Free Handsome Harry by James Carlos Blake Page A

our heads off. We stood there with our hands up high while the guards came running and Pantano lay there quivering with his hands at hisbloody neck, making gargling noises for about a half-minute before he died.
    They hauled me and Russell off to the guardhouse and beat each of us in turn and clapped us in solitary for two weeks. There was talk that the warden was going to try to get us charged with murder, saying we were responsible for Pantano’s death, but nothing came of it.
    I didn’t get another chance at escape until a bunch of inmates tried to pull a work strike. This was around the time of the stock market crash, when guys in suits were jumping out of thirty-story windows because they couldn’t bear to go on living without being rich. The hacks went charging into the strikers with their clubs swinging, and in the midst of the brawl Russell and I snuck away and made it to the roof of one of the factory buildings. We figured we could jump from building to building until we got to the wall. But as we ran across the first rooftop we were spotted by the tower guards and bam, a round glanced off a chimney near my head and a brick fragment hit me in the eyeball and turned it red as a tomato for a month. A hack with a bullhorn said to drop down on our bellies or we were dead.
    We got another beating and another stretch in the hole, except this time Russell managed to break loose of the guards holding him against the wall and he gave them a fight to remember. He broke one hack’s arm and knocked out another’s front teeth and nearly throttled another before the whole crew came running in and pinned him down. The day captain of the guards—a huge liver-lipped bastard named Albert Evans who weighed nearly three hundred pounds—then banged on Russell so bad I thought he’d killed him. Russ didn’t regain consciousness for two days.
    Evans had given me my worst beatings too. The inmates called him Big Bertha behind his back, but Russell and I called him that to his face. Russell swore he was going to settle Evans’s hash, but I said not unless he beat me to him.
     
    A word about Russell. He was always a tough number, one of the toughest at M City. Today… well, let’s say he’s changed, but I’ll get to that later.
    He was a little older than me and nearly as tall. He had thick black hair and was impressively strong. He was doing a twenty-year stretch for bank robbery. He said he grew up in Detroit and joined the Marines when he was a kid, but some sergeant kept getting on his back and he’d had to clobber the bastard—and accidentally blinded him in one eye while he was at it. He did six months in the brig and got booted with a dishonorable discharge. He had a job in a car plant for a while, but it wasn’t long before he’d had enough of working for wages and being bossed around by fools, so he took up the gun and went into business for himself.
    He had a longtime girlfriend named Opal Long who lived in Chicago and often came to see him at M City on visiting days. Her family name was Wilson but she’d got married young to a guy called Long and kept his name when they divorced. I saw her for the first time when Russ and I were seated next to each other in the visiting room one time and he was talking to Opal through the grill while I talked to Mary. She was a big hefty girl with darker red hair than Mary’s and one of the best smiles I’ve ever seen. It was also Russell’s first look at Mary, and after the visit he said he was surprised a guy as homely as Earl Northern could have such a pretty sister. I said I thought Opal had a pretty face too. He said yes she did, even though she was never going to be mistaken for a calendar girl, not with her build. He sometimes called her Mack, short for Mack Truck. In days to come, he’d now and then grab that ample ass of hers with both hands and say how much he liked a woman with some meat on her. She loved it when he did that, and she’d laugh along with the rest