"I understand it. I don't like it, though."
"You'd be nuts if you did." Devins folded his hands and leaned over them. "Now. You've told me and you've told the police that you, uh..." He took a stapled sheaf of papers out of the stack by his briefcase and riffled through them. "Ah. Here we are. 'I never killed nobody. Poke did all the killing. Killing was his idea, not mine. Poke was crazy as a bedbug and I guess it is a blessing to the world that he has passed on.'"
"Yeah, that's right, so what?" Lloyd said defensively.
"Just this," Devins said cozily. "That implies you were scared of Poke Freeman. Were you scared of him?"
"Well, I wasn't exactly - "
"You were afraid for your life, in fact."
"I don't think it was - "
"Terrified. Believe it, Sylvester. You were shitting nickels."
Lloyd frowned at his lawyer. It was the frown of a lad who wants to be a good student but is having a serious problem grasping the lesson.
"Don't let me lead you, Lloyd," Devins said. "I don't want to do that. You might think I was suggesting that Poke was stoned almost all the time - "
"He was! We both was!"
"No. You weren't, but he was. And he got crazy when he got stoned - "
"Boy, you're not shitting." In the halls of Lloyd's memory, the ghost of Poke Freeman cried Whoop! Whoop! merrily and shot the woman in the Burrack general store.
"And he held a gun on you at several points in time - "
"No, he never - "
"Yes he did. You just forgot for a while. In fact, he once threatened to kill you if you didn't back his play."
"Well, I had a gun - "
"I believe," Devins said, eyeing him closely, "that if you search your memory, you'll remember Poke telling you that your gun was loaded with blanks. Do you remember that?"
"Now that you mention it - "
"And nobody was more surprised than you when it actually started firing real bullets, right?"
"Sure," Lloyd said. He nodded vigorously. "I bout damn near had a hemorrhage."
"And you were about to turn that gun on Poke Freeman when he was cut down, saving you the trouble."
Lloyd regarded his lawyer with dawning hope in his eyes.
"Mr. Devins," he said with great sincerity, "that's just the way the shit went down."
He was in the exercise yard later that morning, watching a softball game and mulling over everything Devins had told him, when a large inmate named Mathers came over and yanked him up by the collar. Mathers's head was shaved bald, à la Telly Savalas, and it gleamed benignly in the hot desert air.
"Now wait a minute," Lloyd said. "My lawyer counted every one of my teeth. Seventeen. So if you - "
"Yeah, that's what Shockley said," Mathers said. "So, he told me to - "
Mathers's knee came up squarely in Lloyd's crotch, and blinding pain exploded there, so excruciating that he could not even scream. He collapsed in a hunching, writhing pile, clutching his testicles, which felt crushed. The world was a reddish fog of agony.
After a while, who knew how long, he was able to look up. Mathers was still looking at him, and his bald head was still gleaming. The guards were pointedly looking elsewhere. Lloyd moaned and writhed, tears squirting out of his eyes, a red-hot ball of lead in his belly.
"Nothing personal," Mathers said sincerely. "Just business, you understand. Myself, I hope you make out. That Markham law's a bitch."
He strode away and Lloyd saw the door-guard standing atop the ramp in the truck-loading bay on the other side of the exercise yard. His thumbs were hooked in his Sam Browne belt and he was grinning at Lloyd. When he saw he had Lloyd's complete, undivided attention, the door-guard shot him the bird with the middle fingers of both hands. Mathers strolled over to the wall, and the door-guard threw him a pack of Tareytons. Mathers put them in his breast pocket, sketched a salute, and walked away. Lloyd lay on the ground, his knees drawn up to his chest, hands clutching his cramping belly, and Devins's words echoed in his brain: It's a tough old world, Lloyd, it's a tough old world.
Right.
BOOK I CAPTAIN TRIPS Chapter 25