"I used to eat cops," the man taunted. "You tell 'im, McGurk," someone shouted. McGurk leaned into Remo's face. His breath was sour. Like week-old buttermilk.
"Maybe I'll eat you." When Remo didn't reply, McGurk said, "Then again, maybe it'll be the other way around. I could protect you, cop. If you treat me right."
At that, Remo's gaze lifted. His eyes seemed to retreat into their deep sockets. Their expression was unreadable.
"You do for me and I'll do for you," MeGurk said, low-voiced. "What d'you say?"
"I say," Remo said flatly, "that your breath smells like you've been sucking on an elephant's teat. Maybe you should stick with satisfying yourself that way."
McGurk's jaw dropped, making his pachuco tuft bristle.
The only sound in the room for a long time was the shower heads ejecting relentless streams of water. Then a man released an explosive bark of a laugh. Another sucked in his breath. They moved in on Remo and the giant called McGurk to see what would happen next. Behind the big man, Remo could see the guards watching through the square window. Abruptly they turned their backs, and Remo knew there would be no help from them.
"All you swinging dicks stay out of this," McGurk said. He looked down at Remo. Remo met his gaze unflinchingly.
"I'll give you a choice, cop," McGurk said in a taut voice. "Your mouth on my jones right now or my shank in your gut."
"If you're packing, prove it," Remo said calmly. McGurk spread out impossibly big hands and said, "No pockets, friend. But I'll get you in the yard."
"Then I'll see you in the yard," Remo said, pushing past the man and pulling open the door faster than McGurk could react.
Remo grabbed a towel off a rack and began drying himself as the obviously disappointed guards separated and took up positions by the outer door. The odor of stale sweat was a permanent stench in the room. The others drifted out, naked and sullen, and claimed their towels. When they were done, they threw the towels into a laundry cart and put on their clothes slowly, as if donning the blue state-issue dungarees made them less, not more, civilized.
As Remo reached for an identical uniform, one of the guards said, "No prison blues for you. Here." Remo accepted an apricot-colored T-shirt. He pulled it over his head, and realized what it signified. Every man on the row had worn one. It was the badge of the condemned.
They formed a line, with Remo in the rear. The guards buzzed the door open and they walked out single file, their shoulders almost touching the right wall as they right-angled around corners until they passed the multiple-tier cellblocks surrounding Grand Central. The men ahead of Remo filed into their cells. They were general population. Remo continued on, alone, into the Q Wing, death row.
At a signal, the ranges of cell doors rolled open. The simultaneous clangor was deafening.
Remo walked toward the beige corridor to his open cell, just short of the last cell on death row.
A rough voice called after him, "In the yard, cop." After the cell door buzzed shut with a temporary finality that Remo never got used to, he spoke a question into the air. "Know a con named MeGurk?" Popcorn's voice was wry. "Yeah. He's the dude they call Crusher. Ain't that a comic-book name, man? Crusher McGurk. They say his first name's Delbert. "
"Faggot?" Remo wondered.
"Yeah. Real butch. Why you ask? He take a shine to you?"
"Yeah."
"That Crusher, you gotta watch out for him. He pitches, but he don't catch. Know what I mean?"
"Yeah. He says he'll be looking for me in the yard."
"Then don't go into the yard."
"Have to. I have to keep in shape."
"What for? Sparky suck you dry in the end, bro."
"Someday I may get out of here," Remo said. He noticed that someone-himself or the guard-had kicked the corridor cigarette closer to the bars. He went over and put his hand through the bars. He forked the cigarette between two fingers and withdrew to his cot.
"Sure," Popcorn said as Remo examined the white paper for damage. It had split at one end and was dirty where a boot sole had crushed it. But the other end was clean. Remo flicked dust off it carefully. "Someday you'll get out," Popcorn was saying. "There's a white hearse that's gonna carry all us Dead Men outside of these walls one fine day. You can count on that."
"No. Not that way," Remo said, putting the clean end of the Camel into his mouth. "Someday they'll figure out that I'm innocent."
Remo ignored Popcorn's howling laughter as he searched his pockets for a match. He discovered he had no pockets, and of course there was no match either.
And Popcorn kept laughing as if Remo's innocence was the funniest thing on death row.
Chapter 4
For Remo Williams, convicted murderer, his first day at Florida State Prison was not much different than all the days he could remember at Trenton State Prison. The guards came around for the ten o'clock head count. Lunch was served at twelve-thirty. Remo's food tray was placed on the shelflike slot in his cell door. It was meatloaf stew. He smelled it, and although he felt hungry, he returned the tray to the slot. By the time the guard came back to retrieve it an hour later, the surface had congealed into cold grease.
There was another head count at three in the afternoon, and again at eight. Lights-out came at the stroke of eleven, and a final bed check came twenty minutes later as a lone guard strolled down the line, pausing to turn his big D-cell flashlight on each cell. Once he called to a con to uncover his head. Only then did the beam pause for a moment; then its on-and-off activity continued.
The light came on in Remo's eyes and he turned over. The guard went on, repeated his ritual at Popcorn's cell, and then clumped away, his going punctuated by the diminishing loudness of the door buzzers as they closed in succession.
Remo stared at the flat blackness of his cell's outer wall, wondering if the nights here would be as bad as those in Trenton.
They were.
Distantly a voice called out, "Beam me up, Scotty," and Remo almost laughed. Except that the forlorn tone of the man's voice dampened the laughter. He had not been joking. In fact, he launched into an extended one-man performance of an imaginary Star Trek episode, playing in turn the parts of Captain Kirk, Spock, Scotty, McCoy, and even, in a ridiculous falsetto voice, Uhura.
"Shut your hole, chump!" a bass voice warned.
"You shut your hole. Let the man be. He be entertaining us."
That last came from Popcorn. Sighing, Remo rolled out of bed.
"Does this go on every night?" he asked.
"Some nights," Popcorn told him. "That be Radar Dish. He know every Star Trek episode by heart. Says he seen 'em seventeen times each. So naturally he get to the point where he roll his own, so to speak. You shoulda heard the one he spun last Saturday. When it was over, Kirk had got hisself zapped by the Romulans and Spock took over the bridge. First thing he do is to order retreat and start ballin' Uhura. That Radar Dish, he really gets into being Spock. But he likes to put his own spin on things."
Remo sighed. Back at Trenton, there had been a con who did Dragnet impersonations all night long. His Joe Friday had been so accurate that it prompted one lifer to stick a sharpened number-nine pencil into the con's Adam's apple, with fatal results. It seemed like a long time ago now. Remo couldn't even remember either man's name.
Finally the talking aloud, the sobbing, and the groaning tapered off and silence descended over the humid darkness of death row.
Remo slept.
In his sleep, he dreamed.
And in his dream, he was free.
Remo dreamed that he was riding an elevator to the penthouse of a high-rise apartment building. He saw himself framed in the gold-wallpapered elevator cage, as if having an out-of-body experience. One hand was in his pocket and the other hung at his side, fingers snapping impatiently.
The elevator doors slid open and he started to step from the cage. He hesitated momentarily. The gleam that came into his eyes was short-lived. Then, casually taking the hand from his pocket, he stepped out into the corridor. He whistled.