connection? But what difference did that make? His problem was what to do about it.
They weren’t going to send him the ten thousand now. No identification and no publicity for a month. That was the deal. A month without anything in the papers was going to be proof enough he hadn’t screwed it up. And now, what was it? Twenty-nine days? For a moment he allowed himself to think that they would agree that this was close enough. But that was bullshit thinking. All they needed to screw him was the slightest excuse. They looked down on him like trash. Like dirt. Just like Mama had always told Delmar and him.
He smelled the liver burning in the frying pan, moved it off the burner, and fanned away the smoke. Elkins had told him that Mama was right. He hadn’t remembered telling Elkins anything about Mama, certainly wouldn’t have normally, but Elkins said he talked about it when he was coming out from under the sodium pen-tothal—the stuff they’d given him when they fixed him up there at the prison infirmary. Right after the rape.
Elkins had been standing beside his bed when he came to, holding a pan in case he threw up the way people sometimes do when they come up from sodium pentothal. “I want you to listen now,” Elkins had told him in a whisper right by his face. “They’re going to be coming in here as soon as they know you can talk and asking you questions. They’re going to ask you which ones did you.” And he guessed he had mumbled something about getting the score evened with the sons of bitches because Elkins had put his hand over Fleck’s mouth—Fleck remembered that very clearly even now—and said: “Get even. But not now. You got to do it yourself. You tell the screws that you don’t know who did you. Tell ’em you didn’t get a look at anybody. They hit you from behind. If you want to stay alive in here, you don’t talk to the screws. You do your own business. Like your Mama told you.”
“Like your Mama told you!” So he must have been talking about Mama when he was still under the anesthesia. It was all still so very vivid.
He’d asked Elkins if they had really raped him the way he seemed to remember, and Elkins said they truly had.
“Then I got to kill ’em.”
“Yes,” Elkins said. “I think so. Unless you want to live like an animal.”
Elkins was a disbarred lawyer with some seniority in Joliet and he understood about such things. He was doing four to eight on an Illinois State felony count. Something to do with fixing up some witnesses, or maybe it was jurors, for somebody important in the Chicago rackets. Fleck understood that Elkins had kept his mouth shut and taken the fall for it, and that seemed to be the way it worked out. Because now Eddy Elkins was important again with some Chicago law firm, even if he couldn’t practice law himself.
For that matter, Elkins had been important even in the prison. He was just a trustee working as a male nurse and orderly in the prison hospital. But he had money. He had connections inside and out and everybody knew it. When Fleck came out of isolation, he found he had a job in the infirmary. Elkins had done that. And Elkins had helped him with the big problem—how to kill three hard cases. All bigger than him. All tougher. First he’d started him pumping iron. Fleck had been skinny then as well as small. But at nineteen you can develop fast if you have direction. And steroids. Elkins got him them, too. And then Elkins had showed him how a knife can make a small man equal to a big one if the small man is very, very fast and very cool and knows what to do with the blade. Fleck had always been fast—had to be fast to survive. Elkins used the life-size body chart in the infirmary office and the plastic skeleton to teach him where to put the shank.
“Always flat,” Elkins would say. “Remember that. What you’re after is behind the bones. Hitting the bones does you no good at all and the way past them is through the crevices.” Elkins was a tall, slender man, slightly stooped. He was a Dartmouth man, with his law degree from Harvard. He looked like a teacher and he liked to teach. In the empty, quiet infirmary he would stand there in front of the skeleton with Fleck sitting on the bed, and Elkins would tutor Fleck in the trade.
“If you have to go in from the front”—Elkins recommended against going in from the front—“you have to go between the ribs or right below the Adam’s apple. Quick thrust in, and then the wiggle.” Elkins demonstrated the little wiggle with his wrist. “That gets the artery, or the heart muscle, or the spinal column. A puncture is usually no damn good. Any other cut is slow and noisy. If you can go in from the back, it’s the same. Hold it flat. Hold it horizonal.”
Elkins would demonstrate on the plastic skeleton. “The very quickest is right there”—and he would point a slender, manicured finger—“above that first vertebra. You do it right and there’s not a motion. Not a sound. Very little bleeding. Instant death.”
When it was time for him to go into the yard again, he went with a slender, stiff little shank fashioned of surgical steel and as sharp as the scalpel it had once been. Elkins had given him that along with his final instructions.
“Remember the number for you is three. There are three of them. If you get caught with the first one you don’t do the last two. Remember that, and remember to hold it flat. What you’re after is behind the bone.”
He had been twenty when he did it. A long time ago. He had yearned to tell Mama about it. But it wasn’t the sort of thing you could say in a letter, with the screws reading your mail. And Mama hadn’t ever been able to get away to come on visiting days. He felt badly about that. It had been a hard life for her and not much he’d done had made it any easier.
The liver had that burned taste. And the hamburger buns were pretty much dried out. But he didn’t like liver anyway. He only bought it because it was about half the price of hamburger. And it satisfied what little appetite he had tonight. Then he put on his hat and his still-damp coat and went out to make his call to Elkins.
“There’s not a damn thing I can do for you,” Elkins said. “You know how we work. After twenty years you ought to know. We keep insulated. It’s got to be that way.”
“It’s been more than twenty years,” Fleck said. “Remember that first job?”
The first job had been while he was still in prison. Elkins was out, thanks to a lot of good time and an early parole. And the visitor had come to see him. As a matter of fact, it was the only visitor he’d ever had. A young lawyer. Elkins had sent him to give Fleck a name. It had been a short visit.
“Elkins just said to tell you to make it four instead of three. He wants you to make it Cassidy and Dalkin and Neal and David Petresky. He said you’d understand. And to tell you you’d be represented by a lawyer at the parole hearing and that he had regular work for you after that.” The lawyer was a plump, blond man with greenish-blue eyes. He was not much older than Fleck and he looked nervous—glancing around all the time to see if the screw was listening. “He said for me to bring back a yes or a no.”
Fleck had thought about it a minute—wondering who Petresky was and how to get to him. “Tell him yes,” he said.
And now Elkins remembered it.
