“Sure.” I continued to scribble. “Awesome, Joel. You’re a peach.”

“You want a tail?”

“I don’t think it would look good on me.”

“Hey, smart guy? What’s it gonna be? Do I tail him? Interview him?”

“Let me think about it,” I said.

“Yeah? You’re making me nervous, kid.”

“Any luck on this ‘Mace’?”

Joel used silence to express his disapproval. Hell, he found people for a living. Why would he assume the worst about my intentions?

“No luck,” he finally said. “Nickname isn’t much to go on, right? And cops don’t usually advertise their CI’s.”

Fair enough. John Dixon was the one I wanted, anyway.

26

REYNARD PENITENTIARY was a maximum-security prison out in rural country, a good fifty miles northwest of the city. It took me more than an hour to get there, which put me at about half past one. Visiting hours began at two, if memory served, though as a prosecutor we could get access to inmates whenever need be. I’d been out here a few times in my stint as an assistant county attorney, usually flipping witnesses through a combination of sticks and carrots.

The place was a brick fortress with several acres surrounding it on all sides, covered with the usual barbed-wire fencing and in-ground sensors. I was stopped no less than three times on my way in, always checking my identification against the visitor sheet. Arrelius Jackson had put me down as an “A” visit—meaning an attorney-client visit, which entitled us to special rooms where, allegedly, we could speak in confidence. I say “allegedly” because the Department of Corrections, on occasion, had been known to overlook this special privilege and eavesdrop on attorney-client conversations, too. There had been a scandal about five years ago with a downstate penitentiary, resulting in a handful of resignations and typical reactionary reforms.

I didn’t really care. I didn’t have the slightest impression that Arrelius Jackson was looking for a lawyer. I’d done a search on him back at my office. Age thirty-four, African American, unmarried, a sheet starting when he was seventeen. Mr. Jackson was serving consecutive life sentences for a triple homicide in the city about a decade ago. His appeals had long dried up.

I was searched, seized, X-rayed, poked and prodded. I gave my autograph a couple of times and passed through two metal gates before I was finally ensconced in a small room of concrete walls, painted green, and a metal table at which I sat. The single door to the room popped open with a hydraulic whoosh and in walked the man of the hour, none other than Mr. Arrelius Jackson, in an orange body suit, accompanied by two of Reynard Penitentiary’s finest.

Inmates used the phrase stone cold to describe the nastiest, scariest of the prison population. The term was typically reserved for the sexual predators and the enforcers. I didn’t know if Jackson was either of those but I figured if I looked up the phrase in the dictionary, I would find a picture of the man now standing before me.

Jackson had several scars on his forehead, followed by braided hair pulled tightly over his skull. Uneven facial hair straggled along his jaw line. His eyes were small and cold, and fixed on me from the moment he walked in the room.

One guard—unarmed—bolted Jackson’s handcuffs to the metal clip on the table while another armed guard observed from a safe distance. The protocol had been established a couple of decades ago, after a manacled inmate managed to lift the handgun out of a guard’s holster during this very process. The guards left us, closing the thick metal door. They could monitor us from a camera posted in the corner of the room but they couldn’t listen—allegedly.

Throughout this entire process, Jackson never took his eyes off me, not showing a trace of emotion. He had raped and killed. He had no hope for release. His life would be spent in this Darwinian hellhole, where the only hope for survival was to be meaner and tougher than everyone else.

Arrelius Jackson hated me. He hated every man associated in any marginal way with the criminal justice system, with authority, a cop, a lawyer, a judge, the people who felt entitled to lock him in a cage. Undoubtedly he hated his own lawyer, part of the same system, in his mind probably equally corrupted, in cahoots with the prosecution all along. Given the chance, he would come over the table right now and pummel me, smash every tooth in my mouth, use my skull for a punching bag, probably piss on my dead corpse.

Usually that didn’t happen until people got to know me.

I leaned back in my uncomfortable chair and stared back at him. I wasn’t going to speak first. It was his dime. His call.

“Bitch,” he said, then he chuckled to himself, amused.

That cleared up any minute possibility that he was seeking my legal assistance. He was here to intimidate me. Smith had reached this guy. I had a pretty good idea of his sales pitch from here on out.

“Is that what your mama used to call you?” I asked.

“Say again?”

“I mean, Arrelius—that’s a girl’s name, right? Did your mama dress you up in pretty pink doll outfits and call you ‘bitch’?”

He didn’t engage. His face balled up in rage, then eased. His mouth was a tight, straight line.

“Your brother,” he said. “Nice white boy like that. Nice little bitch. Be my bitch, he come here. Don’t matter where, man. Be someone’s bitch. We’ll be sure a that. Time we’re done, he be beggin’ for the blade.” He made a motion, a finger tracing across his throat. “We gonna slice that white boy wide open,” he said.

I had expected this. I’d prepared for this. Still, it was all I could do—it took every mental muscle I could flex—to look disinterested, bored, unaffected, as this lifer inmate threatened to commit every conceivable felony on my brother. Smith was telling me he had a wide reach. He could get to Pete inside. Pete would never make it out of the penitentiary, and his time inside, while still alive, would be worse than death.

I bottled the rage, ignored the hammering inside my brain, and slowly nodded at Arrelius Jackson. “Is that it? Anything else?”

He took a moment, then smiled at me. “I’ll keep a spot warm for him, man.”

I got up and picked up my briefcase. I walked past Jackson and stopped behind him, positioning myself so that, chained as his hands were to the table, he could not reach me. I leaned into him and whispered into his ear.

“Redgrave Park,” I said. “That’s where your brother lives, right? Arrelius, one thing happens to my brother, I’ll castrate yours. And I’ll send you a picture.”

I left him, straining against his restraints, unsure of whether I was bluffing or telling the truth.

I drove away from Reynard Penitentiary with electricity flowing through my limbs. I told myself to focus on solving the problem but couldn’t stifle unimaginable images, courtesy of Arrelius Jackson. As a prosecutor, you hear that prison rape happens but not as often as they say. Still, a scrawny, good-looking white boy like Pete? He wouldn’t stand a chance.

Solve the problem.

Smith’s people had connections, all right. He’d managed to frame Pete and to get an inmate to threaten Pete’s well-being inside. He was flexing his muscle for me, and it was working.

“McHenry Stern on South Walter,” I said to the automated voice. I was driving back to my office, calling information on my cell phone. “Connect me,” I answered when the robot asked me my preference. I was all for technological advancement, but Christ, can’t I get a human being on the phone once in a while?

A woman answered the phone and spoke so quickly, I wasn’t even sure I had the right number. “I’m looking for John Dixon,” I said. “He works in the mail room.”

“Please hold for the mail room.”

Apparently the mail room was in another country, because it took a painfully long period of time to connect me, to the point that I was about to hang up, call information again, and start over with the speed-talking receptionist, when a gruff male voice answered. “Yeah.”