The Killing Floor Blues by Craig Schaefer

of mashed potatoes. I didn’t have much of an appetite.
    “Makes sense,” I said. “Killing me, and getting away with it, will make him look like a guy who can get things done. Somebody who isn’t afraid to spill a little blood. What’s Brisco think?”
    Westie shrugged. “Brisco doesn’t want a war. And his general course of action, when it comes to problems, is to do whatever makes said problem go away. As quietly as possible.”
    “You think he’ll hand me over to the Calles?”
    “Not a chance, friend. The prisoners who take this white-solidarity business seriously would skin him alive for it. But just because he’s not handing you over…”
    He let the thought trail off.
    “Doesn’t mean,” I said, “he won’t stand aside and let them take a shot at me. ‘Oops, sorry, they shanked him when we weren’t looking. It couldn’t be helped.’”
    Westie twisted his lips into a bitter smile.
    “Now you’re thinking right. Watch your arse, Dan. Raymundo will make a move on you, and soon—it’s not
if
, it’s
when
.”
    When I’d finished choking down dinner, I fell in with a ragged crowd of men heading back to Hive C. All my shade of pale, most of them Brisco’s boys.
    I’d never felt so alone in a crowd.
    Back in my cell, I caught Paul up on current events. He sat on his bunk, a dog-eared paperback by Voltaire nestled in his lap, and sighed.
    “You’ve got options,” he said, “but ultimately it comes down to a choice of evils. There’s voluntary segregation, for instance.”
    “Voluntary?”
    Paul nodded. “Sure. Any prisoner who feels threatened has the right to request voluntary segregation.”
    “How’s that work?”
    “You know Ad Seg? The hole? Solitary confinement? That’s where they stick you. Hell, you can do your whole sentence in solitary. Pros: you won’t get stabbed. Cons: you’ll probably go insane from the isolation.”
    “Not an option,” I said. “What else have you got?”
    “Kill him first? Not easy to pull off, considering Raymundo never rolls with less than three of his, er, ‘homies’ to play bodyguard, but you seem like a resourceful gentleman. Of course, then the banger who takes his place will have to kill you to avenge Raymundo, and so on down the line.” He wagged his paperback at me. “Vengeance is an endless cycle. Tragic, really.”
    That idea had some merit. Not sure how I’d pull it off, though. I set it on the back burner.
    “Of course,” Paul added, “you could also…not be here when the attack happens. Those questions you asked me about people breaking out of the Iceberg. Those weren’t hypothetical, were they?”
    I caught the glint in his eye.
    “Paul?” I asked. “By any chance, would you be interested in getting out of here?”
    “Hmm.” He glanced at his bare wrist, as if checking an invisible watch. “Well, I’ve got nothing else to do for another…forty years or so. So yes, Daniel, yes I would.”
    “Forty more years? Christ, what’d you do?”
    Paul smirked. “Less than you did, according to
your
rap sheet. But to answer your question, I’m a bad, bad man. A bad, bad man who made the mistake of trusting a public defender with a heavy caseload. I may have committed a tiny little murder, but there
are
such things as mitigating circumstances, you know?”
    “If we do this, you’ll be a fugitive for the rest of your life. You okay with that?”
    He stretched his arms over his head and stifled a yawn.
    “My wife divorced me. She’s made it clear I’ll never see my little girl again, and I’m
pretty
sure my tenure at the university’s been revoked by now. It’s not as if I have a whole lot from my old life to cling to. So. You have a plan?”
    “I’m working on that,” I told him.
    Later, I lay awake in my bunk, staring at the eggshell paint on the wall and listening to the restless sounds of the prison after dark. They were less jarring than the night before, and it was that much easier to close my eyes and slip,