Like his father speaking to him from the car, Louis standing there.
“You think you’re a good guy,” Ordell said, “and it messes you up.”
Not like anybody’s father after that. Louis relaxed and got out a cigarette.
“You get into a deal, you don’t see yourself taking it all the way,” Ordell said, “doing whatever has to be done to make the score. You go in looking for a way out. Not ’cause you scared. It’s ‘cause you think you’re a good guy and there things a good guy won’t do. What’s the most you ever took robbing a bank? Maybe twenty-five hundred? Was me, I decided to do banks? Man, I’d go in and clean the fucking place out. Plan it and do it right. What you stole each time, you couldn’t even buy a good used car with it, could you?”
Ordell said, “Listen to what I’m saying to you. Once you decide what you’re going after you ride it out, no stops, no getting off. You need to use a gun you use it. Look at the situation. If it’s him or you, or if it’s him doing time or you doing time? There’s nothing to think about, man, you take him out.” Ordell said, “Once I pick up the goods and make one more delivery? I won’t ever have to work again till I’ve spent something like a million bucks. You think some dude gets in my way I won’t remove him?”
He said, “Listen, I already have so much money in lockboxes, man, in a Freeport bank, it’s spilling out. I’m bringing some over a little bit at a time as I need to buy goods and pay different ones work for me. Finding the right kind of help these days is the problem. I have an airline stewardess doing it for me I believe I can trust. She don’t ask where the money comes from. I think she don’t want to know and that’s fine with me, I don’t tell her. I could bring it myself, ten grand at a time, but they ever look in my bag once, they be looking in it every time after that. Ask me all kind of questions, get the IRS on my ass. They don’t even look in hers. But she only does it when she feels like it. I said, ‘Girl, we have to step it up.’ I don’t like my funds sitting over there where I can’t get at them. I said, ‘Bring me like a hundred thousand at a time. How would that be?’ She don’t want to. Then says okay, but she’ll only bring what can fit in a big envelope or she won’t do it. It don’t make any difference, they catch you with even one buck over the ten-grand limit they got you by the ass. No, has to fit in this manila envelope. You understand? She can live with thinking she’s delivering the envelope Mr. Walker gives her. But if it’s a big package, like I ask her to bring, say, five hundred thousand at one time? She couldn’t do it. It wouldn’t be just a manila envelope then. She’s afraid her hands would sweat and the Customs people would see it.” He said, “You understand how this woman thinks? You do, huh? It even makes sense to you.”
Ordell in his Mercedes making a speech, telling how to be bad and become successful. Throwing these numbers around to impress him. One more delivery and he’d be a millionaire.
Ordell was ready to leave when Louis said, “Okay, you’re talking about guns. What kind?”
Ordell said, “What do you need? A fifteen-shot Beretta, Colt .45? Shit, name it. You want a MAC-11 converted to full automatic, with a suppressor on it? I’ll show you my demo movie, you can take your pick.”
“Where do you get them?”
“Buy some, steal the hard-to-get stuff. This is big-time, man. Got brothers working for me love to smash and grab. Jackboys, home-invasion experts.
Learned their trade ripping off dope houses. They fearless ’cause they crazy. We got a jump coming up could interest you—seeing how you’re asking me my business. It’s up to you, you want to look at some real money. I ain’t talking you into anything.”
Louis said, “What kind of jump?” Feeling himself being drawn in.
“I showed you Big Guy?” Ordell said. “The grownup skinhead Nazi looks like our old friend Richard? We gonna jump his place and clean him out, all his military type of shit, and sell it. Big Guy ain’t as stupid as Richard, but you saw how serious the man is. I know he’ll try to protect his property.”
Louis said, “You’re gonna kill him?”
“Did you listen to what I told you a minute ago? I don’t premeditate that kind of business,” Ordell said. “I’m gonna get what I need to make a sale. Whatever happens to Big Guy in the process of it, man, it happens.”
Louis shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“What’s that?”
“About going with you.”
“You don’t think you will or you know it?”
Louis shrugged and drew on his cigarette.
“I said before I ain’t talking you into anything. But just answer me this, Louis. What does a three-time loser have to lose?” He started to back out of the drive and stopped. He said, “Louis? You only think you’re a good guy. You’re just like me, only you turned out white.”
7
They had booked Jackie at the admitting desk, removed the handcuffs, and brought her to a counter at the end of a narrow hallway where she was searched, photographed, and fingerprinted on six separate cards. She studied a list of bail bondsmen displayed on the wall while they inventoried her property, taking her bag, her watch, jewelry, the gold wings pinned to her uniform jacket. They took her heels and pantyhose and gave her a pair of “slides” to put on that were like shower slippers. They took the razor and mirror from her bathroom kit. They let her keep the rest, her cigarettes—the two she had left— and the change in her purse. They snapped a blue plastic ID bracelet around her wrist and said she was lucky to get processed through early, before they brought in a hooker sweep. The deputies wore dark green. Their holsters were empty. They said she could make her phone call now.
Jackie dialed a number. A young black woman’s voice said, “He ain’t home,” and the line went dead. Jackie dialed the number again. The woman’s voice said, “He ain’t home,” in the same tone. Jackie said, “Wait.” But not in time. They told her she could try later, once she was in the dorm.
The dorm. She thought of college.
But it wasn’t like college or a fort either, imagining the Stockade on the way here as a stockade fence, pointed logs planted upright. The fences were wire, the one-story buildings seemed to be either cement block or siding. In the dark, driving in, she saw construction equipment, piles of building materials.
They brought her from Administration across the street to Medical where they gave her a questionnaire to fill out, took her temperature, her blood pressure, and examined her for vermin. Outside again walking along the street, the deputy with sergeant stripes said, “That’s ‘F’ Dorm, where you’ll be,” nodding toward a building enclosed in double fencing: Spotlights reflected on rolls of razor wire strung along the top. Unlocking the gate he smiled at her and said, “Fuels your apprehension, doesn’t it?” Jackie looked at him, a young guy, clean-shaved, his hair carefully combed. He said, “After you,” and she walked in expecting to see cells with bars.
What she saw were doors to six dormitory rooms, each with an expanse of wire-covered windows across the front, three on one side of a guard post in the open area, three on the other. She saw faces at the windows watching her and heard faint sounds, voices. A woman deputy stood inside the waist-high enclosure, the guard post: a tall, broad-shouldered woman with pale-blond hair combed up in a pile. She was smoking a cigarillo, the pack stuck in her empty holster. The sergeant said, “Miss Kay, take care of this lady, would you, please?” and handed her a three-by-five inmate status card. Miss Kay said, “Why certainly, Terry,” looked at the card for a moment and then at Jackie. “Would you believe you’re my first flight attendant in about, I’d say, three years?”
Jackie didn’t say anything, wondering if they were putting her on. She caught the aroma of Miss Kay’s cigarillo. That was real.
With two bed sheets under her arm she scuffed along in the slides to the first room on the left, the holding dorm, Miss Kay told her, for prisoners awaiting court appearances. Faces moved away from the wire-mesh windows as Miss Kay unlocked the door and stood holding it open. Jackie stepped inside to see women at two of the four picnic tables in the front part of the dorm. Black women, one or two Hispanic. All watching her, paying no attention to the television set that was on.
The double bunks in the rear area all looked empty. Miss Kay told Jackie she could have any bunk that wasn’t occupied. She said, “If anyone asks you to pay for a bunk, tell me.” Toilets and showers were back there. The two phones on the wall-one was a hot line to the Public Defender’s office, the other a pay phone, but you could only make collect calls out of the area. You were allowed to have six dollars in change. The television set was showing a movie, Mel Gibson . . . And the women were still watching her, waiting. Miss Kay let them. She said the dorm held sixteen, but there were only seven in here now. Two dorms were for misdemeanants, two for drug offenders, one for violent prisoners. Miss Kay turned to the women at the picnic tables, all wearing street clothes, slacks, a few in dresses, and said, “This is Jackie.”
A black woman wearing a shiny black wig said, “What is she, a general? Got her uniform on?”
