Marigold Plate: Meet Ape Lonergan

Footsteps in the corridor, measured clicks of ricochet. Guards striding with purpose, keys jingling, hard soles hitting concrete. Four, by their footfalls — four guards and murmurs down the cellblock. Four meant Lonergan. Always four guards for the beast in cell 73.

Ape turned his blue-eyed stare toward the bars. They came abreast the door, taking their positions with rehearsed but slovenly shuffles. Two rows of two, legs braced and spread, batons in hand. All but Yancey, who held the shotgun: Heckler & Koch, 12-gauge pump in a white knuckled grip. Chief Yancey chewing his toothpick — mustache twitching, adam’s apple bobbing with swallowed nerves. Like the others. All of them reeked of it. The dread that seeps through ironed uniforms.

They were common men after all, with no more desire to be here than the inmates. Poor shits trying to make a living, as his old friend Owney would say. You could pity them, it wasn’t hard to do. But Ape declined the temptation. Instead he watched while they shifted on their feet, gripping and re-gripping sweat damp batons. Watched, and let his reflexes compute the quickest way to disable them.

“Up and on your feet, Lonergan. Warden wants to see you.”

He breathed deeply and stood up, the part in his black brill-creamed hair sweeping within a palm's width of the ceiling. The fear, coming off the guards like a rippling heat, climbed another few degrees. In his bare feet, Ape Lonergan rose just shy of seven feet. In his black state issued brogans, he passed beyond it. He was thickly built, around 350 pounds, and possessed of an enormous pair of hands, either one of which could enclose an average human head the way a pitcher held a softball. He had the shoulders of a linebacker in full padding. Where other men stood, Ape Lonergan loomed. Merely to behold him was to grow alarmed.

Yancey cocked the stock of his shotgun. He shouted down the block, “Open 73!” Then softly to Ape, “Try something and I’ll blow your goddamn head off."