Dirty White Boys Read online

  HIGH PRAISE FOR

  STEPHEN HUNTER’S

  DIRTY WHITE BOYS

  “EDGE-OF-THE-SEAT EXCITING AND PALPABLY TOUCHING … you take away from this book a marvelous sense of human texture. The heroes have crippling weaknesses. The villains have true redeeming virtues.”

  —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  “UNMISTAKABLY ONE OF THE BEST SWEATY-PALM THRILLERS OF [THE YEAR] … Stephen Hunter’s writing is like movie popcorn—you won’t be able to stop once you’ve begun.”

  —The Gazette Telegraph (Colorado Springs)

  “AN ADVENTURE BOTH VICIOUS AND POIGNANT.”

  —Winston-Salem Journal

  “POWERFUL AND GRIPPING, this could be Hunter’s most popular novel yet.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “SPEND A DAY WITH DIRTY WHITE BOYS AND YOU’LL BE COMPARING ALL OTHER THRILLER WRITERS TO STEPHEN HUNTER.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “SPLENDID . : . A WICKEDLY MATURE THRILLER.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “IT’S A HONEY … Nasty people armed to the teeth in heart-stopping situations. The best part is, Hunter can write.”

  —Elmore Leonard

  BOOKS BY STEPHEN HUNTER

  FICTION

  Pale Horse Coming

  Hot Springs

  Time to Hunt

  Black Light

  Dirty White Boys

  Point of Impact

  The Day Before Midnight

  Tapestry of Spies

  The Second Saladin

  The Master Sniper

  NONFICTION

  Violent Screen: A Critic’s 13 Years on the

  Front Lines of Movie Mayhem

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  Copyright © 1994 by Stephen Hunter

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Random House, Inc., New York, New York.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and

  Trademark Office.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77984-7

  v3.1_r1

  Dedicated to the five friends who helped me

  the best when I needed it the most:

  Mike Hill

  Bob Lopez

  Lenne Miller

  Weyman Swagger

  Steven Wigler

  There is a paradox at the core of penology, and from it derives the thousand ills and afflictions of the prison system. It is that not only the worst of the young are sent to prison, but the best—that is, the proudest, the bravest, the most daring, the most enterprising and the most undefeated of the poor. There starts the horror.

  —Norman Mailer’s introduction to

  In the Belly of the Beast

  by Jack Henry Abbott

  No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man.

  —Peter Townsend, “Behind Blue Eyes”

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CHAPTER

  1

  Three men at McAlester State Penitentiary had larger penises than Lamar Pye, but all were black and therefore, by Lamar’s own figuring, hardly human at all. His was the largest penis ever seen on a white man in that prison or any of the others in which Lamar had spent so much of his adult life. It was a monster, a snake, a ropey, veiny thing that hardly looked at all like what it was but rather like some form of rubber tubing.

  Therefore he was Number One on the fag hit parade, but the fags knew to stay away and could only dream of him in private. Lamar wasn’t a fag, although, when the spirit moved him, he was a buttfucker. He wasn’t a boss con’s fuckboy, either, or a punk, or a bitch or a mary or a snitch, and he carried a simple message in the graceful economy of his movements: to fuck with me is to fuck with death itself.

  It helped, of course, that he was also protected by Daddy Cool, the bullet-pocked biker king who ran the Mac’s dirty white boys; with Daddy’s special mojo protecting him and his own reputation as a man-killer, almost nobody, con or guard alike, messed with him. And it helped that his hulking cousin Odell stood ready to back him up on the dime if it went down hard. But mainly it was just Lamar and his attitude. He was the prince of the Dirty White Boys.

  It was four o’clock in the afternoon, on a day like any other in the institution’s melancholy history as Oklahoma’s toughest prison. In the guard quarters, through two levels of security off the D corridor, Lamar turned on the shower and let the water hit him. Its blast struck his bulging muscles, washed the sweat away. This was his favorite moment of the day, and as a ranking lifer, he had earned the right to a private second or two in the hack’s shower before lockup. It meant as much to him as a million dollars in the bank, and he knew he’d never have a million dollars in the bank. What he had was a nice, fresh bar of Dial soap, which he’d just unwrapped: none of that green liquid disinfectant soap the regular cons used in their showers.

  Lamar Pye was thirty-eight years old, with a tangle of thick hair, which he generally wore braided down his back or in a ponytail. Though he had an open, friendly face and warm eyes showing over a nose that had seen much wear, he also had F U C K and Y O U! inscribed across the knuckles of his left and right fists and BORN TO KICK ASS on his left forearm, all in the spidery and uncertain blue ink of a freehand convict tattoo artist. On his right forearm, in the same wobbly line, was a pictograph of a dagger jammed halfway to its hilt into the flesh. A stream of red droplets wiggled out of it. On his left wrist it said SHADOW OF DEATH under a crude but unmistakably effective rendering of a skull. On the top of his right hand, it said WHITE GREASED LIGHTNING, with a rat-tailed squiggle in fading blue indicating a lightning bolt. Lamar couldn’t even remember getting that one. He must have been drunk or high or something. He just woke up one goddamned day during a two-year slide for assault with intent up at Crabtree State in Helena and there it was. Craziest damn thing.

  The water felt so good when it blasted against the swollen bulges of his muscles, with the contrast between the hissing steam and the sense of cooling. Two hundred curls with the seventy-five-pound bar, two hundred squat thrusts with the two-hundred-pound bar on his shoulders, a long goddamned time under the chest machine, hoisting two hundred pounds of dead weight until he was swollen like a tire on a hot day. When the water hit his muscles and deflated him, man, that felt so cool!

  Lamar contemplated his chest in the hissing steam. Looking
downward he saw an endless field of possibility. His chest was wide and white and not particularly hairy. It was wide open. You could put anything on it you wanted.

  It was Richard who’d got his head turned in this direction. Newboy Richard was so scared of them he hadn’t said a thing for a week, and Lamar at first wanted just to torture him for a while before he fucked him and sold him to Rodney Smalls’s niggers for cigarettes, but goddamn Richard was so weak it wouldn’t have meant a thing. All Richard would do was sit there with a pencil and some kind of tablet, his hand flying over the surface of the paper, as if by concentrating so hard he could make it all go away. Or read funny little books with no pictures, underlining things furiously. Though he clung to Lamar’s shadow like a dog whenever Lamar went into the yard.

  Finally Lamar had said, “Goddamn you, boy, what is that shit you’re working at?”

  Addressed directly, Richard had seemed to melt. His puffy face trembled as the color fled his cheeks. He quivered like a leaf in a high breeze. Then he said, “Art.”

  “Art who?” Lamar demanded.

  “Art art,” said Richard. “You know. Art. Pictures. What the imagination can show.”

  “Fuck all that shit,” said Lamar. Now he really wanted to hurt Richard. He hated when somebody threw a word at him. Mag-i-nation. Fuck that. But weirdly curious, he bent over and looked at what Richard had been diddling.

  Goddamn, it was Lamar! It was Lamar himself, fearsome as a lion, scared of no man, looking like some kind of ancient king or Viking. Under a frosty moon. Lamar, with a mighty sword, ready to slay enemies by the thousands. The whole thing had a spooky feel to it, some kind of magic or something. Somewhere inside, Lamar felt a little thing move.

  “The fuck,” he said, “that ain’t the way it is. I’m a hardtimer goddamned inmate buttfucker. I ain’t no goddamned he-ro.”

  “I—I just drew what my mind saw,” said Richard. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  “Ah,” said Lamar, stumped. He went back to his Penthouse.

  Yet the image had somehow jiggered something in Lamar. It troubled his dreams, bumping aside for a while the stroke-book blondes who gave their rosy asses to him every night until he came and could relax. Not that night. And the next day he wanted Richard to show it to him, and the next and the next. He thought about it for nearly another week, and then he started dreaming about it.

  “You know that there picture?”

  “Yes,” said Richard.

  “Could you do another one? From what I told you. You wouldn’t have to see it or nothing. I could just fucking tell you. You could make it?”

  “Er, yes, I suppose. I mean, of course.”

  “Hmm,” said Lamar, thinking hard. “You know, what I truly like, is lions. But a lion not in no jungle but in a castle. You know. And a bitch, blond, with really big tits. And, somehow, she love the lion. She love him like a man, not like no pet. Now, I don’t want no picture of the lion fucking her, but the lion could fuck her if he wanted to.”

  “Ah, I think I see what you’re getting at. He’s, like, an archetype of a certain aggressive masculine power.”

  “Huh?”

  “Ah, I mean—”

  “He’s a lion and he’s got a bitch. And she has tits. And it’s all a long time ago. Got that?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Richard got busy. For days he huddled in the corner madly dashing away. He’d throw pictures away, cursing. He even went to the prison library and got books with lions in them. And then finally—

  “Lamar? Is this what you had in mind?”

  He held out a sketch. The lion was a god, the woman a slut with huge tits, her nipples taut as bowstrings. It was master, she was slave.

  “Goddamn,” said Lamar. “Look-a-that! Man, like you got that outta my head! Damn, ain’t that a goddamn piece of work! Only, now, wouldn’t it be better if the lion was taller? And maybe the gal’s tits weren’t that big? That’s too big. It don’t look real. I want it to be real. I like the castle though.”

  Richard took the criticism like a man and spent another week on revisions. When he made his final submission, Lamar was quite pleased.

  “Goddamn, Richard. You got a gift, if I do say so myself. Now, say, I wanted you to try other things. You know, other things I see in my head, could you do it?”

  “I know I could,” said Richard.

  “Goddamn, ain’t that something. I want you to draw what I tell you. You do that, I’ll look after you. Got it?”

  “Yes sir,” said Richard, and the deal was done.

  Why was it so satisfying? He didn’t know. But it was, and it was a newfound source of pleasure. He could just dream something up and Richard would make it appear on paper. It really made him happy. So Lamar swelled a little with pleasure, taking happiness from the pleasures of his well-ordered world. Everybody feared him. He could fuck just about any of the white boys and half the niggers if he so chose. He had a percentage of three dope smuggling operations, including a methamphetamine lab in Caddo county that muled in a pound of crystal a week. He had his cousin Odell about as happy as that poor boy could ever be. He had Richard to draw whatsoever he chose. He was a wealthy man.

  But then, ahead of him, something moved in the vapor, and it all changed, it all went away.

  Lamar, startled, looked up. No-goddamned-body was supposed to be in here. He paid Harry Funt, the hack, four cartons of cigarettes a week to make sure nobody disturbed him in his private time.

  “Who’s that, goddammit?” barked Lamar.

  A huge, dark shape emerged from the steam, just as buck naked as Lamar, gleaming and globular.

  “Goddamn, Junior, ain’t nobody supposed to be in here. I bought this goddamn time, fair and square.”

  Junior Jefferson went close to four hundred pounds, and naked, his giant body seemed like something out of a movie, especially the way he shone in the light. He had a goddamned strange look in his eyes, too. Lamar didn’t like this at all. His feral instincts came alert. Junior was a known rapist and child molester, and perhaps the only man in D block who didn’t fear Lamar or his monster cousin Odell.

  “You know the goddamn rules, Junior,” said Lamar, backing up just a bit. “It’s mine, I paid for it. Paid Harry Funt, It’s the goddamned rules.”

  “Rules be shit,” said Junior and reached down and grabbed his cock to show Lamar. It was stiff as a bat and strangely blue.

  “Git me some white pussy,” said Junior. “Git me some whiteboy asshole, yas, I am.”

  “You fucking nigger, you stay away. We got a gang truce and you is over the limits.”

  “Your dumb motherfucker cousin O-dell, he done dissed Daddy Cool and so Daddy Cool sold your ass to Rodney Smalls who done give it to me. You gonna service the niggers for a month.”

  Lamar knew in a second it was possible. That Odell! That boy was born without a brain in his head! It wasn’t just the soft part of his mouth and lip that was missing but a goddamned part of his thinker, too! But if he dissed Daddy, there was no sense in disciplining him, because he was too dumb to know pain from pleasure; worse yet, he had no ability to mag-ine fear. So to punish Odell would be pointless; Daddy must have decided to punish Lamar in his place, and Lamar saw the terrible justice in it: he was responsible for Odell. Odell was family.

  “You got something wrong, nigger. I don’t take it in the ass. I give it in the ass, but I don’t never take it there.”

  Junior said, “I asked for you special, Lamar, ’cause you so pretty.”

  Lamar had seen Junior kill a bitch in D yard once, just by squashing him against a wall. A snitch, the bitch deserved it; still, Junior just rammed him against the wall, capturing the bitch’s face in his huge belly and sloppy, saggy chest. The bitch beat and chirped, but it was over in two minutes. That’s how fast it could happen in the yard.

  Junior advanced on him like the earth itself, set on swallowing him up. Lamar had no weapons; his shank was in his shaving kit in the shitter. He had no boots to kick with. He w
as outweighed by a good two hundred pounds of meat and, though strong, was not near strong enough. But he wasn’t scared. It was funny: he never got scared. He laughed a little bit. He liked having his back to the wall and everything on the line. It was exciting.

  He paused, gathering strength as the giant wobbled in, arms spread, fingers grasping. Just as Junior closed, he hit Junior a powerful blow right above the heart, his F U C K fist driven forward like a steam piston, and the blow sent the echo of meat pounding meat against the hiss of the showers. He followed up with a Y O U! to the solar plexus, but it didn’t slow Junior a goddamned bit, he just butted Lamar with his belly back against the wall and leaned on him.

  “Drain you of air, then when you half dead, do you like a doggy. Then you be movin’ to my cell, yes sir. You gots a busy night ahead.”

  Junior’s rich laughter filled the air as his arms squished around Lamar, his immense bulk flattening Lamar’s ribcage, crushing his heart. Lamar felt his head bobbing like that of a dying fish flopping on the dock for the amusement of small boys. With a ham hand, Junior grabbed hold of Lamar’s hair and quieted the head and then, beaming with pleasure, bent to give his victim a little kiss.

  Deoxygenated, Lamar watched helplessly as the nigger lips gathered to form a dainty seal, then felt a scream of helplessness erupt from his lungs, which shocked Junior a hair, giving Lamar a whisker of a chance. His neck snapped upward, unfolding almost like a turtle’s, and in a second he’d sunk his teeth into Junior’s nose. He bit and bit, almost choking on the blood, and he couldn’t hear Junior scream. But scream Junior did, pulling away, his hands flying reflexively to the torn appendage. Lamar spit some gristle out, bent in a flash and struck upward, another piston stroke that landed in Junior’s balls, crushing one testicle. Junior staggered, seemed to lose it, then flared up in rage just as Lamar drilled him a savage FUCK in the throat, this time with a quarter fist so that his knuckles were sharp like a blade. They roared through the flab covering Junior’s larynx, but they reached that treasure and crushed it. Junior went down to his knees, gasping. He begged for mercy with his eyes, but Lamar was not into mercy; he quickly flanked the giant and with another open hand drove FUCK into the back of his neck. Junior jerked forward as if the blow had a charge of electricity with it and put up a weak arm to ward off more punches, but Lamar kept hitting him in the high spine and the neck, a F U C K and then a Y O U!, using the heel of his palms so that he would break none of his own bones, over and over and over, until the big man lay still.