"So what's a cop doin' in this empty place?"
"I forgot to Mirandize your mother."
"Hoo! You are some cold dude. But let me set you straight, bro. The cons, they know you're a cop. The hacks, they know you offed a guard. That put you in a very bad place. I'd make all the friends I could get, I was you."
"You're not me," Remo returned, suddenly wishing for a cigarette. Maybe it would clear the cobwebs from his mind. He felt like stale beer-flat and too warm.
"In that case, I just got one more piece of advice for you, Jim." When there was no answer, Popcorn said, "Don't eat the meatloaf. It's always yesterday's hamburger. And if they offer you meatloaf stew, that's not only yesterday's meatloaf, it's also the day before's hamburger. They don't waste shit in this joint. They just reheat it and slide it back into your sorry face all over again."
"I'll keep that in mind," Remo said, still staring at the ceiling. It was too smooth. In his old cell, the ceiling was cracked and peeling: He used to imagine the cracks were an earthquake and the hanging flakes volcanic eruptions. He used to follow the cracks with his eyes for hours, imagining them-no, willing them-wider. Sometimes, it seemed that they did widen, but they never widened enough to let him out, now matter how long he stared through the endless gray days and months.
Remo rolled to the side of his bunk. He found no entertainment in this flat unblemished ceiling. Staring at his shoes, he thought about what the warden had said.
He couldn't remember killing any guard back at Trenton State. But his mind was still fuzzy from sedation. Remo couldn't remember ever hearing of an inmate being shipped under sedation. Not a sane one. He wondered if he had cracked from the long years of imprisonment on death row.
He let his mind roll back over the years. It was all a flat gray blur. How many since the day they came for him at his Newark walk-up? Ten years? Twenty? Closer to twenty. Twenty long years since the judge-what was his name, Harold something? had sent him up the river. In those days, New Jersey enforced its death penalty. Remo had sweated out over a year on death row-a "Dead Man" in the parlance of the other inmates-while his lawyer filed appeal after appeal.
It was not so much the appeals process that saved his life as it was the trend against invoking the death-penalty statutes that finally saved ex-patrolman Remo Williams' life. It wasn't vindication, but it was better than sitting on the chair.
Now, twenty years later, he was facing the chair all over again.
Remo stood up. His joints felt stiff. His not-quite-numb fingers stroked the stiff stubble of his chin and throat. There was no mirror in the cell. On death row a man might cheerfully slice open his throat rather than be dragged to the chair.
Swallowing reminded Remo of how dry his throat was. The washbasin was dry, so Remo decided to go in the other direction.
"I could use a smoke," he said aloud.
There was no answer from the left-hand cell, which Remo recalled had been empty when he passed it. But from the other side Popcorn asked, "Camel do for you?"
"Yeah."
"Well, here she come. One tailor-made."
Outside his cell door, a filterless cigarette rolled into view. Remo had to get down on his knees to snare it. But his wrists were too thick for the narrow space between the bars. He strained, his fingers nearly brushing the paper cylinder. He shifted to the other hand, but only succeeded in pushing the cigarette completely out of reach.
Remo returned to his bunk and sat down heavily, his face a mask of defeat.
After a while Popcorn remarked, "I don't smell no smoke, Jim. And I had my heart set on second-hand."
"It got away from me," Remo told him without emotion.
"That how I feel about my life, Jim. But you still owe me one."
"Sure," Remo said flatly. He felt like shit.
"Just don't be waiting long for payback. Sparky own my ass, you know."
"Who's Sparky? Your lawyer?" Remo wondered into the air. He might as well have been communicating with the dead. Popcorn's next words told him that he was.
"Sparky's the chair, man. I walk the line next month if my appeal don't stick. They tell you when you're going?"
"I'm not going," Remo said flatly.
"Do tell. I used to think that. The Man lets you think that for a while, him and his lawyers. After a while you get to believin' it yourself. Then they take it away from you an inch at a time. That's the bitch of it. One day you be flyin', the next you're scratchin' in the dirt at your own damn feet, thinkin' that the only way out is to dig your way out. But either way you slice it, you be diggin' your own grave."
"I'm not going," Remo repeated.
"You figure 'cause you was once a cop, you got the juice. That it?"
"They won't fry me. They didn't fry me in Jersey. They won't fry me down here."
"Maybe so, Jim. But in this hole we in, Florida juice got a whole 'nother meanin'. It ain't orange and they gotta strap you down before you can get the benefit of it."
"They can't transfer a man from one state to another and fry him. My lawyer will see to that."
"I'm with that. My lawyer's my last hope too."
"They won't fry me," Remo repeated. And suddenly he remembered why he had felt so uncomfortable sitting on the hardwood chair in the Warden's office. Electric chairs were always built of nonconducting wood.
A door buzzed down the passageway distantly. Another buzzed. And each time, the buzzing was louder as Control opened door after door. Then there came the clear, unmuflled sound of footsteps.
The guards stopped outside Remo's cell. They were the same guards as before.
"Today's shower day, Williams," one said, sneering. Remo looked up from his bunk with dull eyes. He stood up. "Why not?" he muttered.
This time they didn't cuff him as they brought him out from the cell.
"Am I the only one who gets to wash off the dust?" Remo asked.
The guard showed fierce teeth. "The others are already getting nice and clean for you, Soap Boy. Now, get moving."
Remo walked slowly past the range of death-row cells. He met each glance in his direction boldly.
This time there were no catcalls or jeers. In a way, it was a bad sign.
They walked past the control booth at the prison crossroads, called Grand Central, where the watch commander buzzed them into the shower area. Remo stripped under the watchful eyes of the guards and stepped into the communal shower.
Dozens of pairs of hard eyes drank in his lean, tigerish muscles, his athlete-flat stomach and oddly thick wrists. Remo ignored them and stepped under the hot stream of an unoccupied shower head, lathering himself with a dirty bar of soap that stood melting in a gutterlike shelf that ran under the shower heads the entire length of the room. He rubbed some of the lather into his brawn hair, scrubbed furiously, and, aware of the eyes on him, stepped back under the hot water until the last of the lather ran into the floor grates, to be carried away to the kind of freedom Remo hadn't known since he was half his current age.
As Remo started for the door, a man stepped in his path. He was white and built like a pregnant linebacker. His thick face was as expressionless as the Hoover Dam, except for the Fu Manchu mustache that had gone out of style when Gerald Ford was in the White House and a tiny dab of hair under his lower lip called a pachuco tuft. His black hair splayed all over his forehead, dripping dirty gray soap lather. He looked like a Klingon with a bad hairpiece.
"You the new Dead Man?" he growled.
"The name's Remo."
"Yeah. That's you. Dead Man," the man muttered as if Remo wasn't there. Then louder he said, "I hear you were a cop."