“Trying for something,” said Mace as she dropped the ball, turned, and stared at the large uniformed woman facing her, billy club in hand. “Maybe sanity.”
“Well, try and get your ass back to your cell. Your buff time’s up.”
“Okay,” said Mace automatically. “I’m going right now.”
“Medium security don’t mean no security. You hear me!”
“I hear you,” said Mace.
“You ain’t here much longer, but your ass is still my turf. Got that?”
“Got it!” Mace jogged down the hall that was enclosed by stacked cement blocks painted gunmetal gray, just in case the residents here weren’t depressed enough. The corridor ended at a solid metal door with a square cutout at the top as a viewpoint. The guard on the other side pushed a button on a control panel and the steel portal clicked open. Mace passed through. Cement blocks, tubular steel, hard doors with tiny windows out of which angry faces peered. Clicks to go. Clicks to get back in. Welcome to incarceration for her and her fellow three million Americans who enjoyed the luxury of government housing and three squares for free. All you needed to do was break the law.
When she saw who the guard was she muttered one word. “Shit.”
He was an older guy, fifties, with pale, sickly skin, a beer belly, no hair, creaky knees, and a smoker’s caustically cracked lungs. He’d obviously switched posts with the other guard who’d been stationed here when Mace had come through for her workout, and Mace knew why. He’d developed an eye for her, and she spent much of her time ducking him. He’d caught her a few times and not one of the encounters had been pleasant.
“You got four minutes to shower before chow, Perry!” he snapped. He moved his bulk into the narrow passageway she had to navigate through.
“Done it faster,” she said as she tried and failed to dart past him. He spun her around and leaned his heft against her while she braced herself with her palms against the wall. He shoved his fat size twelve boots under the flimsy soles of her size sixes; now Mace was on her tiptoes with her back arched. She felt the brush and then grip of his meaty hand on her butt as he pulled her to him, doggie-style. He’d managed to position them both in the one blind spot of the overhead security camera.
Camels and Juicy Fruit are quite a combo. He slid a hand across her chest, squeezing hard enough to make her eyes water.
“I hate your kind,” he said again.
“Yeah, I can really tell,” she said.
“Shut up!”
One of his fingers probed up and down the cleft of her butt through her shorts.
“There’s no weapon in there, I swear.”
“I said shut up!”
“I just want to go take a shower.” Now, more than ever.
“I bet you do,” he said in his gravelly rumble. “I just bet you do.” One hand riding on her right hip, the other on her butt, he shoved his boots farther under her heels. It was like she was tottering on four-inch stilettos now. What she wouldn’t have given for a stiletto, just not the shoe kind.
She closed her eyes and tried to think of anything other than what he was doing to her. His pleasures were relatively simple: cop a feel or rub his hard-on against a chick when he got the chance. In the outside world this sort of conduct would’ve earned him a minimum of twenty years on the other side of these bars. Yet inside here it was classic he-said, she-said, and no one would believe her without some DNA trace. That’s why Beer Belly only pantomimed it through the clothes. And throwing a punch at the bastard would earn her another year.
When he was done he said, “You think you’re something, don’t you? You’re Inmate 245, that’s who you are. Cell Block B. That’s who you are. Nothing more.”
“That’s who I am,” said Mace as she straightened her clothes and prayed for an early diagnosis of lung cancer for Beer Belly. What she really wanted was to pull a gun and lay his brains—on the off chance he had any—against the gray walls.
In the showers she scrubbed hard and rinsed fast, something you just innately did in here. She’d already experienced her initiation