The gloating expression vanished from the sec man’s face as though wiped off
with a rag.
He screamed, “You’ll find out how big it is, bitch! Get the fuckin’ prod! Time
I’m finished with ya, yer cunt’ll be green as well as yer hair!”
“Cute,” said Hunaker. She said to Sam, “Hey, you think he knows where a girl’s
whoopee actually is?”
J.B. muttered out of the corner of his mouth, “Shut it.”
Hunaker shut it, and shrugged. She turned away from the door with an exaggerated
yawn. The man, his face suffused with rage, disappeared from the opening,
clattering off up the passageway with the other guard.
“Too mouthy,” said J.B.
“Fuck it. The wimp got up my nose.”
“You just pray he doesn’t stick the prod up your nose,” advised Koll.
Hunaker snorted with laughter. She was irrepressible. She started gurgling and
shaking and had to lean up against Koll to keep her balance. J.B. shot her a
stony look.
“Aw, come on, J.B. Ain’t the end of the world. We’ll get outta this one.”
“If we’re lucky. Doesn’t help when you feel the spike of that guy. You’re gonna
have to make up to him, or one of them.”
“Oh, crap,” said Hunaker. “Does that mean I have to promise ’em all they can
manage? Like that?”
“I want at least two in the corridor.”
“Why does it have to be me?”
“Preferably both of you.”
“Well, okay, but it’s bad theater, J.B.,” said Hunaker. “I mean, I like ol’
Kollinsen here, but I don’t fancy him. Something about that mustache of his. You
won’t get a performance from the heart, know what I mean?”
“Thanks for nothing,” muttered Koll.
J.B. said, “I didn’t mean Koll.”
“Oh, yeah? Me and Sam?” She turned on the black girl, nudged her in the ribs.
“Hey-y-y! How did you know, J.B.? Been trying for a date for a hog’s age.”
“Jesus.” Samantha the Panther’s voice was a husky plaint. “Look, J.B., I got no
intention of showing off my box to those bastards.”
J.B. stared at her through his steel-rimmed spectacles, his face expressionless.
“Sure. Let’s hope the situation doesn’t arise.”
His voice was as toneless as his face.
The room went quiet. Into both young women’s an image of the bloodstained block
slid like a poisonous snake.
J.B. sat down on the concrete floor and began to unlace his right combat boot.
“Just put on a show is all. Ain’t worth shit. You know it, I know it.”
“Fuck it,” complained Hunaker. “Just ’cause we got tits and all. I mean, why
don’t you guys stand there, wave your dongs around?”
“Ain’t gonna do much to these guys,” J.B. pointed out.
Koll said, “You speak for yourself, buster,” in hurt tones.
Hunaker said, her voice low-key, harsher in tone, “You really think… the train?
Gone?”
J.B. tugged his boot, pulled it off.
“You were there. You heard what Cohn said, what the other guy said.”
He put a hand inside his boot and began working at the inner sole with his
fingers.
“You think we got a chance?”
J.B. stopped working at his boot, sat back and frowned slightly.
He said, “Maybe sixty-forty.”
“Yeah?” Hunaker’s eyes widened. The odds were better than she’d imagined.
“To them,” J.B. said.
“Fireblasted nukeshit!”
A bleak smile flickered across J.B.’s sallow face.
“Just wave those tits around. I’ll give you better odds.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Fifty-five-forty-five. Still to them.”
“Thanks a bunch, big boy,” said Hunaker. She suddenly spat out, her voice
squeezed tight with fury, “Just as long as some of ’em die nasty.”
Sam was now beside the door, peering out through the bars at the empty corridor.
Koll had joined J.B. on the floor and was pulling his own boots off. Hunaker
unfastened the belt she was wearing and began to rip out the false bottoms of
all her empty ammo pouches. She unhooked her water bottle, uncapped it, wiped it
with her sleeve and took a swig. Then she eased the webbing around it, slid the
flask out, began peeling off wafer-thin strips of a grayish and doughy-looking
substance wound around it.
Plastique. Some things just never change.
She said, “How we gonna do it?”