Pain Killers Read Online Free Page A

was one big happy campus.
    “This here’s the AC, the Adjustment Center,” Rincin said. “For guys too violent for gen pop. You work in there, you pretty much have to eat and shit in riot gear. They keep ’em down twenty-three hours. Roll ’em out for an hour exercise in a cage. Then back in the hole.”
    It was another second before I realized he was leading me over there. I swallowed and tried to smother my fear in the crib.
    “So, uh, Officer Rincin, you’re not putting me in…?”
    I pointed at the adjustment center in what I hoped was a casual fashion. Rincin’s grin got a little bigger.
    “What? No! Should I?” Then he got sly. “Had you worried, huh?”
    “Little bit.”
    “The environment takes some getting used to. But like I say, you’ll be stayin’ in a trailer. It’s comin’ up. Just around the other end of the lower yard. We’ll pop in my car.”
    We rounded a corner and that’s when I saw it: the yard. As featured in every prison entertainment from
Twenty-Thousand Years in Sing-Sing
to
Oz.
The inmates really did walk the track in slow circles, clusters of like-skinned fellows strolling together discussing the fine points of the Council of Nicaea, the falling dollar or other subjects of interest. Blacks owned the hoops. Cannonball-bicepped white guys spotted each other on weight benches. A row of ripped skinheads curled plastic gallon jugs of water. Despite the blast furnace heat, nobody seemed to be slathering on sunblock. Maybe that was the real reason they tattooed their arms to sleeves. It wasn’t that they wanted to blanket their epidermis in flaming tits and swastikas, they just wanted to block out the killer UV rays.
    “I know what you’re thinking.”
    Rincin nudged me as we headed past a fat hack checking names on a clipboard marked YARD LOG, out onto the track.
    “You’re thinking,
What do the Mexican guys do for exercise?
”
    “How did you know?”
    “Folks always do. See, for one thing this isn’t the only yard. For another—and this’ll surprise you—your Mexicans hold down the tennis courts.”
    “Mexican prison tennis,” I repeated dumbly. I didn’t know if he was fucking with me, but since he didn’t march out Samoan badminton I let it go.
    “There’s a lot of things that would surprise you,” he said cryptically.
    “No doubt.”
    Nobody in the yard showed overt interest, but I felt the eyes. Once or twice I thought I heard somebody whistle. Not the kind of thing you want to turn around and check. I didn’t tell Rincin what really surprised me—beyond the fact that someone was possibly hard-up enough to find forty-year-old white meat worth whistling at. What spooked me even more was how
normal
the residents looked.
    Watch enough of the nonstop
Lockdown
and
Lockup
on basic cable, and you’d think the guys inside were all malevolent freaks. Much more chilling, it was just the opposite: the majority wandered the track staring blankly, pasty faces stamped with nothing more menacing than resignation and fatigue. More than half had committed their crimes while intoxicated. Half of these sobered up in the delousing shower. Or just came out of their blackouts in state clothes.
    Rincin nudged me. “Check out Hiawatha.”
    I looked where I thought he was looking. On our right, in the patchy grass, sat a trio of broad-shouldered, ponytailed young men styling plucked eyebrows and shaved stomachs, one with pubescent starter breasts showing through his shirt.
    “Regulations let ’em unbutton to the solar plexus,” Rincin said to fill me in. “What they do is roll and knot the tails right here, for maximum midriff.” He tapped the top of his hard, round stomach, just under his man cleavage. “Turns a prison shirt into a bikini top.”
    He watched me watching. “As you can see, they like to show off their titty beans.” Rincin banged me hard on the arm. “Now check this out.”
    In a fenced-off square of earth just off the yard, a shirtless, overweight man with