6. Chapter 3 – Maddox
“On your feet, inmate.”
The guard — my least favorite — rattled the bars of my cage, as if loud sounds and the scent of his presence could frighten me.
My lips, still tasting of the sweet treat Ira had smuggled to me late last night, cracked into a dry and dangerous grin. I put down the tattered book I was reading — an English translation of Tolstoy — and sat up from the metal slab they called my bed, mocking him with my smile.
“Good morning, senhor.”
The man was easily bought once I’d discovered he secretly sucked off the head guard in his spare time, despite a wife and three children at home. I was the keeper of secrets in this prison, for a price. Penal Agent Lucas Silva’s price was higher than most.
Standing, I unfurled my bulky frame in the tight quarters, taking up all but two feet on either side of the walls keeping me in. I caught Silva in my gaze, glaring at his watery pockets of soulless mud. He held my stare, then shrank in his boots, the stench of his fear hitting us both.
Weak, foolish, Puxa-saco. Bootlicker.
“Turn around, inmate,” Silva barked, voice shaking just enough to tell us who was in charge here. “Hands on your head.”
Sighing, I released my irritation at being interrupted. I’d have more time for reading while the daylight still made its way into my cage. The guards knew not to steal my books.
Tolstoy was not as interesting as Marcus Aurelius, but better than Shakespeare. Frankenstein was my favorite. Men who became monsters — I knew them well.
“Of course, senhor Silva,” I answered back in Portuguese while playing his little game, shuffling around to face the darkness of my room.
The three walls of concrete cubes, with no light except for what came from outside the bars, and a single steel slab to sleep on.
Twenty-three hours a day of rotting, with one hour to raise a little hell.
Unlike hundreds of inmates, I had my own cell. Two decades in Brazil’s harshest penitentiaries made mountains or mice out of men. I was the mountain, the leader of Clube de Morte. Silva was the mouse.
The familiar rattle of the mechanical pulley echoed behind me, its taunts of freedom no longer of interest. I’d given up on escaping long ago, once the idealism of my youth had worn off. Now, I focused my fight inward, on my gang, on their survival.
Running my gang had become my purpose. Gang wars were constant in a prison the size of a small town.
Men scurried around like rats while power changed hands with the simple slip of a shiv.
Joining a side gave these men purpose. My right hand had chopped off the head of the Anjos do diabo, our rival crew, in recent weeks. Retaliation was imminent.
I ignored the clammy, grubby fingers touching my skin as Silva pulled them down off my head and into the cold metal cuffs behind my back. He regularly abused his power with other inmates, tearing shoulders and slicing skin, but he knew better than to try that with me, or my enforcers.
After a gentle tug on the cuffs, he barked, “Turn around and walk.”
I rolled my wrists behind me, testing their confines. Loose — just as instructed. Good. Silva wasn’t getting so cocky as to forget the requirements of our arrangement. He gave me a little leeway. I let him live.
Trudging down the hallway with him at my back, we passed the few other cells of men who’d negotiated their rooms for their lifetime stay. I nodded to a few of my lieutenants, signaling to them with an upward thumb behind my back. Meet me at the corner of the yard. We had business to discuss.
It was far easier to lead men into battle when you spoke their language. We lived in the largest prison in Brasília, with criminals from all over South America. Our men spoke Spanish or Portuguese, and sometimes broken English layered with Guarani. I spoke them all.
We walked through the open quarters — the collapsing buildings housing eight men to a room the size of mine.
Sweat, piss, and semen soaked the walls while addicts stuck themselves with needles they found in the garbage piles, and rapists found their next victim night after night.
I’d spent ten years in this shithole and built enough power for the privilege of my own space.
I’d take a bullet in the brain from Silva before I’d ever go back. I’d fire the bullet myself. The boy I’d been when I’d entered the prison had been barely a criminal. Now, I could say I belonged here — I’d earned my place at the top of the pile.
The desperate inmates shouted at me, their loudness an outward show of solidarity and respect. “Mad Dog! Cachorro Louco!” The nickname I’d chosen so long ago was now the only name I knew.
Instead of leading me to the yard, Silva shoved me forward into the smaller corridor past its entrance, toward the small cell block of office buildings.
“What the fu—” I started to protest when another guard flanked my left, a machine gun aimed at my torso. He shoved me into the largest office with a single desk with piles of paper and a sole chair in front of it. The Director’s room.
“Take a seat, Torres,” Director Gabriel Santos commanded, waving his hand toward the single metal chair.
Of all the people I hated, Gabriel Santos wasn’t one of them.
The Director didn’t lead with a tiny dick — he led with purpose and heart, even though most of us didn’t deserve it.
The prison was crowded and the most dangerous place in Brasília, but he gave us medicine when we were sick and fed everyone the same ration amount.
He’d given Luis Castro, the only friend I’d ever had in the prison, a small funeral for his family after they’d taken his beaten body out of his cell.
He took pity on the younger inmates as they adjusted to their new way of life.
I had been one of them.
So, I sat. Not for the other tiny-dicked men breathing down my neck behind me, but for the man who’d protected me before I could be taken out in a bag like Luis.
The tall, silver-haired man, in a too-tight dress shirt covered in yellow sweat stains, steepled his fingers as he stared down at me.
“There’s been a new development in your case, Torres. To relieve the burden on the prison system, we’ve made an appeal to other governments to take their citizens back, to live out the rest of their sentences in their home countries.”
He scanned my face for a reaction. Giving him an impassive stare, I showed nothing. He frowned.
“The Mexican government has agreed to your transfer, and the paperwork has finally gone through. You’ll be transported to Mexico immediately to live out the rest of your life sentence at their selected penitentiary.”
Anticipating change was a survival skill. Sensing danger was the difference between alive and dead. Yet this caught me by surprise. His words were simple, but they didn’t register.
Uncertainty settled heavy on my stomach.
I didn’t like its unfamiliar taste. All I knew about Mexican prisons was from rumors.
Actual uniforms, laundry services, educational services.
Books. Luxuries well beyond my imagination after so long in this hell.
My time here was waning. It was unlikely I would live another decade as leader.
Someone — likely a cocky junior on my own crew — would take his chance with my life.
And someday he would win. I was a monster, but still a man. Man could die.
Still, the crumbling walls of this hell were all I had known for twenty years. My brain was at war: did I kiss Santos for my change in fortune, or kill him for the destruction of everything I’d built through the sacrifice of my soul?
As if sensing my creeping darkness, the Director moved to stand in front of me. I fell into the whites of his eyes locked on mine. Behind my right shoulder, Silva stiffened in distaste, jostling my cuffs.
“This is good news, Maddox.” Santos sighed and wiped a layer of sweat from his upper lip as he assessed me.
“You never deserved to be here.” He waved his hands around for emphasis.
“Nothing is worse than this place. You could make an appeal once you are in Mexico — have access to more lawyers than we do. You could have hope for a real life.”
A guttural snort cut through my silence.
Any survivor knew hope was the most dangerous word of all.
I’d fallen for it once. I was not foolish enough to fall for it again.
Life in a new prison wouldn’t be the same as I’d faced when I came here barely a man.
I knew how to command prisoners and bend them to my will, and I could do so no matter which set of walls I was locked inside.
A throat cleared behind us, and the Director’s gaze flitted to the sound. I turned awkwardly in my seat, my hands still clasped at the base of my spine. A young man with light brown skin and dark hair to match stood confidently between the cracking concrete.
“Right on schedule, I see.” He spoke in stilted Portuguese with a thick Spanish accent. “Excellent. Prisoner Torres, you will be coming with me.”
His cocky smile, combined with hardened dark eyes he did not earn in a place like this, made me instantly hate him. Small men with big guns were the most dangerous men of all.
“Agent Diaz has been assigned to your case,” Santos confirmed, stepping away from me to resume his position behind his desk. “We’ve been instructed to send you as-is, with the clothes on your back. The Mexican government will provide you with everything else.”
Most prisoners here only got the clothes they came in with, unless they traded something of value for something new to wear.
I’d taken the clothes off of dead inmates' backs during my first few years as I outgrew the jeans and shirt of a wiry teenager.
Now, every time I needed a fresh shirt, one was freely offered by any of my gang, but it was always used, never clean.
Even having state-provided clothes would be an upgrade.
I could choose to fight this. One quick move and I could snap Silva’s neck in half and buy myself some leverage. But for what?
The only item I would miss was my faded photo of Ana Patricia Gámez, the celebrity whose beautiful face kept me company on my darkest nights, the perfect vision when I only had my hand to fuck.
I would get another picture. And another book.
Standing, I dipped my head toward Santos, accepting this change of circumstance. I had no friends here, only allies of convenience, enemies, and would-be enemies. Staying was a suicide mission, even if it took another ten years to kill me.
“Lead the way, palhaco,” I taunted, as the two guards lingered a single foot behind me.
Agent Diaz brought us past three checkpoints.
At the last one before the prison’s entrance, he nodded to the two guards behind me.
Their hands went to my feet and I heard the sharp metal click of cuffs cinching around my ankles.
They weren’t loose this time, fucking Lucas Silva’s last attempt at having a spine.
His soft snicker boiled in my blood, but I said nothing. I’d never have to see the man again.
I heard the two guards retreat down the hallway until it was just Diaz and me. He stared through me as if trying to find my soul. It was in there — all men had souls until their deaths. Mine was buried so deeply he would have to excavate to find it.
Finally, he looked away to the final portico where a car was waiting. My shoulders rose, accepting the small victory. If we were going to be stuck together for the next leg of this journey, he should accept who’d eat who for breakfast.
A sneer lifted his lips as he opened the back door of the car, beckoning me inside.
Ignoring him, I shuffled through the sand, anticipation rising in my chest at my first car ride in two decades.
I had to bow my head to climb in, then awkwardly settled into the cracked leather seat with no help from Dickhead Diaz. I didn’t want him touching my skin.
What I wanted touching me was more of that air-conditioned air — a blast of the chill washed over my sticky skin. It felt almost as good as a hard fuck.
Diaz slammed my door and strode around the front to get in the passenger seat, the driver not even daring to look at me in the rearview mirror, probably afraid of what he would see.
I didn’t know what I’d see, either. I shaved my head with a hand-sharpened razor by feel, learning how not to slice my skin to shit a long time ago.
I had more than a few scars along my lips and cheeks.
My face honed into sharp edges from violence and years of near starvation.
Most of the tattoos on my body I’d only seen through tiny shards of mirrors prisoners smuggled in to use as weapons.
I hadn’t seen my own face — all of it, at least — in twenty years.
Diaz climbed into the car and told the driver to move in rapid Spanish.
I hadn’t spoken my mother tongue in a while, but I could still understand.
I eyed the prison from the outside as we pulled away.
The crumbling walls and torn barbed wire looked more like a bombed city than any place for human beings.
Society had decided we weren’t human a long time ago.
Once the prison was out of our sight, Diaz turned his body toward mine in the back seat, a shining syringe resting against his palm.
“Someone paid an awful lot of money for you, cabrón. You’re going to Mexico, but you’ll beg for prison once they are through with you.”
Before I could retreat, or do anything to escape whatever drug he was about to feed me, the sharp prick of the needle drove through my pants and into my thigh. The heat of the drug coursed through my muscles and spread outward, my blood taking it right into my heart.
Heroin, I realized too late. My head dropped back in my seat and my breaths slowed as the drug took effect. I didn’t like heroin.
Before I could say a word, darkness took me for its own.