and grumbling followed them down the cell block. Any other inmate being led out at this time of night would have brought yelling and catcalls and demands for explanation. But all the Pelican Bay cell blocks were segregated by race and gang. And this block was populated by La Eme and the gangs with which La Eme had formed alliances – the Aryan Brotherhood, the Nazi Lowriders, and the Black Guerillas. So when the inmate was El Jefe, respect was offered.
Tavarez walked slowly, head up, eyes straight ahead. Something fluttered in his upper vision: a kite baggie on a string floating down from tier three to find its intended cell on tier one. Night was when the kites flew.
Lunce unlocked the library just after ten o’clock. It was a large, windowed room with low shelves to minimize privacy, pale green walls, and surveillance cameras in every corner.
Tavarez looked up at one. ‘Cartwright again?’
‘What do you care?’ said Lunce. Lunce was large and young, just like Post. He resented his manipulation more than the other guards and Tavarez was waiting for the day when Lunce would turn on him.
Cartwright was the night ‘situations’ supervisor, which put him in control of the electric perimeter fence and video for the eastern one-quarter of the sprawling penal compound. This made Cartwright the most valuable of all the cooperative guards, and a kickback to him was included in almost every transaction that Tavarez made with lower-ranking men such as Post and Lunce. There were kickbacks to midlevel COs also, to those lower than Cartwright but above Lunce and Post. That was why favors were expensive. The western, northern, and southern perimeter guardtower sharpshooters and attack dogs were under the control of other supervisors but Mike had found no way to influence them.
‘He can turn the cameras back on whenever he wants to,’ said Tavarez.
‘Not with me in here he won’t. You got less than one hour. I’ll be watching you.’
Tavarez nodded. Having an L-Wop – life without parole – meant that there weren’t too many punishments they could give him if he was caught. They could move him back to the SHU, which was something he didn’t even allow himself to think about. But he didn’t pay all that bribe money for nothing, and after all, he was only in the library. No violence intended, no escape in mind, no drug abuse, no illicit sex.
‘The cuffs,’ said Tavarez, backing over to Lunce. It made the hair on his neck stand up – giving his back to a hostile white man – but if prison taught you anything, it was to overcome fear. Outside, you might have power. Inside, all you had was the bribe and the threat.
He found the world atlas on top of the G shelf, which he now slid toward him with a puff of dust.
Both the table and the chairs were bolted to the floor, so Tavarez plopped the heavy book down on the metal table, then worked himself into a chair in front of it.
He lifted the big cover, then the first hundred or so pages. Sure enough, the laptop sat in an excavated cradle. Post had come through.
For the next fifty minutes Tavarez sat before the screen, practically unmoving except for his hands, tapping out orders and inquiries in an elaborate code that he had helped devise for La Eme starting way back in 1988, during his first prison fall, before he had become El Jefe.
The code was rooted in the Huazanguillo dialect of the Nahuatl language that he had learned from Ofelia – his frequent visitor at Corcoran State Prison. The dialect was only understandable by scholars, by a few Aztec descendants who clung to the old language, and a handful of upperechelon La Eme leaders. Ofelia was both a budding scholar and a nearly full-blooded Aztec. Back then, Paul Zolorio, who ran La Eme from his cell just eight down from Tavarez, arranged to bring Ofelia up from Nayarit, Mexico, to tutor the handsome young Harvard pistolero.
Now Tavarez’s text messages would soon be decoded by his most trusted generals, then passed on to the appropriate captains and lieutenants. Then down to the ’hoods and the homeboys, who actually moved product and collected cash. Almost instantly, the whole deadly organization – a thousand strong, with gangsters in every state of the republic and twelve foreign countries – would soon have its orders.
Tavarez worked fast:
Ernest’s Arizona men need help – everyone had a finger in that pie now that California had been clamped down. Move Flaco’s people from the East Bay down to Tucson.
The L.A. green-light gangs would have to be punished severely. Green-lights won’t pay our taxes? They’re proud to go against us? Then peel their caps. Cancel one homie from each green-light gang every week until they pay, see how long their pride holds up.
Albert’s men in Dallas are up against the Mara Salvatrucha. MS 13 has the good military guns from the United States but they don’t get our south-side action. Move ten of our San Antonio boys over to Dallas immediately. Shoot the Salvadorans on sight if they’re on our corners. Not a grain of mercy.
At the end of his fifty minutes, Tavarez had passed on more information than he could send in a hundred handwritten, coded letters and kites. Which would take him a week and a half to write. And a week to get where they were going. And half would still be intercepted, diverted, destroyed – perhaps even passed on to La Nuestra Familia by people like Ken McCann.
But with the computer he could write things once, in just a matter of seconds, then send his commands to a handful of trusted people, who in turn would send them down the line. His code was wireless and traveled at the speed of sound. It was practically untraceable and virtually indecipherable. It was clear, concise, and inexpensive.
Pure, digital Nahuatl, thought Tavarez, beamed exactly where it was needed.
All it had really cost him was a few months of subtle persuasion, then ten unsubtle grand to help the Post family through Tonya’s cancer.
Tavarez turned off the computer, closed the screen, and set it back into the hollowed pages of the atlas of the world.
Like an alert dog who hears his master stir, Lunce appeared from behind the G shelf, dangling the cuffs.
‘Looking at porn?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Are they cute as your whores?’
‘Not as cute.’
‘I don’t believe you. I think you’re running your business. La Eme business.’
Tavarez just shrugged. He felt the cuffs close around his wrists.
Tavarez lifted weights furiously that night, putting everything he had into the repetitions, increasing the weight until his muscles gave out, doing sit-ups and crunches between sets, panting and growling and sweating for nearly an hour. Lunce watched him work out and shower but Tavarez was hardly aware of him.
By the time he was back in his cell, it was well past midnight. His body trembled from the exertion. He lay on his back on the bed and listened to the snoring and the distant wails from the ding wing – psych ward – and the endless coughing of Smith two cells down.
He closed his eyes and thought back to when he was released from his first prison term and he’d moved into Ofelia’s apartment for six blessed weeks. All of the pent-up desire they’d felt for each other during her visits came charging out like water from ruptured dams. She was only seventeen, hopeful and innocent,
