Death Row Breakout Stories E-Book

Edward Bunker

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 266

Beschreibung

Death Row Breakout Stories brings together seven previously unseen short stories that draw fully on Edward Bunker's incomparable experience of the U.S. prison system. The title story Death Row Breakout details the routine of being on Death Row, before exploding into action when the plans for a breakout kick in. In L.A. Justice, a black man falls foul of the law after a minor traffic incident and once inside the prison system he finds it a labyrinth impossible to escape from... As James Ellroy says `by an ex-criminal, from the unregenerately criminal viewpoint...'

Leseprobe

Winner of the Macallan Gold Dagger 2000 for non-fiction

Death Row Breakout brings together seven previously unseen short stories that draw fully on Edward Bunker’s incomparable experience of the U.S. prison system.

The title story Death Row Breakout details the routine of being on Death Row, before exploding into action when the plans for a breakout kick in. In L.A. Justice, a black man falls foul of the law after a minor traffic incident and once inside the prison system he finds it a labyrinth impossible to escape from… As James Ellroy says `by an ex-criminal, from the unregenerately criminal viewpoint…’

Edward Bunker, Mr Blue in Reservoir Dogs, was the author of No Beast So Fierce, Little Boy Blue, Dog Eat Dog, The Animal Factory and his autobiography, Mr Blue, all published by No Exit. He was co-screenwriter of the Oscar nominated movie, The Runaway Train, and appeared in over 30 feature films, including Straight Time with Dustin Hoffman, the film of his book No Beast So Fierce. Edward Bunker died in 2005 and another novel, Stark, was discovered in his papers. Along with some short stories published as Death Row Breakout.

‘Integrity, craftsmanship and moral passion…an artist with a unique and compelling voice’

-William Styron

‘Edward Bunker is a true original of American letters. His books are criminal classics: novels about criminals, written by an ex-criminal, from the unregenerately criminal viewpoint.’

-James Ellroy

‘At 40 Eddie Bunker was a hardened criminal with a substantial prison record. Twenty-five years later, he was hailed by his peers as America’s greatest living crimewriter’

-Independent

www.noexit.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

1. Introduction

2. Los Angeles Justice, 1927

3. Entering the “House of Dracula”

4. Vengeance is Mine

5. Death of a Rat

6. Death Row Breakout

7. The Life Ahead

Copyright

Introduction

Dear Nat,

I’m enclosing a draft of my stories. I wanted each story to stand alone. I could continue and do it all in one large book. I think the best stories are yet to come. How many of your writers have been adjudged ‘criminally insane’? It’s a funny story, very much like ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’. As a thief, I was a jack-of-all-trades. I would commit an armed robbery if the money was right and the score was easy – as in the case of one person caught in the parking lot who walked back in to open the safe for me. But I was very careful about armed robbery; it was sooo much tiiimme… if you got caught. Especially if you were an ex con. I was a two-time loser. I could play ‘short con’, the kind of games you see in ‘The Sting’, which was the best movie about conmen ever made. But short con was a day-to-day hustle, like a job. You’d make a living, but you’d never make a big score.

My day-to-hustle as a thief was ‘merchandise burglary.’ I’d go through walls and roofs to steal merchandise. Cigarettes and whiskey are best, but I’ve hauled off outboard motors, shoes, meat (put a sucker in the restaurant business), TVs and stereos, nickel and platinum (from a plating shop), and the contents of a pawn shop. I never burglarized houses. I really liked ripping off drug dealers and pimps, but there are only so many of those.

I usually got one or two scores a week. I had a heroin habit and a good living habit running concurrently.

The weekend started bad. I had a liquor store on Melrose staked out. Next door was an empty store. Me and my crime partner, Jerry, went in there. Most interior walls are lathe and plaster. Chop with a roofing hatchet, rip and tear with a crowbar, hey presto you’re through the wall in twenty or thirty minutes.

Alas, we found concrete beneath the plaster. We weren’t going to get through with what we had. We packed up and departed, empty handed.

The next night we were back, this time with a 12-pound sledgehammer and a driver’s spike. When I started work, after midnight, not only the empty building but the whole neighborhood reverberated each time I swung the sledgehammer. “Ka-boom! Ka-BOOM!” A tiny sliver splintered away. Naw, that wasn’t going to work either. Shit!

I needed to make some money. I already owed the connection a couple thousand. My partner had a bar we could enter through the ventilation shaft on the roof. We took the whiskey and other things worth money; we’d moved the back seats of the big Roadmaster Buick and a Cadillac for the haul. We found a floor safe in the office and knocked the dial off. But I couldn’t get in. We left. I bought a device that goes down and pinches – and came back to the bar with a fat Mexican named Gordo. I brought out about a grand and some checks. Gordo knocked the pay phone off the wall with the sledgehammer.

The next day, I went to the fence to sell the goods. While I was there, he got a phone-call from a black burglar, who was in an alley behind Western Avenue with a bunch of goods. The fence handed me the phone. The guy on the other end ran it down. It sounded like a taxi job. No harm in driving down to look.

He was on the street, a skinny little guy, whose name I forget. Sure enough, piled in the alley, hidden by a stack of crates, was a pile of loot, including a television, some guns and a silver fox coat. We loaded it into the car and took it back to the fence. He bought everything except the fur coat. I knew I could get more for it from one of the topless dancers out on the Sunset Strip.

The skinny black burglar was a junky, so of course the first thing to do was score. Mexican dope usually being better quality than Black dope, we went to East LA and my connections.

I took him home. We were fixing in the bathroom, me and him, when his old lady said that so and so was at the door. She seemed a mite upset. I thought it was time for me to leave.

As I went out, these two black guys, big and young, eyeball me. As I walk down the sidewalk, I see them come out and follow me. I get in the car. Here they come. I open my knife and hold it on the seat. When the first guy gets to the car, he reaches in the back window and grabs the fur coat. ‘My mother’s coat,’ he says – and I get the picture immediately. My crime partner has ripped off someone he knew.

He opened the passenger door and wanted to reach for the keys. I feinted at him with the knife and he jumped back. I drove away.

A few blocks away, the red cherry lights went on behind me. The chase was on. Alas, I was off my own turf, and no matter how I took corners, I couldn’t get two streets ahead. I finally bailed out. They caught me and, of course, beat the shit out of me. About ten of them were hitting me and advising me of my rights simultaneously.

What could I do? I said I was John McCone of the CIA, and I had to get to the trial in Dallas. I had new evidence. It got pretty crazy: when they booked me, I gave my birth date as 1888 and gave my job as Naval Intelligence. I told them they were Catholics and were trying to put a radio in my brain. One guy took out his church card and said he was a Lutheran.

Finally, they broke it off. When they came back, they said, “We talked to your parole officer. He says you’re faking.” I said that he worked for the church, too.

When they took me for arraignment, I had rolled up my pants, had Bull Durham sacks like medals on my chest and, when the judge came in, I jumped up and started screaming that he was a Bishop, I could tell by his robes. They carried me out, screaming and yelling. I told the DA that I’d been in jail one hundred and eight years.

Proceedings were suspended for a psych-hearing. They appointed two shrinks. They talked to me and said I was an acute, chronic schizophrenic paranoid, legally insane and mentally ill. Off I went to the nuthouse. The rap sheet forever after said I was criminally insane.

In the nuthouse, I agitated all the dingbats into an insurrection. They sent me to prison. The prison knew me. They thought I was a parole violator. The story ends when I bail out of the county jail at night, with the Watts Riots going strong.

Do you want that story?

Then there’s the story of how my fingerprints got on a butcher’s knife that was pictured on the front page of the Herald Express with the caption: PROWLER’S FINGERPRINTS FOUND. The Hollywood Prowler was a serial rapist and murderer. Whooaaaa!

And I surely want to write a story about prison race war in the memoir.

All best,

Edward Bunker

Los Angeles Justice, 1927

The year was 1927. In Washington, DC, the Ku Klux Klan put on full-hooded regalia and marched ten abreast down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue with American flags flying.

In Los Angeles, nineteen-year-old Booker Johnson looked at the front page photo of the march in the DailyNews and was glad that he was far across the continent in California. Sure, there was prejudice and bigotry there, but there was no Jim-Crow bullshit.

Back in Tennessee, all the colored kids in town went to a two-room schoolhouse, grammar school in one room, middle school in the other. After the ninth grade there was no school. Out here everybody went to school together. True enough, colored kids were a small minority in LA. The great westward migration of The War was still fifteen years away. When Booker reached Los Angeles, he was sixteen years old and could barely read. Because he had to work and help support his mother (his father had died in a farm accident when Booker was twelve), Booker was given a work permit; he had to attend school four hours a week. At seventeen he stopped going altogether. No truant officer ever stopped him. At sixteen he carried a hundred and ninety pounds on a 6’1” frame. His stomach muscles had the ridges of a washboard, hardened from bending over with an ‘Aggie’, a very short-handled hoe. Indeed, his whole body rippled with muscles conditioned by hard work. From age ten, he’d picked cotton, dragging a long sack between his legs down a turn row, pulling the little balls of white fluff from the bushes and dropping them in the sack. At thirteen he began cutting sugar cane in the hot sun; his sweat attracted insects and the cane leaves had edges that cut the skin. In autumn, he had chopped many cords of firewood that were stacked in the front yard and sold to people passing by.

Now nineteen, he had a job in a Texaco gas station on Wilmington Avenue and 43rd Street. Monday through Wednesday, he pumped gas and checked oil, but on Thursday and Friday he was the on-duty mechanic. Mostly, he changed oil and fixed flat tires, but there were real mechanic’s jobs, too. He had a knack for it, and had even managed to resuscitate an eight-year-old Model T the station owner sold him for $25.00. His weekly wages were $32.50, and they were pretty good for a time when the house rent was $30.00 a month. On Saturday, the boss let Booker use the service bay and the tools to work on the Model T. This was a Saturday in September, and the desert heat, which was usually dry, was uncommonly humid. Booker had sweat stinging his eyes. The motionless air weighed him down. None of that bothered him at the moment; he was enthralled by the immense, gleaming engine of the 12-cylinder Packard that had been tuned up.

A shadow fell over him. He looked around. Ned Wilson was in the doorway. A tow-headed young man two years older than Booker; Ned was the weekend manager.

“I don’t feel good, Booker.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Maybe something I ate, maybe the heat. I dunno. I just threw up out there… Don’t worry, I hosed it down before it started stinking.”

Booker said nothing; he had nothing to say and it was his nature to say very little anyway.

“I really wish you could do me a favor and cover for me? Stay here and close up. It’s only three hours. I’ll give you ten dollars.”

Ten dollars! God knew he could use an extra ten dollars. “I wish I could,” he said, “but I got a date. Belle don’t have no phone.”

Ned Wilson smiled, showing discolored teeth, the product of his family’s poverty. “I thought of that already. I called Phil. He said you can close an hour early tonight.”

Booker felt manipulated. Phil was the owner. Calling him before asking took a lot for granted. Yet ten dollars was ten dollars. He could take Belle to the Club Alabam. It was the hottest club on Central Avenue. “Yeah, man, I’ll be glad to work for you.”

“Hey, I really appreciate that. No shit.”

Booker nodded and extended his hand. Ned frowned; then understood and grinned and reached for his billfold. “You takin’ all my money,” he said as he handed it over.

A car pulled up to the pumps outside. “I’ll get that,” Ned said, starting out; then he stopped, reached in his pocket and handed Booker the keys. “You’re runnin’ things now, boy.” He gave a mock salute and went out.

At 8:15, Booker started closing up. He emptied the wastebasket, locked the rest rooms and pulled down the garage doors. At precisely 8:30, he locked the pumps and turned off the lights.

The Model T refused to start. When the starter wouldn’t turn over, he used the backup hand crank. It had never failed before. He turned it until his arm ached. Nothing. “Damn! Shit!” he cursed and kicked the tire and felt disheartened. What was Belle going to say? How was he going to tell her?

Then his eye fell on the Packard roadster. Sight, idea and decision were all simultaneous. For a moment he almost changed his mind, but he thought of Belle’s fine brown frame in the thin summer dress. Nothing could go wrong. The Packard would be back in the garage long before daylight.

The V12 engine kicked over instantly – and roared loud when he pressed the accelerator. What a car. He pushed the clutch and shifted into gear. It was sure easier than the Model T. Outside, he stopped to lock the garage doors. A moment later he turned onto the street, grinning to himself as he anticipated Belle’s reaction when she saw the car. She would be waiting on the front porch.

The traffic signals of the era were red and green, without a yellow warning light. A metal flag swung up simultaneously, “Stop” and “Go”.

Booker hit the brakes. The Packard stopped. The car behind did not. One second of squealing tires; then the dull crash followed by tinkling glass.

Booker lurched into the steering wheel. His ribs hurt, but that was nothing to the sudden pain in his mind. Oh, God!

He opened the car door and got out. Approaching him in the twilight was a uniformed police officer. Booker’s fear was immediate, less from personal experience than from ghetto tales. It was decades before rampant black crime, but not before racist police.

“What the hell kinda stop was that?” the policeman asked. “Let’s see your driver’s license. Whose car is this?”

Booker produced the driver’s license, but ignored the question.

The policeman looked at the license and handed it back. “Ever been in trouble with the law, Booker?”

“No, sir,” Booker said. Mama had been strict about having good manners and showing respect. He was apprehensive about police without feeling hostile toward them. LA still had few Negroes and the police, sure of their omnipotence, were often paternalistic instead of repressive. Booker’s respectful demeanor softened the officer’s initial irritation.

The bumpers were hooked together. The Packard had suffered no damage except a broken taillight, but the police car’s radiator had been punctured. Water was running down into the street.

They tried jumping on one bumper and lifting the other to separate the cars. Had it worked, Booker might have gotten away. Alas, the cars remained hooked together. Two-way police radios were not in use yet. “Stay here while I call in,” the policeman said. “There’s a call box on Figueroa.” He set off down the street and Booker watched the figure disappear. It never crossed his mind to leave. His fears were about his boss’s reaction. It was embarrassing to have a cop car hit him in the rear, but he had done nothing illegal. It was the cop’s fault – and, except for the first few seconds, which were understandable, the cop wasn’t hostile, and Booker was sensitive to any current of prejudice in word or tone or attitude. It was a time in history when, despite Jim-Crow and the Klan and good American writers who used “nigger” without a sense of its insult, there was less black crime than white, and it was substantially less violent. Policemen felt no need for bulletproof vests in the ghetto, or to draw their weapons when they pulled over a carload of young colored men. This particular cop felt sorry for most colored guys, and he had no sense that Booker had done anything wrong. His concern was what his superiors would say about the bashed in radiator. The cop reached the call box and made the report.

The Desk Sergeant thought it was funny. He would send someone right away. He started to walk back to the intersection.

Booker smoked a cigarette and waited, worrying over what he would tell the boss about the broken taillight. Would it cost him his job? He’d taken the Packard without permission.

Another police car pulled up. A Sergeant got out. “You the driver?” he asked.

“Yessir.”

“Where’s the officer?”

“He… uhh… went to make a telephone call… I think.”

The Sergeant grunted and went to look at the hooked bumpers. Booker’s sense of the Sergeant’s hostility was confirmed when the Sergeant turned to him. “Where’d you steal the car, boy?”

“I didn’t steal no car, boss man. Honest.”

“Where’s the registration.”

“I dunno. Lemme explain, please. I work in a gas station with a garage. The car was in for the night –”

“The owner said it was okay to take it?”

“Not the owner – my boss.”

“Your boss, huh? What’s his name?”

“Phil Collins. It’s the Collins Texaco station over on Alameda.”

“What’s the phone number?”

“Nobody’s there now. It’s closed.”

“What’s his home number?”

“I dunno. I mean… it’s back at the station, but I ain’ got it on me.”

The officer who had gone to the telephone arrived back on the scene. He and the Sergeant, whose name was Bilbo, stood to the side as they discussed matters. Booker caught a word here and there, but the single sentence that sounded clearly was the sentence of doom: “We’d better run him in and check it out,” the Sergeant said.

Until that moment, Booker had been worrying how long it would be until he could see Belle. Never had it crossed his mind that he might go to jail. “Hey, man, you ain’ gotta do that,” he said, his stomach falling.

“No, that’s right,” the Sergeant said. “We ain’ gotta… but that is what we’re doing.” As he said it, he came forward and Booker heard the rattling sound of a pair of handcuffs slipping through its notches. A moment later the steel encircled his wrists behind his back. As he rode in the back of the Sergeant’s police car, Booker had the ache that goes with tears, although he restrained them. He looked out at the City of Angels, still clean and new, and felt loss and longing, but never did he imagine his future.

After a night in a cell, a pair of detectives unlocked the gate and took him to a windowless room furnished with a table and three chairs.

“Siddown, Booker,” one detective said.

“Your boss doesn’t back you up,” the other detective said.

He looked into their white faces and blue eyes, and the deeply imprinted terrors of the black man in America pulsed through him. He was entangled in white man’s justice. All night long he had believed things would be all right this morning.

“Let me talk to him,” Booker said.

“It’s out of his hands. He doesn’t sign the complaint.”

“No,” said the other detective. “It’s the district attorney’s office.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You will.”

“Take it easy, Phil,” said the other detective; then to Booker: “We’ll take you to Municipal Court this afternoon. The DA is going to charge you with joyriding. The judge is going to set bail; probably five hundred dollars. You have to put up fifty to the bail bondsman. Can you handle that?”

Booker shook his head.

“Don’t you have anybody who will?”

“My mama… but she ain’ got nuthin’. I give her my check day ’fore yesterday.” She had paid the rent with most of it. She wasn’t going to understand even a little bit. Still, he had to tell her what was going on. She was probably worried sick.

“Could I make a phone call?” he asked.

“Why, didn’t you make one last night?”

“They took my money. I didn’t have a nickel for the phone.”

“Okay, we’ll let you make one on the way out.”

But, on the way out, one prisoner was already using the phone and two more were waiting. The detective looked at his watch and said they didn’t have time. “They’ll let you make a call downtown. C’mon, we gotta roll.”

Again Booker felt the steel bracelets. They walked him through the parking lot, his eyes blinking in the glare of LA’s noonday sun.

The bullpen of the Municipal Court was like the hold of a fishing boat. Everything scooped from the streets of the city was dumped here to be sorted out. They handed his papers to a uniformed deputy sheriff and took off the handcuffs before locking him in the bullpen. “Take it easy, Booker. Good luck.”

“What about the phone call?”

“Tell the deputies. They’re running things now.”

Booker looked around the bullpen. No windows, walls covered with graffiti. Why would anyone write his name on a jailhouse wall? Did they want friends who came in to see it?

The gate opened again; three more prisoners were dumped in. The large room was already full. The bench that ran around the wall had no space, although a length of it was occupied by a stretched out man in a white shirt splattered with blood. An open newspaper, covering his face, moved perceptibly as he breathed.

Looking around, Booker saw other men with bruised faces and black eyes. Most were scruffy and unshaven. They looked more like bums than his idea of criminals. One younger man was lying on the concrete, repeatedly kicking his legs, as if trying to loosen them, and simultaneously wiping his runny nose with toilet paper. Next to Booker was an older colored man in a stylish jacket. He noticed Booker watching the man on the floor. “He’s kicking a habit,” the older man said.

“Kicking a habit?”

“Morphine addict… maybe heroin.”

“That’s why he’s kicking his legs?”

“Right.”

“It looks terrible.”

“It is.”

“They don’t do anything for him?”

“They might laugh if he asked.”

A deputy sheriff and a young man in a business suit stepped up to the gate. The deputy banged a key on the bars. “Listen up in there!” The noise went down, but not completely. “Hey,” the deputy yelled, “you turkeys better shut up or I’ve got something for you.”

Silence ensued.

The young man stepped up. He had a yellow legal pad attached to a clipboard. “All of you guys were brought in for arraignment and bail setting. If you have a misdemeanor, don’t pay any attention – but if you are being charged with a felony and don’t have a private lawyer, line up and give me your name.”

Over half the prisoners lined up, Booker among them. Every man had something to say, some story to tell, some question to ask, until the young deputy public defender had to insist, “Just your name. No questions now. Court is going to start any minute.”

Despite the admonition, when Booker stepped up, he had to say: “I never got to make a phone call.”

“The… uhh… deputies will… uh… handle that. What’s your name?”

“Booker Johnson.”

The young man added it to the list on the yellow pad. A bailiff came up and whispered that court was about to start. “I’ll have to see the rest of you later,” he said to the several who still waited. Voices grumbled, but the young man departed anyway.

A pair of deputies stepped up. “When we call your name, step out.” The gate was opened and a dozen names were called. The prisoners were lined up outside the bullpen and marched through a door at the end of the corridor.

Fifteen minutes later, the first batch returned and another dozen were called. Booker was among these. The deputy unlocked the door at the end of the corridor. “Okay, stay in line and go into the jury box on the right.” He opened the door and the motley dozen followed him through. Going from the packed bullpen with its defaced concrete walls and stench of sweat and urine and Lysol to the wide, wood-paneled courtroom with lawyers in trim business suits and hair sleeked back like Valentino and the smell of Bay rum about them was like going from the outhouse to the mansion.

“Okay, move on in… move on in,” said the deputy as he guided the scruffy dozen men into the empty jury box. All were bedraggled from one or more nights in precinct cells. All needed shaves. Booker and two others were colored. A couple of the others were Mexican. Some of the prisoners had friends or family in the gallery outside the railing. They gestured and signaled and tried to communicate while keeping an eye on the bailiffs, who closed fast on any sign of noise. Booker craned his neck to scan the room, both hoping and afraid to see his mother. She wasn’t in the room.

The judge came out from another door, a small man until he mounted the bench and sat beneath the Seal of California between the flags of the United States and California. Then he looked like Pharaoh on a throne.

The arraignments began. The Court Clerk gave the bailiff a list, and the prisoners were brought out of the jury box one at a time in that order. Each one waited at the edge of the jury box while the man before him stood in front of the judge with the young public defender beside him. The deputy district attorney handed the defendant a copy of the complaint and stated for the record that he had been served. The public defender waived a reading of the complaint. The district attorney recommended the amount he thought the bail should be. Sometimes the public defender asked that it be lower, arguing that the defendant was a resident, had a job and family and was no risk for flight. Not once did he prevail. Once the bail was decided, a date was set for preliminary hearing and the prisoner was guided back to the jury box as the next prisoner stepped forward. One man tried to speak, but the judge admonished him to speak through his lawyer. “My lawyer… Who’s my lawyer?”

“Standing there beside you.”

“This guy! I thought he was a public defender.”

“I assure you that he’s a lawyer.”

“Hellfire, he don’t even shave yet.”

“I’m not going to discuss it with you,” the judge finished with a flicking of his fingers and the bailiffs closed around the man. Instead of bringing him back to the jury box, they took him straight through the door back to the bullpen.

Booker was next. He walked with the bailiff until signaled to stop beside the lawyer.

“…violation of Section 502 and 503 of the California Vehicle Code, both felonies. Defendant is herewith served with a copy of the complaint.” The district attorney handed some papers to the Clerk, who handed them to Booker.

“Waive reading of the complaint,” the public defender said.

For bail, the People recommended $500. The judge was looking down at him; the judge’s eyes seemed immense behind thick glasses.

“Sir,” Booker said, surprising himself. “Can I make a phone call?”

“How long have you been in custody?”

“Since last evening.”

“And you haven’t made a phone call yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Why hasn’t this man had a telephone call?” the judge asked, looking at the bailiff.

“I don’t know, Your Honor. We assume they had a telephone call when they were arrested.”

“Look into it… tell the escorting officers to see that he gets his call. He’s entitled to that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bail is set at five hundred dollars. How long will the preliminary take?”

“Half a day at most,” said the deputy district attorney. “We have three witnesses – the car owner, the gas station owner and the arresting officer.”

“We’ll set preliminary for ten a.m. on the fourteenth.”

The public defender made a note of it. The deputy was already beside Booker, waiting to guide him back to the jury box, and then he took the next man to stand in front of the judge.

When all of the dozen were done, the deputies had them file back through the door to the bullpen. As the gate was being locked, Booker pushed through to the bars. “Say, officer –”

“Yeah?”

“You heard the judge say I get a phone call.”

“I heard it. We don’t have a phone. You’ll get it when you get to the county jail.”

“When’s that gonna be?”

“When everybody gets done here.”

Before Booker could say anything more, the deputy had twisted the key and turned away.

The Hall of Justice at Temple and Broadway was brand new. The jail occupied the 10th to 14th floor. Above that was the roof. The bus disgorged its prisoners at the mouth of a tunnel that ran beneath the building. A big sign with a red arrow pointed to the Coroner’s Office, down the tunnel where they walked against the right-hand wall. Across from the morgue was the freight elevator. It carried them to the booking office on the 10th floor. As the booking sergeant counted them in, Booker stopped in front of him and asked for his phone call. “The judge said I could have one.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” the Sergeant said. “Get on in there.”

“The judge say…”