Andrew Vachss - Safe House

“I’m fine,” I told her. “I must have drifted off, that’s all.”

“Drifted off? You were . . . not here. I mean, you weren’t actually sleeping, I could tell. Just . . . zoned out or something.”

“What’s the big deal?” I asked her, wondering why she didn’t recognize the same thing she did herself.

“It’s been hours you’ve been like that,” she said, answering the question she didn’t know I’d asked. “I didn’t want to . . . disturb you. I didn’t know. But then you finally fell asleep. And I got scared.”

“I’m fine,” I told her again. “It happens to me sometimes. When I have to think.”

“My mother said the shamans . . . Oh, I don’t mean you. . . . I mean, you were . . . in a trance, like. Awake, but not here. One minute we were talking, the next you were gone.”

“Can I have a glass of water?” I asked her, more to shut her down than because I was thirsty.

“Sure, baby.”

She came back with a cone-shaped paper cup. The water was cold and clean. “Thanks,” I said.

“You want anything else?”

“A cigarette?”

She lit one of mine, handed it to me, not saying a word. I smoked it all the way down in the darkness, my spinal cord crawling with snake-twisty nerves. Alive now.

Alive with fear.

Where I’d gone, it had come to me. I wasn’t afraid of Pryce. I wasn’t the target. He couldn’t really hurt me. Yeah, he might know some stuff I wouldn’t want shouted around the town, some old ID might be blown, crap like that. But there was nothing in it for him to try for me. If he knew enough to hurt me, he knew enough to know that he wouldn’t live long if he did.

Maybe that was the difference. In prison, it’s not how tough you are that keeps you safe, it’s your capacity for revenge. Prison is icy hell. Feelings are the enemy. Showing them is a crippling illness—sometimes a fatal one. You get raped, you’re a cunt. And every con in the joint is free to use you like one. You kill the rapist, you’re a man. Everything squared. Vengeance is the only true religion in there. And if you have backup, even killing you won’t make the killers safe . . . so they step off.

The first time I went down, it was for a good, high-status beef. Shooting a guy. Attempted murder, they called it, and they were right on the money. I did it because he scared me, but that wasn’t how I profiled it once I was inside. In my version, I did it because he disrespected me.

It helped protect me. I watched plenty of others who couldn’t stay safe. It was ugly, what happened to them. But even before I crewed up, the predators stayed away. Everyone knew—Burke would get even. Next to me, elephants had Alzheimer’s.

If Pryce knew so much about me, he had to know that. He had to know that, whatever I was, I wasn’t alone. I’d die for that, and that would die for me.

So I was safe from him.

But Herk wasn’t. He was hung out to dry. Without the immunity, he was barbecued beef. Without the immunity, he was going back Inside. He’d never be a gardener. Never be a person, like he wanted so bad.

Doc, the prison shrink—I was his inmate clerk, a real sweet spot—told me once that the only thing that really distinguishes a sociopath from the rest of the world is that the sociopath lacks empathy. He feels only his own pain, cares only for his own needs. Selfishness squared. All sexual sadists are sociopaths, but not all sociopaths are sexual sadists. All sociopaths are the same thing, but they don’t all want the same things. Take politicians—the way they breed is to fuck the rest of us.

All sociopaths are encapsulated. Always have every feeling they need right inside themselves. Nobody else counts.

The plague of the Nineties isn’t AIDS, it’s self-absorption. Sociopaths always crank the revs right to the redline. And keep the hammer down.

Amateurs think prisons are full of sociopaths. A pro would tell you the truth—the only sociopaths in prison are the failures. The rest of the population is all the result of the “Just Us” system. Flops and fools, weasels and weaklings. Lazy lames. Most of the convict population today is in there for drugs.

It’s like we learned nothing from Prohibition.

I was safe from Pryce and Herk wasn’t. So what?

I knew the answer to that: Herk would die for me.

That’s an easy thing to say, but I knew it for true. A feeling and a fact. Herk had only been down with our crew for a few weeks when it happened. I was rat-packed in the long corridor between D Block and the commissary. Four black guys, three with shanks, one working lookout. It wasn’t me they wanted. Not me in particular. A race war had been raging inside for almost a week. When that happens, color is the only target.

It wasn’t a heist. They weren’t looking to rough off some commissary goods. No, the next white convict who walked into their trap was going to die. They wanted a body. Any body, so long as it was the right color.

That was me, that day.

If it had been years earlier, when I was still on my first bit, when my image was more important than my life, I would have done it different. But that day, as soon as I spotted the first two, I turned and ran. That’s when I saw the other one, sharpened rat-tail file wrapped in black electrical tape held low against his hip, moving in. He was the hit man—the others were carrying steel too, but they didn’t look as professional, just there to drive the prey onto the killing ground.

I was unarmed. And out of time. I rushed the hit man, charging at his chest. He came up to meet me. I twisted my right shoulder like I was going to try and slide past on his right, exposing my back for a second as I planted my right foot and spun quickly, flattening my chest against the opposite wall away from his knife hand, firing my right elbow at where I thought his face would be as I scrambled crab-style toward safety. I almost made it. I felt the shank punch through my denim jacket and take me just below the shoulder. I went down, rolling away as fast as I could. Heard the pounding footsteps as the other two charged, knives held high.

That’s when Hercules hit them from behind like a runaway train, taking them both into the wall. The lookout shouted something. I kept rolling, covering up as best as I could, kicking out at the hit man every time he got close. Guards piled into the corridor, the riot whistle blowing loud. Sweeter than church bells on a wedding day.

One of the hacks clubbed me right where the hit man’s shank had gone in. When I came to in the prison hospital, my head was bandaged too.

If you can get to the hospital in prison, they can probably save you—the docs there have plenty of practice. Herk took almost seventy stitches, but they were slash wounds, not deep. I got a heavy tetanus shot, then they cleaned the wound out and packed it. Told me how lucky it was that it hadn’t been lower—if he’d gotten a kidney, I was gone.

They did a prison investigation. Which means a body count. This one was zero, so they called it off. Herk and I told the same story. We were walking down the corridor and got jumped. No, we didn’t see who did it. No, we didn’t know if they were black or white—they had masks and gloves on. No, we didn’t know how many of them there were.

The black guys told the same story.

The shanks were somebody else’s. No prints . . . if they even checked.

Herk and I got thirty days’ keep-lock. The black guys got six months in the bing. Except for the lookout. They cut him loose. An innocent bystander.

When the hit man died from eating a rat-poison-laced candy bar in solitary, the Man put it down to the race war. That had been Wesley’s work, although I didn’t know it then.