Y HEAD HURT. I came to, freezing and cramped, lying in darkness. There were muffled sounds, but all I could remember at all clearly was the weight of the gun being dropped in my lap and the freezing ice beneath me. The muzzle of the gun was hot. That was what woke me. Shoving upwards, I got the freezer lid open with difficulty, just in time to hear scuffling, hurried steps and to see a fleeing figure.
I had reached up in my stupor and been able to grab the punk’s wrist before he was gone. By sheer reflex I held on pretty hard and gave the wrist a good twisting wrench. It sounded, and felt, like it broke. If I didn’t break it in two, he was for sure going to be out of the Fuzboll games for a few days.
Clambering up in the freezer I was slow and clumsy. I looked at the gun. As I expected, it was my gun. A drill-bit bore of pain stabbed through my shoulders and all of my limbs and joints. They cracked with the cold. The lid of the freezer was stiff and heavy. I was even more stiff.
The clump of the punk’s feet wasn’t too hard to follow, but I struggled down the stairs in fitful, rolling staggers. Every step, I expected to pitch forward to roll and bounce headlong the rest of the way down the stone steps.
The punk ran downstairs and I heard him crash through a back door. Still groggy, I stumbled after him with the gun in my hand. How long I’d been lying unconscious in the freezer, I had no way to tell. Can’t have been too long, though. More than half an hour or so, I would have been too frozen and stiff. It would have taken me a long time to get up, get my limbs working. I wouldn’t have been able to get up and get out in time.
I stumbled onto the dark of the first floor and heard booted feet making a run for it out the back. Through the rear door I saw him disappear out into the yard.
Not a great start to my first evening as an unwanted bodyguard for a couple of mafia brats. And I had no clue what the punk had done after he knocked me out and slung me into the freezer. All I knew was, as I started to come to, the hazy recollection of the lid of the freezer lifting and a figure dropping the gun in on top of me.
Groggy as I was, I figured that the gun was more likely a plant than a gift from a mystery benefactor. His plan must have been to leave it with me in the freezer, and I guessed it was most likely to put me in the frame for whatever it was he’d just done with it.
My legs felt like they were broken and I was running through setting concrete. It seemed like a long time before I made it through the door after him. Right outside the door was where I stumbled into the long barrel of her gun.
Pointed right in my face. The woman I’d flung around a bed the night before. In the bed, up against the wall, in the shower. Oh, yeah, in the shower, too. She held the weapon in both hands with her head cocked to one side along the sight and her lovely eye boring hard into mine. She still looked fucking great.
I said, “I was going to call. You could have waited.”
“Drop the weapon. I thought you were more of a one-night-stand kind of a guy.”
“I was going to make an exception.”
She said, “While I think of it,”
“Yes?”
“Drop the weapon.”
“Can I just put it down?”
She cocked the hammer and I thought I’d take that as a ‘no.’ The gun I’d been holding fell on the stone floor with a clatter.
“I love the way you hold a gun. Great stance.”
She sighted along the barrel at me. “You want to watch how I handle the recoil when I discharge it?”
I’d been right. It must have been a custom long barrel. “This might not be the best time.”
“Hands behind your head.”
“No need to be so formal.”
With Special Agent Vesper Cross’ eyes on me, it felt like she looked all the way inside me, like she could see into my inner thoughts and secrets. Into that dark place I almost never went. I have secrets, of course I do. Too many. Most of them are things I want to keep locked away, things that I’ve seen that I don’t want to have to look at or think about ever again.
What showed in her eyes was that she didn’t judge. Not the person. She would judge a person’s actions and her judgement would be swift and decisive. Her judgement of what a person chose to do would shake a prophet of the Old Testament, but only their actions and choices. Never the person. Only the deed, never the man.
With a gun she was like a Zen archer. She would feel the target with her heart, reach along the line of sight. Wait for the heartbeat on the arc of the breath. My weapons training was deep enough that I could see she was beyond a natural. She was a gifted weapons handler.
If she fired on me from fourteen inches away there wasn’t too much chance she would miss, but still she sighted right along the barrel. Flexing her fingers on the grip and taking no chances with her aim. There would be no warning shot, and when she pulls back on that trigger, the lights are going out.
How did I know all that? At the time I didn’t. But I had a very long time to think over those few moments, and you can get a lot from time spent looking at details.
Her voice was soft. Silky and sexy, exactly as I remembered it.
“Put your hands on the back of your head please, Horse.”
There was a question in her eyes, I saw it. I was wondering something, too, and it was probably the same thing. Could it really be a coincidence, her being here? Had chance brought us together that one night, or was that only the way that it seemed as we rumbled around and over the mess that we made of her bed. I thought about how she’d felt. How she’d made me feel.
Red and blue lights flashed on the wall behind me. The sirens of the black and whites pulled up outside. Doors slammed and footsteps clomped through the house as I stood with my back to her.
“Out here!” she shouted. I chewed my lip.
Adrianu and Custanzu Bonaventura were both in the house with bullets in their skulls. Two each.
It came to a plea and I took the DA’s bargain. There was no way for me to get away from it. My arrest was made at the scene of a double homicide and I was found with the murder weapon in my possession. Paulo, Georgio and Armando had melted away like a mist. Nobody with any connection to the family would admit to ever knowing anything about them. Or me.
Not so surprising, I guess, but it left me out on the ledge, and left the D.A. with a slam dunk.
There had been a theft as well as the killings, and that supplied a motive so, boom, the prosecutor had a full house. Nobody attempted to show that I actually had any of what was said to have been missing, but the case looked so good to everyone that even my attorney looked at me pityingly when I raised it with him.
Somehow the gun barrel got lost between the ballistics test and the evidence locker, and that was my break. If it hadn’t been for the fucked up forensics, I would have been looking at murder in the first, times two.
So, a holiday in the big house and I was next in line for a whole world of new culinary experiences. Omelettes boiled in a bag. Dope fiend sandwich, made out of two Grandma’s brand peanut butter cookies with a Snickers smashed in between. So called because all the dope heads needed fast fixes of sugar and protein when they were new arrivals. Pizza was made in the cell with a Top Ramen crust, tomato sauce and slices of pepperoni sausage or summer sausage. It’s not delivery, It’s de jailhouse.
Connections are everything in the joint and I got along okay. The University of Crime offered many opportunities for profit, inside and in preparation for release. The gangs, like most things in prison, split down racial and tribal lines. The stereotypes were so loud and overblown it was like living in a cartoon. The blacks, Puerto Ricans, Columbians, Mexicans and Italians all had their big, swaggering, dead-eyed crews of muscle , clustered like a donut around their bossmen.
The boss' cells were like tiny replicas of high-end hotel rooms, made from pieces, like a collage. As an outsider I was able to get along with all of the gangs. Just to look at me, I was obviously not one of them so I didn’t represent competition to any of the members. All except the Italians. There was no friction, but I couldn’t ever get closer than conversations with members on the fringes. The ‘made guys’ would hardly even talk to me.
“Nothing personal,” they said. Enzo Cuzamano was the biggest mob guy in there. He wasn’t ever getting out. He made a point to come over to where I was sitting at dinnertime one evening in my first week. He put his tray down next to mine and leaned on the table. He looked around the room to make sure everybody there was carefully and respectfully not watching him before leaning close to my ear.
He said, “Nothing personal.” And he looked in my eye. Then he picked up his tray and went to join his gang.
It was like a stamp of respect, but at the same time the message was clear. As far as the Italians were concerned, I was an outcast. Nobody from that section would have anything to do with me.
Time and time again throughout those five years Vesper requested visits, but I couldn’t say or do any of what I wanted, any of what I needed to do with her. Not in a supervised visitation. Cameras, guards watching. Bright lights.
It seemed Vesper didn’t have or couldn’t make up a compelling enough legal reason to see me, or she would just have demanded an official visit from the prison governor. Wouldn’t have mattered then whether I wanted to see her or not. And I did, I really did. All the time I was inside, I wanted nothing more than to be alone in a room with Vesper Cross. But not the room that would be available in the prison.
And I had no legitimate reason to see her. Not until I got out. Then I would definitely be looking to meet up. And there would be nothing legitimate about it.