Blackjack Read Free Page A

heart,
verdado?
”
    “Sí, ese.”
The three acolytes spoke as one.
    “Inside, just being there, you get old,” their leader continued. “If you lucky. Out here, bang-bang! You live or you die. But in there, it is twenty-four/seven pain.”
    “I been Inside—” the youth with the headband started to speak.
    “I know you have,
hermano
,” the leader said. Although still young, he had learned that a vital part of his role was to provide support and encouragement. “I ain’t downing you. But the Walls, it ain’t like the kiddie camps. Only one game gets played in the Man’s House. War. Race war. And there ain’t no neutral ground. No place to get out the way.
    “Out here, we fight among ourselves. Like fools, perhaps. But that is how it has always been. But in there, it does not matter—even united, we would never be strongenough. This ain’t the West Coast, you feel me? It ain’t even Chicago. So we outnumbered, very bad. Downstate, you look around, you see nothing but wrong colors.
Blancos y negros
. Nazis and Zulus. How you gonna ever be safe between those
psicópatas?
They try and wolf-pack you on the way back from Commissary, you expect that, no? So you never go to that window alone. But how can you protect yourself when you get jammed right in your own cell? Some of them, they so
loco
they even take you out standing on the mess line.
    “And the yard … 
pantano de la muerte!
They do their drive-bys walking! When that black-white thing gets hopping, even if we ever
could
outnumber them, there ain’t no place for us but the middle—we still too busy fighting each other to see the truth. And you know what happens if you get caught in the middle:
crunch!
    “Body counts, that’s like status for some of them maniacs, specially those Nazis. They already under a load of Life Withouts, so there’s nothing to hold them in check. Even Ad Seg—fancy name they use for Solitary—that’s always all full up, so what those psychos got to lose, a little yard time?
    “No place to stash them
all
, so the COs just let them cruise around and do their thing. Which is making other people dead. They got, like,
contests
, man. One Nazi dude I heard about when I was in there, he had, like, thirteen kills. Confirmed kills.”
    A micron-thin shadow rippled faintly inside the elaborately painted panel on the hood of the low-rider. As in another jungle, on another continent, its presence was undetected.
    If any of the group had been able to tune in to that throbbing shadow, they would have heard a faint whisper:
    “Asesinatos confirmados.”
    From a rooftop several blocks away, a shape similar to thatwhich had emerged from the acacia tree formed itself from a pile of debris.
    Suddenly, the girl twitched as if from a cold chill, her mother-to-be senses picking up … something. The leader patted her shoulder. “Don’t worry,
mi amor
. I am here. With me, you
always
be safe.”
    The girl nodded as if reassured, but her hands remained clasped defensively across her stomach.
    From the shadow, another one-word sentence, now in an Aztec language no longer spoken anywhere on earth. Translated, it would have been:
    “Stay.”
    Unaware of his reprieve, the leader continued his lecture.
    “Out here, a man don’t be talking about who he took out, but it gets
known
. We not
Los Peligrosos
for nothing. You want to carry the brand, you got to take that
stand
, hear me?”
    Unnoticed by all, the infamous “dead man’s hand”—aces and eights—depicted on the white wall behind them incorrectly as a full house—had morphed: all the cards were now arranged correctly, but as duplicates, not pairs: the aces and eights, all in hearts.

    THE INTERIOR was a scaled-down version of a Pentagon war room: maps, charts, and graphs, blinking computer terminals, two long conference tables, angled so they formed a V, at the apex of which was a giant-screen LED monitor. On one side of the monitor was a series of Insta-Graph meters; on the