Parker shook his head. ‘Never heard of him.’
Surprised, Williams turned away to see what Parker was looking at down there. Watching the guards as they shifted their charges around, he said, ‘Then why should Chili tell me to talk to you?’
‘Probably,’ Parker said, ‘it was after he talked with a friend of mine.’
‘Would he be a friend of mine?’
‘Not yet. His name’s Ed Mackey.’
Williams grinned. Now that the tension was gone, you could see where it had been. He said, ‘That’s the name I heard.’
Parker said, ‘Ed told me you’re all right, and he’d find somebody to tell you the same about me.’
‘Now we know and love each other,’ Williams said, ‘what next?’
‘You’re facing twenty-five to life,’ Parker told him.
Williams turned his head to look at Parker’s profile. ‘Your friend Ed got this on the outside.’
‘Nobody gets anything in here.’
Williams shrugged. ‘And so what?’
Parker said, ‘I’m not good at prison.’
Williams laughed. ‘Who is?’
‘Some are,’ Parker said.
Williams sobered, looking away again at the scene below. ‘And that’s true,’ he said. He sounded as though he didn’t like the thought.
‘I don’t think you are,’ Parker said.
Williams shook his head. ‘I can feel myself gettin smaller every day. You fight it, but there it is.’ He turned his head to study Parker’s face. ‘You aren’t thinking about breaking out of here.’
‘Why not?’
‘This is not an easy place,’ Williams said.
‘Better than some,’ Parker told him. ‘It’s transient, it wasn’t built to house this big a population, or for people to stay this long. The system’s strained, and when I look around, they’re short some guards. A state pen could be tougher, and you’ve already been beaten down for a few months.’
‘Jesus.’ Williams looked off. Beyond the mesh fence, out over the air, the concrete block wall featured long lines of plate-glass windows that bore no relationship to the levels of the floors inside the cage. ‘I’ve been setting it aside,’ he said. ‘Thinking I’d wait till I was in a stable place, where I could be part of a crew. I bet a lot of guys figure that way.’
‘I need the crew here,’Parker said. ‘That’s why I asked Ed Mackey to look around, find me somebody wasn’t going to rat me out.’
Williams shook his head. ‘Two guys? Is that enough?’
‘I have a line on one more. Three should do it.’
‘Depends what we do. Who’s this other one?’
‘Do you know Tom Marcantoni?’
‘Sounds white.’
‘He is.’
‘Then I wouldn’t know him,’ Williams said. ‘I know you because we got a stateroom together.’
‘When you see me talk to somebody,’ Parker said, ‘that’ll be Marcantoni.’
Williams laughed. ‘You don’tdo a lot of talking, do you?’
‘Only when I have to,’ Parker said.
9
Tom Marcantoni said ‘Let’s play a game of checkers.’ It was the first time he’d spoken to Parker, who had walked into the game room a while after his conversation with Brandon Williams. So Ed Mackey had been busy.
‘Fine,’ Parker said.
The tables and chairs in the game room were metal, bolted to the floor. Marcantoni got a checkerboard and an open cardboard box of men from a shelf on the back wall while Parker found an empty table and sat at it. Marcantoni came over to join him and they started to play.
Parker waited, but for a while Marcantoni had nothing to say. He was a big man with a bullet head and a thick black single eyebrow that made him always look pissed off about something. Now he looked pissed off at the checkerboard and had nothing to say until he yawned hugely in the middle of a move, covering his mouth with the back of the hand holding the checker. Yawn done, he blinked at the board and said, ‘Shit. Where’d I get this thing from?’
Parker pointed at the square, and Marcantoni finished his move, then said, ‘I can’t sleep in a place like this.’
‘I know,’ Parker said.
