Hangman: A Novel by Stephan Talty Read Free Book Online Page B

glanced at the older guard behind the glass, and nodded.
    “Holler if they get too
nnnnnaasty
,” the man said, and his laughter echoed back to her as he walked off.
    Abbie headed to the last cell before the wall curved into a semicircle, the one just before Hangman’s. She ducked her head down. Inside a thin white man with wrinkly, tattooed arms and greasy hair to his shoulders was laid out on his cot, facing the door, and reading a tattered paperback. Abbie read the title—
The Fate of All Mankind
—before the inmate dropped it to his lap and stared at her.
    “How you doing?” Abbie said.
    The man’s eyes were watery. He looked like an old biker with emphysema.
    “Ah’m okay.” Southern accent.
    “How long have you been in this cell?”
    “Two days. Got caught shoplifting again.”
    Abbie nodded. “You have a good night,” she said. The man looked almost disappointed when she pulled back from the bars.
    “Hey!” he called out. “What are you looking for? This ain’t my first time through this place.”
    Abbie considered that. “Someone who had a cell next to Hangman’s for the past few weeks, or longer.”
    The eyes looking at her with a look a thousand years old. “Try Hector Lopez. He was in 8, next door to Hangman, for a couple of months. He’s in 14 now, on account of spitting at Sergeant Platz, the animal.”

10
    Hector Lopez was young and wiry and dressed in a clean wife-beater and white pants rolled up to the calf. When he saw Abbie standing at his window, he lifted up off the toilet seat where he’d been doing curls with a towel tied around something square and heavy. He walked toward the door with a rolling gait, catlike, smiling.
    He whispered something in Spanish.
    “Excuse me?” Abbie said.
    “Oh! I thought you might be …”
    “Do I look Spanish, Hector?”
    He grinned. “Might be, might be.”
    Abbie shook her head. “I’m Detective Kearney with the Buffalo PD and I have a question for you.”
    His teeth were brilliantly white, and he had dimples. He came to the door and rested a muscled arm on the horizontal bar. “The answer is yes,
mujer
. You don’t even—”
    “Shut up, Hector. I need to know something about Hangman.”
    Hector’s face twisted as if he’d bitten into a lime. His head shot back. “Why you want to talk about that freak?”
    “You were celled next to him for a while, weren’t you?”
    Hector leaned toward Abbie, studying her. The motion caused his biceps to pop. Abbie rolled her eyes.
    “Yeah,” he said.
    “Did you ever hear anything from his cell? Or outside it?”
    Hector’s face went still, then he turned and strolled back slowly to the toilet. He pivoted, sat on the toilet seat, and picked up the cloth, began wrapping the ends of it around his left hand while he flexed his fingers.
    “Be serious, Hector,” Abbie said.
    “I
am
serious,” he said, puffing a little as he lifted the weight up, not meeting Abbie’s eyes. “I’m a very serious person, cuz.”
    “Did you hear anything?”
    The eyes were bright, but Hector’s face was stony.
    “You help me, I can help you,” Abbie said.
    “With what?”
    “If your information helps me find Hangman, I’d say a reduction on your sentence for good behavior. Or transfer downstate. Where you from, the Bronx?”
    Hector considered that. He curled the brick a second time, a third and fourth, then lowered it to the floor, picked up the looped cloth with his other hand. “I might have heard a thing or two.”
    “I’m listening.”
    Hector’s face grew red as he finished the fifth curl.
    “You’re starting to annoy me, Hector. Is that little curling weight legal? I might have to have one of the sergeants come down and check it out.”
    Hector’s face tightened. He dropped his head, then came back off the seat, but there was no roll in his walk this time. He got to the window and laid his left forearm against the flat horizontal bar.
    “What you lookin’ for?”
    Abbie held his gaze.