Hard News

relation), Class D felonies, beer, traveling around, hitchhiking….
    But there was another foundation for the friendship between the two.
    One day Washington had sought Boggs out in the yard and said, “Know why you come up and talked to me?”
    “Nope, Severn, I sure don’t. Why was that?”
    “Allah.”
    “What’s that again?” Boggs asked.
    The huge man explained that Allah had come to Washington in a dream and told him it was his job to befriend Boggs and eventually convert him.
    He told all this to Boggs, who felt himself blushing and said, “Damn, if that’s not the craziest thing I ever heard.”
    “No, man, that’s the way it is. Your ass’s safe. Me and Allah gonna watch out for you.” Which Boggs thought was even crazier, the Allah part at least, but perfectly fine with him.
    From the start, though, Washington’s job wasn’t easy. Boggs was animal feed in Harrison prison. Scrawny, shy, quiet, a loner. He didn’t deal, he didn’t fuck, he didn’t side. Instantly unpopular. The sort that ends up “accidentally” dead—like not paying attention and driving a ¾-inch drill press bit through his neck then bleeding to death before somebody notices the blood.
    Or the sort that does it himself. They may take your belt away from you but if you want to get dead in prison you can get yourself dead, no problem.
    But Severn Washington did his job. And when it became clear that Boggs was under the wing of one of the most devout Muslims in all of Harrison (who also happened to be one of the largest) when that news made the rounds of the cell blocks, Randy Boggs was left pretty much alone.
    “Pretty much,” however, didn’t mean “completely.”
    Washington, disposing of the fast Muslin greeting, “Marhaba, sardeek,” now frowned as he whispered, “Yo, man, you got trouble.”
    “What?” Boggs asked, feeling his heart sink.
    “Word up they gonna move on you again. Serious, this time. I axed a moneygrip o’ mine from the home block and he say he heard it for fucking certain.”
    Randy Boggs frowned. “Why, man? That’s what I don’t get. You hear anything?”
    Washington shrugged. “Make no sense to me.”
    “Okay.” Boggs’s face twisted a little. “Shit.”
    “I’m putting out some inquiries,” Washington said. “We’ll find ourselves out what the fuck’s going on.”
    Boggs considered this. He didn’t go out of his way to look for trouble. He didn’t give steely killer eyes to blacks, he didn’t eye anybody’s dick in the shower, he didn’t get cartons of Marlboros from the guards, didn’t look sideways at the Aryan Brotherhood. There was no reason he could think of that somebody’d want to move on him.
    “I don’t know what I did. I don’t think—”
    “Hey, be cool, man.” Washington grinned. “You walk in what? Twenty-four months. Shouldn’t be too hard to keep yo ass intact that long.”
    “This place, man, I hate it so much….”
    Severn Washington laughed the way he always did when somebody expressed the obvious. “Got the antidote. Less play us some ball.”
    And Randy Boggs said, “Sure.” Thinking, as he saw his reflection in a chicken-wire-laced window, that what he was looking at with the red-socketed eyes wasn’t his living body at all, but something else—something horrible, lying cold and dead, as his blood fled from the flesh.
    Thinking that, despite this huge man’s reassurance, the only hope he now had was that slip of girl with the ponytail and the big camera.

    chapter 11    
     
    THIS CITY WAS A PLAYGROUND YOU NEVER GOT TIRED OF.
    Once you took the element of fear out of it (and there wasn’t anything Jack Nestor feared) New York was the biggest playground in the world.
    He felt the excitement the instant he stepped out of the Port Authority bus terminal. The feeling of electricity. And for a moment he thought: What was he doing wasting his time in piss-ant Florida?
    He smelled: fishy river, charcoal smoke from pretzel vendors, shit, exhaust. Then he got a whiff of some gross incense three black guys dressed up like Arabs were selling from a folding table. He’d never seen this before. He walked up to them. There were pictures of men from ancient times, it looked like, dressed the same. The twelve true tribes of Israel. Only they were all black. Black rabbis …
    What a crazy town this was!
    Nestor walked along Forty-second Street, stopped in a couple peep shows. He left and wandered some more, looking at the old movie