“Three years?” I said.
“He beat the hell out of them with a blackjack, mostly i
n the mouth. You could say he has a little bit of a denial problem. He was fresh meat as soon as he went into gen pop.”
Dupree sat down next to Clete. It was hard not to be distracted by the scars below his left eye. They resembled a pink, segmented worm someone had stepped on. He wiped at them with his wrist and grinned with half his mouth. “They make my eye water, although that don’t make sense.”
“Tell Dave why the AB wanted their ink back.”
“I took down four guys to earn my teardrops. Two in the shower, one in the yard, one in the block. Then they told me I had to come across for maybe half a dozen swinging dicks. They used a screwdriver. I would have been killed if I hadn’t gotten transferred to Atascadero.”
I let my eyes slip off his. I couldn’t imagine what his childhood must have been like. “Yesterday’s box score.”
“I lit up one guy in lockdown. That sound like somebody who should pull a train?”
I looked at Clete.
“You were stand-up, Spider,” Clete said. “Nobody is holding anything against you. Right, Dave?”
“Right,” I said.
There was a warm light in Spider’s eyes that reminded me of a nineteen-year-old door gunner I once knew, a mindless kid who had no idea how his rhetoric unnerved other people.
“About this guy who got suffocated in the Iberia Parish prison?” Clete said. “Two guards sat on him?”
Spider seemed to come out of a trance. “Yeah, he was AB. But deaf and a nutcase. He started fighting with the hacks and they sat on him. He was a hump for a cop named Devereaux.”
“?‘Hump’ like a boyfriend?” I said.
“No, he worked for the cop.”
“Pimping?” I said.
“Cooze, coke, and crank. Now it’s cheese and oxy. I don’t like to talk about this too much.”
“Why not come clean?” I asked.
“That’s the point: I am clean. Trips down memory lane don’t do a lot for my serenity.”
“We totally dig what you’re saying,” Clete said. “You’re doing a solid for us, Spider. We won’t forget it.”
“The guy who got smothered cooked his head when he rode with a couple of motorcycle clubs on the West Coast.”
“Tell Dave about the tats,” Clete said.
“Around one ankle. A chain of crosses.”
“Like big fat ones?” Clete said.
“Yeah,” Spider said.
“The Maltese cross?” I said.
“The what?”
“I remember the man who died in the jail,” I said. “His name was Frank Dubois. That’s who you’re talking about?”
“Yeah, he had a coat of arms tattooed on his back. He could speak Latin or ancient Greek or some shit. He knew sign language, too.”