Safe House

And that’s when I knew what was wrong. Why I couldn’t think my way out.

I wasn’t afraid.

The first thing I remember about being a baby is terror so total that fear became my one true friend. Always with me, never leaving my side. Warning me, keeping me vigilant. Distrustful. A layer of protection between the terror and me—the little tiny bit that was me then.

Fear never abandoned me. I took it with me everywhere I went. Everywhere they sent me. The State—my true parent—sending me to surrogates who continued its vicious work. The orphanage. Foster homes. Reform school. Prison looming as inevitable in my future as college was in the lives of the privileged.

Fear came there with me too. A friend I internalized so deep the wolf packs that ran wild through the joint couldn’t smell it. That’s because it wasn’t on me, it was in me. I cherished it, nurtured it, encoded it into my own DNA. My face flattened, my hands stopped shaking. My heart went slow and cold.

I came into prison with a life-taker’s rep. They test reps in there. I kept mine. It cost a lot, but it wasn’t me who paid.

I got to where I never broke a sweat. My voice stayed within a tight, narrow range. I could stare down a cobra. But the fear-bolts always roamed loose in my body, firing off bursts whenever danger was around.

In prison, I lived in danger, adrenaline crackling through my synapses like turbo-boosted cocaine. It kept me alive.

My one goal, then.

Out in the World, I kept the fear. But I played it different. I learned to show the fear when it would do me some good. Trained myself to act, role-playing along the tightrope of survival.

Fear never left me. Until now.

I felt abandoned all over again. Deserted. Without my old friend, I couldn’t plot, couldn’t plan.

So why wasn’t I afraid? I was boxed, all right. Couldn’t see a way out. So why . . . ?

“Burke! Burke, wake up. Are you all right?”

Crystal Beth, shaking my shoulders, gentle but serious. I opened my eyes.

“Are you all right?” she asked again.

“I’m fine,” I told her. “I must have drifted off, that’s all.”

“Drifted off? You were . . . not here. I mean, you weren’t actually sleeping, I could tell. Just . . . zoned out or something.”

“What’s the big deal?” I asked her, wondering why she didn’t recognize the same thing she did herself.

“It’s been hours you’ve been like that,” she said, answering the question she didn’t know I’d asked. “I didn’t want to . . . disturb you. I didn’t know. But then you finally fell asleep. And I got scared.”

“I’m fine,” I told her again. “It happens to me sometimes. When I have to think.”

“My mother said the shamans . . . Oh, I don’t mean you. . . . I mean, you were . . . in a trance, like. Awake, but not here. One minute we were talking, the next you were gone.”

“Can I have a glass of water?” I asked her, more to shut her down than because I was thirsty.

“Sure, baby.”

She came back with a cone-shaped paper cup. The water was cold and clean. “Thanks,” I said.

“You want anything else?”

“A cigarette?”

She lit one of mine, handed it to me, not saying a word. I smoked it all the way down in the darkness, my spinal cord crawling with snake-twisty nerves. Alive now.

Alive with fear.

Where I’d gone, it had come to me. I wasn’t afraid of Pryce. I wasn’t the target. He couldn’t really hurt me. Yeah, he might know some stuff I wouldn’t want shouted around the town, some old ID might be blown, crap like that. But there was nothing in it for him to try for me. If he knew enough to hurt me, he knew enough to know that he wouldn’t live long if he did.

Maybe that was the difference. In prison, it’s not how tough you are that keeps you safe, it’s your capacity for revenge. Prison is icy hell. Feelings are the enemy. Showing them is a crippling illness—sometimes a fatal one. You get raped, you’re a cunt. And every con in the joint is free to use you like one. You kill the rapist, you’re a man. Everything squared. Vengeance is the only true religion in there. And if you have backup, even killing you won’t make the killers safe . . . so they step off.

The first time I went down, it was for a good, high-status beef. Shooting a guy. Attempted murder, they called it, and they were right on the money. I did it because he scared me, but that wasn’t how I profiled it once I was inside. In my version, I did it because he disrespected me.

It helped protect me. I watched plenty of others who couldn’t stay safe. It was ugly, what happened to them. But even before I crewed up, the predators stayed away. Everyone knew—Burke would get even. Next to me, elephants had Alzheimer’s.

If Pryce knew so much about me, he had to know that. He had to know that, whatever I was, I wasn’t alone. I’d die for that, and that would die for me.

So I was safe from him.

But Herk wasn’t. He was hung out to dry. Without the immunity, he was barbecued beef. Without the immunity, he was going back Inside. He’d never be a gardener. Never be a person, like he wanted so bad.

Doc, the prison shrink—I was his inmate clerk, a real sweet spot—told me once that the only thing that really distinguishes a sociopath from the rest of the world is that the sociopath lacks empathy. He feels only his own pain, cares only for his own needs. Selfishness squared. All sexual sadists are sociopaths, but not all sociopaths are sexual sadists. All sociopaths are the same thing, but they don’t all want the same things. Take politicians—the way they breed is to fuck the rest of us.

All sociopaths are encapsulated. Always have every feeling they need right inside themselves. Nobody else counts.

The plague of the Nineties isn’t AIDS, it’s self-absorption. Sociopaths always crank the revs right to the redline. And keep the hammer down.

Amateurs think prisons are full of sociopaths. A pro would tell you the truth—the only sociopaths in prison are the failures. The rest of the population is all the result of the “Just Us” system. Flops and fools, weasels and weaklings. Lazy lames. Most of the convict population today is in there for drugs.

It’s like we learned nothing from Prohibition.

I was safe from Pryce and Herk wasn’t. So what?

I knew the answer to that: Herk would die for me.

That’s an easy thing to say, but I knew it for true. A feeling and a fact. Herk had only been down with our crew for a few weeks when it happened. I was rat-packed in the long corridor between D Block and the commissary. Four black guys, three with shanks, one working lookout. It wasn’t me they wanted. Not me in particular. A race war had been raging inside for almost a week. When that happens, color is the only target.

It wasn’t a heist. They weren’t looking to rough off some commissary goods. No, the next white convict who walked into their trap was going to die. They wanted a body. Any body, so long as it was the right color.

That was me, that day.

If it had been years earlier, when I was still on my first bit, when my image was more important than my life, I would have done it different. But that day, as soon as I spotted the first two, I turned and ran. That’s when I saw the other one, sharpened rat-tail file wrapped in black electrical tape held low against his hip, moving in. He was the hit man—the others were carrying steel too, but they didn’t look as professional, just there to drive the prey onto the killing ground.

I was unarmed. And out of time. I rushed the hit man, charging at his chest. He came up to meet me. I twisted my right shoulder like I was going to try and slide past on his right, exposing my back for a second as I planted my right foot and spun quickly, flattening my chest against the opposite wall away from his knife hand, firing my right elbow at where I thought his face would be as I scrambled crab-style toward safety. I almost made it. I