Pain Killers Read Online Free Page B

white hair down his back ducked into the mouth of a low hut and disappeared. “Warden lets ’em have their own sweat lodge.”
    A young Native American, hair in braided pigtails down his back, squatted on a wooden bench, hands on his knees, staring back at me with no expression.
    “Say one thing for the red man,” said Rincin, “there ain’t a lot of white boys I’d want to strip down to my skivvies and sit in the dark with.”
    “You ever go in there, look for contraband?”
    I imagined the pigtailed man had somehow read my lips and felt his accusing eyes on me. Was there such a thing as too paranoid in prison?
    Rincin shook his head. “You’ve seen too many of them jailhouse shows. ’Round here we call ’em ‘prison porn.’”
    “What does that make you guys? Fluffers?”
    For a second Rincin didn’t reply. Even though his grin remained intact, I could see him thinking:
If an inmate doesn’t do it, I’m going to shank this asshole myself.
    Then, even before the buzzer, everybody in the yard dropped to the ground. I started to hit the dirt and Rincin grabbed me. Yanked me back up by the shoulder. He wasn’t gentle. “Dumbest fucking thing you can do is get on the ground. You stay on your feet, standing up, the tower shooter knows you’re one of us.”
    Eager to move on, I pointed across the field, in front of the bleachers, where a team of paramedics was trying to pluck a thrashing orange jumpsuit off the ground onto a gurney. “What happened to him?”
    Rincin grabbed my hand and pulled it down. “Don’t ever point in prison.”
    “Sorry,” I said.
    “No biggie.” Rincin looked back at the paramedics, now carrying the stricken inmate off on a stretcher. “Guy’s probably a flopper. In this sun, some boys just keel over and have seizures.” He turned back to me, gripped my shoulder and wagged a finger at me. “Crank and sun don’t mix! Tell your kids!”
    “Words to live by,” I said.
    “Better believe it…. The car’s right over here.”
    I followed Rincin down a steep row of wooden stairs to a dusty parking lot. He held out his key and beeped it at a black Impala. “Sorry if I was a little rough back there.”
    “No,
I’m
sorry. I’m the green one.”
    “That would be true,” he said.
     
     
     

Chapter

3
     
     
Quentin Adjacent
     
     
    Rincin drove with his elbow out the window, expounding on the sights. “What you’re looking at is a small city. Four hundred and seventy-three acres. We are now going by North Block. The death house, built in nineteen twenty-four,” he announced, with the canned enthusiasm of a tour bus operator touting Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. “Somebody here may tell you that Scott Peterson can see the spot where they fished his pregnant wife out of the water by the bridge. They may be telling the truth.”
    “Wow.”
    I felt him staring at me.
    “No, I mean that. Wow!”
    “Right. Over there you got your infirmary. Behind that, your South Block. Behind that, your dining hall and water cannons.” With this he reached into the backseat into a cooler. Pulled out two cans of Coke. He popped both pop-tops at once and handed me one. That must have taken practice. We both sucked fizz from the lids and wiped our mouths.
    “Coca-Cola,” he said. “Calms my nerves.”
    “You still get…not calm?”
    “I’ve stroked out twice.” He stared away from the ocean, toward the water tower. “You know, I been here twenty-eight years.” His smile, unchanged, now seemed poignant. “You know what’s different now? I’m
old
!” Suddenly he snapped his fingers as if he’d remembered something important. “I bet this might interest you—I was here for the Kosher Mosher reclassification fight. In ’eighty-eight.”
    I told him I hadn’t heard of that.
    “Really? I figured you for a Jew.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    Rincin knocked back the last of his Coke and belched. “Well,” he said, crushing the can in his hand and grabbing another one. “That’s the