Taking his time, marking his impossible next bet with a pencil stub, he looked up at me. That stare lasted maybe half a minute. Maybe he was still trying to pick the right horse.

“Pardlo,” he said at last. “Fenster Pardlo.”

“I’m Rawlins. Easy Rawlins.”

The name earned a brief frown from my cellmate.

“What they got you in for, brother?” he asked.

“The wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Pardlo grinned. He was missing a lower front tooth and a toothbrush. Something about his faded countenance set my teeth on edge.

“That’s funny, but I know what you mean. What they put on the arrest form?”

“Let’s just say I knew where the bodies were buried. You got anything I could read?”

He had a day-old LA Times under his stained mattress.

Reading the paper reminded me of my ex-girlfriend, Bonnie Shay. She read the LA Times and the New York Times every morning. Two or three days a week she got her hands on the original Times, the one from London. Later on she married a black African named Joguye Cham. Cham was at first royalty and then became a rebel in western Africa, fighting against American and European imperialism.

From nowhere a man began hollering piteously from a distant place outside our cell.

“I won’t do it again!” the man yelled and then he grunted from a heavy blow. “I won’t—” Another blow landed.

I couldn’t hear the thudding fists but I felt them in the man’s howls. After the beating was over the victim whimpered for some time before someone said, “If you don’t stop that snivelin’ I’m’a beat you again.”

And he did.

“Rawlins,” Pardlo said with offhanded speculation. “Easy Rawlins. You’re that guy knows Raymond Alexander, right? The one they call Mouse?”

My sympathies for the man being beaten evaporated. I cut my eyes at Pardlo but said not a word.

“I did a job with him on United California Bank three years back,” my cellmate declared.

A man can’t be proud of everything he do, Uncle Sorry once said to me. All he can hope for is to learn from his mistakes and pray he don’t do it again.

I don’t know what there was to learn when I leaped from the bed and grabbed Pardlo by his shirt. I slammed him into the wall, caught him, and then slammed him again.

“Help,” he gulped.

I hit him in the jaw with my fist and then slammed the right side of his neck with an elbow. I kneed and kicked him and then lifted him from the floor.

“Help!” he shouted, and I threw him clear across the cell.

On the floor Fenster Pardlo was grabbing at his shoe. Too little too late. I was on him with three heavy punches and then I snatched the shiv from his hand.