Double Life of a Cell Block King novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Block D

Reed beats the big man who runs Block D in front of the whole yard and takes his place. Then an old man in the next cell whispers that he knows whose son he is.

They put me in Block D, cell 14, on the second tier.

The cell was six feet by nine, with two bunks and a steel toilet.

Nobody was in it.

The thick-necked guard from intake walked me up himself.

He wasn't being friendly.

"Cellmate's in the infirmary," he said. "You get the room to yourself tonight."

He smiled.

"Enjoy it."

I understood him an hour later, when the doors opened for dinner.

Block D was a long room of steel and concrete with two tiers of cells facing a common floor.

Every man in it stopped talking when I walked down the stairs.

I took a tray, and I could feel two hundred eyes on the back of my neck.

The long table in the middle had one man at the head of it.

He was six foot five and wide as a door, with a shaved head and a tattoo of a chain around his neck.

The others called him the landlord, and he ran the block.

I had learned that much from a letter smuggled out by a man who owed my lawyer a favor.

The landlord watched me come toward his table.

"You," he said. "Fresh fish. Tray."

I looked at him.

"What about it?"

"Leave it. I'm hungry."

The men around him grinned.

This was the test, and every block has one.

If I gave him the tray, I would give him everything else by Friday.

If I fought and lost, I would lose it all the same, only slower.

I put the tray down in front of an empty seat at a different table and sat.

The room went quiet in a new way.

The landlord stood up.

"I said leave it."

"I heard you," I said. "I'm eating."

He crossed the floor, and two of his men moved to flank me.

I noticed that the guard had wandered to the far wall and turned his back.

Of course he had.

Dalton had told him I wouldn't last the week, and he had decided to help it along.

The landlord grabbed my collar.

"You think you're special because you got a rich boy's blood on your hands?" he said. "Everybody knows why you're here."

"Then you know I hit hard," I said.

He swung first.

I had grown up on a loading dock.

My father had put me on one at thirteen, because he said no son of his would be soft.

I had also boxed in the back room of a gym on Cleveland Avenue from fifteen to twenty-two.

I stepped inside his punch and drove my fist into his ribs twice.

He grunted and swung again, wide and slow, because he was a big man who had never been hit properly.

I ducked it.

I hit him in the stomach, and when he folded I hit him once on the jaw.

He went down onto the table, and the metal trays flew.

The room made a sound like one breath.

His two men moved in.

I broke the first man's nose with my elbow.

The second man stopped halfway through his swing, because he had looked at the landlord on the floor and done the math.

Nobody else moved.

I was breathing hard.

My ribs hurt where the first swing had grazed me.

I reached down, took the landlord's tray from the table, and put it on top of mine.

"Thanks," I said. "I was hungry."

Somebody laughed.

It started at the back of the room and spread.

In a minute a hundred men were laughing and banging their spoons on the tables.

The guard turned around slowly.

His face had gone the color of dishwater.

The landlord pushed himself up on his elbows and looked at me, and I saw respect there under the blood.

"What's your name, fish?"

"Reed."

"Reed what?"

"Reed Mason."

He wiped his mouth.

"Well, Reed Mason," he said. "I think the block just got a new king."

By lights out, the whole of D had heard about it.

Men I'd never seen stopped me on the stairs to shake my hand.

A kid with a teardrop tattoo gave me his dessert.

I took it and handed it back, because I knew a king who takes everything is only a bully with a bigger tray.

I had one more thing to do before I slept.

Cell 14 had been empty for me, and the cell next to it was cell 15.

Through the vent I could hear someone breathing slow and careful.

I knelt by the vent and kept my voice below a whisper.

"Amos Carmody?"

Nothing.

"Amos."

The breathing stopped.

Then a very old, very tired voice came back.

"Who's asking?"

"A man who isn't Dalton Westerfield's friend."

A long silence.

I heard the creak of a bunk and the shuffle of slippers.

Then his face was a shadow against the vent, with taped glasses and white stubble.

He looked at me for a long time.

"You've got his jaw," he said.

"Whose?"

"You know whose."

My throat closed.

"You're Gordon's boy," he whispered.

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