Blood Cell by Shaun Tennant Read Free Book Online

morning, Leo decided that his nonverbal taunts just weren’t entertaining enough. So at breakfast he plopped himself down at Santos’s table, in the seat next to Charlie Cortez, the member of Santos’ gang with the shortest fuse.
    “Culo,” muttered Charlie, looking over to his friends for some advice on how to handle the nuisance.
    “We speak English here, Chuck, you forget again?” Leo poked his tongue through his scar while he pushed his oatmeal around the bowl.
    For a while, Charlie kept himself composed. Charlie knew, from experiences like the one that landed him in Pittman, that he had a tendency to go too far. Going too far on Leo would have some dire consequences for the whole group, so he stayed silent and ate his breakfast. But Leo, like a wasp, just kept buzzing in Charlie’s ear.
    Leo had never liked Charlie. Even on the outside, as members of a gang that would supposedly die for each other, they had been enemies. Leo barely spoke Spanish, and pretty much faked all of the cultural shit. Charlie was the opposite; he was immigrant from Mexico, and for some reason, he thought their gang was about their culture, their racial group. Leo was a realist—they did it for the money and the power and the thrill. Leo couldn’t have cared less about a turf or a code or a credo. That was why as soon as Santos was locked up, he moved off of Eighteenth Street. It was shitty ghetto, beneath Leo, and they’d hung around long enough to build up their cred. Charlie was always a nag about stuff like that, as if murdering thieves really lived by rules. And he was constantly talking in Spanish, even though he knew that Leo didn’t speak it very well. Now, Leo could be just as much of an annoying dick to Charlie as Charlie had always been to him.
    Leo leaned over, getting his mouth right up to Charlie’s ear, to whisper “Chupas mis huevos. Is that right? Was that Spanish enough, pendejo?” Charlie leaned back to his seat and enjoyed a spoonful of his oatmeal.
    He was so content, so busy smiling that twisted smile of his, that he never noticed Delman across the table leaning forward, or Charlie, right next to him, leaning in as well. He never noticed both men reach under the table, so that Delman could pass Charlie a homemade knife made out of a toothbrush filed down to a point.
    Charlie clutched the shank so tightly his hand shook, but Leo was too busy looking down at all of the Eighteenths at the table to even notice. He was untouchable, after all, so why would he worry? Leo locked eyes with Santos.
    “Hey, no disrespect here, but if this is prison than which one of these guys is a bitch? Hey Santos? I mean, somebody’s gotta be taking the tubesteak, right? Because I was just thinking to myself that if Charlie here’s so desperate to suck on my nuts, I might be willing—“ He wasn’t able to finish because Charlie, pushed too far, had driven the shank hard into Leo’s thigh and twisted the blade.
    Leo screamed and tried to pull away, but Charlie kept the pressure on, pushing the toothbrush farther into Leo’s leg. Leo’s screams alerted the guards, and within seconds a trio of uniforms were at the table. One of them knocked Charlie on the shoulder with his baton to get him to stop, and then dragged him hard to the floor. The other two grabbed Leo and pulled him from his bench and away from the table. They waved for a nearby door to be opened and dragged the screaming, bleeding former captain of the Eighteenths to the infirmary.
    The cafeteria in C Pod is a single large room with twenty-five foot ceilings. All around the perimeter, fifteen feet above the floor, is a wide balcony where guards with shotguns and rifles constantly monitor the prisoners. At any given time, the guards are monumentally outnumbered, and if the prisoners decided to riot, there was very little that could stop them from taking down all of the guards on the floor. For this reason, the guards on the floor only kept batons and handcuffs on