Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
Before Jack ever met Lozada, before he had even learned how to play cards himself, Jack had gotten a job working security at high-stakes card tables.
He was there less for the money—it paid a pittance—and more for the sort of information he could siphon right out of the air.
It was amazing what tips could slip out when people started winning and drinking too much because of it.
He could take those tips, tuck them away, and present them like shiny coins at just the right opportunity.
Which black-market trade might be coming off the coffers next.
Which horse would win. Who was searching for a score of heroin.
Jack gleaned information and used it to make inroads on the black market, to get the intel he wanted.
He made significant headway with his contacts over one single tip: the location of a known enemy to the Perralta family.
Jack learned that the man would be staying at a certain hotel on a certain night.
Knowing that if he passed the information on, he would have the man’s blood on his hands.
Even if he wasn’t the one to pull the trigger. Even if it was just words.
He’d done it anyway.
He had fallen asleep that night with a sick twist in his gut, knowing that he had gone too far. He had given information that killed a man.
The next time, he held it back to save another.
He had come to Enchanted Hill knowing exactly what he wanted. Once Leo died, he was entirely on his own—and it had been safer that way. Cora, with her own wants and needs, made things confusing.
But Cora hadn’t known what it was like to be kept inside Cell Block D, built behind dense clusters of barbed wire that snaked along like vines covered in thorns.
It was dank, and Jack often heard a perpetual dripping sound, slow and steady, all night long.
Living within it was like climbing down the inside of a sewer drain.
Jack knelt on the floor of his suite and opened the false-bottom drawer with the blank journal that he was too afraid to write anything personal in.
He remembered the way the iron bars had once stretched from ceiling to floor in front of him, like a row of strings just waiting to be strummed.
The cell across from his held a painting of poppies inside, and they were brighter than they should have possibly been.
Colors and sounds were all distorted in that place.
The longer he had been on Pelican, the more he had felt himself starting to go wrong.
He lit a cigarette, thinking about one Christmas Eve, when the children and wives of Pelican Island officers had filed into D Block to sing Christmas carols for them.
He remembered the reverent, watchful silence as they walked down the corridor between two floors of cells.
Some of the youngest children had looked into the cells, even waved joyously.
Others watched their shoes, the reflection of the dull lights on the linoleum floor.
The inmates had sat on their cots, watching with a hungry look in their eyes that told Jack these were some of the only women and children they had seen in years.
Cora’s hair had been pinned back when she stepped inside.
She wore a green dress with a ribbon. Her gangly elbows hung by her sides.
He had been planning to give her a smile, or hold up his cup of iceplant flowers when she walked by, so that she wouldn’t be nervous.
But instead, at the last minute, he had stepped back into the shadows of his cell.
He hadn’t wanted her to see him in his cage.
Or she might never have looked at him the same way again.
Because it was Christmas, a few inmates were granted permission to accompany with borrowed instruments—the warm brass of a trumpet, a mournful French horn.
Someone had even found Leo a violin, and his face was bliss as he touched the bow and let the music out.
But mostly it was the sound of the voices, shining like a beam of pure light through a pit.
The visitors had lined up on a second-floor bridgeway, right in front of the guards’ locked arsenal of weapons.
Long lay the world in sin and error pining, they sang
Till He appeared,
and the soul felt its worth.
Jack had listened while watching a disembodied hand wrapped around the iron cell bars. And he had wondered, were souls worth less when they were on Pelican Island?
He remembered how Cora had kept her eyes closed tight the entire time she sang, as if she knew he didn’t want her to see him.
Why did it matter to him so much what she saw when she looked at him now?
For so long, he’d been in it only for himself. It had become almost frighteningly natural to live in this world he’d created, where nothing—and no one—mattered beyond getting justice and revenge.
He desperately wanted to clear his name of the things he hadn’t done, and be forgiven for the things that he had.
But perhaps he couldn’t have both. And he was starting to wonder, if he had to choose between them, which one would truly set him free.