Rhozier Brown - DC Noir 2 - The Classics

“I heard this shit already,” said Jackster.

“And I choose her, tells the man nine, pay him, go to the room and skin down — and who strolls in but the skaggiest bowser in the line who’s so untogether, she’s number six but her number’s on upside down!”

“Hard luck,” said Lucus, rolling out Sam’s punch line.

“Yeah,” spit out Jackster, “like when old H.L.S. here, him already a two-time fall man, cases his apartment rip so bad that the lady done showed up coming home—”

“She got sick at work.” Sam’s tone was flat. Hard. “She wasn’t supposed to.”

If Jackster knew what he was hearing, he didn’t show it.

“Yeah,” he said, “hard luck that lamp you whomped her upside the head with—”

“She wasn’t supposed to be screaming, getting in the way of me getting gone.”

“And hard luck when you dropped out her window and the alley dumpster lid caved in on you, and hard luck it was empty so’s you hit steel bottom and busted your foot instead of bouncing off a pile of dirty Pampers, and—”

“You talking about my crime.”

Even Darnell heard the sound of gravestone from the man on the bottom bunk.

Can’t let this shit roll down today, thought Lucus; said: “Enough hard luck out there to fill our happy home.” Zero the score so H.L.S. won’t need to. “Kind of like when somebody sells three bags of rock to a roller wearing a beard over his badge, deal going down just in time to catch the new mandatory-sentencing guidelines.”

Darnell’s eyes risked flicking from the lower bunk to Lucus.

Lucus smiled: “Some guys just ain’t cut out for the spy game.”

“I don’t play no games,” said Darnell. But his edge was jagged, backing away.

The air inside the room eased out the open cell door, whirled into the cacophony of shouts and radios and sweat in the cellblock.

“The point of the story,” said Sam, his words round and smooth again, “is numbers. Some people get their number wrong, and look what hard luck that brings.”

“I got my number,” mumbled Darnell, “don’t worry about it.”

“I won’t,” said H.L.S. “I be glad for you.”

“What about you, Lucus?” said Darnell.

“What about me what? ”

“You gotta be working on your number,” said Darnell. He met Lucus eye for eye. “Like you said, we live together, no choice. That means your number’s chained to mine.”

“I know about chains,” said Lucus.

“Me too,” said Jackster. “And us being linked, it’s righteous I should get to know what’s what and figure my score around your play.” He shrugged. “Ain’t saying I’ll throw with you, but I gots to do the stand-up thing by the guys I’m bunking with.”

Chaos and chatter from the tier filled their cell.

“Time for me to hit the shower.” Lucus snagged his towel, stepped past Darnell. “You boys play nice while I’m gone.” Then Lucus was on the walkway, strolling down the tier, his towel looped in his left hand. Inside his sleeve rode the shiv.

Split the walkway toward the right, stay closer to the rail than the cells. Not so close it’s an easy bull-charge to push you over, but better than walking next to the bars where you’re an easy pull into a cell for a pile-on of badasses and blades. Ripping it up on the walkway meant that the tussle might get seen by the tier monitor in the tower. He could punch the horn, maybe get nightsticks there while you still had some pieces left. In the cells, you’d fall into a setup so savage it’d be history before anyone got there, even if the monitor saw you snatched.

Usually when Lucus walked the tiers, dudes sang out to him, gave him a nod, or even strolled up to jazz. That morning, the guys hanging outside the open cells and doing their busies inside sent him no words. Guys in his path rolled away.

“Hey, sir,” Lucus said to the guard behind the desk at the cage entrance to the shower rooms, “okay if I catch a shower so’s I won’t stink up the boss’s office today?”

Security plans for the Central Facility called for two corrections officers to be on front desk duty at the cleansing unit’s entrance, and for one officer to be stationed “in visual range” of the showers in each of the five locker rooms. The building’s architect had taken the “custody and care” charge of incarceration laws seriously. Under the latest budget plan, however, there was only enough manpower for one front desk officer.

That pockmarked guard had seven years left to his pension. Whenever he found a dollar bill on a walkway, he failed to smell fermenting homebrew. The guard skimmed the clipboard of demerit denials and didn’t find Lucus’s name or designation. “Number two and four are busted out,” he said.

“Believe I’ll try three,” replied Lucus, signing his name and number on the second line of the log book.

The guard frowned, spun the log book around, and double-checked the scrawl on the line above Lucus’s name.

“I thought you could read, boy.”

Keep it level — hell, slam it straight back at the fat son of a bitch: “Do my numbers too.”

“You know who’s in there?”

“I don’t care.”

Flat out, the power mantra.

The guard shook his head, scrawled his initials in the column. Said: “Never figured you for that scene, Lucus.”

Like all its counterparts, Unit 3’s locker room had no lockers. Wooden benches were bolted to the floor. A set of prison-orange clothes and a DayGlo undershirt were neatly stacked up in the empty dressing room when Lucus walked in. From inside the tiled shower area came the sound of rushing water and billowing steam.

Lucus stripped to his skin, stacked his clothes by the wall opposite the other pile. A scar snaked around his left ribs where he’d been too slow seven years before. He held the shiv along his forearm, his other hand fanned a path through the warm fog.

There, against the far wall, under the last of all twenty spraying shower spigots, shoulder-length permed tresses protected by a flowered shower cap, saying: “And lo, it is the man himself.”

“Who you expecting, Barry?” Lucus walked through the lead-heavy rain.

Barry was six feet three inches of rippling muscles. Long, sinewy legs that let him fly across the stage of the city ballet or lightspeed kick the teeth out of dudes inside who were dumb enough to think his style equaled weakness. The shower steam made the mascara over Barry’s right eye trickle down his cheek like a midnight tear.

“Expecting?” Barry turned his bare shoulder toward Lucus, flashed his floodlight smile, and swung his arms out from his sides, up above his head, hands meeting in a point as he stretched to his tiptoes, eyes closed in ecstasy. He held position for a full count, then fluttered his arms down, cupped his hands shyly above his groin, and lowered his chin, eyes closed: a sleeping angel scarred by the midnight tear.

One heartbeat.

Barry’s eyes popped open and he beat his lashes toward the man with the shiv.

“Why, I’ve been waiting for only you.” Barry cocked poses with each beat as he sang: “Just you , indeed, it’s you , only you , yes it’s true …” Whirling around, dancing, singing: “No-body bu-ah-ut—” Cobra coiled, shrinking back on one cocked leg, both pointing fingers aimed right at Lucus’s heart: “ Yooou! ”

“Good thing you came,” said Lucus.

“What else is a girl supposed to do?” Barry leered. “My pleasure.”

“No, man,” said Lucus, “my payoff.”

“Oh my, yes,” replied Barry, washing. “Lucus to Mouser to Dancer — why, you’d think we’re playing baseball! ”