in here after only two days. She’d busted the woman’s face. The fact that she’d avoided solitary or time tacked on had not endeared Mace to her fellow inmates. They simply tagged her as a privileged bitch, and that was about as bad as it could get in a place where your cell rep defined every right you had or didn’t have. Nearly two years later she was still standing, but she wasn’t exactly sure how.
She hustled on, every minute now precious, as she counted down her time to freedom, with both anticipation and dread, because on this side of the wall nothing was guaranteed except misery.
CHAPTER 3
A FEW MINUTES LATER a wet-haired Mace walked through the chow line and received her basic food groups so crapped and fatted up that in any other place—except possibly high school cafeterias and airline coach class—they would be deemed inedible. She swallowed enough of the garbage to keep from passing out from hunger and rose from her seat to throw the rest away. As she passed by one table a drumstick of a calf shot out and she fell over it, her tray clattering away, the goop on it painting the floor a nice greenish brown. Up and down the perimeter line, guards tensed. The inmate who’d done the tripping, a prisoner named Juanita, glanced down as Mace slowly got to her feet.
“You a clumsy bitch,” said Juanita. She looked at her crew who sat all around the queen bee Juanita had become in here. “Ain’t she a clumsy bitch?”
Every member of Juanita’s crew agreed Mace was the clumsiest bitch ever born.
Juanita carried two-hundred-and-fifty-plus pounds on a wide six-foot frame, with each hip the size and shape of a long-haul truck’s mud flap. Mace was five-six, about one-fifteen. On the surface Juanita was soft, mushy; Mace was as hard as the steel doors that kept all the bad girls inside this place. Yet Juanita could still crush her. She’d landed here after a sweetheart plea deal for murder in the second in which her tools had included a tire iron, a Bic lighter, and lots of accelerant.
It was said that she liked this place much better than she ever had her world on the outside. In here Juanita was queen bee. Out there she was just another GED-less fat chick to punch the hell out of, courier drugs and guns through, or make babies with before the man abandoned her. Outside prison Mace had known a thousand Juanitas. She was doomed from the moment she’d tumbled from the womb.
That might have explained why Juanita had done enough crazy stuff inside here, including two aggravated assaults and a weapons and drugs bust, to tack twelve more years onto her original sentence. At that rate the woman would be here until they hauled her carcass out and slipped it into a potter’s field somewhere. Her fat and bones would soon fertilize the earth and no one would either care or remember her.
However, that left the living woman with nothing to lose, and that’s precisely what made her so dangerous, because it carved normal societal inhibitors right out of her brain pattern. That one factor turned mush to titanium. No matter how many reps or laps Mace did, she could never match what Juanita had. Mace still had compassion, still had remorse. Juanita no longer had either, if she ever did.
Mace held the fork ready. Her gaze drifted for a moment to Juanita’s wide hand planted flat on the table, orange nail polish muted against her skin that was obscured only by a tattoo of what looked to be a spider. An obvious target, the hand.
Not tonight. I already two-stepped with Beer Belly. I’m not dancing with you too.
Mace kept walking and slid her tray and utensils into the dirty bin.
Only as she was leaving did she glance over at Juanita, to find the woman still watching her. Keeping her gaze dead on Mace, Juanita whispered something to one of her crew, a gangly lily white named Rose. Rose was in here for nearly decapitating her husband’s sexy plaything in a bar restroom using the gutting knife hubby kept for his fish catches. Mace had heard that the husband hadn’t come to Rose’s trial, but only because he was so upset she’d ruined his best blade. It was definitely more the stuff of Jerry Springer retro than Oprah couch chatter.
Mace watched as Rose nodded and grinned, showing the nineteen teeth she had remaining in her gaping