Джо Горес: Come Morning

Art was abruptly loud and blustery, as he always was when he didn’t quite know what to say or do.

“Don’t get the idea that you aren’t welcome when you get out. I mean it, now. I’m not pushing a rig any more, I’ve got a desk job at the union...” He slapped the roll of belly over his trousers top. “You’re looking in great shape, but I’m just getting hog fat.” He stood up abruptly. “I’ve got the old homestead and an apartment downtown Portland, lots of room, you need money, a ticket, anything, you just call...”

Runyan went back for his strip search. His mother was dead and his sister didn’t want to see him and Art’s offer, while genuine enough, was more family than feeling. They’d never been close, Art was a talker and Runyan was a doer. Art had the strength and the size, but not the craziness.

Art hadn’t ended up in the joint, either. And San Quentin’s endless hours of empty routine, strictly observed, had leached away most of Runyan’s craziness, too. Now all he wanted was OUT. And once he knew nothing was coming at him outside, he’d deal the diamonds away to Moyers and walk free.

In his dream, Runyan was always dressed in black, watching the second hand of his watch climb to 12. At two a.m. precisely, he thumbed the brass latch of the loading door and pushed. No alarms went off. He slipped through, letting it ease shut behind him with a scarcely audible click.

Jamie Cardwell was already taking his key out of the alarm reset beside the door as Runyan came through; he was Runyan’s age, 30, but bulkier and slower in his guard’s uniform with the Sam Browne belt and holster. Runyan grinned silently at him; a line of sweat stood on Jamie’s full upper lip. Runyan started up the fire stairs as Cardwell continued down the hall only 18 seconds behind his ideal patrol schedule.

Runyan eased open the heavy metal fire door on Seven and gave a quick look up and down the deserted corridor. Five minutes before the other guard’s round. The key Cardwell had given him unlocked the opaque glass door of Suite 729. Thick wires were criss-crossed in glass which bore the legend:

Inside, he leaned against the door for a moment, having trouble breathing, with a heightened pulse and difficulty swallowing. He’d never worked with an inside man before; the adrenaline was really pumping.

Light from the street showed a lapidarian litter: hot box, small gemstone cleaner, polishing and grinding wheels, an oxyacetylene torch. Across the room, the squat old-fashioned floor safe behind the heavy wooden desk which must have last seen varnish in the ’thirties.

Just over three minutes left. Runyan began jerking out desk drawers and dumping them on the floor. The last one he carried empty to the window, where he used street light to letter R12-L10-R21-L6-R13 on the back with a felt-tipped marking pen. He dropped this drawer also, then waited. Right on time the uniformed shadow loomed up against the glass, the knob rattled, then the shadow and footsteps moved on.

He switched on the desk lamp, directed its light at the dial of the safe, then worked the same combination he had written on the back of the drawer. He jerked the handle to one side and swung back the ponderous door. After wiping sweat from his forehead with the tennis band on his wrist, he removed the velvet-lined trays. Those with unset gemstones he emptied into a black velvet bag taken from his pocket; the others he dumped on the floor.

The slim attaché case beside the desk was a better way than his pocket to carry a couple of mil in uncut stones, so he put the velvet bag into it, left the light on and the safe gaping. Out in the hall, he took a short steel prybar out from under his sweater and jimmied open the door with it, leaving white splinters of wood around the jamb. He tossed in the prybar and left.

In the basement he crossed to the loading door, making an OK circle of thumb and forefinger to Jamie, grinning like an idiot. Despite his doubts it had gone like glass; he’d been inside just 17 minutes...

It was at this point that Runyan always realized he was having a nightmare. Because Jamie’s hand was coming up, not with the key to switch off the alarm, but with the snub-nose .38 from his already unflapped holster. There was terror in Jamie’s face but murder in his hand.

Runyan, by reflex, was already swinging the attaché case, already slamming his body up against the loading door release bar. The case knocked the gun aside for the first shot; as he went through the door, the alarm started clanging and Cardwell put the second round in his back.

Runyan yelled and arched away from the tremendous thudding blow of the slug, shredding a knee painfully on the cinderblock wall of his cell. Old-timers said a horny con could circumcise himself just by rolling over in his sleep.

He lay in the bunk for a few moments, panting, then swung his feet to the concrete floor, staggered to the sink, and splashed icy water on his face in the dark. His cell was one of the relatively few singles left in Q.

The eight-year-old memory had started recurring as a nightmare when his release date had been fixed. Had some inner mechanism suspended at 15-to-life begun operating again when he made parole? The organism preparing for change, getting ready for life on the outside? Ever since he’d been short, he’d had the feeling that somebody or something was out to get him, him personally, just because he was short. Not other prisoners: the system, the bureaucratic process, the impersonal finger.

Short? Christ, today was the day. Today . This day, this morning! He rested a forearm against the bars, pressed his forehead against it; corridor light laid vertical strips of shadow down his naked muscular body. His face felt as clenched as his fist. Today .

After nearly a minute, Runyan turned and in the dim light stared around the tiny stripped cell to which he had given seven years of his life. What did he really want, outside?

Was just to be outside enough?

No. He had to make sure he never came back here again, no matter what or who was waiting for him out there.

Louise Graham examined her carefully wrought image in the motel room mirror. Recalling the Oscar Wilde character with the epigraph, she had a long 29, Louise shoved an impatient hand into her cold cream and smeared it all over her face to wipe out 20 minutes of makeup. Men were always telling her she was beautiful, but now, at 29, she couldn’t see it.

The narrow oval face had too strong a chin and faint permanent laugh lines at the corners of a mouth a shade too generous. Straight narrow nose, but too much flare at the nostrils. Good brow, though, and if she did say so herself, great eyes. A sensual face: She’d always known she looked like a great lay, but beautiful, no. Sophia Loren, that was beautiful. At 90 that woman would be beautiful.

Louise impatiently jerked back her shoulder-length black hair, tightly, severely, and flicked around two turns of elastic to keep it that way. There. Better. Add a pink man-tailored blouse and grey two-piece suit with grey pumps, big round sunglasses to mask the stunning almond-shaped emerald eyes, and she was ready. Repressed sexuality, all the fires banked, all the appetites controlled, that was the look for a surly, dangerous, angry man who hadn’t touched a woman in eight years.

Nor answered her letter, nor come to the visiting room on the day she’d suggested. She checked her watch. No other chance to catch him so vulnerable as today, when he emerged from San Quentin like butterfly from chrysalis, tender and fluttery and unprepared for the world into which he was being reborn.