though."
"Huh?" Joe's head buzzed.
"His watch," Danny said. "He didn't have it. Never knew him to - "
"I got it," Joe said. "He gave it to me. In case I run into trouble. You know, in here."
"So you've got it."
"I got it," he said, the lie burning his stomach. He saw Maso's hand closing over the watch and he wanted to beat his own head against concrete until he stove it in.
"Good," Danny said. "That's good."
"It's not," Joe said. "It's shit. But it's about the size of things now."
Neither of them spoke for a few moments. A factory whistle blew distantly from the other side of the walls.
Danny said, "You know where I can find Con?"
Joe nodded. "He's at the Abbotsford."
"The blind school? What's he doing there?"
"Lives there," Joe said. "He just woke up one day and quit on everything."
"Well," Danny said, "that kinda injury could make anyone bitter."
"He was bitter long before the injury," Joe said.
Danny shrugged in agreement and they sat in silence for a minute.
Joe said, "Where was he when you found him?"
"Where do you think?" Danny dropped his cigarette to the floor and stepped on it, the smoke leaving his mouth from under the curl in his upper lip. "Out back, sitting in that chair on the porch, you know? Looking out at his . . ." Danny lowered his head and waved at the air.
"Garden," Joe said.
Chapter Nine
As the Old Man Goes
Even in prison, news of the outside world trickled in. That year all the sports talk concerned the New York Yankees and their Murderers' Row of Combs, Koenig, Ruth, Gehrig, Meusel, and Lazzeri. Ruth alone hit a mind-boggling sixty home runs, and the other five hitters were so dominant that the only question left was by how humiliating a margin they'd sweep the Pirates in the World Series.
Joe, a walking encyclopedia of baseball, would have loved to see this team play because he knew their like might never come around again. And yet his time in Charlestown had also instilled in him a reactionary contempt for anyone who would call a group of ballplayers Murderers' Row.
You want a Murderers' Row, he thought that evening just after dusk, I'm walking it. The entrance to the walkway along the top of the prison wall was on the other side of a door at the end of F Block on the uppermost tier of North Wing. It was impossible to reach that door unobserved. A man couldn't even reach the tier without going through three separate gates. Once he did, he faced an empty tier. Even in a prison as overcrowded as this, they kept the twelve cells there empty and cleaner than a church font before a baptism.
As Joe walked along the tier now, he saw how they kept it so clean - each cell was being mopped by a convict trustee. The high windows in the cells, identical to the window in his own, revealed a square of sky. The squares were all a blue so dark it was nearly black, which left Joe to wonder how much the moppers could see in those cells. All the light was on the corridor. Maybe the guards would provide lanterns when dusk became night in a matter of minutes.
But there were no guards. Just the one leading him down the tier, the one who'd led him to and from the visiting room, the one who walked too fast, which would get him into trouble someday because the objective was to keep the convict ahead of you. If you got ahead of the convict, he could get up to all sorts of nefarious things, which is how Joe had moved the shank from his wrist to his butt five minutes ago. He wished he'd practiced it, though. Trying to walk with clenched ass cheeks and appear natural was no easy thing.
But where were the other guards? On nights when Maso walked the wall, they kept their presence light up here; it wasn't like every guard was on the Pescatore payroll, though those who weren't would never go pigeon on those who were. But Joe glanced around as they continued along the tier and confirmed what he'd feared - there were no guards up here right now. And then he got a close look at the inmates cleaning the cells:
Murderers' Row, indeed.
Basil Chigis's pointy head tipped him off. Not even the prison-issue watch cap could disguise it. Basil pushed a mop in the seventh cell on the tier. The foul-smelling