Fifth Monday Fiction

Chapter 4. Set the Hook, from the novel Far Stone

By Steve Glossin

[Editor’s Note: Chapter 2 of this unfinished novel appeared on March 21.]

The prisoner opened his eyes when he heard the key inserted into the lock at the end of the hallway. The light switch made a clicking sound when it was flipped and a glow filtered through the door seems. He sat up and waited patiently as the booted footsteps approached his cell. The steel latch opened with a clang and reverberated through the cell block like a dropped guillotine. The prisoner stood and with both arms behind his back, limped toward the door and the beam of light that penetrated the room.
    “I see our accommodations suit you,” said the sergeant.
    “How can you see that?” the prisoner replied in Spanish. He knew what the answer would be, having played the game a dozen times.
    The sergeant coughed once then hawked a harsh cackle, like someone suffering from emphysema. “You’re still alive.”
    The prisoner took a step forward. “I have a question.”
    When he didn’t get a reply he brought his right arm from behind his back and held his hand up with a US hundred dollar bill in it.
    The sergeant’s eyes squinted and he ran his tongue over his graying mustache. “Where did you get that?” he spit out.
    “I have a question,” the prisoner repeated in a calm voice.
    The sergeant’s brow furrowed and his heartbeat increased. “My guards can be here in ten seconds and I will have the money.”
    And it would be the only one you will have…unless we can come to an understanding.”
    Their failure to make a cavity search when he was brought into the prison after the short stay in the hospital kept the thin aluminum cigar tube safe. Fifteen one-hundred-dollar bills rolled and inserted in the tube then inserted up his rectum. His get-out-of-jail money when on assignment. This would be the first time he had to use it. They had searched his cell six times, but found nothing. His bank and his toilet were the same hole in the floor. A crack in the pipe that he had widened then covered with his own feces hid his personal safe deposit box.
    The sergeant had supervised the guards who searched the cell and knew there was nothing to find. “Perhaps a knife up your ass will cause it to shit money,” he threatened, while picking at straws as to where the money could be hidden.
    Too late, the prisoner thought. “You can threaten me, but you won’t find anything. You can kill me and pick at my bones, but there is nothing there for you to find.”
    The sergeant weighed his options. The prison comandante was receiving a monthly bribe to keep the prisoner alive and secluded. How much and from whom he didn’t know. Complete isolation was all that he had been told. Nothing flowed down to him, but here was a chance for a few bread crumbs for his pocket.
    “You said you have a question.”
    “Why am I isolated?”
    The sergeant eyed the bill. “Someone with money is paying for it. I don’t know who or how much, but it must be a lot to give you a private block in this prison.”
    The prisoner extended his hand and the money was snatched and disappeared into the sergeant’s tunic in less than two seconds. The prisoner’s facial expression remained emotionless, but his mind was jubilant as the hook was set. “Perhaps next week I will have another question.”
    The door was slammed shut and the prisoner returned to his slab of concrete and listened to the footsteps receding down the hall. A leer played across his face in the darkness.

“You have a question for me?” the sergeant asked, watching the prisoner’s arms in anticipation of one coming forward.
    The prisoner’s smirk wasn’t visible under his hawkish nose, but it was there. The sergeant, who made his weekly visits on Friday, had arrived a day early. No taunting greeting this time, but an anxiousness to answer a question and get a reward.
    “Is the moon up tonight?”
    “What?” the sergeant blurted, not sure he’d heard the question right.
    “Is there a full moon tonight?” the prisoner repeated.
    Solitary confinement did strange things to the wretches who struggled to survive each hour of each day in their dark, cold tombs. The sergeant knew the one thing they missed most of all was fresh air and a glimpse of the sun and stars.
    “There is a moon,” he answered. When the arm didn’t come forward, he added, “It’s as round as a child’s soccer ball, and yellow. Yes, very yellow.”
    “Can you take me outside so that I might see it?”
    “Impossible.”
    “Nothing’s impossible for the sergeant of the guards.” The arm came forward holding three bills. “One for you and for each of your men…if you decide to share it. Why should the comandante get all of the rewards when you do most of the work?”
    The sergeant looked at the three one-hundred dollar bills and ran his tongue over his mustache.

Copyright © 2015 by Steve Glossin