Prison Code Read online

“Yeah,” Bolan acknowledged. “Dogs love it.”

  The Duivelstad mess hall went quiet as for the first time in living memory Kal threw back his head and laughed. Bolan picked up his chunk of tasteless horror and poured some of his carton of milk into one of the many, sadly empty hollows in his tray. In his War Everlasting, Bolan had partaken of that which crawled under rocks, that which flew in the blue vault of heaven, and just about everything else that a man could digest in between besides human flesh. Bolan held a thousand calories in his hand; he had work to do and no time to be picky. He broke his nutraloaf in two, dunked a chunk into his milk and tucked in.

  He’d eaten worse.

  Kal squeezed honey from a foil packet onto his cornbread. He had a packet of salt, pepper and ketchup for his meal, as well. The two men both knew discipline would fall like rain if Kal offered any of it to Bolan. “Have I mentioned you are one dead white boy?”

  Bolan stopped munching prison loaf and smiled. “That’s white man to you.”

  Kal snorted in derision, but his eyes narrowed. “Tell you what. I’ll just call you Cooper and you just call me Kal.”

  Bolan resumed eating. “I’d be honored.”

  Kal stared ruefully into the middle distance. “Honor is all a man has in here.”

  “Honor is a temple of light. A man builds it brick by brick in his heart, and he lays his soul on its altar every day he wakes up above ground.”

  “Man—” Kal’s eyes tried to bore holes into Bolan “—who the hell are you?”

  “I’m Cooper, and I’m in trouble.”

  “I told you. I won’t protect you.”

  “I know, but will you help me?”

  Kal’s voice dropped dangerously low. “Help you what?”

  “Don’t know yet.” Bolan felt the beat down coming.

  Kal squeezed ketchup onto his beans and rice, more honey onto his cornbread, and shoved both into his mouth. “Check my shit, white man.”

  The soldier shook his head. “That’s cold.”

  Bolan and Kal both looked up as another con walked up holding his tray. He was white and Bolan noted he had no visible tattoos. The soldier read him as an upper echelon criminal, most likely an organized crime lawyer or an accountant. The man nodded at Kal, but he kept his eyes on Bolan. “Kal.”

  “Rudy.”

  “Mind if I sit down?”

  Kal shook his head at a man who should know better. “We play chess in the library once a week, Rudy. We don’t eat together, and that’s in your best interest, not mine.”

  Rudy nodded at Bolan. “Actually, Kal, I want to talk to him.”

  Bolan nodded at Kal. “It’s Kal’s world. I’m just a squirrel, trying to get a nut. You want to park your butt, it’s his table.”

  Kal stared at Bolan incredulously. He jerked his head at Rudy. “Your funeral.”

  Rudy sat down. “Cooper, is it?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I have it on good authority that you and I are going to be cellmates tomorrow. In the Todd’s cell.”

  “Nice to meet you. Hope they fumigated it. The Todd was seriously cultivating his own signature odor.”

  “Listen, you took down the Todd.”

  Bolan gazed at Rudy innocently. “The Todd took a suicidal swan dive against the toilet, twice.”

  Rudy looked back and forth between the two most arguably dangerous individuals in Duivelstad. “Cooper, you’re having breakfast with Kal.”

  “I’m having breakfast in Kal’s vicinity,” Bolan corrected him. “Kal just hasn’t killed me yet. There is a difference.”

  Kal nodded over a bite of beans. “Truth.”

  Bolan dunked his other nutra-chunk and took a tasteless, sodden bite. “What do you want, Rudy?”

  “I need help. I know Kal won’t.”

  “You got that right,” Kal confirmed.

  “Kal doesn’t take sides, but Cooper, I can pay you.”

  “Help with what?”

  “My son is being processed into Duivelstad in forty-eight hours.”

  Bolan stirred the crumbled bits from his nutraloaf into his remaining milk to form a thin gruel. “If you can afford to pay me, you can afford to pay off whoever wants a piece of your boy.”

  “It’s not a question of money, or him. It’s a question of leverage.”

  Bolan tilted back his tray and finished off his breakfast. “Leverage on you.”

  “Correct.”

  “Someone wants to put you to work for them,” Bolan surmised.

  “Correct.”

  “Lawyer or accountant?”

  Rudy raised a challenging eyebrow. “QA engineer.”

  Bolan regarded the con before him with renewed interest. “Quality Assurance?”

  “I used to work for a computer company.”

  Bolan gazed upon a software engineer who had gone rogue. It was a new class of criminal that was popping up more and more in U.S. prison populations. Unfortunately, they almost never had any gang affiliations or pull, and unlike a lawyer or accountant on the inside, they didn’t have prison yard saleable skill. They paid for protection, and if they couldn’t they swiftly became the new woman of mystery on the block.

  Bolan had found some very suspicious computer code in Lancaster. “You don’t have any affiliations?”

  “I do, but they’re not what they used to be.”

  “Mafia,” Bolan ascertained.

  Rudy weighed Bolan heavily before answering. “I was christened Territizio Rudolpho.”

  Bolan kept his poker face and weighed the Mafia hacker before him. “That’s not enough.”

  “I know you’re new.” Rudy took in the mess hall meaningfully with his gaze. “But what have you noticed about Duivelstad?”

  The soldier ran his eyes across tables of disturbingly prevalent skinheads, mullets and wannabe Vikings. “It’s the most white as rice prison I’ve ever seen.”

  Kal nodded. “You begin to see.”

  Rudy gazed toward the doors. The tables closest to them, the kitchen and the guards were clustered with men with more skin pigment. “The blacks and the Puerto Ricans are like forward fire bases in Nam. Constantly probed. Constantly under attack, covertly and more and more overtly. The Italians?” Rudy sighed heavily. “When the Big U came in, he wanted nothing to do with us. When he couldn’t transfer us out fast enough, it came down to outright assassinations. We were ruthlessly weeded out. We have almost no pull now.”

  “But your services are required?” Bolan probed.

  “I was never supposed to be here. Hell, I wasn’t even convicted in Pennsylvania.”

  Bolan smiled. “You were drafted.”

  “The Big U wanted his computer system upgraded. He wanted the prison wired for sound, and he wanted it to be done on the q.t. and pass under the nose of state and federal inspection.”

  “And you did it.”

  “I did,” Rudy admitted. “It was an honest trade for an easy stretch.”

  Bolan had already seen it a mile away. “But now the Big U wants you to be an earner.”

  “I refused. When his intimidation shit failed, well, my son, he’s something of a loose cannon. He messed up. For the third time. Warden Linder called in markers. My boy was tried as an adult and sentenced to hard time, here.”

  Bolan nodded. “Okay.”

  Rudy blinked. “Okay what?”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “I’ll defend you and your son to the best of my ability. I’ll put your lives before my own.”

  Both Rudy and Kal stared at Bolan, incredulous. Rudy looked at Bolan as if he beheld an escaped maniac or a Bengal tiger that happened to be sitting in a prison mess hall. “How much?”

  “Someday
, and that day may never come, I’ll call upon you to do a service for me.”

  Rudy’s jaw dropped. “You sick fuck.”

  “Bank on it, and I’m most likely going to be a dead fuck real quick, so the favor is going to come fast. I guarantee you it won’t involve any hole in your son’s body, or yours. I won’t ask you or him to kill anyone or hold contraband for me. Everything else is on the table. Deal?”

  Rudy looked like a dog that had chased a car and caught it. “Kal isn’t backing your play?”

  Bolan turned to Kal. “You backing my play?”

  “Oh, hell no.”

  The soldier shook his head. “Nope. Kal pretty much temporarily tolerates me, and that’s about it. We have a deal?”

  “We have a deal.” Rudy shook his head as if he had gotten the short end of the stick in a deal with the devil. “You want to give me a hint about what you want?”

  Bolan rolled the dice. “I may need to get a message out to my people.”

  “Oh, shit! Listen. Internet access is strictly controlled in the library. And for that matter, you can be caught with drugs, guns or shemale strippers in this place, but they catch you with a cell phone, that’s a peeing-blood-for-a-week-from-a-Schoenaur-beat-down and a hell stretch in solitary.”

  “And why do you think that would be?” Bolan asked.

  “How the hell should I know?”

  Bolan rolled his eyes.

  Rudy sighed. “Because the warden has plans?”

  “Seems likely. We just need to figure out what those are.”

  Rudy’s jaw fell. “Tell me you’re not a cop.”

  Bolan grinned. “Do I look like one? Smell like one?”

  “No...”

  “Then I just figured out my favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Earn for the warden,” Bolan said.

  Rudy visibly controlled his temper. “I just told you I didn’t want to.”

  “Earn for the warden and tell me anything you can about what he is up to and what is going on in this prison.”

  The hacker balked. “I tell you I need a favor. I tell you I don’t want to earn for the warden and I want you to protect my son, and you tell me to earn for warden and inform on him for you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And why the fuck would I do that?” Rudy asked.

  “Because then I’ll owe you a favor.”

  “What favor are you going to do for me?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I’ll make you a promise, Rudy. As of now, no matter what choice you make, anyone who wants a piece of you or your son has to go through me. If they get you in a place I can’t follow, you will be avenged. If they kill me, then by others.”

  Bolan felt Kal’s eyes burning into him from the side. Prisons were a great deal like glacially paced open warfare. Life here consisted of vast stretches of worry and boredom punctuated by short, sharp upheavals of horror. The latest upheaval had come, and Bolan was the fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse. Kal wasn’t pleased.

  Bolan kept his eyes on Rudy, but he spoke to both men. “Shit’s coming down.”

  Rudy stared at Kal helplessly. Kal stabbed his fork into his rice and beans. “Fuck you, Rudy. Dig your own grave. Your chess lessons are over.”

  Rudy looked at Bolan like a drowning man grabbing at a rope. “I accept.”

  Kal rose. “As for you, Cooper, your breakfast privileges are revoked. I won’t kill you tonight. But after roll call tomorrow, after you and Rudy are all puppied up? If you step into my cell again without permission, I’ll put you on a gurney next to the Todd.”

  “Duly noted,” Bolan acknowledged. “And thank you for your patience.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Kal took his tray and stalked back to the return counter.

  Bolan nodded at Rudy. “I’m growing on him.”

  * * *

  BOLAN SETTLED IN. The Todd had done some significant bleeding and disgorged serious amounts of internal bodily fluids under Bolan’s ministrations. Maintenance had given the unit a thorough decontamination and the cell smelled of bleach and cleanser; and that was a huge step up from the all-pervasive Todd funk Bolan had first walked into. The soldier unrolled his blankets and hit the top bunk. He cracked Leaves of Grass and paused. “Yo! Kal!” he shouted. “You want your book back?”

  “My parting gift to you, Cooper!” Kal snarled.

  “Cool.” Bolan went back to reading. He weighed the risk of trying to stop Kal from breaking his thumbs, and wrote on the inside cover with the stubby pencil he’d bought from the commissary. The soldier flashed the word at Rudy with supreme casualness.

  Cameras?

  Rudy absorbed the query like the pro he was, and yawned and shook his head.

  Bolan wrote “Sound?” And flashed it.

  Rudy nodded.

  The soldier rolled off his bunk and stepped out onto the tier. Rudy followed a few minutes later. The soldier and the hacker leaned on the railing and gazed down at the common area.

  “People are talking about you,” Rudy said.

  “I’m worth remarking upon.”

  Rudy sighed in disgust. “Oh, for God’s sake...”

  He wasn’t talking to Bolan.

  A young man approached timidly across the tier. He had to be at least eighteen to be in Duivelstad, but he had the face of a younger teen. He walked with the hunched, haunted demeanor of a man made ancient by a thousand subjective years in hell. Bolan had seen a great deal of human evil, and he recognized the scooped crescent scars of human bites on his arms and the right side of his neck.

  Rudy glared. “Bobbie? What the fuck?”

  The broken young man ignored Rudy and continued to try but continued to fail to meet Bolan’s eyes. “I’m Bobbie-John.”

  “Cooper.”

  “I’m—”

  Bolan nodded. “I know.”

  Bobbie-John shook.

  “What can I do for you, Robert?”

  “When I came here, I knew what would happen. As a new fish I was Force’s. But then he told me I was going to earn for him. I told him he and his friends could take what they wanted, I couldn’t stop them, but they’d have to kill me before I’d be a whore.”

  “So Force threw you to the Todd.”

  Bobbie-John clutched at golf divot scars on his arms and shuddered. “You took him down.”

  A cold wind blew through Bolan. Duivelstad was piling horror upon horror, but he had a mission. “What do you want?”

  Bobbie-John looked both ways. It didn’t matter. Half the block was pretending not to watch. The other half was watching in open interest. Bobbie-John reached down the front of his pants.

  Rudy recoiled. “Oh, for...”

  The young man came up with a king-size candy bar from the commissary and held it out. “I heard you’re on nutraloaf. I bought you this.”

  Bolan took the candy bar. “Thanks.”

  “You d-don’t owe m-me nothing,” Bobbie-John stuttered and looked at his shoes. “I mean, I just want to thank you, and you know, if you want, I’ll...”

  Bolan kept his face neutral and nodded. “I know.”

  “I just wanted to thank you. A lot of cons want to thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Bobbie-John turned and walked away, holding the horrible scars on his arms.

  Rudy made a noise. “You’re making friends and winning influence.”

  “We try.”

  “Yeah,” Rudy scoffed. “With the house catamites.”

  “Catamite. That’s a word you don’t hear in conversation every day,” Bolan whirled on Rudy, who started and backed up until he met iron bars. The soldier loomed over him. “You want your son to join Duivelstad Team Catamite?”

/>   Rudy’s teeth clenched.

  Bolan smiled without an ounce of warmth. “Team Catamite just professed their undying love and gave me a candy bar. What the fuck have you done for me in here, Rudy?”

  To his credit, Rudy met Bolan’s burning gaze. “I’m working on it.”

  Bolan turned back to the tier railing. “Good to know.” He unwrapped his candy bar and had to admit the chocolate, caramel and nougat were a blessing after the nutraloaf. The tier door slammed open almost on cue and a three-man wedge of guards advanced with their boots clanging on the metal floor like storm troopers. The point of the spear was Captain Schoenaur. Zavala and a guard Bolan hadn’t seen before flanked their captain. Schoenaur had rolled up his uniform sleeves to reveal the veined, bowling pins of horror he called forearms. Bolan had read the file Kurtzman had compiled on the captain. None of it was good. Schoenaur managed to glower and grin at the same time at the half-eaten candy bar in Bolan’s hand.

  “What the hell is that, Cooper?”

  “Chocolate bar. Packed with peanuts.” Bolan took another bite. “You want some?”

  Schoenaur’s smile was a travesty on his face. “That, Cooper, is a dietary infraction.”

  Bolan popped the remaining bite into his mouth, chewed and swallowed it. “What? You’re going to put me on nutraloaf?”

  “Oh, Cooper.” Schoenaur cracked his knuckles. “First you tap at my window, and now you’re knocking at my door.”

  “I’m sorry, Captain.” Bolan held out his hand. “Could we shake and let bygones be bygones?”

  “You really are new here.”

  “I’m new to this whole thing. I apologize for disrespecting you, Captain. I don’t want any trouble.”

  Schoenaur smiled like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, and held out his hand. “I give every newbie one free pass.”

  The entire tier held its collective breath as Bolan and Schoenaur shook hands. Schoenaur really did have forearms the size of Popeye the Sailor’s. However, they really did taper at the wrist like bowling pins. Bolan bypassed the traditional bone crusher and curled his hand around Schoenaur’s wrist in the Roman handshake. For a split second Schoenaur blinked at this unexpected development. Bolan took that heartbeat to choke up on Schoenaur’s wrist so that both men literally held each other’s wrist joints. Schoenaur instinctively started to squeeze.