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“I didn’t open it ’cause Anton give it to me an’ I was only gonna get paid when I got back.”

“That’s all?”

“Why you wanna know anyway? Anton an’ Yollo is dead and all the businesses they had is ovah.”

“That was a fresh body in the tomb,” I said. “It couldn’t have been there more than a few days or so. Somebody who knew the dead cops’ business used it to bury that woman.”

“Maybe I’ll remember more later,” Burns speculated. “You know, after I shoot up and then sleep, sometimes in my dreams I put things together that were far apart before.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. If you remember something Hester has my number.”

“Maybe we could make some kinda deal?”

“Maybe…if you remember something I need.”

We stood there a moment or two in silence.

“You gonna get Manny outta that prison?” Burns asked.

“One way or another.” I didn’t know what the words meant—not yet.

The junkie took it as his cue to leave.

I stood there on the corner. It was nearly 3:00 a.m. The impact of the mass-murder gravesite manifested as a shudder in my chest and forearms.

30.

I know I slept because all night long I heard that unnamed prisoner threaten to rape and murder my wife and child. I felt the dank coldness and the crawling, hairy legs of insects over my skin. Men cried out in pain and madness, and there was the continual sound of tramping feet: men pacing in cells only two and a half steps in length.

None of this could have been real because, even though I was in an underground cell, I was not anywhere near the sounds of suffering. There were no rats keening for love or blood, or footsteps destined for nowhere.

I would have done better staying awake and planning my next move.

I woke up exhausted, with no appetite and little hope. But I knew what I had to do next. I knew where to go and how to get there.

My first destination was Ray Ray Wanamaker and Company on the south side of Central Park at 11:45 a.m.

Ray Ray’s brother, Brill Wanamaker, was a bus driver for the city of New York. He worked hard and had many commendations from the city, his union, and private commuter organizations that judge public transportation and those who deliver it.

Brill was a bastion of good, but his brother, Ray Ray, was just bad. His first stint in prison was for drug dealing. His second conviction was for attempted murder, and his final period of incarceration was for stealing an ambulance; no one, not even Ray Ray, it seemed, could figure out why he stole that emergency vehicle. When he was in for the third time, Brill decided to save him. He bought a fleet of five defunct buses and worked diligently rebuilding them while Ray Ray languished in Attica.

Upon the career criminal’s release, his brother presented him with a ready-made business that would ferry family and loved ones directly to the prisons where their blood, kinfolk, and friends were interned.

Love is a powerful tool. I believe that Ray Ray rehabilitated not because he had a good-paying business but because of the idea that his brother worked all those years just for him.

Ray Ray got a license to drive a bus, hired a staff of mainly ex-cons, and worked seven days a week transporting spouses, family members, and other lovers to see their unlucky kinsmen for a minimal price.

I took off my fake facial hair, donned a yellow hoodie, and made my way to the makeshift bus stop that the NYPD had been ordered to let operate so as not to incur political rancor from proponents for prisoner rights.

Most of Ray Ray’s clients, to most prisons, were women and children, mothers and now and then a brother or father. But Bedford Hills Correctional Facility was the only maximum-security female prison in the New York penal system. So there were a good number of husbands and boyfriends sprinkled in among mothers, grandmothers, grown daughters, and children. When I climbed up into the entry well of the old-time bus I had my $17.50 in hand, ready to pay and ride in relative anonymity.

“Joe?” the driver said.

“Lenny.”

“You got somebody at Bedford?”

“Private now. There’s someone I need to talk to.”