“With what?” I tried to keep my voice light and failed miserably.
Lon closed his office door, and as he turned to me, there was a kindness on his face I hadn’t expected. I almost tripped over the chair in front of his desk as I collapsed onto it. Tiredness that hadn’t been chased away by my morning coffee swamped me. He went around his desk and took his time sitting. He leaned forward, and I held my breath.
“Is it money trouble? Is that why you’re here all the time? Everyone’s talking about the fact that you amped up your availability. You doin’ all right?” He took his glasses off and hooked one of the arms into the pocket on his shirt.
Dropping my head to the back of the chair for a second, I laughed. It was a chore to straighten up and look at him again. “Yeah, I’m okay. Um”—I scrambled mentally—“no issues. I just want to fix up the house this summer. Socking all that overtime cash away in savings.” I awkwardly jammed a hand into my coat pocket and attempted to appear at ease. I was a terrible liar, which was why I rarely did it.
“You sure?” Lon studied me, and his lips thinned as he sniffled and glared around the room. Neither one of us really did the feelings dance at work. Maybe he wasn’t any more comfortable than I was with this conversation.
“Yeah.”
He sighed and leaned back against his chair. “I got….” He turned and spread out a few papers across his desk. “Four requests between three guards over the last week to move Tatum Black. What is going on? I’ve told you guys and told you guys it isn’t happening.”
Tension twisted my gut. Here we go. “Yeah. He’s a menace. He takes this prison from a pain in the ass to scary, and everyone damned well knows it. We’re medium here. Half the time we run like min. We’re not supposed to have assholes like him, and he stirs up the sewer rats everywhere he goes. Makes them braver.” I sucked in a deep breath because that was true and had been ever since Black was transferred here from max.
They’d claimed it was good behavior and overcrowding that prompted the move, but I had to wonder if there had been something more going on there. Maybe he’d had too many of his rats on the raft with him there. He’d created a power base and had to go. But the hell of it was, no one would ever say. The fact that we struggled to get him the fuck out of here spoke volumes on its own.
“Keep doing your best like you always do.” Lon glanced back at his desktop and let out a little sigh. “You and Bond have both requested a few things this week, and half of them have to do with Peter Gaffin. Why?”
I hated to say it because I knew how it would wound Peter’s pride if he heard such a thing, but I gave Lon my best smile. “He’s in a wheelchair. He can barely function. I know we try to stick the elderly in the medical dorms, but he really does belong there. Peter needs more looking after than I can reasonably do, especially since you gave me Black.”
Lon’s mouth twisted into a sad frown. “I want to accommodate you, ’specially since we moved Black to E.” I noticed Lon said he wanted to help me and not Peter, and that already had my blood boiling. “But we’re getting a busload in today, and two men need room in the medical dorms. We have precisely zero spots and we’re going to have to shove them in. He’s going to have to make do in the handicapped cell. He was damned lucky to get that.”
Closing my eyes for a second, I nodded. “Okay, sir. Need anything else?”
Lon dragged another piece of carbon-copy paper toward himself. “Tell me about this request to have Rolánd moved permanently to the maintenance garage out of the kitchen. Is he that good out there?”
We chatted for far longer than I wanted, but there was no getting away from Lon when he was in the mood to bullshit, and we’d run through every request I’d made, and what kind of fishing lure he was planning on using this weekend—twice, because he loved to fish—before I could get out of there and start my day. I’d barely stepped foot into the hallway when I ran into a con standing outside Lon’s office, which was weird. The guy’s name wouldn’t come to me, but I thought it was something like Jacobs. People talked to Lon sometimes when they were scheduled for a release interview, but he hadn’t acted like he was expecting anyone.
“You need something?” I asked.
“No.” The man shook his head and skittered away from me down along the hall, rushing off. He was also wearing the gray jumpsuit, something most of the guys avoided, since T-shirts and sweats were allowed here also. The entire encounter was bizarre enough that the tiny hairs on the back of my neck rose. Something seemed to be in the air, and I was on alert as I moved off.
Sometimes there were just days where you knew something would go wrong in a prison. Everyone was itchier and twitchier. The day we’d had a bomb scare had been like that. All day everyone in the entire prison had been wound tighter than a nut waiting to crack. I got in the guard station and stowed my coat, and since nothing in my lunch needed to be refrigerated, I dumped it in a locker in there to save myself a trip.
Burnsdale wasn’t in until later, so I took a minute to glance through the screens and try to find the con who’d run from me, but the mess hall was open by now, and I’d missed the cells opening. There were men everywhere. I panicked until I found Peter on one of the cameras, determinedly pushing himself along with his new friend Laken at his side, talking up a storm. The kid was in D, but every morning he shot awake and out of his cell to E.
Peter had told me Laken was annoying, but he hadn’t told the kid to go fuck himself yet, and I had a feeling he wouldn’t. I’d snooped on him. He was young, only eighteen, and in for petty breaking and entering. He’d be out soon. I’d be jealous, but the way Peter talked about him was more fond than interested. Almost paternal. I sighed as I watched them longer than I should have. We hadn’t really gotten much of a chance for lengthy chats after that night in the medical room, just short snippets of conversation, and I worried about him. And more importantly, I was still curious. Everywhere he turned, mysteries cropped up around him like daisies.
Peter could be a real fucker when he was in the mood to do it. Why did that kid like him? Laken casually slapped the back of his hand to Peter’s arm, and I worked out as they turned down a hallway that they were probably on their way to Brandon’s classroom. Was Laken the same as me, pulled in by that surliness that seemed almost brittle? Why did Peter tolerate him, when I knew for a fact he had a temper sometimes? Although I had to admit, in the short time he’d been here, I hadn’t seen much true anger since those first few days.
Someone had put money on Peter’s commissary account, too. Another mystery. I couldn’t get in to see who had done it and hadn’t wanted to ask. The last time I’d been in Peter’s cell, he had a plastic bucket with soap, a toothbrush, and toothpaste in it. That meant someone on the outside must be worried about him.
And it burned my ass that I hadn’t taken care of him. I’d thought about it but was worried about the money coming out of my account and would have had to ask someone else to do it.
But I knew exactly why else I wanted to know everything about him. When he smiled, he flashed teeth that weren’t quite straight and curved in a little—imperfect perfection. His face lit up. And I loved the way he filled out his clothes. I smiled as I watched him turn to say something to Laken that had the kid laughing.
Shrugging away the lingering oddness from the incident outside of Lon’s office, I checked my gear and ran through what I needed to get locked in for the day. I’d been neglecting to check up on the maintenance garage, and I sometimes liked to pop over to the fleet garage to say hi to the guys there and lend a hand. Now that it seemed like the routine of prison was taking over for Peter—and maybe Black was developing some common sense that didn’t have to do with where to plant his dick—I left to take care of those things.
The sense of something being off trailed me everywhere I went, however. Each time I tried to figure out what was bothering me, I couldn’t. But I was beginning to feel spied on. Hour by hour, when I turned around, someone was behind me, which in a prison this size wasn’t unusual, but they were people who I knew hung around Black or could probably be scared into doing things by him. Weak men who would be easy enough to coerce. I growled to myself and kept my eyes open.
More than once, I circled around to look in on the classroom and check that Peter was where he should be because I was worried. About the third time I peeked in the door, Brandon gave me a head tilt, and I shook my head at him before I went about my business. I took my lunch early, exhausted from the morning and all my running around all over hell and back, and leaned my head against a wall after I ate the sandwich I’d brought.
* * *
“Hey, hello, Greene?”
I snapped awake, and Wettekin stood over me, smiling from ear to ear. His red hair was plastered to his forehead, and there was a shiner developing on his right eye that made him seem dangerous. “Oh, fuck. Hey.”
