Warren Murphy: Death Sentence

"You sure you done time before, Jim?" Popcorn's voice was wary again. "You don't seem to be acclimatizin' none too good. Hate to think you was a fish. 'Cause if you was a fish, that'd mean you was a rat. Though what the Man would be doing puttin' a rat on the row is more than I can understand."

"You got anything to rat about?" Remo asked, spitting the last of the milk from his mouth. It tasted sour now, but that was stomach-acid taste.

"No. But you be acting like a first-timer, not a lifer."

"I haven't smelled free air since . . ." Remo hesitated. When did he go in first? Was in '71. No, earlier, '70. Maybe '69. No, it couldn't have been '69. He remembered pounding a beat in '69, just another beat cop on his way to a faraway pension.

The C.O. came around for the tray and saw the mess on Remo's floor. His tight expression turned into a glower.

"You do that on purpose?" he demanded hotly.

"I threw up," Remo told him.

The guard looked closer. "Doesn't look like vomit to me."

"It wasn't in my stomach more than two minutes," Remo said with the sullenness that came to a prisoner after being in the joint for so long that all the pride had seeped out of the soul. It was a consequence of being treated, for all intents and purposes, like a dangerous teenager.

Popcorn spoke up. "I can vouch for whitey, there," he said. "I heard him throw. Man sounded like he was coughin' up his lungs. Kidneys too."

"Shut up, Dead Man."

The guard went away, coming back with a mop and bucket.

"Rack Number Two," he called down the line. The door to Remo's cell rolled aside. The C.O. shoved the mop and bucket in through the half-open door.

"Clean it up," he told Remo.

Remo looked in the bucket and said, "No water."

"Boy, you got endless water," the guard said, pointing to the open stainless-steel toilet.

Remo dipped the mop into the open bowl, slopped it into the bucket, and carried both over to the mess. He swabbed the floor until it was clean, emptied the bucket into the bowl, and then brought bucket and mop back to the cell door.

"Wring it out first," the guard insisted.

"With what?" Remo demanded.

"You got hands."

"I don't shower again until tomorrow."

"I don't make the rules," the guard said. "I just enforce them. Maybe next time you feel like puking, you'll try harder to hold it down."

Scowling, Remo wrung out the mop with his bare hands and emptied the bucket into the toilet bowl. The guard took the mop and bucket and locked the door. He called down the line, "Rack Number One." He stepped up to the next cell, beyond Remo's sight. "Okay, Popcorn, time to hose down your poor black ass."

"You just saying that 'cause you love me," Popcorn told the guard.

The door buzzed open, and Remo, holding his dripping hands in front of him, looked up with sudden interest.

He got a shock. The man who sauntered by, flashing him an easy Ipana smile, was short and reedy, wearing a high-top fade haircut that made his head look like a well-used pencil eraser. He was not much more than eighteen.

"How ya doing, Jim?" he said, and just as quickly was gone.

"Damn," Remo muttered. "Just a kid. He's just a kid. "

After the ten-o'clock check, Remo was told it was his day to exercise in the yard. Popcorn had long since returned to his cell.

The cell door buzzed open and Remo stepped out. There beside him was Mohammed, alias Popcorn. "Looks like we go together," the little con remarked.

"Looks like," Remo said.

"No talking in line," the guard snapped. It was a different guard than the man who had forced Remo to wring his acid-and-milk breakfast from the mop. By this time Remo's hands had dried to a milky tightness. He had gotten so sick of the smell that he had, after flushing the toilet six or seven times consecutively, washed his hands in the bowl. It was degrading, but no more so than any of the other indignities that had happened to him over the last two decades.

They walked down death row, where the apricot T-shirted inmates regarded them with unblinking serpentlike eyes to C Block. One long-haired blond man sat on the bottom of his bunk-they had bunk beds in C Block-his eyes blank, his head swiveling from side to side like a human radar dish.

"That be Radar Dish," Popcorn whispered to Remo. "They say he ate his mother. He be one fucked-up dude."

High up on the second tier of cells that made up C Block, a gravelly voice sang out. "In the yard," it warned.

"And you know who that be," Popcorn said. "Delbert himself. AKA the Crusher." Popcorn pronounced the nickname with evident relish, extending the last syllable as if tasting it.

"McGurk carry a shank?" Remo asked. The C.O. grumbled at them, but didn't interfere with the conversation.

"Some days," Popcorn supplied. "But Delbert, he don't need no shank, you see. Heard it said of him he once cornered a man he like in the machine shop and pinned him to the wall. Planted a big wet one on the dude's mouth. Man fight back, as is natural with a man. Delbert, he don't like that. He want a piece of you, he figure that be his right. So he pry open that man's jaw with his thumbs and take hold of the dude's tongue with his teeth. Bit down hard, did my man Delbert. Took half of his tongue. Swallowed it like raw liver. Then he held that poor suffering bastard's face down on the floor until he done bleed to death. Leastways, that's the way I heard it told."

Rerno grunted. He wondered if Popcorn was trying to scare him. Some cons took pleasure in testing a newcomer's nerve.

But Remo Williams was no newcomer. He had done hard time. He was afraid, but he wasn't frightened. That slim distinction often was the margin by which a man survived imprisonment.

They passed through the last door to the yard. It was empty.

Remo relaxed. Then Popcorn spoke up. "Don't get comfortable," he said. "The row always get first crack at the yard before they turn the population loose."

And behind them, the cacophony of buzzers indicated that C Block was being released from their cages. They milled out like schoolkids at recess, everyone talking but no single voice rising above any other.

"Catch you later," Popcorn said, edging away from Remo. "If you live."

Remo hung back near a corner of the yard. The institution was a lime-green building surrounded by a double Cyclone fence. Green watchtowers thrust up in battlementlike extensions by the fence. The sun was high and it was warm, but muggy, as if they were near the ocean. Remo could almost smell the salt air.

The cons came out like a human wave, but quickly separated into groups. Cellies paired off or split up, each according to the tension of the day. The lames-those who couldn't adjust to prison life-went off by themselves. The obvious queens gathered together, talking in high-pitched voices. A basketball game started under a gingle forlorn hoop.

And towering above even the tallest of the general population was the bullet head of Crusher McGurk. His eyes, small and mean and overhung by bony brows, sought out Remo.

Remo met the giant's gaze with frank contempt. Crusher pushed a pair of squealing queens apart and started out of the crowd. Instead of coming toward Remo, however, he made a bounding, bellyswaying beeline for Popcorn, who stood with his back to the population, shading his eyes from the overhead sun. His head was tilted back. He was watching a lone sea gull wheeling in long lazy circles just over the north fence.

He didn't see or hear Crusher come up on him with the steady flat-footed walk of a man who didn't care where he stepped or what he stepped in-or on. It was obviously all the same to Crusher McGurk.

One of Crusher's big hammy paws lifted up and snared the top of Popcorn's hairdo and twisted his head around sharply. Popcorn spun with the twist, almost losing his footing.