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held my mud. Or tried to.
    I had, I should explain, a bad habit of thinking I knew what people were thinking while I was talking to them. Sometimes I actually replied. Which was never good. Even if you were right about what was going on in another man’s head, there was no upside to responding if he hadn’t actually said anything.
    “Some powerful people,” the warden went on, “obviously think you’re the right man for the job. Of course, it’s a little unorthodox.”
    “Of course.”
    “Well, I’m a little unorthodox, too. Right, Colfax?”
    “So I’ve read, sir.”
    I’d felt someone looming, and when Colfax spoke I felt free to turn around. Colfax was six-six, no wider than a Volvo, three hundred pounds of order-maintaining muscle, packed in a snug deputy’s uniform and topped with a shaved head, acne-pocked skin and the requisite handlebar mustache. He must have come in after we’d sat down.
Even big men learn to walk like cats in the big house,
I thought. (And wondered why I was suddenly channeling promo lines from the Turner Classic Movies channel.)
    “Look at me!” The warden snapped his fingers and I jerked my head in his direction. Everything in prison is a test, but it hadn’t occurred to me the warden would be testing, too. It should have. But just when I thought he was going to go all “this is my house” territorial, he went somewhere else.
    “Let me put this on the table,” he said. “Just because you’re here undercover, that doesn’t mean you can’t do some kind of good with these fellows. Drug addiction is a scourge. I realize you’re not actually here for that purpose, but there’s no reason, as a kind of side benefit, you can’t show these fellows something. We’ve had UC inside before, for all kinds of things. We had a fed undercover in D Block for six months, trying to flush out a baby raper named Mooney.”
    “Flush out?”
    “We had him on a parole violation. But we knew he’d had relations with his girlfriend’s daughter. Problem was, girlfriend clammed up after she reported it. That happens when your boyfriend sticks your face in a pot of grits. Of course, missy wouldn’t report that either. So that’s where the UC came in. To get Mooney to say what we already knew.”
    “Of course,” I echoed, as if I myself had been around the track with facial grits situations. “So, how’d that work out?”
    The warden leaned sideways, talking past me. “Colfax, how’d that work out?”
    “Not well, sir.”
    Just then a trustee who might have doubled for Uncle Ben—before he was updated—limped in with a tray. The warden rubbed his hands. “Ah, chamomile. Like some?”
    “I’m good,” I said.
    “Suit yourself.”
    The tea man poured and backed away. The warden took the cup and blew delicately. He sipped, somehow making even that look macho.
    “Not well,” he repeated with a satisfied sigh. “That pretty much sums it up. To get close to Mooney the UC had the idea that he should act like a kiddie diddler. So Mooney would trust him. Trouble is, he was a little too convincing. They became best friends.”
    “What happened? He get into a fight?”
    “Not exactly a fight. A young Zulu out to make his bones heard Mooney and the UC swapping cookie recipes, or whatever the hell pedophiles talk about, and stuck a spork in his aorta. Our man just kind of bled out. Convicts hate pee-pee bandits. They’re fair game.”
    “How do they feel about drug counselors?”
    “Fine, as long as you don’t get any of their customers clean. That’s messing with their money.” His Gibraltar jaw lent gravitas to every pronouncement. “Long as you don’t take money out of their pocket, you can all hold hands at meetings.”
    “So then—there’s nobody from gangs in the class?”
    “Oh no. Everybody’s in a gang in a prison. If you have a race, you have a gang. Fact of life.”
    “So then everybody in the class is already clean?”
    “Bingo. All clean.” The warden took