Morrell gave me another quizzical look and said he’d see what he could do. He switched the talk to neutral matters—my neighbor, who was so distraught at the idea of me behind bars that he wouldn’t make the trip to see me. He gave me news of Lotty, of the dogs, of all the people whose welfare I cared about and couldn’t attend to. He stayed an hour. I felt a wrenching desolation when he left. I went down to the rec room, where I shot baskets for an hour, until I was wet with sweat and too tired to feel sorry for myself.
When I went back upstairs to shower, the CO at the entrance, a man named Rohde, seemed to react oddly. He looked at me, then got on the phone. I had to wait five minutes before he let me in, and then it was only when two other CO’s joined him. I wondered if they had somehow monitored my conversation with Morrell and were going to put me on report, but Rohde watched me go past the guard station without saying anything. Still, he seemed to have an air of suppressed excitement about him, and he was joined behind the double–glass walls by the other two men. The video cameras were trained on the shower rooms as well as all other common areas, but I had already figured out which shower head cut the camera angle so that it could only catch me if I stood directly under it. If he’d called his buddies for a peep show, I figured I knew how to avoid providing it.
I was jumped almost before I got into the shower room. Two women, one from the front, one from the rear. Rohde’s manner had put me on guard, otherwise they might have destroyed me. I dropped my supplies and towel and kicked, all in one motion. I was lucky; my foot caught the woman in front square on the patella, and she grunted and backed away.
The one behind me had my left shoulder in a steel grip. She was pulling me toward her. I gasped—she had something sharp that sliced across my right shoulder. I hooked my feet around her ankles and used her own force to catapult her forward. The wet floor made it hard to get a purchase and I slipped and fell with her. I chopped across her right wrist before she could recover and forced her to let go of her weapon.
The one I’d kicked was closing in on me. I rolled over on the moldy floor and got up into a crouch. She flung herself at me before I could kick the weapon away. She had her hands around my neck. I held on to her shoulders for leverage and swung both knees into her stomach. She squawked in pain and let go of me.
The woman with the weapon was behind me again. I was winded; I’d already been working out for an hour and didn’t know how much longer I could keep fighting. When she lunged at me I ducked. It was the wet floor that did the rest. She lost her footing, scrabbled to gain it, and careened so hard against the concrete wall that she stunned herself. Her partner saw her fall and suddenly shouted for help.
The guards appeared so fast I knew they must have been on their way as soon as the woman knocked herself out.
“She jumped me! She jumped Celia, too, and knocked her out!”
Rohde grabbed me and held my arms behind me. Polsen, the CO who’d joined him at the video monitor, stood nearby but didn’t touch my assailant.
“Nonsense,” I panted. “Celia is lying there with something in her hand that gave me this cut on my neck. And as for you, whoever you are, if you were waiting to take a shower, where the hell is your towel or your soap? As you two CO’s know, because you were watching all this on your monitor.”
“You stole them from me.”
“Those are my things on the floor there. Where are yours?” I demanded.
At that point CO Cornish appeared. He was the fairest–minded of the CO’s on our wing.
“You fighting again?” he asked me.
“The woman on the floor there cut me with something when I came into the shower room,” I got my story in quickly. “She still has the razor or whatever she used in her right hand.”
The woman was beginning to stir. Before Rohde or Polsen could move, Cornish bent over and pulled a strip of metal from her.
“She belongs on the prison wing. As does the other one. I’m putting all three of you on report. Warshawski, if I catch you in one more fight you’re going into segregation. And you two, off you go to your own quarters. How did you get in here, anyway?”
Rohde was forced to let me go. He and Polsen escorted my assailants off the floor. Cornish looked at my neck and told me to go to the infirmary for a tetanus shot. It was the closest he was going to come to acknowledging that I’d been jumped, but it eased the injustice of the whole situation slightly.
“I’d like to wash off first,” I said.
Cornish waited in the hall while I picked up my shampoo and towel from the filthy floor. I took off my shirt and bra and washed off under the shower most remote from the video monitor. Cornish took me in an elevator down to the basement, which I’d never seen, and waited while I got my shot. The woman on duty put some antibiotic ointment on the wound in my neck. It hadn’t gone deep enough to require stitches, which was fortunate, since she didn’t have the equipment to put me back together.