Keeplock: A Novel of Crime Read Online Free PDF Page B

as I walked off. “You gotta lighten up, sugar,” she called after me. “Smoke a few rocks and you’ll feel better. I can get it for you.”
    The Ludlum Foundation was housed in a four-story building that used to be called the Paradise Hotel. I know, because after a successful job we used to grab a few whores and party all night at the Paradise. Snort and fuck until the sun came up or the coke ran out. The Foundation must have taken the hotel over, converting it into some kind of halfway house.
    The change, on the outside, wasn’t all that impressive. Same sooty red brick, same sooty windows, same broken steps leading up to a narrow wooden door. I stood across the street for a few minutes, fending off the whores and sucking on a cigarette. The whores I’d gone to the Paradise with had been one thing, but these women (and men) looked ravaged. Even the young ones. The bodies were still okay, especially half-naked under a streetlight, but the faces were drawn, the eyes bulging and red with lack of sleep.
    It was time to go inside and get settled, but I stayed where I was, lighting another cigarette, wishing for a family, a home. Macho is the standard fallback for prisoners swept by loneliness, but I had no one to kick or punch. Simon had called The Ludlum Foundation a “Tier II Facility,” but I couldn’t see it as any more than a homeless shelter. Coming out of jail is hard under the best conditions. Living in a shelter, no matter what they call it, in the middle of whore and drug heaven, pounds home the reality of being a loser. I’d spent ten years protecting my honor and, with it, my ego. But, in reality, I was just another homeless asshole, dependent on the state for a mattress and a half-cooked meal.
    There was a phone booth on the corner. As if someone had dragged me (as if a Cortlandt C.O., backed by the Squad and their steel batons, had ordered me), I jammed a quarter into the slot and punched out a number I’d sworn never to call. A woman answered on the second ring.
    “Hello.”
    Her breathless voice seemed faintly familiar. Close enough for me to hope. To take a deep breath and hold it.
    “Ginny?”
    “Pardon me?”
    I let my breath go, called myself a schmuck. “Is Ginny there?”
    “You must have the wrong number. There’s nobody here named Ginny. Sorry.”
    And why should there be? Why, if I hadn’t once heard from Ginny Michkin in ten years, should I expect here to be out here waiting for me to finally call? The apartment we’d shared must have enclosed as many painful memories as my prison cell. The only difference was that she’d been able to move out.
    “Is this 555-8473?” I felt like a fool even as I asked the question.
    “Yes, it is, but there’s no Ginny living here.”
    “Sorry.”
    I hung up the phone, ground out my cigarette butt, and walked across the street, up the steps, and into The Ludlum Foundation. The guard at the security desk, a black man, was dressed in designer jeans and a leather vest over a New York Mets t-shirt. His hair was shaved on the sides and rose six inches to form a flat shelf on top. He was obviously one of the residents.
    “Hey,” he said, “check this shit out. We got ourselves a slice of white bread for a change. What happened, white bread, they run out of niggers where you come from?”
    He was well over six feet tall and thickly muscled, but even though I was barely five foot eight, I felt no fear whatever. Size has no importance unless you plan to fight with your hands. I didn’t plan to fight at all.
    A short Spanish guy wearing a white t-shirt with a Puerto Rican flag on the front laughed uproariously. He was sitting off to one side of the desk, reading a comic book. Apparently, I was more amusing than Archie Andrews, because he put it down and leaned back to enjoy the game.
    There’s no sense in showing your hand before the cards are dealt. I was willing to play the fool if playing the fool would get me through. I put my referral slip on the