Safe House

felt the shank punch through my denim jacket and take me just below the shoulder. I went down, rolling away as fast as I could. Heard the pounding footsteps as the other two charged, knives held high.

That’s when Hercules hit them from behind like a runaway train, taking them both into the wall. The lookout shouted something. I kept rolling, covering up as best as I could, kicking out at the hit man every time he got close. Guards piled into the corridor, the riot whistle blowing loud. Sweeter than church bells on a wedding day.

One of the hacks clubbed me right where the hit man’s shank had gone in. When I came to in the prison hospital, my head was bandaged too.

If you can get to the hospital in prison, they can probably save you—the docs there have plenty of practice. Herk took almost seventy stitches, but they were slash wounds, not deep. I got a heavy tetanus shot, then they cleaned the wound out and packed it. Told me how lucky it was that it hadn’t been lower—if he’d gotten a kidney, I was gone.

They did a prison investigation. Which means a body count. This one was zero, so they called it off. Herk and I told the same story. We were walking down the corridor and got jumped. No, we didn’t see who did it. No, we didn’t know if they were black or white—they had masks and gloves on. No, we didn’t know how many of them there were.

The black guys told the same story.

The shanks were somebody else’s. No prints . . . if they even checked.

Herk and I got thirty days’ keep-lock. The black guys got six months in the bing. Except for the lookout. They cut him loose. An innocent bystander.

When the hit man died from eating a rat-poison-laced candy bar in solitary, the Man put it down to the race war. That had been Wesley’s work, although I didn’t know it then.

The other two sent word to me that there had been nothing personal—they’d mistaken me for somebody else. I was okay with them. Sorry about what happened. How about if they send a few crates of smokes over to my wing, make it up to me?

I sent word back: Sure. No hard feelings.

A couple of months later, the race war was over. For then—the only way it’s ever over in there. One of the two guys who’d sent me the smokes was watching a softball game on the yard when someone came up behind him and played a one-swing game of T-ball with his head.

The hacks figured it for debt collection—the black guy was a known gambler. Like always, they got it about half right.

Less than a week later, his partner went off a high tier all the way down to the killing concrete floor.

The investigation was quick. After all, a lot of suicides don’t leave notes.

The lookout was the sole survivor. He smelled the wind, took a voluntary PC. Refused to eat any food that the hacks didn’t taste. Which meant he was starving to death. He became convinced microwaves were being sent to give him cancer. Heard voices telling him he was going to die. They gave him medication—held him down for the needle. It calmed him, let him relax. After a while, he started to trust again, so they switched to oral meds. He always took them, no complaints. It wasn’t so bad in there for him after that. He got tranquil, started to eat again. But he never came out of his cell.

That’s where they found his body, burned to a crisp. If he’d screamed, nobody had heard.

Herk would die for me.

He was my brother.

My brother was in a box, not me.

But my family is me. My brother was in danger, and I was afraid. For him, for me. Same thing.

I had my old partner back. Fear was in me, alive.

And it would keep my brother that way too.

I guess I’ll never qualify as a sociopath. But you don’t have to be a sociopath to act like one.

I started to plot.

“Are you okay?” Crystal Beth asked me again. “You keep . . . going away.”

“I’m back now,” I told her.

In this city, some of the rats have wings. There’s parts of Brooklyn where pigeon-racing is a bigger sport than baseball. And if you’re tired of having your house covered in pigeon shit, professional exterminators will lay a covering on your roof to solve the problem. It’s really a carpet of tiny little face-up nails— pigeons can’t land on it.

But starlings live in this city too, and they need places to roost. For their tribe to survive. So what they do is they carefully gather twigs and paper and other stuff, drop it on the carpet of nails and then stand on that.

I don’t know how they do it in other countries, but in America, people call themselves “friends” and it means about as much as when they sign their letters “Love.” All their letters.

Down here, it’s different. I have no friends. There’s people I know, people I wouldn’t hurt if I could help it. There’s people I like, and maybe they like me. But it really comes down to Us, Them . . . and non-combatants.

Us is the deepest blood of all. And it only takes volunteers.

In your world, you ask a friend to get something for you, he’d probably ask what you wanted it for. And then he might say yes and he might say no.

When I asked Clarence to get something for me, he didn’t ask me what I wanted it for.

And he didn’t just say he’d get it for me—he asked if he could use it himself.

“What’s the point?” Pryce asked.

“I don’t want to say on the phone. Especially without a land-line,” I told him.

“You want to meet, I can do that. But why does . . . my friend have to be there too?”

“I learned something,” I said. “It could change the game, understand? Change everything.”

“I still don’t—”

“Change everything,” I said, letting an organ-stop of pressure into my voice.

He was silent for a minute, but the cellular’s hum told me he was still on the line. “The last time we met, it was all yours,” he finally said. “This time, it has to be mine.”

“Time and place,” I said. “You call it.”

“I can’t just reach out and—”

“When you have it, let me know,” I said. “But there isn’t a lot of time.”

“You trust me?” I asked Hercules in the bedroom of Vyra’s hotel suite.

“All the way, brother,” he said, no hesitation.

“Up to now, they been the players, we been the game, got it?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re gonna change the game,” I told him.

Two days later. Three-thirty in the afternoon. Rain banging against Crystal Beth’s dark window.

“You know where River Street is?” Pryce’s voice, over the cell phone.

“What borough?”