Feelers Read Free

choleric shriek of the landlord’s wife. It came from the gloom beyond his open apartment door. She was even more horrible than he, and he feared her like we fear landlords. She was so large she could not even leave their grotto. The woman’s howl made him cringe, and he eyed me sadly as he turned to retreat to his cave, as if to say, “You got that right, buster.”
    Olé!
I was out the door with my money, and an hour later the eight hundred thousand in the Scottish suitcase was safely sealed in a storage locker. As you can imagine, I was flying. I’d scored the money free and clear.
    I could write my own ticket. I could accelerate my plans for the future, to reclaim my birthright.
    But like Pizarro with the wealth of Peru at his feet, I would be lucky to escape with my skin. He did not.

CHAPTER
TWO
     
     
     
     
    I AM NOT A FORTUNE-TELLER , but if I were a gypsy, I might have foreseen what was happening thirty miles up the Hudson River at a state correctional facility. The date and facts are a matter of record, and as we know records make a dull story, and sometimes no story at all, really just a list of dates and times. I can only imagine the full series of events based on the facts as I know them now. But I will be brutally honest, Father Gomez: This is what happened in my life, my explanation, my confession, so I will paint you the full picture of Danny Kessel. Of what happened. Of how it all started.
    Danny was a model prisoner. In fact, they called him Mr. Manners. When the guards opened his cell for him to go in or out, he said thank you. When they served him slop in the dining facility, he said thank you. When he slid a shiv into the neck of a fellow prisoner who stole his cigarettes, he said sorry. A man has to do unspeakable things to survive in prison, to position himself so that he is not abused. Danny proved to be talented with a shiv—you know, a slim homemade dagger—and he became a hired killer. He had a reputation for being quick,decisive, unpredictable, and precise. And, of course, deceptively polite.
    Yes, they have hit men in prison, too. Sometimes a prisoner is being tormented by another and wishes to wreak vengeance. Sometimes a gang leader is sent to solitary and needs someone outside the gang to punish the prisoner who sent him there.
    Yet Danny did not start out as what people think of as a hardened criminal. He was the driver for an armored car heist. He and four others knocked over an Atlas Security truck collecting cash from supermarkets in Queens. They got away, too, but of course made mistakes and the cops came and shot them all up in a gun battle on the Coney Island boardwalk.
    All except Mr. Manners.
    They sent him away for fifteen years, and he was smart enough to claim he didn’t know where the money was. I say “smart” because he did know where the money was, and the others who did were all dead. No sense in losing fifteen years of your life for nothing, is there?
    Even as I was driving the Scottish suitcase full of money to the storage locker, this darkly handsome man was being led through the drab institutional hallways to the place where they process parolees. See, they did not know the bad but polite things he had done so expertly with his shiv. Only the other prisoners knew. Of course, Danny knew, and if you looked closely you could see it in his cold blue eyes. The same eyes that from the prison bus windows scanned all the strange SUVs on the highway, the billboards for Web sites, ads for cell phones, and fast food chains he had never heard of. You would not have known he was just a little bit afraid to be out. You would not have known when he stepped from the bus and entered the subwaythat he was confused by the fare card machine—he still had some tokens that were now worthless. He just walked right back out of the subway and began walking, eyeing police cars as though they might screech up alongside, throw him in the back, and take him back to Sing Sing. They would