He had a green parka with a fur-lined hood draped over his arm. “Hurry up or you’ll miss your last ride outta here.”
Dexter rose off the narrow cot. He was nude—he had stripped out of the prison jumpsuit before their arrival. He spread his long, muscular arms and legs.
“All right, open that big-assed cum-catcher of yours,” Jackson said. He was a stern-faced black man with a jagged scar on his chin that he tried to hide with a goatee. He clicked on a pen-sized flashlight.
Dexter opened wide. Jackson panned the flashlight beam inside his mouth, and checked his nostrils and ears, too.
“Now bend over,” Jackson said.
“But we hardly know each other,” Dexter said.
“Don’t test me this morning. I ain’t in the mood for your bullshit.”
Dexter turned around and bent over from the waist. Jackson shone the light up his rectum.
“He’s clear,” Jackson said.
“How about one last blow for the road, Jacky?” Dexter grabbed his length and swung it toward Jackson. “You know I’m gonna miss that sweet tongue action you got.”
“Fuck you,” Jackson said.
During Dexter’s first month in the joint, Jackson had tried to bully him. Word of Dexter’s background had spread quickly, and there were a number of guards and inmates who wanted a crack at him. A shot at glory.
Dexter had repeatedly slammed Jackson’s face against a cinderblock wall, fracturing his jaw and scarring his chin. Although assaulting a guard would normally have resulted in a stint in the hole and additional time tacked onto his ten-year sentence, Jackson had never reported the incident. He had his pride.
Jackson searched Dexter’s jumpsuit and boots for weapons, found nothing, and then Dexter dressed, shrugging on the parka that Steele gave him. Jackson cuffed his hands in front of him and attached the ankle restraints.
The guards marched him down the cell block. None of the inmates taunted Dexter, as was typical when an inmate departed. There were a few softly uttered words of support—“Peace, brother,” “Take care of yourself, man”—but mostly, a widespread silence that approached reverence.
“These guys are really gonna miss you, Bates,” Steele said.
“They can always write me,” Dexter said.
They took him to inmate processing, where the final transfer paperwork was completed. He was being sent to Centralia Correctional Center, another medium security prison, to serve out the balance of his sentence. He had put in for the transfer purportedly to take advantage of the inmate work programs offered at that facility, and it had taken almost two years for the approval to come through.
The administrator, a frizzy haired lady with a wart on her nose, expressed surprise that Dexter was not taking any personal items with him. Most transferring inmates left with boxes of belongings in tow, as if they were kids going away to summer camp. Dexter assured Wart Nose that he would get everything he needed once he was settled in his new home.
Paperwork complete, they walked Dexter outside to the boarding area, where an idling white van was parked, exhaust fumes billowing from the pipe. “Illinois Department of Corrections” was painted on the side in large black letters. Steel bars protected the frosted windows.
It was a cold, overcast December morning, a fresh layer of snow covering the flat countryside. An icy gust shrieked across the parking lot and sliced at Dexter’s face.
He wondered about the weather in Chicago, and felt a warm tingle in his chest.
Steele slid open the van’s side door, and Dexter climbed in, air pluming from his lips. Two beefy correctional officers from Centralia waited inside, both sitting in the front seat. A wire mesh screen separated the front from the rear bench rows.
“Sit your ass down so we can get moving,” the guard in the passenger seat said. “It’s cold as fuck out here.”
Steele lifted the heavy chain off the vehicle’s floor and clamped it to Dexter’s ankle restraints. He nodded at Dexter, his blue-eyed gaze communicating a subtle message, and then he slammed the door.
As in police vehicles, there were no interior door handles. Packed inside and bolted in place, a prisoner bound for another concrete home could only sit still and enjoy the ride.
“Headed to our home in Centralia, eh?” the driver asked. He glanced in the rearview mirror at Dexter. “Just so you know brother man, whoever you were outside won’t mean shit there, got it? You’ll be everyone’s bitch, especially ours.”
“Spoken like a man who’s always wanted to be a cop,” Dexter said. “Did you fail the exam? Or wash out of the academy?”
“What a piece of work,” the passenger guard said, shaking his head. “You must want deluxe ’commodations in the hole soon as you get there.”
At the manned booth, a guard waved the van through the tall prison gates. Dexter looked out the window. The snowy plains surrounded them, so vast and featureless they nearly blended into the overcast horizon.
By design, many state correctional centers had been erected in barren wastelands, to make it almost impossible for an escaping inmate to progress far before recapture. Dexter had heard rumors of inmates who managed to get away being tracked down within three miles of the joint, upon which they were brought back, weeping like babies, to an increased sentence and a long stay in solitary.
The two-lane road was crusted with dirty slush and riddled with potholes. It wound through nothingness for close to five miles before it fed into a major artery, which eventually intersected the highway.
At that time of morning, there was no traffic, and there wouldn’t be much at all, anyway. The road dead ended at the prison, a place most normal people preferred to avoid.
The guards switched on the radio to a country-western station. The singer crooned about seeing his lady again after being away for so long.
Dexter wasn’t a fan of country western, but he could dig the song’s message.
“What time is it?” Dexter asked.
“You got somewhere to be, asshole?” the driver said.
“I want to make sure we’re on time. I’ve got a hot date with my new warden.”
“Whatever. It’s a quarter after nine, numb nuts.”
Nodding to the music, Dexter dug his bound hands into the right front pocket of the parka.
A key was secreted inside, courtesy of his good man Steele. Correctional officers were even more receptive to bribes than cops, and that was saying something.
“I’m really feeling this song,” Dexter said. “Turn it up, will you, man?”
“That’s the smartest thing you’ve said yet,” the passenger guard said, and cranked up the volume.
Dexter used the key to disengage the handcuffs, the loud music drowning out the tinkle of the chains.
