wanted the money, plain and simple. I turned eighteen exactly three days before my arrest so I did a hundred days at Cook County instead of juvey. That was about as much fun as a punch in the dick. I’m sure you’ve seen your share of hellholes but you have no idea. You have no fucking idea, I assure you.
“The second time I got picked up was across state lines. I had grown pretty skillful at jacking cars by then and I had a regular thing going with six or seven chop shops all over Chicago. This one cat named Holmes I worked with a few times asked if I could drive a hot Nissan over to Boston where his brother Todd had a shop and drive back some other wheels to Indy. Said he’d pay five gees for the trouble and that cash sounded pretty damn good to me. I don’t know what I was aiming to buy at the time, but I remember that the money would set me straight for a while. Needless to say, I saw the bubble lights go up behind me just crossing into Massachusetts, and I panicked, ended up with a helicopter spotlight over my head, six cruisers, and a set of those spikes stretched across the road to take me down to the rims. It was like a Hollywood movie except missing the ending where the good guy gets away. Or maybe I wasn’t the good guy, come to think of it.
“Anyway, state lines is state lines and I ended up in Federal without a friend in the world. I tried to call Holmes and I’ll be damned if the number done changed. I was staring three years in the face and the Fed House meant organized crime and drug traffickers and El Salvadoran gangs and Aryan brotherhoods and a whole mess of hard cases who wouldn’t think twice about putting your insides on the outside of you if you know what I’m saying.
“The second day I’m locked up… the second damn day… I get sucker-punched in the walkway between the chapel and the restrooms. I’m walking along and WHAM! on my back, laid out flat. Didn’t see the fist fly, didn’t see the face, just a blast of pain, blinking white lights, and I’m looking up at the ceiling. I don’t know who hit me or why they hit me or what I had to do to make it right.. no one tells you that shit. Look at me, I’m all of five-ten and skin and bones and I was even thinner back then if you can dig that. No one helped me up and no one told me what the fuck I was supposed to do to keep from getting jawboned again.
“When I went to get my meal that afternoon, I saw some of the prisoners snickering at me and my fat lip and my purple cheek but I just ignored them best I could and sat down at one of the tables they had scattered in the cafeteria.
“That’s where Archibald Grant found me, busted lip and busted flat, eating a dry hamburger in the cafeteria at Lewisburg. He asked me my name and he asked me my story and I don’t know why I let everything out, but like I’m doing here, I did for him there. The words just poured out of me like water out of a busted bucket. I told him where I came from, where I’d been and why I was stuck up inside there.
“He looked at me, smiling that half smile of his, the way he does, you know, and didn’t say nothing for a while. Then, he nodded like he’d known my story before I told it and he said I’d been stealing the wrong things. Cars, electronics, wallets, knicks and knacks, this place was full of people who boosted the wrong shit. Boosted it because they didn’t know better. All that crap could only get you a little cash and what was the point in that? Risk versus reward was all upside down. Five thousand dollars worth five years in lockdown? In Federal? With these animals? Hell no. No fucking way.”
Smoke shakes his head vigorously, then swallows hard. He doesn’t look at us, lost in his story, as he continues.
“Archie folded his hands and lowered his voice. He said what he stole, the only thing worth stealing, was information. He said there was no greater commodity in the world. He said people laid down their lives for it since the dawn of man and they did it for good reason. Told me he stole information on the outside and he’d been stealing it on the inside, riding out his two-year term in comfort and security until he could resume business on the other side of the wall. Said he got thrown in here on purpose anyway, and though that claim had just the slightest ring of bullshit to it, I bought it like a fifty-cent bottle of beer. Looking back now, I’ll just bet he did get himself thrown in there for whatever reason made sense at the time.”
I remember that time. My old fence Pooley went to visit Archie in that prison, and commented how he couldn’t get to him to put a scare in him, get the information I needed at the time. Maybe Archie was in there to avoid my reach back then. It doesn’t matter… I keep my mouth shut and listen to Smoke unfold his story.
“Anyway, I naturally said something along the lines of ‘why you telling me this?’ And he said, ‘nobody ever believed in you, but I see a spark inside you maybe no one else saw before. Maybe it’s buried deep down in there but I can see it.’ Of course I thought he was completely shining me but fuck if those words didn’t sound like honey. Say what you want about Archibald Grant, but he’s got a mouth on him that could sell scissors to a bald man. He told me he knew who waylayed me in the hall outside the chapel and he knew how to take care of that situation so I wouldn’t be bothered again, not even looked at askew the whole time I was behind bars, but I needed to do something for him. ‘Could I do that?’ he asked.
“I didn’t know but I said I’d try. He said ‘good, good.’ Then he nodded to indicate a beefy prison guard standing behind the glass near the exit. ‘See that hack over there what looks like he ate too many dollar specials at the Taco Bell?’”
Smoke stops and laughs to himself. “You know how Archie do.”
I can’t help but smile too, but signal with my hands tumbling over each other for him to get on with it. It doesn’t do either of us any good to think of Archie in the past tense.
“He tells me the guard goes by the name of Nash. Archie says he’s been able to crack the code on most of the hacks but this Nash has been a problem. Says he’s tightlipped and none of the other guards’ll spill on him.
“Now, as you can imagine, most bulls take a handout here or there for favors, but not this Nash. He’s straight as an arrow and there was no chinks in the armor neither. He’s one of those true blue badges you hear about but never expect to see. And those are the dangerous ones. Because nothing can fuck up a connected con’s plans like a hack who won’t play ball. Suddenly, you find yourself transferred to the wrong cellblock, or your pleasantries are confiscated, or you’re eating at the wrong table in the cafeteria or worse. Balance of power is always a precarious thing in life, but in lock-down, it’s hanging by tooth floss, I’ll tell you that.
“Archie looks me over, and says, ‘get me something.’ ‘What’d’you mean, ‘something’? I ask back, and Archie gets that look in his eye he gets time to time that says ‘I’m smarter than you think I am.’ He looks down his nose at me and says, ‘What have we been talking about? Information, Smoke.’ He’s the first one to call me that by the way cause I had this pack of Parliaments I pulled out and lit up in mid-conversation. That’s the one good thing I’ll say about L-burg.. you can smoke inside that damn place. What happened to the world where we kicked all the smokers outdoors? Anyway, Archie keeps on, ‘Anything I can use on Nash to get what needs getting. One week. You find me some A-plus information and all your problems inside this box disappear like bad dreams in the morning light. Consider yourself off-limits for a week… nobody but nobody gonna be in your business, I guarantee that. And don’t forget something, Smoke. I believe in you.’”
Smoke fiddles with his unopened pack, turning the box over and over, occupying his hands. I have a feeling he’d like to pause the tale to step outside and light one up, but telling stories has a way of gaining a foothold on anything else you might want to do, planting its flag until it’s over. He looks up at me.
“So what the fuck was I gonna do? I’m like three days into this shitbox and I’m going to find out information on a hack no one else has been able to procure? A bull with a clean certificate? How the fuck was I gonna do that? But those words were there, Columbus. He said ’em and I’ll be damned if he didn’t mean ’em. ‘I believe in you.’ Those words were like, I don’t know, they had weight, man. You believe that?”
I nod and half of Smoke’s mouth turns upward. His eyes start to shine, but he doesn’t wipe at them.
“First thing I did was spend two days doing nothing but watching Nash. Marking his shift changes, seeing how he conducted himself, who he talked to, who he watched, hell, I even counted how many times he scratched his nuts. But there was nothing there. He just stood behind the glass and watched us with dark eyes.
“Now, he wasn’t always behind the glass and that gave me a bit of hope. The bulls took various shifts, sometimes behind the glass, sometimes in the corridor outside the rec room, sometimes walking the block, and sometimes out in the yard.
“I watched him, I watched him, I watched him, and this cat Nash did not give me a goddamn inch. Believe that. I started thinking maybe he’s a robot, like some android out of a space movie. C-3PO or some shit. Cons would try to talk to him and he’d just ignore their shit and give ’em a stare that stopped ’em cold.
“I was five days into my seven and I hadn’t come up with jack squat. Not a plan, nothing. My mind was racing. Maybe I just make up a story and tell it to Archie, but what would that give me? Seemed like I might as well grab a shovel and start digging my own grave out in the yard. But damn if your mind don’t play tricks on you in the box when you start running out of options. And those words were hanging over me the whole time… ‘I believe in
