The young man stared at the money like a dog would stare at meat. “I’ll take your money, old man, but you’re not going to last any ten minutes.”
He stooped for the bills, then came with his chin tucked and the big fists up. He thought the fight was a joke, that X was used up and stupid-crazy, an old man with half the reach. In a different life, he might have been right, but X, in motion, was a marriage of power and speed that few in the world could match. He worked the right eye first—four hard jabs—then bloodied the mouth, the nose; cracked a rib on the left side.
That was the first nine seconds.
X slipped out of reach, then came back for the face, two lefts and right, then a roundhouse kick that cut cables in the big man’s knees. X danced away a second time, not yet breathing hard. He saw the fear then, the understanding.
What if they were true?
The stories …
X smiled as that fear opened like a flower. The big man saw it, and hated it. “You paid me to fight, so fucking fight.”
He came harder that time, and X bled, too. It’s why he’d picked the big man in the first place.
All those kills.
That readiness.
X made it last the full ten minutes, but the fight was never close. X got hurt; the big man got ruined. By the ten-minute mark, he was bent at the waist and half-blind, too bloody and broken to lift his hands. He looked once at the guard, and X felt the first real distaste. “He can’t help you.”
“Do it if you’re going to do it.”
The man’s face was a mask of blood, one eye ruined for life, the right shoulder out of its socket. The rage was still there, though; he could go longer. But what was the point?
“Guard. We’re finished here.”
The guard kept his eyes down, but knew from long experience what to do. He got the big man up and out, and never looked at X.
When they were gone, X went into a second cell, washed blood from his hands and face, then taped up the cuts.
Bored again, he wandered the cells he kept like a suite of rooms: one for the wine, another for his art. Everyone knew he was rich, of course. Years ago, he’d been in the news all the time: the jets and mansions, the models and call girls and socialite girlfriends. Of course, the stories changed after his arrest: profiles on the family fortune, the long list of famous friends and political connections. An inmate had asked once how much money X really had, intending to leverage that information with violence of his own. He’d have considered it an easy thing: a rich man, new to prison. But X was unlike other rich men, so he’d given that inmate a long smile and a silent count, three full seconds before he’d torn the esophagus from his throat, and flushed it down a prison toilet. Since then, there’d been so few questions.
“Ah, well…”
He had his privacy and his comforts. For the privilege, he gave the warden an unholy amount of money each and every year, plus a solemn, cross-his-heart vow that the warden’s wife would not be gang-raped ever again.
Not on a Sunday morning.
Not with the kids watching.
* * *
It was late that same night that something broke the steady routine of X’s life. “Excuse me. Um … sir?” The guard was a large man, and apologetic.
“What is it?”
“Someone has been asking to see you. Francis Willamette. A prisoner. We didn’t want to bother you, but he’s been asking for a few days now, very insistent. We … um … we took a vote. The guards, I mean.”
X lit a cigarette, and leaned back. Six guards served on his regular detail, but he had other guards in other pockets. “What does Mr. Willamette want?”
“He says it’s about Jason French. It’s … um … it’s why we voted yes.”
“Then I suppose you should bring Mr. Willamette down.”
The guard backed from the cell, and hurried away. When footsteps sounded in the stairwell, the same guard said, “Third cell. You can go on down.”
“Are you certain? He’s not … you know?”
“He’s expecting you. You’ll be fine.”
When Willamette appeared, the same doubts seemed to fill every line in his face. X had met the old man once before. He’d claimed to be a chess player, but managed to embarrass himself in three moves. He’d lost weight in the years since they’d played that single game, and the skin was loose on his bones. One hand clutched at the cell door, and he held on to the bar as if he’d fall without it. X took in the sunken eyes, the brown teeth. “You claim to have seen Jason French?”
“Three days ago, yes, sir. On the road, um, I was on the prison bus.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Because I can describe him in perfect detail, the car he was in, and the people with him, how he froze the moment he realized the bus was from Lanesworth. My memory’s photographic. Any detail you ask for.”
“Assuming all of that is true, why should I care?”
The old man was cunning enough to hide his satisfaction, but the glint in his eyes was pure greed. “We both know that you do.”
X stared for long seconds, his entire being dangerously still. He’d never cared about the stories that circulated in the general population, not who he’d killed or why he’d done it, or what really went down in the subbasement under death row. True or false, such stories were irrelevant. X stayed above them. But this, however, this presumption to know anything about X’s wants or needs or preferences …
The old man understood the shift in X’s eyes. “Hey, buddy, hey now. No judgment.” He spread his fingers, showing the seamed palms. “We all have our kinks. You. Me. It’s just that I’m too old to play games. Fifty-two years inside. I know you see the logic.”
X studied the old man’s face. The lips. The damp eyes. “So you can tell me about Jason French. What would you want from me in exchange?”
The old man took a breath, and named his price. Money. Pornography. Two days with a girlish inmate he’d seen once in the yard.
X shook his head dismissively. “Descriptions of an isolated encounter. A few flowery words.”
“I can tell you how to find him.”
X blinked, a hard thump in his chest. “Go on.”
“I know the car, the license plate. From there, it should be easy. Anyone on the outside could track him down.”
X tried to conceal his emotions, but the old prisoner knew better. A smile split his face as he said, “There’s one other thing,” then drew back a chair, and sat as if he owned the place. “There was a girl in the car, a brunette…”
* * *
When Willamette was finished and gone, X paced the empty hall, debating the pros and cons of the bargain he’d made. He didn’t care about the brunette in the car, or the girlish inmate on cellblock C—let Willamette have his fun. But some time ago X had given Jason certain assurances—promises, actually—and while most people mattered little to X, Jason was not most people. That made the debate more like a war of attrition.
A full hour, pacing.
One more staring at a stain on the ceiling.
In the end, though, X knew exactly what he’d known at the moment of Willamette’s proposal: there could be no real debate.