“It sure is, but they make plenty of good things up there, though.”

“Like for instance?”

Rocco thought it over. “Panini with mocetta.”

“What the hell’s that?”

“Next time I’ll take you. You can’t really describe it.”

THEY WERE CROWDING IN ON HIM, ALL THREE OF THEM, EACH double his weight and a good foot taller. Their heads blocked out the sun, suffocating him and erasing the walls and the guard tower.

“Abdul, how long do we have to wait?” the blond threatened him, the one with one eye sealed half shut by a scar and a tattooed snake writhing up his neck. Erik the Red, they called him there in prison. “Well, Abdul?”

It didn’t strike Omar as wise to correct him on the name. “I don’t know. Like I told you, there are certain things I don’t do.”

“I say bullshit!” snarled the Nigerian. The biggest guy there, the one who trained in the gym every day. In the outside world, he’d been a boxer; in here, he was a killer. “This morning, you piece-of-shit Moroccan, you were supposed to take a delivery of drugs!”

Omar wasn’t a Moroccan. He was from Tunis. But he decided to turn a blind eye to that minor inaccuracy as well. The Nigerian’s enormous hand crushed Omar to his chest. “You want to die at age twenty?” The Nigerian vomited the words onto him, flashing his set of white teeth, marked here and there by patches of tartar. The big black man’s breath might even have been worse than his fists. “Eh? Do you want to die at age twenty, you piece of shit?”

Another minor inaccuracy. Omar had been born in Tunis on May 18, 1988. If he were to die today, as Oluwafeme was threatening, it would happen just a few days short of his twenty-fourth birthday. But he chose to say nothing, especially now that the African’s enormous hand was clutching his Adam’s apple.

“Listen carefully.” Now the third member of the trio, the Professor, was speaking. The one with glasses. An NGO, Never Get Out. Two life sentences without parole, plus other judicial kibble he’d piled up in years of honored service. Behind the lenses, what he had weren’t eyes, actually. They were two pieces of soulless glass. Two things he used to look through, to spy on the world, to observe but not to transmit emotions. “You see, Omar, my friends and I know all about the fucked-up things you do in here. That you have your friends from the outside bring you little presents, and that you peddle that shit around and save up money for when you get out. Because you’re getting out, right?”

Omar nodded. He only had six months to go.