Otto Penzler - Murder At the Foul Line

The fans throw themselves under the broken benches, yelling, “Gun! Gun! Gun!”

The ref sinks into the body of the drunk again. Shorty’s friends the All-Stars-Shaq and Webber and Houston and Pippen-scatter with Junior, Lester, Enrique, and Shawn. And Madison Square Garden goes dark as a busted TV as the big Navigator turns into a rusty yellow deuce-and-a-quarter Buick filled with the gangstas who killed his father.

“Run, Shorty, run.”

“Mama!”

When at last Shorty runs he runs toward his mother. He hears the Tec-9 going buyaka-buyaka .

Just like when they capped Daddy. The bullets hit like punches, knock his eighty pounds through the air, smash the air out of his chest. The asphalt’s jumping at his face.

But suddenly the fans are going crazy, screaming, lifting him with their cheers. He’s flying, rising over the court, over the garden, searching for that open place.

Something happening behind the chain-link fence. Frantic, desperate motion. Then the boo-yaa, boo-yaa thunder of the twelve-gauge Mossberg pump. Then cops all over, running, shooting.

The boys in blue too late for you.

Too late for us.

But his mother is rising, too. She’s coming with him. The court’s wide open. He sees his shot.

Gimme the rock .

Shaq to Magic to Michael Jordan.

To Shorty.

Jumper.

In!

The way it goes down, I’m more than ready. The moron’s been riding me since the first minute of the first quarter. He does not shut up, not for a minute. You got nothin’, you white bread bitch. You can’t handle my shit. You slow. You old. You ain’t now and you never was .

And me, Bubba Yablonsky, I’m trying to keep the game close because at the end, when we make our move, I want everybody worked up. So I’m letting the moron go by me and I’m missing my shots and this inspires him to even greater rhetorical flights. Where’s yo game, white bread? You leave it with yo mama? Ah think she done stuck it down her panties. ’At’s ’cause it stinks .

I put up with it because I’m basically a goal-oriented guy and because I’ve learned to control my anger.

We’re well into the fourth quarter, the game tied at 38, when their point guard takes a jump shot that comes off the far side of the rim. I box out the moron, who compensates by twisting his knuckles against my spine, then go up for the rebound. The ball drops into my hands, but I don’t catch it. I tip it, instead, toward the sideline.

Spooky Jones, our small forward, is closest to the ball and he fears after it, leaping over the sideline and into the third row of benches. While he’s in the air, I slam my elbow into the moron’s chest, then scrape the heel of my Nikes against his shin. As expected, the moron begins to throw punches, and a moment later both benches empty. Now all eyes are on the combatants, all eyes except those of Road Miller’s wife, Louise. Her eyes are on her work as she yanks at the waist of Spooky’s shorts and jams a small package down into his crotch. The package is bound with double sided tape and molds so nicely to Spooky’s abdomen that when he finally pulls himself up and dashes off to the locker room, nobody notices a thing.

I don’t see the rest of it, of course, because the moron has me by the throat and one of the screws is pounding on my back like I’m the one who won’t let go. But the plan is for Spooky to dump the package beneath a pile of dirty towels in the hamper, then come back on the court. Later, Freddie Morrow will push the hamper to the prison laundry, remove the package, and bring it to yours truly.

It’s an eminently workable prison hustle, brilliantly conceived and elaborately planned. The package contains two ounces of powder cocaine which sells on the inside for two hundred dollars a gram. As there are twenty-eight grams in an ounce and the two ounces are costing me and my partners twelve hundred dollars… well, the math speaks for itself.

I let myself be pulled away from the moron and back to the sidelines where my teammates are already gathered. Spooky Jones isn’t there. That’s because he’s lying in a shower stall, his throat slashed and the product vanished. He’s still bleeding when we find him, his heart still fluttering. His breath whistles through the hole in his throat while a deputy warden screams into the phone for a doctor; his eyes remain open and imploring until the doctor rushes into the locker room. Then Spooky’s breathing stops, for good and forever.

I can’t help it. I’m a criminal. I don’t mourn Spooky. Yeah, he was a good guy and we’d split many a joint during our stay at the Menands Correctional Facility, a minimum security joint with a spectacular view of the Hudson River. But if there’s anything a thief can’t stand, it’s being ripped off. Somebody took my coke and I want it back. As for Spooky Jones, he’s past caring.

Deputy Warden Ezekiel Buchanan rakes me over the coals. Him and Coach Poole, who’s also, technically, a deputy warden.

“You started the fight,” Buchanan tells me. He has a thin face and a long nose and unnaturally red lips. “Can we agree on that?”

I’m thinking, If I was still in Attica, the screws would be working me over with ax handles . I’m thinking, That’s exactly where you’re going, dickhead, back to Attica, where your life is on the line every minute of every day. Say good-bye to paradise .

“Coach,” I finally respond, “I didn’t have anything to do with… with what happened to Spooky. I was on the floor every minute, which you know because you were there. For me, that’s an alibi.”

Coach Poole doesn’t respond. He looks devastated, like a jilted lover. His ebony skin has a grayish cast and his small chocolate eyes are shot through with jagged red veins.

“You wanna answer me, Bubba? Answer the question I asked you?” Buchanan’s a patient guy, a twenty-year man who’s worked a dozen institutions, and he also thinks he’s been betrayed. That’s because he personally recruited the Menands’ basketball team from some of the worst prisons in the system, choosing very carefully from the pool of eligible talent. In the process, he’d put his reputation on the line.

“The only point I wanna make,” I say, “is that the entire team was on the court when this went down. I don’t see how you can blame us.”

“I asked you if you started the fight.”

“It was the moron threw the first punch.”

“After you elbowed him.”

“This is prison basketball, Deputy, which, as you know, is characterized by aggressive defense. You want us to play nice, you tell the officials to start callin’ fouls. They’re your officials, right?” Again, I’m thinking, If you talked like that to a deputy warden in Attica, they’d find pieces of your body in Montreal .

Now I’ve got two goals. I want my coke back and I want to finish my bit at Menands, where life is easy, where the food is edible, where there are no rats, where the screws don’t begin every conversation with Hey, you piece of shit .

“Jones flies into the cheap seats. You start a fight. Jones disappears into the locker room, where he gets killed. Am I supposed to believe this is all coincidental?”

“I didn’t start the fight, Deputy. And I didn’t see when Spooky took off for the locker room. But anybody in the stands could’ve followed him and nobody would’ve noticed.”

We go around and around for another hour. I’m polite and respectful, but I stick to my guns. Fights, I insist, are common under the best of circumstances and this was the New York Prison League’s championship game. High feelings were to be expected and the refs were allowing us to play. Thus, when the very predictable confrontation finally went down, person or persons unknown had taken advantage of the resulting chaos.