usually Monday, Tavarez would skip his late-night workout and instead be escorted to the far corner of the southeast compound perimeter, where he would stand handcuffed while a prostitute serviced him through a chain-link fence.
‘How’s Tonya?’ asked Tavarez.
‘Chemo sucks, you know?’
Tavarez figured that Post would need some help.
‘With her not feeling good, you know, the kid doesn’t get decent meals and he doesn’t ever get his homework done. I’m here in this shithole forty-eight hours a week ‘cause we need the money, so I can’t do everything at home, you know?’
‘Sounds difficult,’ said Tavarez.
‘That’s because it is difficult.’
‘As soon as you get me the library, I can make a transfer for you.’
Post was predictable and self-serving as a dog, which was why Tavarez valued him.
‘It’s done,’ said the young guard. ‘You have the library for one hour tonight. The laptop will be inside in the world atlas on the G shelf, down at the end, up on top, out of sight. Lunce will come to your cell at ten to take you in. Then he’ll take you to the iron pile at eleven, then back to your cell at midnight.’
Tavarez suppressed a smile. ‘Batteries charged?’
‘Hell yes they’re charged.’
‘I’ll make the transfer.’
‘Ten K?’
‘Ten.’
Tavarez watched the men labor and count. The ten K infuriated him but he didn’t let it show. Plus, he had the money.
…ninety-eight…ninety-nine…one hundred!
‘Behave yourself, bandito,’ said Post.
‘Always,’ said Tavarez.
‘ You don’t want to go back to the X.’
‘God will spare me that, Jason.’
‘God don’t care here. It’s every man for himself.’
‘That’s why I value our friendship,’ said Tavarez.
‘Yeah, I bet. Make that transfer, dude.’
Prison Investigator Ken McCann delivered a cloth sack full of mail to Tavarez in his cell later that afternoon. Mail was delivered to Tavarez only twice a week because he got so much of it. The Prison Investigation team – four overworked Corrections employees overseeing a prison population of almost 3,500 – had to read, or attempt to read, every piece of Mike El Jefe Tavarez’s incoming and outgoing correspondence.
‘Strip out, Mikey,’ said McCann, making a twirling motion with his finger.
Tavarez faced the far wall and spread his arms and legs. ‘Looks like quite a haul.’
Then the guard unlocked the cell and McCann tossed the sack onto the bed. The door clanged shut with a faint echo, and the lock rang home.
Tavarez backed again to the door slot – it was called the bean chute because meals sometimes came through it too – then went to his bed. The bed was just a mattress on a concrete shelf built into the wall. He dumped the mail onto the thin green blanket. He sat and fanned through the correspondence. True to form, McCann and his investigators had opened every envelope except the ones from law firms. Attorney-client privilege was a constitutional right even in a supermax prison, though Tavarez suspected that McCann opened and read some of them anyway. Which was fair, since several of the law firms with very impressive letter-heads were fictitious, and others were counterfeit. There were fifty or sixty letters in all.
‘How many letters did you write this last week?’ asked McCann.
‘Seventy.’
‘Every week you write seventy.’
‘Ten a day,’ said Tavarez. ‘An achievable number.’
Tavarez knew that most of the inmates got little or no mail at all. He’d seen printouts of the pen-pal ads on the prison Web site, which were full of pleas for letters from inmates who hadn’t received a letter in years, or even decades.
But Tavarez was El Jefe, and he got hundreds of letters every month from friends and relatives – long, usually handwritten tales of life in the barrio, life in jail, life in other prisons, life in general.
‘It’s pure numbers, isn’t it, Mikey?’ asked McCann. ‘Enough mail comes and goes, and you know your messages will get through.’
‘No, Ken. I just have lots of family and friends.’
‘You have lots of business is what you have.’
‘You overestimate me.’
‘Well, the piss trick won’t work anymore.’
‘No. You’re too smart for that.’
Tavarez had used his urine to write a coded message on the back of a letter to a cousin in Los Angeles. The message was about raising ‘taxes’ on a heroin shipment coming north from Sinaloa to Tucson, then on to L.A., though McCann couldn’t decipher it. It was an old prison trick – the urine dries invisible but the sugars activate under a hot lamp and the code can be read. McCann had had the good luck of picking this particular letter for his heat-lamp test.
But Tavarez had written the same message in a kite – a small, handwritten note – that a trustee had smuggled out for him through a friend in the prison kitchen, so the tax hike had gone into effect anyway.
Tavarez noted a letter from Ruben in San Quentin. Always pleasant to know what’s going down on death row.
And one from the nonexistent law firm of Farrell & Berman of Worcester, Massachusetts, which would contain news of La Eme’s East Coast business.
And one from his mother, still on Flora Street, still chipper and full of gossip, no doubt. Money was no longer a problem for his parents, though why they insisted on staying in the barrio Tavarez couldn’t understand.
There was a letter from Jaime in Modesto – trouble with La Nuestra Familia, most likely.
One from a real lawyer – Mel Alpers – who was representing him on appeal. It looked like a bill.
One from Dallas, where the Mara Salvatrucha gang had butchered two local homies in a war for narcotics distribution in the south side. Blood was about to flow. We should exterminate the Salvadorans, thought Tavarez. Bloodthirsty animals with no sense of honor.
And another letter from Ernest in Arizona State Prison, a supermax prison like Pelican Bay. Ernest was doing a thirty-year bounce on three strikes. Tavarez knew that Ernest’s boys in Arizona were busy these days. Since so much attention had been focused on California’s border, Arizona was now the nexus for drugs, humans, and cash going in and out of the United States.
