In the showers she scrubbed hard and rinsed fast, something you just innately did in here. She’d already experienced her initiation in here after only two days. She’d busted the woman’s face. The fact that she’d avoided solitary or time tacked on had not endeared Mace to her fellow inmates. They simply tagged her as a privileged bitch, and that was about as bad as it could get in a place where your cell rep defined every right you had or didn’t have. Nearly two years later she was still standing, but she wasn’t exactly sure how.
She hustled on, every minute now precious, as she counted down her time to freedom, with both anticipation and dread, because on this side of the wall nothing was guaranteed except misery.
CHAPTER 3
A FEW MINUTES LATER a wet-haired Mace walked through the chow line and received her basic food groups so crapped and fatted up that in any other place-except possibly high school cafeterias and airline coach class-they would be deemed inedible. She swallowed enough of the garbage to keep from passing out from hunger and rose from her seat to throw the rest away. As she passed by one table a drumstick of a calf shot out and she fell over it, her tray clattering away, the goop on it painting the floor a nice greenish brown. Up and down the perimeter line, guards tensed. The inmate who’d done the tripping, a prisoner named Juanita, glanced down as Mace slowly got to her feet.
“You a clumsy bitch,” said Juanita. She looked at her crew who sat all around the queen bee Juanita had become in here. “Ain’t she a clumsy bitch?”
Every member of Juanita’s crew agreed Mace was the clumsiest bitch ever born.
Juanita carried two-hundred-and-fifty-plus pounds on a wide six-foot frame, with each hip the size and shape of a long-haul truck’s mud flap. Mace was five-six, about one-fifteen. On the surface Juanita was soft, mushy; Mace was as hard as the steel doors that kept all the bad girls inside this place. Yet Juanita could still crush her. She’d landed here after a sweetheart plea deal for murder in the second in which her tools had included a tire iron, a Bic lighter, and lots of accelerant.