Stuart Woods: Heat

“Tennessee was my guess,” Bottoms said.

“Yeah, even folks a little farther south in Georgia think my accent’s kind of crazy.”

“A real hillbilly.”

“The real thing.” Jesse was a preacher’s son and he had three years of college and two of law school, but his childhood country accent had never changed a whit.

“I hear you’re heat,” Bottoms said.

Now they were on dangerous ground. “Used to be.”

“Why ain’t you still?”

Jesse thought about it for a moment. Hell, why not? “They found half a million dollars and my dead partner in the trunk of my car.”

“You did all that?”

“I couldn’t convince them I didn’t.”

“Come on, boy, I want to know what you did.”

“I’m not making any jailhouse confessions; they have a way of turning up later on.”

“You think I’d testify in court against another con?”

“Maybe against a con who used to be heat.”

Bottoms shook his head. “You got a bad opinion of me.”

“Not at all,” Jesse said. “I just try to run a tight mouth.”

“So you’re doin’ two big ones, back to back, huh?”

“That’s what the judge said.”

“How many fights you been in since you got here?”

“A hell of a lot more than I was looking for.”

“Yeah, I guess cons just naturally don’t like heat,” Bottoms said. “You’re one tough son of a bitch, though; I’ll give you that. You took on some of the hardest guys in this joint, and you’re still alive. Don’t appear to be punchdrunk, either.”

Jesse wondered how long it would be before he was.

“Word in the block is, it’s not gonna change,” Bottoms said. “Every time you get out of solitary somebody’s gonna take you on.” He grinned. “There’s a long line.”

Jesse shrugged. “Nothing I can do about that.”

“Sure there is,” Bottoms said. “What you need is some friends in this joint.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. If you’re a nigger in the joint, you join up with the niggers; if you’re a spic, you join up with the spics. But you’re a white man, so you oughta join up with white men. That’s us.”

“It’s real nice of you to think of me, but I don’t buy your rules,” Jesse said. “Thanks, anyway.”

“Just what is it you don’t buy?” Bottoms asked.

“I don’t hate anybody.”

“Shit, man, you gotta hate somebody just to live, so we picked niggers and Jews. What’s the big deal?”

“Every time I ever hated anybody, even for a little while, it did more damage to me than him. Besides, I know some real good black people and some real good Jews. In fact, in both cases, I’ve known a lot more good ones than bad ones. Trouble with you people is, you’ve got to hate somebody else so you can feel worthwhile. That’s what I don’t buy.”

“Look, Warden,” Bottoms said, and he sounded exasperated, “you got a lot of time to pull in this joint, and every time you walk out in the yard, somebody’s gonna try and beat the shit out of you, because you used to be heat. Now so far, nobody’s been able to do it, but I’ll tell you something, my friend, you’re not looking so good.”

“Well,” Jesse said, “I’ve got thirty days of solitary to rest up.”

Bottoms stood up, and his full stature was awe-inspiring. “You’re gonna need your rest, buddy, because if I don’t hear by the time your solitary hitch is up that you’re ready to join up with us, then the next guy you meet in the yard is gonna be me.” Bottoms looked him up and down. “What’re you, six-three, two-twenty?”

“That’s close enough, I guess. It’s been a while since I got measured and weighed.”

“Most places, that’s big. Not in here.” Bottoms rapped on the steel door. “You better be in touch, you hear?” The door opened, and Bottoms strode out of the cell, then the door slammed shut again.

Jesse sank onto the bunk and stretched out his aching limbs. The guy he had just fought had kicked him, hard, in the thigh, and it hurt worse than his cut eye. He had another thirty days to do in this cell, and he was looking forward to the rest. Still, with no radio or TV and no reading matter it would be hard. Once again, he was alone with himself, and the company was lousy.

Whenever Jesse closed his eyes the same picture came back to him: it was the best year of their marriage; Beth was healthy after losing a breast to cancer five years before; Carrie, named after his mother, was nearly four, smart and pretty; they had the little house in Coral Gables, and he was moving up in the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Jesse had never thought of being a cop; he’d had his life all planned. It was college, law school, a few years in an Atlanta firm, then back to north Georgia to set up a practice. Then Beth got pregnant and sick at the same time. Jesse’s parents were dead, and Beth’s weren’t rich; she had to quit her job, and the part-time work he had in the admissions office wasn’t enough to support them. There was nothing to do but leave law school and look for a job.

The DEA was recruiting on campus, and they made working for the government look attractive and secure. Beth recovered, the baby was born healthy and things started looking up.

That year was the best — not just because they were comfortable and happy, but because the future looked so bright. Jesse had enrolled, part-time, in law school, and once the degree was his, he could rise to new heights in the Justice Department. His assignment to the South Florida Task Force had been a plum; it was where the action was, where promotions happened and careers were made. He was twenty-eight, smart, hard-working, making big busts on a regular basis, and his superiors, once they got past his hillbilly drawl, thought of him as a comer. Then Beth had gotten sick again.

Her first illness had been covered by her parents’ medical insurance, but when they got married, that lapsed. Then, when he had joined the DEA, her cancer was excluded from his insurance as a preexisting condition. Suddenly, all the money was going to doctors, medical laboratories and hospitals. Beth took fourteen months to die, and meanwhile Jesse was left thoroughly in hock, with nearly $400,000 in outstanding medical bills. That was when he had started to think about the cash in the evidence locker.

He was startled by the opening of his cell door; he hadn’t expected it to open for another thirty days.

“Jesse, you got a visitor,” the guard said.

Jesse sat up and blinked in the bright light. A prisoner in solitary wasn’t allowed visitors, and since his lawyer had died a couple of months back, there was nobody left to visit him. He got up and followed the guard.

He was led upstairs, in the direction of the warden’s office, and shown into a small conference room. A man who had been sitting at the table stood up. A cardboard box was in front of him on the table.

“Hello, Jess,” Fuller said. “You look awful.”

Jesse blinked at this apparition. “Hello, Kip,” was all he could think to say. Kip Fuller had been with the South Florida Task Force for less than a year when Jesse had been arrested. The young officer and his new wife had been out to the house a couple of times for barbecues, and Jesse had liked them. When Jesse had been arrested, Kip had been sympathetic, had brought him things in jail, had tried to help inside the agency. “Seems like a long time,” Jesse said.

“It does, doesn’t it?”

Fuller reached into the cardboard box and took out a set of chain restraints, then shoved the box down the table toward Jesse. “Your clothes are in there,” he said. “Get dressed; you and I are going to take a helicopter ride.”

Jesse had trouble climbing the stairs to the roof, because of the chains. Fuller helped him.