Stick by Elmore Leonard Page A

The headlight beams lit up the compartment, showed him the rear-door latch. He banged through the doors and left the van running, digging hard, that hammering sound chasing him until he was around the corner of the school building.
    With no idea of direction he walked residential streets of tile-roofed bungalows concealed in shrubbery, aroused a few relentless dogs, came out to commercial lights again, finding South Dixie Highway without knowing where it was. He waved down a taxi, let the driver look him over, told the driver South Beach and didn’t say another word after that. They had to leave city streets and traffic, break free onto MacArthur Causeway before he opened the window to feel the breeze coming off the bay and to stare at distant solitary lights out in the Atlantic Ocean, listening in his mind to Moke saying, This boy here’s suppose to take it . . .
    Suppose to die.
    They sold nickel bags inside for seven bucks, they sold regular cigarettes, shampoo, all that kind of stuff; they sold shine made from potatoes, spud juice at ten bucks a gallon, or let fruit juice stand till it turned and drank that. Stick’s former partner, Frank Ryan, died of the potatoes in the prison hospital.
    DeJohn Holmes said he could have anything he wanted. A sateen jacket? Blue and gold with his name on the back? Stick. Look nice, be a man of fashion.
    Here was the strange part. It wasn’t any of the colored guys in the wool-knit caps he had to watch.
    No, out of five thousand eight hundred and something losers shuffling around, hanging out in the yard, getting high, chasing sissies, it was a white guy named Luther doing two to five who stared at him a few weeks, circled in and finally told Stick he was going to kill him. Why?
    (Just like, why would he have thought he had to watch Moke? He wasn’t mixed up in that business.)
    It didn’t make sense: sitting there in the Big Top, the dining hall, one morning with his cold scrambled eggs and having this stone-eyed asshole biker chewing with his mouth open telling him he was going to put a shank in him when he least expected. The colored guys—Christ, he got along fine with the colored guys and they knew all about him, from DeJohn Holmes.
    DeJohn was one of the “mayors” at Jackson and ran a section of the yard, taking cuts on the card games and numbers and renting out weight-lifting equipment by the quarter hour when he wasn’t using it. “Stay by me when you need to,” DeJohn told Stick. “I’ll show you how to jail, not lose any good time mixing up with crazies.”
    But why did Luther want to kill him?
    â€œ ’cause he see you talking to me when you should be hanging out with the white boys. Start with that,” DeJohn said. “Man like him, he don’t even know how to brush his teeth. You watch him ’cause you don’t know when the bug is going to go out on him and he turn hisself loose. Maybe he thinks in his stone mind you somebody else or you remind him of somebody stepped on him one time. Or he like to be like you and he can’t. He say he going to shank you and you say watching the motherfucker eat is enough to turn you sick to death anyway. But see, he so slow in the head he has to think, man, to blink. So I get him assigned the meat shop and let him see he fuck with my frien’ Stickley what can befall him.”
    Pure luck. Getting next to DeJohn, being discovered by him. DeJohn’s story:
    â€œA man point at me in Recorder’s Court, City of Detroit, say yeah, that’s him, that’s him. Say I’m the one come in his place with a gun and cleaned out both his cash registers. Yeah, that’s him. I draw thirty to life for the third and final time around. Now that man that pointed—not because I took his cash receipts but took his woman, one time, one night only and she love it—that man was Sportree, who died of gunshot at the hand of my frien’ Ernest