giving a detailed commentary of what he could see through the cracked door. "Never in all my years of medical practice have I seen hooters like those, Frank.Oh - there goes one with two cats in her pants - look at that ass wiggle."
Since Rudy's death, Doc had become his best friend. Doc was in his early sixties, a lean hard man. He had one of the foulest mouths Frank had ever heard, but Frank knew he was all bluff. Frank had watched him care for inmates the prison doctor ignored. No complaint was too small for Doc to take seriously.
"Oh, my God.The color. The beauty. The bodies.Frank, I'm getting a hard-on just looking. You should see this."
Doc nudged him and he looked through the crack. Businessmen walking, going somewhere. Women in suits, walking with men, with other women, walking alone, but all walking, heading someplace. That was the difference with prison. These people had goals. Men in prison walked nowhere. They walked to fill their twenty years.
"Jesus, Frank, how about a smile, a laugh? You don't fuckin ' see this every day. Why so gloomy? You just won."
Yes, he had, and that gave him satisfaction, but the changes the committee had made - they were disastrous. "Lots of problems, Doc."
"Like?"
"First, that Adak Island is going to be impossible. You heard them. A former hard-duty Naval station. Uninhabited.Ask yourself why it's uninhabited.Remember your geography. The Aleutians are between the Bering Sea and the Pacific, weather system meeting weather system. And I think it's on the Ring of Fire."
"Which is?"
"Volcanoes and earthquakes around the Pacific."
"Fuck.If the Navy made it there, we can make it."
"You heard them, Doc. Adak is in the Aleutians. In World War II the weather killed more people than the Japanese did."
"So it rains and it's windy. So?"
"Do you have any idea how much preparation we'll have to do?"
"What's to do? A few months maybe. You choose some of your friends, they line up their women, you get Uncle Sugar to buy us some umbrellas. No big deal."
Frank snorted in derision. "No. The Bureau decides who goes. We don't."
"So? They were against the whole thing and we beat them. Fuckin ' right."
"I'm not sure we beat them. Now the Bureau can clean out all their weirdoes and dump them on Adak."
"Come on, Frank. Take some of those assholes out of prison and they won't be so bad. Assholes still, but you let them know right from day one that you're the meanest motherfucker on the block."
"That's not my way. And this businessman friend of Murphy's who's going to set up a factory for us - how much is he going to pay us? You heard the Congressman. 'It's work or starve.' The guy can pay us slave wages and we have to take it."
Frank lowered his voice and nodded toward Gilmore. "And what's the connection to Gilmore? Gilmore knows Murphy. What's going on there?"
Doc shrugged."I don't know. Best thing is just kill Gilmore."
"The fox is being invited into the chicken coop," Frank muttered.
Frank shifted his whole body to look at Gilmore. He didn't look so in control now as he struggled to keep the phone under his chin. Even Gilmore couldn't get his hands unshackled.
In some ways he had to admire Gilmore. The man was a smooth prison boss, and, although he dealt in drugs, he had brought a measure of peace to the prison. Gilmore, a black man, had ended long years of racial tension by setting up an organization that included whites as key players. Gilmore liked to tell everyone that the warden and the guards used racial tension to keep the focus off themselves. Frank suspected there was more to it. It was business - why sell to just the blacks, when you can sell to the whites as well?
The door opened and a beautiful young woman from the Indian subcontinent stood in the doorway. She wore a pink and purple sari. A light fragrance of lavender floated into
Lee Iacocca, Catherine Whitney