About the time Beck could no longer feel his hands, the front door opened and Willie Reese leaned into the bar. Demarco didn’t pick up his shotgun, so Reese stepped inside.
From behind the bar Beck said, “So?”
Reese stood near the front door looking at Beck. His left eye was killing him. His nose continued to bleed. His muscle T-shirt was more red than white. The bruises on his ribs and body thrummed with pain.
He said, “You asked me do I want the job.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“Well, you fucking failed the first part of the interview.” Beck motioned with his head toward a table near the door, one of three set up against the wall opposite the bar. “Have a seat, and let’s see how you do on the second part. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Reese sat two tables away from Demarco, whose right hand now rested on the Benelli’s trigger guard. Demarco stared back at Reese without expression. Beck dug out his cell phone and made a call as he headed back toward the bar kitchen.
*
Beck found Manny at his two-chair wooden table in the old first-floor kitchen where Manny spent much of his time. The shotgun was back in its rack, but Manny’s white kitchen apron didn’t cover the bulge of the Charter Arms Bulldog revolver that he always carried in his right front pants pocket. It was a small inexpensive gun, but at .44 caliber it had tremendous stopping power. With only a four-inch barrel it was the kind of gun that had to be used up close, which was fine with Guzman.
Manny sat with a cup of the same coffee Beck had been drinking, except Manny brewed his version with twice as many grounds. This morning, however, Manny also sipped from a shot of dark, one-hundred-proof rum. Manny took a sip of the sweet liquor, followed by the coffee. He sat motionless, the air around him pulsing with murderous rage.
“Not a good way to start the day,” said Beck as he took the seat opposite Manny.
Manny made a face. “I was ready to kill somebody even before those co?os showed up. That punk don’t know how close he came to losing the top of his head.”
“Actually, I have a feeling he does know.”
“Yeah, well, I can see not shooting ’em, but they come up on us like that and don’t even get a beating? I don’t know.”
“One of ’em did. The others … maybe their time will come.”
“I don’t like that they thought they could do that. Like they don’t know who we are.”
Beck answered, “They do now.”
Manny replied with a half grunt.
They both sat quietly for a few more moments. Manny took another sip of his rum and chased it with the strong coffee. Then a deep breath. And a long exhale.
Beck waited for more of the tension to ebb out of Manny. He shifted in the hard wooden chair. He asked, “Those guys have anything to do with your…?”
“No. I don’t know what the fuck any of that was about.”
“About being stupid, I guess.”
Manny moved his head a fraction, not saying anything. And then, “Stupid is a good way to get killed.”
Beck nodded. “Yeah. Well, I’ll look into it. So what about the thing D told me? What should I know about it?” Beck leaned forward. “Is it something to do with us?”
“No. It’s my thing. It’s family. My family.”
This surprised Beck. After so many years in the gangs and in prison, as far as he knew, Manny Guzman’s family had either died or abandoned him long ago. He wondered if there was an ex-wife or a child. Beck knew a great deal about Manny, but he hadn’t heard much about any of his family members.
“I see,” said Beck.
Manny swallowed, not coffee or rum, just moving his mouth and swallowing as a way to relieve tension. Beck waited for the rest, not pushing it. Manny sat shrouded in stoic silence.
It reminded Beck of when he’d first met him at Dannemora Prison in upstate New York. Manny’s reputation had preceded him, but even if Beck had never heard anything about him, one look at Manny Guzman sitting in the yard at Dannemora, surrounded by his clique, was all Beck needed to know that this was a dangerous man. The kind of man they’d built Dannemora to house.
Located just south of the Canadian border, Dannemora was a cold, desolate place so isolated and remote that even if someone managed to escape, it wouldn’t do them much good. There was literally no place to go outside the walls of the prison. The main street of Clinton ran right alongside the prison’s main wall, but didn’t lead anywhere. Either side of the wall, you were still hundreds of cold, bitter miles from anywhere.
Even though Dannemora had been designed to isolate and demoralize hard men, Beck knew that for some men, men like Manny Guzman, the place actually made doing time easier.
For them, the best way to do time was to never think about the outside. If you thought about the outside, it could drive you into despair. You did your time on the inside. In the here and now. Moment to moment, according to a routine. Inside. The outside couldn’t exist in the mind of a long-term convict. And Dannemora was perfect for that. Inside that prison, you were nowhere but prison. Which made Beck even more surprised to hear about this family member Manny had stayed connected to.
For Manny there were three categories of people: those who were with him, against him, and undetermined, which corresponded to alive, dead, and irrelevant.
But now, in the with-him category, was a family member Beck didn’t know anything about.
“There’s only one,” said Manny.
“Uh, huh,” said Beck.
Again, he waited for more information, watching Manny, feeling his mood. Waiting for the thick-bodied, dark-skinned man with dense graying hair and mustache to say more.