James Swain - The Program

“Tell me. Please,” he begged.

“Jenkins is reviewing what happened,” Mickey said. “Every guard who’s involved will either get fined, or fired, or both. The inmates who were involved will lose their privileges and it will go in their files. Everybody’s fucked because of you.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to screw up.”

“You’re sorry? Jenkins said you were talking to some whack-job in Fort Lauderdale who’s killing teenagers. You didn’t tell us you were a child killer, little man.”

Crutch felt Mickey’s hands gripping the sides of his arms. The guard pulled him to his feet and shook him. His round, pimply face was right there in front of him.

Kill him! the voice inside Crutch’s head screamed.

“Jenkins also said you were the sickest puppy he’s ever come across,” Mickey said. “That says a lot, coming from him.”

The inmates had started to file out of the cellblock. Mickey spun Crutch around and pushed him out of the cell. Crutch tried to put on the brakes. He needed to stay here, and think things out. Too much was happening at once for him to deal with.

“Come on,” the guard said.

“I don’t want to go into the yard,” Crutch said.

“You don’t have a choice, little man.”

Mickey continued to push him out of the building until they were standing in the blinding sunlight of the grassy yard, surrounded by hundreds of other inmates whose eyes seemed to catch on Crutch’s face and tear at the skin.

“Have a nice day,” Mickey said, walking away.

Crutch stood frozen to the ground. He thought about the metal shiv hidden in the hollow leg of his bed. He knew that many inmates carried their shivs for protection when they were in the yard. He had never felt the need to carry a weapon, convinced he could talk his way out of any tight situation.

Until now.

He couldn’t talk his way out of the web of lies he’d spun. They’d started the day he’d entered Starke, and had continued until a few short minutes ago, the facade of him being a soft-spoken Milquetoast easy for the other inmates to digest. But now the other inmates had been given a taste of the real him, and that was unacceptable even to their lowly standards. It was only a matter of time before they retaliated.

He was going to die.

The other inmates would gang up, and figure out the best way to kill him. They’d recruit another inmate who had nothing to lose, and give him the job. It would be like a badge of honor.

He scurried around the yard, looking for a place to hide. He tried to join several groups of inmates standing in tight circles, but was rebuffed each time.

“Get the hell away from us,” an inmate swore.

“Yeah – fuck off,” another warned.

He came to the basketball courts. A pick-up game was going on between a team of black inmates, and a team of white inmates. The white team couldn’t play worth a damn, but that didn’t stop them from throwing elbows and putting up a fight.

A crowd of white inmates stood beside the court, shouting encouragement to the white players. They were muscle heads, and spent their free time in the weight room, pumping iron. Crutch stood behind their broad bodies, and pretended to watch the game. For a few minutes, everything was good. Then, one of the white inmates spotted him.

“Look who’s here,” the inmate said.

The inmate was a bank robber out of Pensacola named Justin Hainz. Hainz had a nasty side that even the black inmates respected. Hainz grabbed Crutch, and put him in a headlock.

“Cut it out,” Crutch said.

“You’ve been a bad boy,” Hainz said.

“Haven’t we all?”

“Ha, ha.”

“Come on, let me go.”

“Hey guys, look who came for a visit,” Hainz said to the others.

The others formed a tight circle around the two, no longer interested in the violence taking place around the hoops. Crutch struggled to free himself.

“Let me go!”

Hainz threw him to the ground. Crutch landed on his back, and spent a moment trying to regain his senses. He looked up into a sea of hatred.

“Who wants him first?” Hainz asked the group.

“I do.” One of the blacks penetrated the group, and pointed at him. “Motherfucker ruined my business. Without my cell phone, I can’t talk to my runners no more.”

It was his neighbor, Leon.

“Come on, Leon, I didn’t mean to screw you up,” Crutch said.

“Doesn’t matter what you meant,” Leon said.

Leon raised his leg. Once Leon started kicking him, the others would join in. This happened often in the yard, the inmates pent-up rage turning into a feeding frenzy of violence. They would kick in his teeth and break his ribs and puncture his stomach and he’d go to the infirmary and never be the same. He wouldn’t die, but he’d wished he had.

Kill him , the voice inside his head said.

Crutch hesitated. So many times during his prison stay, the voice inside his head had told him to kill another inmate, or a guard. Just as many times, he’d refused to listen. It had been hard, but he had no other choice.

But the game had changed. Now, it was about survival. Killing so that he might continue to live.

Do it, the voice said.

Crutch sprang to his feet and threw himself onto Leon, wrapping his arms and legs around the black inmate’s body. He did hundreds of push-ups every day in his cell, and was stronger than people thought.

Leon tried to shake him off. When that didn’t work, he brought a fist up, and clocked Crutch in the back of the head.

“Let go, motherfucker,” Leon said.

The other inmates were slapping their sides with laughter. They did not see the threat, just as Leon did not see the threat.

Bite him, the voice commanded.

Crutch sunk his teeth into Leon’s neck and tore away at the flesh until he’d found the jugular vein. Warm blood splashed onto Crutch’s face and streamed down his neck. He brought his face away, and watched the blood geyser out of Leon’s body.

Leon screamed and did a pirouette with Crutch still hanging on. Then he fell backwards, his body making a terrific Whumph! as it landed on the grass. The other inmates stepped back, their laughter gone.

Crutch stayed on top of Leon, and drank his blood. He knew the perils of this, the inmates rife with AIDs and other fatally transmitted diseases, but he did not care. He had missed the erotic ecstasy of tasting a person’s blood as the life seeped from their body. It was like dying and going to heaven.

It was love.

Finally the guards pulled him off Leon’s lifeless body, and hauled him away.

“I think we’re going about this wrong,” DuCharme said.

Food was fuel during an investigation. They were eating chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant called Pepe’s in North Miami. Vick had not spoken ten words to the detective since he’d weaseled his way into her apartment a few hours ago. She still wanted to rip his head off for what he’d done to her.

“How so?” she replied, upping the word count.

“Son of Sam’s crimes are somehow similar to Mr. Clean’s crimes, right?”

Vick wiped her chin with a paper napkin and nodded.

“If we can figure out the similarity, it will lead us to figuring out what Mr. Clean does for a living, right?”

DuCharme’s tone was nothing but condescending. Like the investigation was his, and she was just palling along for the ride.

“Get to the point,” she said.

“We’ve just wasted two hours reading up on Son of Sam, and haven’t found the similarity. Maybe we should be reexamining the files on Mr. Clean instead. You never know – something might jump out at us.”

Vick stopped eating. DuCharme was as thick as a brick when it came to police work, yet this was a good idea. Even blind pigs got acorns, she supposed.