him I didn’t wash my hands after I used the toilet or something. This was the same guy who was always telling me I had great genetics but I’d need some help if I ever wanted to get really big.
I didn’t go back to that gym.
Fuck it. Wasn’t like I was friends with anyone there or anything. I like working out by myself more, anyway.
I guess it depends on what you want it for. These guys, they were more worried about how good a suit of armor looked than how good it worked. Not me.
People think the worst thing about being locked up is that you can’t have the things you had on the outside. But that’s not it. Plenty of guys who hit the joint never had anything on the outside. So what did they lose, really?
Freedom? How much of that do most people have, if you think about it? In prison, they tell you what to do. Outside, they do the same thing. Some people, they hate being told what to do so much that they end up Inside. Again and again. Time after time.
What you really lose are choices. I’ve seen men stabbed over which TV program to watch.
You get to make some choices, but those are only between bad and worse. One of the heavies asks you to do something. Say no, and somebody in there gets told to kill you. Or at least fuck you up so bad that you end up wearing a diaper or breathing through a tube in your throat.
You could ask for PC. Or you could do what you got told to do. Either way, you’d be alive. Protected, even.
You’d also be nothing.
So, if you have to kill somebody, you might as well start with the guy who started your problem.
Having to sit and wait until I could meet with the cop again, that was okay. Truth is, I didn’t even want to go out—I wanted to be where it was safe. I had that apartment. With a TV where I could watch whatever channel I wanted to.
So I worked out. Watched TV. I didn’t cook, just brought home takeout. There were like a hundred different places for that—I never even had to go to the same one twice.
I drank a lot of water. The kind that comes in bottles.
I tried to figure out what the cop would do. Maybe I would have been better off with his partner, the black guy. He was closer to my age, and you could see that the rape stuff had made him angry, like he took it personal.
But it hadn’t been the black guy who’d figured out why my alibi for that rape was no good. That older cop, Tom—the other guy was Earl—Detective Tom Woods, he snapped it right away.
In my whole life, I never gave up a man I worked with. But the guy who owned that jewelry store, I didn’t know him. Never even met him.
I kept thinking about whether that would be enough to make it right. It’s hard when there’s no rules for something you have to do, because you still have to do it.
He was already on the bridge when I showed. Even in the heat, he was wearing an old-style raincoat, had to weigh a few pounds. Probably miked to the max. Which meant I’d have to dance around with every word out of my mouth. Even if the big cop had done the right thing, I knew his kind; if anything happened to the guy who’d actually raped that girl, I’d be good for that one. Extra good.
While I was still deciding how to play it, he got off first: “It’s no go.”
“What d’you mean?”
“That girl, she may have been … say, unsure of herself before. Even after the plea. But now it has to be you. In her mind, I mean.”
“But if I could just—”
“The court gave her a Permanent Order of Protection, okay? You go anywhere near her, and you’re going back in.”
“But if—”
“If you contact her, same thing. Or someone doing you a favor contacts her. She gets a letter, a phone call, a fucking e-mail … it’s gonna be on you.”
“But you know I didn’t do it.”
“And I’m going to tell her that?”
I looked at the river. People’s boats were going by. Mine was sinking.
“What if I knew something?”
“About the—?”
“Yeah.”
The big cop took a step back, like some invisible pair of hands had pushed him off.