Night Sun

by Tom Barber

  But then the door behind him buzzed and clicked open.

  ‘I got it!’ Marquez said, having found the control for the right door. Beside her, Archer watched Reyes turn and push his way through before slamming it behind him, the door locking automatically a fraction of a second before the brothers got there.

  They’d bought him a bit more time.

  ‘We gotta go help him,’ Marquez said but Archer was already checking the fire exit map on the wall of the housing block, looking to see where they were and how to reach Reyes.

  But unknown to them both, the A Block control room was being monitored by the main control center in the facility, the county jail’s captain watching in frustration as Reyes passed through another door that had just been opened for him by the detectives from New York City, only the actions of the two cops keeping the fugitive alive.

  Their arrival and Hinckley and Pruitt being overpowered had just created a major complication. There’d been a brief window here, the timing quickly but carefully arranged, the captain aware that US Marshals and cops had been drawn away off-site for another twenty minutes to half an hour, but then this pair from the NYPD had showed up. And once they got out, they were going to start talking.

  The captain had already sent two other COs who’d been in here with him on an errand to another block, not wanting any potential witnesses for what was going to happen to Reyes. That meant no-one was there to see as he shut down all the cameras, knowing he needed to change this from just an apparent suicide in Reyes’ cell to something much bigger.

  About to set off in the direction of where he’d last seen Nicky, carrying Hinckley’s keys, Pruitt’s gun and with the facility’s layout in his head, Archer had just left A Block’s control room when an alarm started sounding.

  He stopped and looked up, and saw the red light on the side of the camera lens was gone.

  Then the door down the corridor ahead clicked open and it wasn’t alone. Behind him, Archer saw the one at the other door had just been released too.

  Having stayed behind to open more doors to help Archer if any were blocking him from reaching Reyes, Marquez looked at the bank of screens and goosebumps prickled over her body, her blood turning to ice.

  Every inner door inside the facility had just been opened.

  Which meant all the prisoners in the county jail had just been set free.

  FIFTY ONE

  Nicky hadn’t registered all the doors had opened, as he had something far more urgent to deal with; he’d just been caught up on by Billy, who was ahead of his brother and who moved very fast for a man so large. Nicky already knew that from Gatlin and his previous encounters with him. The college girl Billy had abducted, tortured and murdered four years ago had learned it too.

  A few seconds earlier, the brothers had been distracted by two inmates, who suddenly finding themselves free to roam the county jail had taken quick advantage; Brooks had turned to deal with them as Billy kept going after Nicky. The younger Loughlin chased his fellow Gatlin fugitive down and tackled him to the floor. He intended to use his weight to pin the smaller man before stabbing him, but dropped his shiv as Nicky fought back. He scooped it up again, but Nicky managed to twist an arm free and buried his thumb into the huge man’s eye socket. Billy screamed and reared up, allowing Nicky to fight his way out from under him. He scrambled back to his feet and ran on through the next open door, pushing it shut behind him and hearing the lock re-engage just as Brooks reached it. Three hundred pounds slammed into the door but the lock held.

  Punching the wire-enforced window in anger, Brooks looked back at his brother who was bent double covering his face, blood dripping off his cheek to the floor.

  The other side, Nicky had no idea where he was heading, the county jail’s layout totally foreign to him, but he continued to run.

  The moment the alarm sounded and Archer had realized what was happening, he’d raced back to A Block’s control center. The screens had all gone black, but he and Marquez didn’t need them to know how much danger they were in, the rising level of noise from elsewhere in the building sounding just like Gatlin on Friday morning when the two NYPD detectives had arrived on what they’d presumed was going to be a simple transfer from prison to prison.

  Now three days later, after going through so much, they found themselves trapped in another facility where a riot appeared to be breaking out.

  But this time they were alone with no support.

  ‘We gotta get the hell out, Sam!’ Marquez said quickly, looking down at the two COs they’d overpowered lying on the floor, both restrained in handcuffs.

  ‘The cell block’s entrance point is between us and the way we came in,’ Archer said, looking up at a camera trained on the room, its red light black too like all the others. ‘We’re cut off.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  Archer glanced at the two COs then across the room saw a large metal closet with a key hanging from the lock; passing Pruitt’s gun to Marquez, Archer opened the doors, threw the shelves with their contents to the floor, then with his fellow detective’s help maneuvered Hinckley and Pruitt into the closet one a time. ‘Better keep quiet, fellas,’ Archer warned them both, before closing and locking it, pocketing the key. The two COs might have tried to take on him and Lisa, but he knew that if inmates found the pair of cuffed guards, they’d be killed and not necessarily quickly.

  As Marquez picked up the room’s landline and started dialing, Archer searched the drawers in the desk. He found a roll of scotch tape then snatched a couple of magazines from a pile off a stack on a small table near the door. ‘We’re two cops stuck inside Onondaga County Jail,’ Marquez informed the local operator, having called 911. ‘A riot’s breaking out and we need immediate back up. Someone in here opened the doors to let the inmates out and shut off all the cameras.’

  ‘Lift up your shirt,’ Archer told Marquez quickly, who looked at him in surprise before realizing what he intended to do. She pulled the hem of her shirt free from her beltline, then held two of the magazines in place over her stomach and back as he started to pull the tape around her. ‘Lower down too, over your kidneys,’ he said and started quickly winding more tape around the magazines, strapping them to her body over her internal organs. Some sort of protection. Two minimally-armed cops locked in a county jail with over a hundred freed inmates. They were going to need it.

  As he went to fetch more of the magazines and strap up his own body, someone slammed the gate back down the corridor outside and they heard the sound of approaching footsteps.

  Archer happened to be standing out of sight of the door, but Marquez wasn’t. A tattooed white prisoner in a vest with a large beer gut saw her and cut into the control room, drawing breath to yell to others in the corridor, but instead of a shout it came out as a gargle as he was caught from behind in a chokehold and pulled to the floor by Archer, who didn’t take his eyes off the door.

  It would take seconds for the man to lose consciousness, but seconds would be all his friends would need to get to Marquez if they weren’t far behind. She was trained, but in a fight to the death with nothing but her bare hands these guys would win, and both she and Archer knew it. With their weight of numbers, it wouldn’t take long for them to kill Archer too.

  The inmate went slack, and Archer let him go just as another burst through the door.

  Across the cell block, having just missed Nicky, Brooks went back to Billy to find him still bending over, clutching his face. He pulled his hand away to see his brother’s eye socket was bleeding heavily.

  ‘I can’t see out of it,’ Billy whimpered. More gunshots suddenly sounded from somewhere across the prison, and Brooks knew from past experience the chaos was only going to build. With blood now staining his jumpsuit and bare arms after killing the two inmates who’d rushed him a minute ago for his shiv and keyset, he hauled his brother to his feet and dragged him deeper into the prison with him, now even more determined to finish what they’d come here to do.


  This time, Reyes couldn’t hide under a truck to escape.

  The second inmate who’d just burst into the control room with a shank in his hand ran at Marquez, but she was holding the pistol Archer had passed her and the prisoner dropped as she put a bullet through his shoulder.

  Then two more inmates appeared, the gunshot attracting their attention, a taste of how totally outnumbered the pair of NYPD cops were. Archer tackled the closest into the desk but not before the prisoner slashed at him with a razor and cut his arm; Archer connected with a hard step-in elbow on his jaw in return, causing the prisoner’s knees to buckle and sending him to the floor but Archer didn’t have time to prevent the second inmate making contact. The guy stabbed Archer in the upper back a split-second before Marquez fired, putting the prisoner down, not a kill shot but enough to disable him.

  Seeing the shiv sticking out of Archer’s shoulder blade, she rushed forward to help him, but before she could do anything he quickly pulled her back out of sight, easing the door almost fully closed after hearing more people approaching. The prisoners they’d put down were all either groaning from being shot or coming round. Time was short.

  The footsteps faded and no-one else appeared. Checking each way and realizing the corridor was clear, although almost certainly not for long, Archer pulled the door shut behind them and moved with Marquez out into the hallway before quickly cutting into a small break room for the guards.

  ‘Pull it out,’ Archer told her, easing the door almost fully closed and turning his back to her so she could get hold of the shiv.

  ‘I can’t, it’ll make the bleeding worse! Like we told Lupinetti at Gatlin.’

  ‘I fall back, it could do more damage.’

  Instead of withdrawing the shank, she gripped the handle of the toothbrush, a razor blade attached to the other end, and quickly snapped off the end as Archer cursed fluently under his breath, the pain radiating through his entire body. Not ideal, but it meant the wound would stay packed and avoided the risk of the razor slicing any further into him. He was also bleeding from the slashes of the other man’s shiv, the cuts more superficial but still open wounds.

  ‘More prisoners are gonna appear; they’ll be drawn by the gunshots,’ he said as she nodded.

  ‘So we’ve gotta move.’

  ‘You want to just leave Reyes to the brothers?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Me either,’ he said, closing his eyes for a second, trying to ignore the pain, adrenaline helping as it kicked in. ‘Let’s try to find him.’

  Running for his life, this time not in the outside world but in the closed confines of an unfamiliar prison, Nicky knew the Loughlins wouldn’t be far behind him. To go to all this trouble to show up here and kill him, they weren’t going to give up that easy.

  As he heard shouts getting closer from some of the freed inmates, he spotted a door to his right and tried the handle. It opened and he squeezed himself into what was a storage closet. Quickly pulling the door shut, he held the handle tight, chest heaving, waiting for the inmates he could now hear in the corridor to run past his hiding place, praying they were too fired up to start trying doors.

  He could see their shadows in the light under the door as they ran past. Once it went quiet and praying they were gone, he pushed the door open slowly then checked up and down the corridor. It was empty so he slid out then looked around, trying to locate an exit.

  As he made his way along the hallway, it occurred to him that someone had unlocked that door when the Loughlins had almost been on him in the SHU block. Not the door to his cell, but the one that had allowed him to escape.

  If it wasn’t a mistake, then he had to hope that at least someone in here didn’t want to see him die.

  A few corridors away, Archer and Marquez rounded a corner and bumped straight into three inmates, two of them already bloodied from attacking other prisoners. The same two were each holding a shiv, the other a baton stolen from somewhere, and seeing Marquez’s gun they immediately went for her and Archer.

  She raised the pistol and put the one with the baton down, the weapon flying out of his hand and skidding down the corridor as he fell, but the front man who’d rushed Archer managed to stab him in the thigh as they fought. The NYPD cop punched the shiv holder hard, knocking him to the floor, but then Marquez felt a sharp pain too as the third man stepped forward and stabbed her in the body. The magazines taped there partially blocked the attack, though she felt the shock of pain as the tip of the blade pierced her skin; she shielded her face and neck with her arms as he caught her gun hand and used his other to slash at her again, trying to get to her throat, her forearms taking the punishment and being cut open as she kicked out at him desperately.

  Her attacker then changed tactic and tried to tear the pistol free from her grip but Archer was already on him and tackled the inmate to the floor, beginning to feel increasingly light-headed from blood loss. He trapped the man’s shiv arm in a keylock and wrenched downwards, the inmate shouting in pain as his arm was twisted from the torque. Archer punched him a couple of times for good measure, the guy’s arm broken, and kicked the shiv away.

  ‘Response team will be here soon,’ Archer panted to Marquez, blood starting to dampen his sweater, another shiv now sticking out of his leg. ‘We just have to …’

  But instead of answering, he heard her take a sharp intake of breath and turned.

  Brooks and Billy Loughlin had just walked into the corridor.

  Just like at Gatlin when the riot took hold, the inmates were fighting anyone and everyone they came across in the euphoria of unexpected freedom, attacking the COs, each other, whoever. They didn’t care. So far, Nicky had managed to avoid other prisoners and had just made it towards what he thought could be a way out.

  But as he passed a side corridor, he saw a CO splayed out on the floor, blood pooling slowly from a wound to his head. Nicky assumed he was dead, but as he was about to run past, stopped, thinking of that truck driver from outside Gatlin three days ago. He went to the injured CO and felt for a pulse, finding one. He’d already worked out that if the Loughlins had been able to walk into the solitary wing the way they had, then some members of staff here had to be working with them. But if the newly-freed inmates found this guy, the man could be raped, tortured, killed or all three; an unconscious or badly-wounded screw was a dream for some of these guys who had a lot of pent up fury to vent.

  Swearing under his breath, Nicky pulled the man towards the relative safety of some toilets he’d just passed so the guard would be hidden from immediate sight, but after a quick search, to his intense disappointment found the man didn’t have either his baton or keys. Someone had already taken them.

  Over the last few days, although he’d been heavily occupied with avoiding arrest and getting that bag of money off Nicky, the memory of his youngest brother getting gunned down on the bridge in West Virginia on Friday night had never strayed far from Brooks’ mind.

  And just like on Station Road in Pennsylvania when they’d split from Lupinetti, the man who’d killed Craig was right here in front of him once again. This time though, Brooks saw the cop was wounded, blood staining his jeans and sweater, some of it dripping over the police badge on his hip. When Billy had kidnapped that student from Maine and locked her in their basement before enlisting his brother’s help to kill her, just before she’d died the woman had started praying. Brooks was a godless man but now, seeing the man responsible for his brother’s death served up right in front of him, he knew it was fate.

  However, no higher power was going to deliver justice.

  That was going to be down to him.

  Archer got the gist of these thoughts from the murderous look on the man’s face and watched as the older Loughlin brother started to advance down the corridor towards him, his bulk seeming to almost fill the entire space. Billy was a bit slower to realize who they’d got cornered, but then also recognized Archer and his eyes widened in anticipation, blood streaming down the lef
t side of his cheek as he moved forward to join his brother.

  While Archer tried to clear the dizziness that was beginning to affect him and focus on how to try to survive what was about to happen, Marquez aimed the gun in her hand and fired, but it clicked dry, the small magazine empty. The pair of detectives backed up into the wider space of the chow hall to their right, looking for something, anything, to defend themselves with; Archer saw two fallen inmates, one with a knotted-off gym sock lying beside him weighed down with something heavy and picked it up quickly, keeping Marquez slightly behind him who was frantically searching for another weapon or way out.

  Billy fanned out slightly to make sure the two cops were being backed towards the wall.

  Then he and his big brother went in for the kill.

  Archer swung the weighted sock sideways and fast towards Billy as he rushed in, the Gatlin fugitive dangerously quick and almost getting to him first. It hit the younger Loughlin in the side of the head and caused him to stumble, his sheer size and weight knocking Archer backwards as he crashed into him. The NYPD cop smashed into a table bolted to the floor but managed to stay on his feet; using the table as leverage, he shoved Billy backwards hard with his feet but then at the last moment threw his other arm up to try and deflect Brooks’ shiv, seeing the second attack coming. It missed his chest but another wave of pain scorched through his body as the razorblade sliced into his arm, the power behind the stabbing attempt immense. Archer felt as if his forearm had almost been broken from the force of the blow.

  He didn’t have room to swing the sock again with Brooks so close but as the much larger man made to grab him, Archer jumped forwards and upwards instead, sending the top of his head crunching into the older Loughlin’s lower jaw and snapping his head back. Billy meanwhile had got back to his feet, his head now joining his eye in bleeding profusely, and with a roar of rage slashed wildly at Archer who reacted fast and jumped back, the razor slicing open some of the fabric on his sweater and cutting across his chest. In the meantime, Marquez had taken advantage of being ignored and slammed a shiv she’d found on the floor by the second body into Billy’s torso in a desperate attempt to put him down, but all it did was enrage him further. He roared again, this time in pain, and swung, Marquez scooting back, the slashing blade in the giant’s hand missing her throat by centimeters.