Brenda had trailed Mackey and Parker, though she hadn’t been asked to, when they went to deliver some stolen paintings in a deal that then went very bad. At the end, Parker left a lumberyard’s burning main building, with the paintings destroyed, and he’d believed Mackey was dead, shot by one of the people who’d been waiting in there. Brenda, seeing Parker take off alone, went into the building, found Mackey on the concrete floor, and dragged him out and into her car before the fire engines arrived.

  “Fortunately,” Mackey said, “life is usually quieter than that.”

  “We like it quiet,” Parker said.

  “We do. Williams and Marcantoni might be good to talk to. They’re both facing hard time like you, both got stand-up histories.”

  “Not the other two?”

  “Clayton’s in on a Mickey Mouse,” Mackey said, “do a nickel tops. He doesn’t need alternatives. And Jelinek’s ratted people out before.”

  “Then we don’t talk to Jelinek,” Parker said.

  8

  There was the day Parker went on sick call, and the day he went to the library to work on his case, and the afternoons he spent on work detail in the kitchen, a long windowless bright-lit space in the basement under the mess hall, with siren-alarmed iron doors at one end where supplies were delivered.

  The eleventh day, after the other two from the cell went off to work on their case, Williams got up from his bunk and tossed away his magazine and came out to where Parker leaned on the railing to watch the movement down below. Williams said, “I hear you know Chili Greebs.”

  Parker shook his head. “Never heard of him.”

  Surprised, Williams turned away to see what Parker was looking at down there. Watching the guards as they shifted their charges around, he said, “Then why should Chili tell me to talk to you?”

  “Probably,” Parker said, “it was after he talked with a friend of mine.”

  “Would he be a friend of mine?”

  “Not yet. His name’s Ed Mackey.”

  Williams grinned. Now that the tension was gone, you could see where it had been. He said, “That’s the name I heard.”

  Parker said, “Ed told me you’re all right, and he’d find somebody to tell you the same about me.”

  “Now we know and love each other,” Williams said, “what next?”

  “You’re facing twenty-five to life,” Parker told him.

  Williams turned his head to look at Parker’s profile. “Your friend Ed got this on the outside.”

  “Nobody gets anything in here.”

  Williams shrugged. “And so what?”

  Parker said, “I’m not good at prison.”

  Williams laughed. “Who is?”

  “Some are,” Parker said.

  Williams sobered, looking away again at the scene below. “And that’s true,” he said. He sounded as though he didn’t like th
e thought.

  “I don’t think you are,” Parker said.

  Williams shook his head. “I can feel myself gettin smaller every day. You fight it, but there it is.” He turned his head to study Parker’s face. “You aren’t thinking about breaking out of here.”

  “Why not?”

  “This is not an easy place,” Williams said.

  “Better than some,” Parker told him. “It’s transient, it wasn’t built to house this big a population, or for people to stay this long. The system’s strained, and when I look around, they’re short some guards. A state pen could be tougher, and you’ve already been beaten down for a few months.”

  “Jesus.” Williams looked off. Beyond the mesh fence, out over the air, the concrete block wall featured long lines of plate-glass windows that bore no relationship to the levels of the floors inside the cage. “I’ve been setting it aside,” he said. “Thinking I’d wait till I was in a stable place, where I could be part of a crew. I bet a lot of guys figure that way.”

  “I need the crew here,” Parker said. “That’s why I asked Ed Mackey to look around, find me somebody wasn’t going to rat me out.”

  Williams shook his head. “Two guys? Is that enough?”

  “I have a line on one more. Three should do it.”

  “Depends what we do. Who’s this other one?”

  “Do you know Tom Marcantoni?”

  “Sounds white.”

  “He is.”

  “Then I wouldn’t know him,” Williams said. “I know you because we got a stateroom together.”

  “When you see me talk to somebody,” Parker said, “that’ll be Marcantoni.”

  Williams laughed. “You don’t do a lot of talking, do you?”

  “Only when I have to,” Parker said.

  9

  Tom Marcantoni said, “Let’s play a game of checkers.” It was the first time he’d spoken to Parker, who had walked into the game room a while after his conversation with Brandon Williams. So Ed Mackey had been busy.

  “Fine,” Parker said.

  The tables and chairs in the game room were metal, bolted to the floor. Marcantoni got a checkerboard and an open cardboard box of men from a shelf on the back wall while Parker found an empty table and sat at it. Marcantoni came over to join him and they started to play.

  Parker waited, but for a while Marcantoni had nothing to say. He was a big man with a bullet head and a thick black single eyebrow that made him always look pissed off about something. Now he looked pissed off at the checkerboard and had nothing to say until he yawned hugely in the middle of a move, covering his mouth with the back of the hand holding the checker. Yawn done, he blinked at the board and said, “Shit. Where’d I get this thing from?”

  Parker pointed at the square, and Marcantoni finished his move, then said, “I can’t sleep in a place like this.”

  “I know,” Parker said.

  “It keeps me awake, this place, like a weight on my chest,” Marcantoni said. He frowned at the board, didn’t look directly at Parker. He said, “Any time I’m in a place like this, when I get out, the first thing I do, I sleep for a week. It isn’t a natural environment, this.”

  “It isn’t an environment,” Parker said. “It’s a body cast.”

  Now Marcantoni did look at Parker, peering at him from under that eyebrow as though looking out at a field from the edge of the woods. “You got that right,” he said, then looked down at the board. “Whose move is it?”

  “Mine,” Parker said, and moved.

  Marcantoni said, “A friend of mine says I should talk to you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Maybe,” Parker said, “we could figure out a way to get a night’s sleep.”

  Marcantoni nodded, and jumped one of Parker’s pieces. “This game’s too easy,” he said. “Not like some games.”

  “The harder games take more concentration,” Parker said.

  “And more risk,” Marcantoni said.

  Parker said, “You’re facing life. Not much risk left for you.”

  Marcantoni sat back, ignoring the board. “You know things about me,” he said. “But I don’t know diddly about you.”

  “Ask your friend.”

  “I will. You’re thinking about a game for two?”

  “Three,” Parker said. “It wouldn’t be a polite game. More a power game.”

  Marcantoni looked around at the other inmates in the room, playing their games, reading their magazines. “A lot of mutts around here,” he said.

  “There are,” Parker agreed.

  “You can’t be too careful.” Marcantoni nodded, agreeing with himself. “That’s why you had your friend check me out and then go talk to my friend.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So you’ve got a third guy?”

  “One of my cellmates. Williams.”

  Marcantoni frowned, trying to place that, then said, “He’s a black guy.”

  “Right.”

  Marcantoni made a sour face and shook his head. “You wanna work with a black guy?”

  “Why not?”

  “Group loyalty,” Marcantoni said. “One of the first things I learned in life, stick with the group where there’s a chance for loyalty. There’s never a guarantee, but a chance. A black guy doesn’t feel loyalty for you and me. He’d trade us for chewing gum, and we’d do the same for him.”

  Parker said, “I’ve been here eleven days. I got the population on this floor to work with. Like you say, a lot of it’s mutts. Some of it, all they’re facing’s a nickel-dime, it’s not worth it to them, try a different game. From the rest, only two have a reputation I can take a chance on. You, and Williams. He isn’t afraid to stand with you, so if you’re afraid to stand with him I’ll just have to look around, try to find somebody else.”

  “Instead of me, you mean,” Marcantoni said.

  Parker waited, looking at the board.

  Marcantoni sighed, then yawned again, then laughed at himself. “I’m groggy, is what it is,” he said. “Okay, fuck it, a new experience. Get outa your neighborhood, meet new friends.”

  “Good,” Parker said.

  “King me,” Marcantoni said.

  10

  Because of the black-white thing, it was hard for them to meet, make a plan. If a black guy and a white guy who weren’t cellmates talked to each other, people would want to know why. The guards would want to know, and some of the inmates would want to know. What have those guys got to talk to each other about? What’s going on?

  The answer was to work out with the weights. Only Marcantoni had been doing that before, but now Parker and Williams went over there, too, and could be in a little separate group without snagging anybody’s interest.

  The first thing Marcantoni and Williams had to do was get a sense of each other. Lifting hand weights in alternate moves, like walking up the air, not looking at anybody in particular, Marcantoni said, “I never had to rely on anybody your tone before.”

  “Same here,” Williams said. Seated on a wooden bench, weights strapped to his shins, he was lifting and lowering both feet together, from the knee.

  “Maybe we got something we can share,” Marcantoni said. “You got a religion?” Then he laughed at himself, lost his rhythm with the hand weights, found it again, and said, “Never mind, you were brought up Baptist, I don’t even wanna know about it.”

  “And you’re a fish-eater,” Williams said. “I could tell from your nose.”

  “We don’t do that any more,” Marcantoni said.

  Parker pressed a weighted bar up to his chest. “You don’t have to like each other,” he said.

  Williams stood and jogged in place, the weights still on his shins. “But we have to trust each other,” he said.

  Marcantoni said, “How come you trust Kasper, that’s what I don’t get. He’s a white guy.”

  “He looks like a door to me,” Williams said. “I never did care what color a door was.”r />
  Parker lowered the bar, lifted it again. “We ready to talk?”

  “Let’s do it,” Marcantoni said.

  Williams said, “The only way out is through the front building.”

  “Well, you’re right about that,” Marcantoni told him. “This place’s only got two exits. The back comes here, and we don’t get through or over or under those walls, and the front goes to the front building, with all the ways out.”

  Parker said, “We can forget the kitchen. It’s under the mess hall and the only way out from there is kept solid locked, unless they’re bringing supplies in or garbage out.”

  “Some places,” Marcantoni said, “some guys got out in garbage cans. A little messy, but there you are, out.”

  “Here they know about that,” Parker said. “They use plastic bags, and they back the compactor truck into the door opening, toss in the bags, compress them right there, before they go.”

  “Squish,” said Williams.

  Marcantoni grinned at him. “That was funny,” he told him. “What you said.”

  Williams grinned back. “You think so?”

  Parker said, “The dispensary is in the prison building, down by the foot of the stairs, before any doors at all, so there’s no point doing sick call.”

  Williams said, “The laundry’s in the basement, across the way from the kitchen. Just as impossible.”

  Marcantoni said, “If that leaves nothing but the visitors’ room and the lawyers’ room, I don’t see us doing it without a tank.”

  Parker said, “’There’s the library.”

  Marcantoni put the hand weights on the shelf, stood contemplating the other possibilities lined up there. He said, “What does the library do for us?”

  Parker said, “When you first go into the front building, there’s the mess hall on the right, and the first thing on the left is the library.”

  “Sure,” Marcantoni said.

  “But it isn’t the first thing,” Parker told him. “Before that, at the very start of that wall on the left, there’s another door.”

  “Closed and locked,” Marcantoni said, and Williams, taking off his shin weights, said, “I’ve never seen anybody use it.”