The Weight (22 page)

People think the worst thing about being locked up is that you can’t have the things you had on the outside. But that’s not it. Plenty of guys who hit the joint never had anything on the outside. So what did they lose, really?

Freedom? How much of
that
do most people have, if you think
about it? In prison, they tell you what to do. Outside, they do the same thing. Some people, they hate being told what to do so much that they end up Inside. Again and again. Time after time.

What you
really
lose are choices. I’ve seen men stabbed over which TV program to watch.

You get to make
some
choices, but those are only between bad and worse. One of the heavies asks you to do something. Say no, and somebody in there gets told to kill you. Or at least fuck you up so bad that you end up wearing a diaper or breathing through a tube in your throat.

You could ask for PC. Or you could do what you got told to do. Either way, you’d be alive. Protected, even.

You’d also be nothing.

So, if you have to kill somebody, you might as well start with the guy who started your problem.

Having to sit and wait until I could meet with the cop again, that was okay. Truth is, I didn’t even want to go out—I wanted to be where it was safe. I had that apartment. With a TV where I could watch whatever channel I wanted to.

So I worked out. Watched TV. I didn’t cook, just brought home takeout. There were like a hundred different places for that—I never even had to go to the same one twice.

I drank a lot of water. The kind that comes in bottles.

I tried to figure out what the cop would do. Maybe I would have been better off with his partner, the black guy. He was closer to my age, and you could see that the rape stuff had made him angry, like he took it personal.

But it hadn’t been the black guy who’d figured out why my alibi for that rape was no good. That older cop, Tom—the other guy was Earl—Detective Tom Woods, he snapped it right away.

In my whole life, I never gave up a man I worked with. But the guy who owned that jewelry store, I didn’t know him. Never even met him.

I kept thinking about whether that would be enough to make it right. It’s hard when there’s no rules for something you have to do, because you still have to do it.

He was already on the bridge when I showed. Even in the heat, he was wearing an old-style raincoat, had to weigh a few pounds. Probably miked to the max. Which meant I’d have to dance around with every word out of my mouth. Even if the big cop had done the right thing, I knew his kind; if anything happened to the guy who’d actually raped that girl, I’d be good for that one.
Extra
good.

While I was still deciding how to play it, he got off first: “It’s no go.”

“What d’you mean?”

“That girl, she may have been … say, unsure of herself before. Even after the plea. But now it
has
to be you. In her mind, I mean.”

“But if I could just—”

“The court gave her a Permanent Order of Protection, okay? You go anywhere
near
her, and you’re going back in.”

“But if—”

“If you
contact
her, same thing. Or someone doing you a favor contacts her. She gets a letter, a phone call, a fucking e-mail … it’s gonna be on you.”

“But you
know
I didn’t do it.”

“And
I’m
going to tell her that?”

I looked at the river. People’s boats were going by. Mine was sinking.

“What if I knew something?”

“About the—?”

“Yeah.”

The big cop took a step back, like some invisible pair of hands had pushed him off.

“
Now
you’re going to give up—?”

“Come on.”

“Yeah. What would be the point? You were willing to do that, you could have skipped your last jolt altogether.”

“The statute of limitations, it’s run.”

“Meaning the other guys with you on that job haven’t, huh?
Could be true, for all I know. The owner, no way that little slime-ball’s leaving town—they’re going to keep his ass in court for years.”

“How could they—?”

“Not for the crime. The lawsuit. The insurance company’s not going down without a fight, not for that kind of scratch. That jeweler, he’s been living small. Claims he can’t make a living be cause that heist of yours wiped him out.”

“You don’t want him?”

“For what? Like
you
said, it’s too late for us to charge him with anything.”

“So why bother to talk to me at all?”

“You didn’t plan that job, Caine. No offense, but I never liked you for
that
part either.”

I looked out at the river.

“If we knew who put that one together, we could probably tie him to dozens of jobs.”

I shrugged.

“We couldn’t even arrest him. But we
could
put him out of business.”

“You said, putting the job together, that wasn’t me. You
that
sure?”

“Like I said, no offense, but … yeah, I’m that sure. Now,
that
guy’s name, that would be worth something. Maybe even something like me and my partner visiting that girl.…”

“Yeah. Only, not the same way you’d ‘visit’ the guy you
think
set up the job you
think
I was on.”

“Who said anything about rough stuff? I just mean, we go over and have a talk with the man. We explain what we know. Tell him we’ve got all kinds of warrants. And all the time in the world. So we sit on him, see who comes and goes. He doesn’t get hurt. But he does go out of business.”

“I get it.”

“So I talk to the girl, and you—”

“No.”

“How bad do you want this guy, Caine? You did
his
time, remember?”

“Not that bad.”

It was the cop’s turn to look out at the river. After a minute or so, he turned around.

“Don’t get me wrong on this, okay? I know who you are. You’re one of the bad guys. No hard feelings. Nothing personal. I’m not talking about any particular crime, I’m talking about who you are. But, for what it’s worth, I know you never raped that girl.”

“It’s worth a lot to me.”

We looked at each other for a little while, like we had nothing else to do.

He put out his hand. I took it. More like a grip than shaking hands, but …

I couldn’t be sure what he meant with that move. But I knew what it added up to: I shouldn’t ever call him again.

What the fuck is wrong with you?

Like a tape playing in my head. A loop, going around and around, with no
OFF
switch.

I held on to the railing for a long time after the cop left. Something solid.

That was me, a few minutes ago. Solid. A man you could count on.

It was all I had, that … I don’t know the word for it. More than a rep, it was who I was. Not a part of me, inside
all
of me. Something you couldn’t separate out.

Years ago, I remember, I heard about this guy. He hated the government, blamed the government for everything that wasn’t the way he thought it should be. I think his brother was on the run for blowing up abortion clinics or something like that.

This guy, he had one of those electric saws they use on lumber. Only, instead of a board, he put his arm down and pulled the saw right through it. Cut off his own hand. He even made a tape of himself doing it, so he could mail it to the FBI, show them how serious he was.

See? A piece of him got taken away, but he was still himself. More of himself, really.

He may have been a nutcase, but he didn’t give up anything. Me, a couple of minutes ago, I almost had.

That guy, he gave up his
own
hand, not somebody else’s.

And I’d just come so close to giving up somebody else’s that it scared me.

I had to get away from there.

All the way back to my apartment, I blocked it off. I thought about all kinds of things: girlfriends I’d had, fights I’d been in, stories Eddie used to tell on the yard. Anything, so long as it wasn’t about work. I didn’t want to think about that until I was someplace I could sit for a while.

I even thought about the time I got tricked into an arm-wrestling match with a guy who’d hurt his good hand in a car wreck. It was still in a cast, so we went left-handed. I didn’t find out until a couple of days later that the fucking hustler was a natural southpaw.

The guy who told me was Buddha, the wheelman. This place—just a dump of a bar where guys like me hung around when we weren’t working—it was never loud, never any fights. The reason for that was the same reason that it wasn’t a place where you’d bring a girl.

They had a table for arm-wrestling, with pegs and all. The guy who ran the place, Nathan, the deal was this: if you wanted to do something for money—they had darts, and a full-size pool table, even a place to play cards—Nathan was the ref. And you didn’t argue with Nathan. Not because he was such a hard guy, because that was the rules. Anyone who could walk into that place knew the rules.

I never did stuff like that for money. It’s just stupid. You win, then there’ll always be some other guy who wants to try you. And then another one after that. And if you lose, what good comes out of that?

This guy, he outweighed me by seventy-five pounds, easy. I
don’t make the same mistake about fat guys most people do. Some guys, they can power-lift like gorillas, they still stay fat. Fat-
looking
, I mean. No definition at all. Big round arms, thick around the gut. But strong. Real strong.

I’d never seen this guy before, and I could tell nobody else had, either. I could feel how bad people wanted me to take him on.

“How do you do it?” I asked.

That was fair—the table was there, all right, but nobody had ever seen me on it.

That’s when Buddha tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and followed him over to the table. Buddha showed me how it worked. When I thought I got it, I sat down.

“A little side-bet?” the fat guy asked.

“Not for me,” I told him. “You look like a pro at this.”

The fat guy grinned. One of his front teeth was chipped. He sat down across from me. Nathan came over and wrapped this strap around our wrists. My elbow was on some padded thing; the other guy’s, too. Buddha told me my elbow had to
stay
on that pad or I’d lose.

“When I let go,” Nathan said.

The fat guy jerked so hard I almost couldn’t hold him. But I did. I just stayed like that, same way you pull against the bars in prison. You can’t bend the bar, but it’s a great isometric.

The fat guy’s face got all red. A vein came out across his forehead. He called me some name, but I couldn’t make it out, what with everybody yelling at the same time.

Butterfly
, I thought to myself. In my mind, I was back in the gym, pulling the two pads together, over and over again. I’d gotten to the middle, where the pads meet, so I should release to set up another rep. But I couldn’t do that, so I made like I was doing a shoulder cross, pulling my right hand against the peg and my left toward my right shoulder.

To the fat guy,
I
was the prison bar. Maybe he was gassed from struggling, maybe he saw it coming, I don’t know. I just pulled. Smooth and slow, like you’re supposed to do, not jerking the weight like the fat guy had tried to do to me.