Pain Killers (20 page)

My unlikely FBI reverted to form.

“Listen to me, Rupert. If Mengele doesn’t get his shot at the von Braun treatment, he says he’s going to spill. They read his outgoing mail. He’s already tried. Certain people are not happy about this. Prison Experiments—if there, you know,
were
such things—would be a state run growth industry. Let’s face it, in this economy there aren’t many of those. Look at Abu Ghraib. Think the scandal was Lindsey England, the leashes and hoods? No, that was micro. Macro would be the
New York Times
publishes a story that a certain big-ass pharmaceutical company arranged the whole damn mess to test new mood stabilizers. Same thing at Guantánamo. But that’s not happening, right? No proof. So hey, its all just crazy talk. No evidence whatsoever. Forget I ever said anything.”

“When your whole life feels like the stress position, you need…Guantanamax!”

“You done bein’ an ass? If Mengele spills, it’s gonna be too big to pin on a few bad apples. I’m not saying they couldn’t frame somebody. More likely they’d just kill the old prick before it came to that. Too big a deal, you know, with the roots running under a lot of respectable graves.”

“That’s a lot of information, man.”

“What’s a lot of information?” He stared at me like I was insane. “Did you hear me say anything? You must be experiencing aural hallucinations. Stress does that. UC work can be hell on the nerves.”

“I know,” I said, “I could use a mood stabilizer right now.”

We got up at the same time. Jim reverted to his UC character, Anglo Rasta man, doing a little jim-jim dance as he scooped up his canteen treats.

When we shook hands he held mine an extra few seconds and looked me in the eyes. “I know what it’s like undercover. The trick isn’t going under, brother, it’s coming back up without getting the bends.”

“Thanks for the advice—and the information,” I said. “You don’t pick that platinum blond old fuck up by tomorrow, I’m going to make a fortune off the
Enquirer.
I don’t care who goes down with him.”

Jim the Rasta stopped. For the first time I imagined how he would look without the clown hair—beneath that twenty-first-century-hippie façade lurked the chiseled features of a daytime soap star. He let loose a trippy giggle for the benefit of onlookers and spoke the rest low. “Let me give you some advice, drug addict: never show your hand—until you’re sure it’s still attached to your arm.”

“Good advice.”

The man was no joke. I was glad I hadn’t mentioned that I got knocked out and woke up tied to a toilet, or that my ex-wife had disappeared. He might have worried about me.

The UC fed said his good-byes under his breath. “Thanks for the snacks. See you in class, Mindy.”

I stopped. “Who snitched me out? Or did you bug the warden’s office?”

White Bob Marley smiled. “If you do anything to impede, denigrate or in any way, shape or form dingle-butt my case, I promise you, I will make sure everybody knows about the estrogen.”

I shrugged. “Do what you gotta do. Might open up a whole new client base. Trannies have problems too.”

Before returning his hand, I turned it over. The knuckles were thick, sprouting wiry ginger hair.

“What are you doing?”

“Checking for tiny doll hands,” I said.

“Dude, if you’re on psych meds, I suggest you change them. If you’re not, I strongly suggest you consider them.”

“What worked for you?” I asked him.

Our repartee was interrupted by a scream. A beautiful young Filipina had leaped up and hurled hot coffee on her boyfriend’s face. He screamed and tumbled off the chair. She kneeled down and yanked his T-shirt over his head, raked her nails across his exposed back, directly over a phrase tattooed across it in swirling letters: SA MAARI BUHAY AY SAY MAPOOT.

Jim read it and translated:
To Be Alive Is to Hate.

“You speak Filipino?”

“Gang detail. I saw a lot of Flips. Watch her left hand.”

“Ya-
bang
!” the Filipina shrieked. “Ya
-bang
!”

“That means ‘pride,’” Jim whispered under the chaos.

With her right hand, the girl slapped and back-slapped her poor boyfriend’s face. He didn’t flinch, but tears came anyway. Then, with a last slap before the guard arrived, she jammed her left hand up to the elbow in her boyfriend’s pants, then slipped it out so fast I wasn’t sure I’d even seen it.

By now the whole place was hooting. “See that,” Jim cried under their shouts, “she keistered him! Everybody thinks he’s a bitch, meanwhile the Flip probably made a grand.”

I turned to see two COs carrying the shirtless Filipino life-hater off horizontally. Another CO, the ever-present Colfax, led the angry girlfriend off with a firm hand on her back. I could hear him chiding her. “Now just what the heck were you thinking, missy?”

When I turned back to Jim, he was gone. For a second I stood there, wondering what kind of narcotics the Filipina shoved up her old man. But I had bigger problems. I still had no idea what happened to Tina. Almost as scary, in fifteen minutes I had to walk into a room full of convicted felons, some of whom might actually be law enforcement, and share my wisdom on the subject of addiction and recovery. If I was lucky, I wouldn’t keel over from a delayed reaction to the Red Cross medicine. I could handle being dead, but I’d hate to set a bad example.

Regret clawed at my brainpan like a cat scratching a couch. The confab with Rasta Jim was too weird to contemplate. But it did little to mitigate my twin terrors: the fact that Tina remained MIA and that I’d had the chance to grab Mengele by his peroxide hair and drag him off. But I hadn’t. And I had to ask myself why. How exactly can you distinguish fear from caution? Was this how Roosevelt felt deciding whether or not to bomb the camps?

With Mengele walking the earth, the blue sky was an affront.

I stepped past a cluster of men with briefcases. We sized each other up. Would they have been standing around if they knew Mengele was there? Avoiding their eyes, I thought of the old race doctor’s irises: black and light-sucking. Six hundred thousand he killed. Personally. I imagined the compressed energy of his victims’ fear like a swarm of bees. But who did the honey nourish? The dead or the living?

Approaching the classroom, I stopped and took a breath. The FBI Rasta was behind me. He clutched a cup of coffee in one hand and a bag full of visiting room snacks in the other. He put the bag in his teeth so he could clap me on the back. Then he took it out so he could talk.

“You all right, bud? You look a little peaked.”

“I’m great, Jim.” I returned the backslap and bent toward his ear. “So, is there, like, a special department? An undersecretary for not catching genocidal maniacs?”

Rasta Jim returned my back-pat and gave me a man-hug. “Just stick to what you know. Like drugs and hormones. Comin’ in?”

“In a minute. This is when I like to smoke and collect my thoughts.”

“You can’t smoke.”

“That’s one reason I’m nervous.”

I took a last breath, looked around at the yard and the houses scattered on the hill beyond. What fun, having a state prison at your feet. I wondered if residents sat on their back porches, feet up in their chaise lounges, binoculars perched on their noses, nursing a cold one and checking out the shank and riot action. No different than watching NASCAR, waiting for flaming wrecks.

I had not expected to be so happy to see the guys: Roscoe, Davey, Cranky, Movern, Jim the Rasta-fed, even Tina’s AA Christian porno pal, Reverend D. Although the rev and I now shared some awkward personal business. Awkward enough to send me ambling over as I greeted the rest of the fellas, trying to make it look casual when I leaned down and hissed in his face,
“So where the hell is Tina?”
He smiled wide enough to show off the gold trove in his teeth. The Nazis made millions gleaning precious metal from the mouths of death camp residents. They would have loved Rev. D.

“No hello?” the reverend said. “No ‘how are you doing in the struggle to stay clean and sober in an unclean and insane environment’?”

I did my best to freeze an easy grin on my face. “Cut the bullshit, Rev. I need to know what you know.”

“Sex and checks,” he sighed. “Nine times out of ten, it’s sex and checks what drive a man back to the gettin’ high side of town.”

Roscoe approached and stared in my eyes like he was reading the paper.

“Thought you was gonna shine us on,” Rasta Jim haw-hawed from across the room. Back in character. “We was gonna have a riot or somethin’.”

Reverend D backed him up. “That’s right. You best be mindful, bein’ in a room alone with felons and all. You like Siegfried and Roy up in here, without no Siegfried.”

“White tiger chewed Roy’s ass up!” Movern cried, surprisingly passionate. “Can’t tame a white tiger. Big cat do what a big cat do.”

“Dude!” White Rasta waved away the entire notion. “It wasn’t the fucking tiger. It was Siegfried. He gave the secret attack signal.”

Movern slapped the table. “Why the fuck would he do that? You over there all amped up like you dialed into some secret-ass information. Like your stoned cracker ass know shit about shit. You always say this dumb-ass shit that make no fucking sense.”

“Don’t have to make sense. It’s a fag fight,” said Rasta Jim. “You ask any cop. He’ll tell you. Gay dude knifes another gay dude, he never do it just once. He sticks him, like, ninety times, then bitch-slaps him when he’s bleedin’. You’re talking about the body of a man and the emotions of a woman.”

“Sound like you.” Movern pushed back his chair so hard it fell over when he stood up. He pointed at Rasta Jim. “Yeah, I said it. Whatchu gonna do, bitch?”

“Things heatin’ up,” said the reverend. “And here you are, in the same cage as the animals. You lookin’ at worse odds than Roy, son.”

“At least I’m not wearing sequined pants.”

But I saw what the rev meant:
no Rincin…
If one of the violent offenders on hand took issue with my classroom manner—and packed a shank—I’d be hard-pressed to fend him off. The thought started my heart banging on my ribs, like a prisoner hitting his cell bars with a spoon. We both wanted out of there.

“Still a few minutes before class,” I said to no one in particular. I pretended to study some scribble in my notebook. If I ran out now I’d look weak. But if I stayed I might end up ventilated.

Reverend D leaned in close enough to whisper before I took my seat. “Tina told me to tell you she’s okay.”

The reverend was a master of casual menace. But freighted as the conversation was, it was better than sitting there wondering if I could stave off mayhem with a ball-point and a three-ring binder.

“Why did she leave?” My voice had a catch in it.

“That’s nothin’ I know,” said the reverend, eying me sideways. “But here’s somethin’ I do know. Cathy, that shorty who did the doctor? She tol’ me he liked to have her take her clothes off, then walk whichever way he pointed and do stuff.”

“What kinda stuff?”

“Don’t matter what kinda stuff. Ain’t about what she did—s’about makin’ her do it. The old man wanted to remember what power felt like.”

“So it wasn’t about sex?”

The reverend cocked his head at an angle and looked at me. “You playin’ with me, dawg?
Everything
about sex.”

“Sometimes a crack pipe is just a crack pipe,” I said.

“You smoke crack,” Cranky cut in, “you suckin’ a glass dick.”

“No! You suckin’ on
Satan.
” Movern was as worked up as I’d seen him. “The Devil put crack in the ghetto to turn our women into hos.”

I waited for Movern to finish expressing himself before quietly responding to the reverend. “Whatever you wanna call what she did, if little Cathy did it with Mengele, I need to talk to her. But I need Tina first.”

“Every man has needs,” said the reverend. “All
you
need is some faith!”

“No doubt. Thanks.”

I didn’t want to get into a debate about my needs. I had too many to think about at once. I needed to figure out what I was going to say to the class. I needed to figure out if I was hatching a plan or a parasite had entered the bruise on my head and laid eggs. I needed to know more about Zell. I needed to talk to Mengele’s Christian escort, Cathy. Find out about his hit-and-run. I needed to learn more about Bernstein, too. What I didn’t need was the persistent paranoia I’d felt since sharing with J. Edgar Rasta Man. That I was somehow sticking my face into some elaborate interagency web, spun by Jim’s DC handlers, engineered by the feds and Interpol, Scotland Yard, the CIA, MI 5, Mossad and a team of security guards at the Addis Ababa McDonald’s. Who knew who else? I made up my mind. I’d have to find a way to get to L.A. and back by class tomorrow. Assuming I lived through this one. Under and over everything, behind and beside, there was the treacherous mystery of Tina.

The reverend barged into my deliberations, his wink nastier than the magazines that nearly decapitated me. “You like Christian pussy?”

“Never thought about it.”

“Well,” said the reverend, “here’s your chance to remedy the situation.”

If he saw Cranky’s gesture he didn’t acknowledge it. Coming on more pimp than informant, he gave me details about the girl who’d serviced the doctor.

“This one’s nasty, but she clean, too. She keep her pussy pure for Jesus. She still a virgin. But she ain’t afraid to use the Devil’s portal, you know what I’m sayin’? Front door’s locked, but the back door’s open. That girl do love the Lord.”

“I’m not looking for a date. I need to know what she knows.”

“Well whatever you want to call it, she’s down in L.A. In the Valley. You want to fly down, I can set up a meeting. Tina knows her. She tell you she was helpin’ school the girls?”

“She mentioned it.” I had to clamp my jaw to keep from screaming at him. “If you know something about what happened to her, then fucking tell me.”

The reverend smiled.

“Let me tell you about a miracle,” he said. “I was in the chow line at Folsom, waiting for oatmeal, when the Lord came to me and said, ‘Young buck, you need to minister to them fallen women.’ Someday, Manny Rupert, the Lord gonna tap you on the shoulder.”