Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

The doors hinged shut slowly, taking the glare with them, and Evan got his first clear look at Danny Gallo. Nothing about him was recognizable except for the pockmarks and the blue eyes, now watery and dulled. Evan scanned him for any other signs of the boy he’d once known, but there was nothing to distinguish him from any of the other five thousand inmates stored within these walls. He wore signs of poverty on his face—crooked chipped teeth, papery skin, sunken eyes that spoke to malnutrition or opiate use or both. It wasn’t just damage but overuse, ninety years of hard living forced through a forty-year-old body.

“I don’t know no Frank Kassel,” he said.

“Me neither,” Evan said. “I used a fake name to sneak in to see you.”

“Well, I must be more important than I thought.” Amused, Danny rasped a hand across scraggly patches of facial hair. For an instant his eyes caught a glint of inner life, and Evan could see through all the wreckage to Danny beneath. But just as quickly he was gone. “Who are you, then?”

“Evan,” he said. “From Pride House.”

Danny leaned forward, pronating his hands so he could prop an elbow on the table’s ledge. “Evan?” he said. “You’d better be kidding me, now.”

“No, sir, I am not.”

“Holy shit.”

Danny rose in excitement, chains rattling, as if to greet Evan properly, but then remembered himself and sat back down. His movement sent a faint breeze across the table, carrying the sour tinge of body odor. Over on the platform, the COs had gone guard-dog stiff, suddenly on point. They assessed Danny for a moment, then relaxed and went back to chatting softly.

“What happened to you after that guy took you?” Danny said. “Where’d you go, man? Where’d you go?”

Evan said, “It’s a long story.”

“Ain’t they all.”

“How ’bout you?” It was creeping back into Evan’s voice, that street inflection. What a bizarre and unsettling subconscious shift. He reined in his diction. “Last I heard you were serving time back east.”

“Yeah, that was some bullshit. I was just the lookout.”

“How’d you land here?”

“More bullshit. I couriered some stuff from KC to Visalia. Yeah, I helped rock it up, but it was less than five hundred grams. I got paid three hundred fifty bucks. You believe that shit? Three hundred fifty bucks. The supplier flipped on me, reduced sentence for him giving up low-level guys like me. Never fucking trust the sambos. Me, I had priors, judge’s hands tied ’cuz of mandatory sentencing, you know the drill. Fifteen years. It’s the little fish gets fucked, right?” He shook his head. His hair was stringy, greasy, swaying across those pockmarked cheeks. “Three hundred fifty bucks. Fifteen years.”

“Fifteen years is rough,” Evan said. “But you’ll still have enough life left after to have a third act.”

Danny exhaled, a waft of halitosis and stale cigarettes. Evan blinked against it, held a poker face.

“I got in a tussle in the yard last June,” Danny said. “Guy got his head caved in on a dumbbell. Wudn’t my fault. They tacked on ten more years.”

Evan let it settle, the weight of another lost decade. “Maybe good behavior,” he said.

Danny looked up through the curtain of bangs, his eyes flashing blue. “Nah,” he said. “I ain’t gonna behave good. Not for all them days.” He noted something in Evan’s face, drew himself up as best he could, shoulders pinned back as far as the chains allowed. “Don’t you fucking pity me. I’m fine in here. Better, even. Last I was out, it was all fucked up. People walking around with the Internet in their pockets now. Little phones smarter than I am. Don’t make no sense.”

Evan nodded, lowered his eyes. Heat in his fingertips, his neck. It took a moment for him to identify the sensation.

Grief.

For what? For the wasted life sitting before him? Or for the fact that it could just as easily have been him on the other side of the table? If Jack hadn’t shown up. If Evan hadn’t gotten himself chosen. If he’d been found lacking.

He pictured the polished shine of his seven-thousand-square-foot penthouse. The freezer room containing tens of thousands of dollars of vodka. Stocked bank accounts in nonreporting territories. Safe houses and vehicles. The floating bed.

“I put in forty hours a week,” Danny continued, a hint of boastfulness creeping in. “Prison furniture. I spray the polyurethane and shit. Sometimes I sew mailbags, too. Puts seventeen cents a hour toward my commissary account.” He caught himself, seeming to realize that seventeen cents wasn’t worth bragging about. A quiet cough shuddered his shoulders, a loose, wet rattle like a car engine that refused to turn over. He finished and lifted his eyebrows, his ears shifting back, the left lobe lost to a smear of burn tissue. “You heard about Ramón?”

Evan nodded. “Overdose.”

“And Tyrell? Finally got his dumb ass in the army, shot to shit over in Buttfuckistan somewhere, poor fool. Served him right.” Danny’s face loosened with emotion. “May he rest in peace.”

So many lost boys.

Evan said, “Yeah.”

“We used to ride him hard about his sister being a whore.” Danny cocked his head a bit too severely, a med-induced twitch. “You think she was a pro or we just liked to give him shit?”

“Probably the latter,” Evan said.

The old camaraderie felt good, a comfort he had never known to seek. The fact that his life shared a common stream of history with someone, anyone.

“Man, she was fine, wasn’t she?” Danny said. “That caboose.”

“She was. More woman than any of us could handle. Easier to call her a whore than admit she scared the shit out of us.”

Danny’s head jerked a few more times. He scratched at his hair. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe she was just hot and that showed us for the weak-ass little boys we were.”

Evan felt a smile coming up beneath the surface. “Remember when Papa Z went to the hospital that time with gastritis?”

“That fat motherfucker always had gastritis.”

“He was gone for—what?—two weeks?”

“And he didn’t want to tell nobody ’cuz the state’d cut off the checks. So there we were, a buncha savages in the house—”

“Inmates running the asylum.”

“Shit, brother, that whole month we had sleep for dinner.” With a flick of his head, Danny cleared his hair from his eyes. “And ’member we used to steal plums off Old Man Pinkerton’s tree?”

Evan smiled, gave his best Ewelius Pinkerton voice. “‘You motherless bastards get offa my lot ’fore I give you the whupping your long-gone daddies never did.’”

Danny rocked a bit and laughed. “Those plums, shit they was good.” The grin faded. “Till they weren’t,” he said. “It’s like that in here. It was like that for Tyrell and Ramón and the rest of us, too. There’s a season fruit is ripe, right? But if you miss it, it goes all rotten. We didn’t get picked. So we went rotten.” He cleared his throat. “You got picked, though, didn’t you?”

A coughing fit seized him. He tried to raise a fist to his mouth, but a metallic clank stopped it at his sternum.

Evan leaned back, away, picturing a mist of germs settling across the table between them. His OCD revved up, that internal scanning software that assessed infection, contamination, decay. He tried to keep the disgust from his face, but Danny locked onto it.

“You ain’t no better’n me.”

“No,” Evan said. “I’m not.”

Danny drew back his head haughtily. “Okay. So long as we have that shit straight.”

“We have it straight.”

“So why are you here?”

“Andre. He’s in trouble.”