SOMEONE TRIES to kill me at least once a day.
I usually see it coming. By definition, people in prison aren’t the smartest creatures in the criminal kingdom. They tend to be violent attention-seekers, so they usually tell someone what they’re planning to do.
But I’m a dirty fighter. I’ll do what it takes to protect myself.
Sometimes the women are more discreet. I’d first been held at Stillwater Remand Centre, where someone caught me off guard on my third day and stuck a sharpened piece of fencing wire into the back of my neck, going for my jugular vein. I’d been tired and unfocused, worrying about my upcoming committal hearings.
After the attack I’d been moved to a new remand facility, Johnsonborough Correctional Complex, to separate me from my apparent rival, but it became clear to administration not long after the transfer that everyone was my rival.
Today, I’d had the benefit of twenty-four hours’ warning before my attacker made her move. As the wake-up alarm sounded I was sitting on the floor, stretching my shoulders and strategizing a solid plan of defense.
The door to my cell opened in time with a hundred others, a rolling and clunking that almost drowned out the shouts of the guards. I put on my shoes and stood to attention.
Detective Harriet Blue. Inmate 3329.
Charged with a host of crimes. The main one murder.
I’d tracked, hunted, and killed a man named Regan Banks. Banks had been a serial killer who counted my brother among his victims, but that fact didn’t do me any favors. The law was the law, and as a cop I shouldn’t have acted like I was above it. Now I was in prison.
Any inmate who takes down a cop in prison is a hero.
But it was not going to be this cop.
Not today.
DOLLY QUADDICH, MY cellmate, stepped into the count line beside me. She stretched her messily tattooed arms toward the ceiling and shook herself like a dog, but ended up looking no more revitalized. Dolly never looked entirely awake. She consumed more marijuana in prison than some junkies did on the outside.
“What’s for breakfast?” she asked, yawning.
“The same unidentifiable slop they’ve been serving at Johnsonborough every morning for the past fifty years,” I said.
“Just making conversation, Haz.”
“Leave me alone today,” I said. “Go sit with the other dope-heads. I’ll see you in forty-eight.”
“Oh, man,” she whined. “Again? When the hell are you gonna change your name?”
Dolly knew what seeing her in two days meant. It meant I was going to have a fight, and I’d be locked up in solitary for that time. She hated being alone in the cell because she was afraid of the dark. One hundred and seventy women living within sneezing distance of one another, eight guards touring the block every fifteen minutes and all-night security lighting that stayed bright enough for inmates to read jailhouse magazines in bed did little to abate her nighttime terror. She was also convinced that if I legally changed my name, the prison population would instantly forget who I was.
I liked Dolly, but she was dumb as a brick and every time I got put in solitary she sold something of mine in exchange for drugs. I didn’t have a lot of things, so my few items were precious. Usually my deodorant went first.