‘We’ll see,’ Parker said.
Turley stood, ending the session. The uniforms stood straighter, away from the walls. Parker looked around, then also stood.
‘Think about it,’ Turley said. ‘If you want to talk to me, any time at all, tell the guard.’
‘Right,’ Parker said.
3
‘It isn’t just this cell,’ Williams said. ‘The whole place is overcrowded.’
Parker could believe it. The cell he was in, with Williams and two others, here on the third tier of a fourtier cage built inside an outer shell of concrete block, was eight feet by six, meant to house two short-term prisoners, but double-decker bunks had been put in to crowd four men into the space, and the court dockets were also crowded, so much so that inmates weren’t here for the month or two the architects had counted on but for eight months, ten months, a year.
This was a strange place because it was a prison and yet it wasn’t a prison. There was no stable population, no long-termers to keep it cohesive. Everybody was transient, even though the transit was longer and more uncomfortable than it was supposed to be.
This was the place before the decisions were made, so this was the place of hope. There was always that chance; a witness would disappear, the lab would screw up, the court would buy your lawyer’s argument. When this transient period was done, when your time in court was finished, you’d leave here, either for the street or to go deeper into the system, into a penitentiary, and until the last second of the last day of your trial you could never be absolutely sure which way it would go.
But because it was a place of hope, of possibilities, of decisions not yet made, it was also a place of paranoia. You didn’t know any of these guys. You were all strangers to one another, not here long enough to have developed a reputation, not going to stay long enough to want to form into groups. The only thing you knew for sure was that there wererats in the pop, people ready to pass on to the law anything they might learn about you, either because they’d been put here specifically for that purpose, or because they were opportunists, ready to market in pieces of information because it might put them in good with the authorities; push themselves up by pushing you down. And it would probably work, too.
So people didn’t talk in here, not about anything that mattered, not about what they’d done or who they were or what they thought their prospects might be. They’d bitch about their court-appointed lawyers or about the food, they’d talk religion if they were that kind, or sports, but they’d never let anybody else put a handle on their back.
The one good thing about all this isolation was that no gangs formed, no race riots happened. The Aryan Nations guys with their swastika tattoos and the Black Power guys with their monks’ hoods could glower and mutter at one another, but they couldn’t make a crew, because anybody could be a rat, anybody, even if he looked just like you.
In the cell with Parker were one black guy, Williams, plus an Hispanic and a white, Miscellaneous, neither of whom volunteered their names or anything else when Parker arrived and flipped open the mattress on the top bunk, right. Williams, a big guy, medium brown, with a genial smile and reddened eyes, was a natural talker, so even in here he’d say something;introducing himself when Parker was first led in: ‘Williams.’
‘Kasper,’ Parker told him, because that’s the name the law was using.
Neither of them had much more to say at that point, and the other two, both short scrawny guys with permanent vertical frown lines in their foreheads, said nothing and avoided eye contact. But later that day, their section got library time, and those two trooped off with perhaps half the tier to the library.
‘Working on their cases,’ Williams said, with a grin.
‘Law library in there?’
‘They aren’t readers.’
‘They aren’t lawyers, either,’ Parker said.
Williams grinned again. They’re dumbfuck peons,’ he said. ‘Like you and me. But it keeps them calm. They’re working on their cases.’
Yes, it was the dumbfuck peons who’d gone off to work on their cases, but Parker could tell the difference between them and Williams. The whole pop in here was in white T-shirt and blue jeans and their own shoes, so it shouldn’t have been possible to say anything about people’s backgrounds or education or anything else just from looking at them, but you could tell. The ones who went off to work on their cases wore their clothes dirty and wrinkled and sagging; their jaws jutted but their shoulders slumped. Looking up and down the line, you could see the ones who were brighter, more sure of themselves. You still couldn’t tell from looking at a guy if he was square or a fink, but you could make an accurate class judgment in the snap of a finger.
Parker would usually be as silent in here as the other two, but he wanted to know about this place, and the sooner the better. Williams, an educated guy no telling what he, or anybody else, was in here for clearly liked to take an interest in his surroundings. And he also liked to talk, about the overcrowding or anything else that wasn’t personal.
Parker said, ‘A couple others came in with me. I’m wondering how to get in touch with them.’
Williams shook his head. ‘Never happen,’ he said. ‘I come in with another fella myself. I understand he’s up on four, heard that from my lawyer.’
Parker hadn’t been reached by a lawyer yet; that was the next necessity. He said, ‘So my partners are gonna be on different floors.’
‘It’s a big joint,’ Williams said, ‘and they do that on purpose. They don’t want you and your pals working out your story together, ironing out the little kinks. Keep you separate.’ Williams’ grin was mocking but sad; knowing the story but stuck in it anyway. ‘They can go to your pal,’ he said, ‘tell him, Kasper’s talking. Come to you, say, your pal’s talking.’
Parker nodded. They had the cell doors open this time of day, so he stepped out and leaned on the iron bar of the railing there, overlooking the drop to the concrete floor outside the cage. Heavy open mesh screen was fixed along the face of the cage, top to bottom, to keep people from killing themselves.
