CHAPTER 25

Because You’ve Got To Hope, or The Long Way Around

RAY left the law library with three books under his arm, and a file sandwiched between them. It had been a long day, his first back in the population. Voices were too loud, smells too sharp, as if his senses had been honed through deprivation. He walked slowly, tapping his fingers on his leg and thinking about tomorrow. If his case were reopened, as everyone expected, it would be big news. All eyes would be on Graterford. The warden understood the ramifications and had given Ray special permission to be in the law library at this hour. 

CO Munsing hadn’t been too happy to get baby-sitting detail and he’d let Ray know it. Ten minutes after they’d arrived at the library, Munchy said, “Got to take a whiz, be right back.” He’d wagged a stubby finger at Ray. “And don’t get no ideas.” 

It hadn’t taken Ray long to find the books he needed, or the files. He sat at the table and waited for Munchy. When he awoke with his head on the cool laminate, he figured, Fuck him. I’m going back to the block. Isn’t like they don’t know where to find me.

There’s something about the way your body works when it’s tired. Like mind and body go on automatic pilot, a kind of sleepy-headed funk. Ray was in this kind of funk when he focused his eyes on the men at the end of the long corridor. “Shit.” 

He’d taken the day route. Mornings and afternoons these halls were busy with COs and volunteers, safely occupied and fully monitored. But after five, you’d be a fool to come down here alone. He should have gone the long way around. He would have if he’d been thinking straight. Now he’d come too far to go back. 

The boys who ran this strip stood less than twenty-five feet away, watching him. They were dark, but not black enough to be part of the gang that ran the block. Their skin had a soft mocha hue, making them light enough to ‘pass’ in the free world, had they tried. They might have had a chance at a different kind of life had they sold out on their skin, looked deeper into their heritage. Instead they went the other way. 

Ray knew their kind. He thought of several ways to play it—lost, confused, crazy, mad, belligerent, friendly, tough, subservient. It all depended on them. He checked the hall cameras, looked back at the men, three of them now. One pointed in his direction. 

Ray kept walking, knowing it would be worse if he turned and ran, not even sure he had the energy to run. 

Fifteen feet away, one of them called, “Law dawg!” 

Ray knew Skunk. He bobbed his head in the guy’s direction, moved the books and files across his chest.

“What you got for me, Brother?”

“Just some books, Skunk.” Ray shrugged, “Mostly bullshit, you know?”

“Books?’ Skunk elbowed his pudgy pal. “We like books, don’t we?” 

They looked like poorly drawn cartoon characters, cardboard cutouts propped in the doorway and dressed in baggy Graterford browns. Skunk’s hair was a closely trimmed Mohawk, painted white and powdered. It accented his round head and tiny ears. Ray thought the pudgy one was the kid they called Nester. He had a habit of squirreling things away in his cell, in his nose, in his ass. Nester’s head was shaved in a crooked swirl of colors. They started behind his right ear and encircled his conical head, ending in a purple Kool-Aid-dyed circle on the crown. Ray got a faint whiff of grape when the kid approached.

“Let me see that, Law dawg.” Nester held out a beefy hand, fingertips rainbow-stained.

“Can’t do that, man.” Ray adjusted his grip on the books and glanced over to see that the third con had slipped away. Noises came from the room behind Skunk, a string of commercials that meant nothing behind these walls: a guy talking about the pleasures of driving a luxury car, a child excited about learning to read, a woman confessing her allergies to an audience more interested in the size of her breasts.

Ray tipped his chin to Skunk, “How did that plea work out? You gonna get some time off?” 

Skunk shook his head, his eyes on the floor. When he looked up, he seemed to be weighing something in his mind. He pushed off the wall, approached Ray and fixed his gaze just above Ray’s head as if he were talking to someone behind him, someone tall. Skunk tapped the law books with a long dirty fingernail and accented each word, “You...lied...to...me.” 

Ray said, “What do you mean?”

The missing guy took him from behind, locked his arms in a vise-like grip. Books and files fell to the floor. Ray lunged forward trying to break the grasp. He felt something rip in his shoulder. Pain shot down his arm. Skunk stepped out of the range of Ray’s flailing body and kicking legs and gave Nester the nod. Nester waited for the big guy to control Ray’s legs and came in low, like a junkyard dog. 

Ray screamed as the shank pierced his skin. Nester looked into his eyes as he drove the sharpened spoon under Ray’s rib cage. The thrust forced Ray up on his toes. Nester twisted the crude weapon until it broke then pulled back, the dull, bent bowl of a soupspoon in his bloody fist. 

Ray felt the pain behind his right eye, like a flashcube spinning and burning on an old camera. Pop. Sizzle. 

Then it was over. 

Ray didn’t feel himself falling, but knew he was on the floor. He had nothing left but words—syllables that weren’t strong enough and vowels that bled. He lay there, moaning in a language only pain understands.

A shout from the end of the hallway was like a switch that sent the three men scurrying. Ray saw rapidly approaching black shoes and heard someone say, “Dear Jesus,” from very far away.

She fell, unafraid. Maria Rosarita Conchetta had made atonement, paid in full. She was dead before her robed body smashed onto the empty metal cage and crushed the sign that asked passers-by to free the innocent creatures and give from their heart. 

In the hotel room fifteen floors above, glass tinkled out of the window frame, joining the fragments on the carpet below. Three cops stood over Deluca. One knelt, put two fingers to the jugular then shook his head, his lips in a tight line.

Paris pushed past the news camera and approached the body of Fast Eddie Deluca, Esquire. 

“Is he dead?”

The kneeling cop stood. “Yes, Ma’am.” He grabbed her elbow as she turned white, then called to another cop, “Porter!” 

They sat her in a low suede chair facing the open bathroom door. A gust of wind from the broken window rustled a paper soap wrapper on the floor, pushing it up against the wall. She closed her eyes, felt this same breeze brush the back of her neck and shivered from the tickle of air and the siren screams of the approaching ambulance. 

Halfway across the state, fire companies from Third Mountain, Peters Mountain and the Susquehanna Reserve Paramedic Squad answered the call. There were helicopters and Humvees, TV news vans and a scrappy group of Vegetarian Environmentalists from New Buffalo who passed a jug of carrot juice and chanted, “Woods and bombs don’t mix, no! Woods and bombs don’t mix!”

Though the night air was warm, Sailor took the blanket the EMT offered. She held it around her shoulders with one hand and rubbed her head with the other. The bump felt like a quail egg.

As her hearing came back, she watched Banning with the reporters and the cops. He looked good, younger somehow, confident again. He had protected Reilly and Sailor from the verbal barrage and acted as their attorney during the police questioning. Now he stood in front of three cameras giving a concise yet veiled statement. He would come out of this fine, better than before. If that were possible.

Sailor was beginning to think nothing was impossible, as if they were caught up in a Hollywood production. The director would call “Cut!” any minute and the backdrop of woods, trees and smoldering fires would be rolled away and stored in a warehouse in Lomita while a clean-up crew swept away the undergrowth to reveal a cracked concrete floor and a bunch of trick wires.

But when the uniformed men lifted black-bagged bodies into an ambulance without lights and flew Berger off the mountain in a helicopter, there was no denying it was real. 

Reilly sat beside her. “I was just talking to the city reporters and there’s something you should know. Deluca’s dead.”

Sailor wrapped the blanket tighter around as she fought back tears. “What happened?” 

Reilly told her what he knew. How Banning had asked Maria to come to Philly and give testimony, tell the whole story of what happened twenty-four years ago. How Paris offered to help, wanting to bring down Montgomery. How Deluca sung like a canary before he shot Maria Chetta with a gun that backfired and killed him too. How it all took place in a swanky hotel room on live TV.

Then there was Gallo. 

Sailor held up a hand and shook her head. “Wait.” How had something so simple gotten so out of hand? All she’d intended to do was free a wrongfully convicted man. “Shit! The meeting with the judge. Did you get my message?” 

But the way Reilly was looking at her said it all. He had no idea what she was talking about. “Doesn’t matter,” she whispered, “we’ll never make it. I’m sorry, Ray.” 

Sailor stood, dropped the blanket and began walking, then stopped. She didn’t know where to go. 

She turned around and Reilly opened his arms. Sailor began crying and he came to her and held her, wrapping his arms around her and closing out the world. 

After a while she said, “Reilly?”

“Hmm?”

“What the hell am I doing?”

“Shh.”

“God, this is so messed up, you know?”

“I know.” Reilly lifted Sailor’s chin, stroked the tears from her cheeks with his thumb then kissed her tenderly. “It’s supposed to be messed up. That’s how real life is.”