Innocent Blood; Blood Money; Blood Moon

by Michael Lister

The empty waiting room was dim, the hallways eerily quiet.

  Mom is dead.

  The unbidden thought rose out of the darkness and silence, and I was overcome by an oppressive sadness.

  Pausing a moment, I leaned against the wall in the narrow hall, squinting against tears and trying to catch my breath.

  The heaviness on my chest was severe, the hollowness inside cavernous, and I was separated from everything, even my own body, by a great dark distance.

  Wasn’t really until this moment that I realized the extent to which I was still in shock.

  How is this possible? We weren’t close. I was prepared. I dealt with death all the time.

  I started laughing. It was all I could do in the face of such thoughts. I should know better, but I had been reduced by the great reducer, regressed by death.

  “I want you to continue to focus and concentrate on that spot,” Bailey Baldwin was saying to Lance Phillips, “and listen fully as I speak to you. As you focus on that spot, I’d like you to begin by just resting back in the way that’s most comfortable for you.”

  Lance had been sitting up in an infirmary bed. Now, he was lying back on the stack of pillows.

  “Good,” Baldwin continued. “As you recline, you begin to notice the feelings and sensations in your body. Just notice some of them. For instance, as you continue staring at the spot, you may become aware of your feet, or you may become aware of the bed you’re lying on, how soft it is, how comfortable. And as you do, you can pay attention to your breathing, and the sensations you experience with every breath you take.”

  I was standing near the open door of the infirmary, the dark hallway hiding my presence. From where I stood, I could see not only Baldwin hypnotizing Lance, but Alvarez preparing for surgery in the first exam room.

  “As you continue concentrating on that spot, I’m going to begin to count. Each time I say an odd number, I’d like you to close your eyes. Each time I say an even number, I’d like you to open them and see that spot again. So, when I say one, you will close your eyes, and when I say two, you will open your eyes. Do you understand?”

  Lance nodded very slowly.

  “Close your eyes on each odd number and open them on each even number,” she said. “And as you open and close your eyes, they will begin to become more and more tired and relaxed, until before long, they’ll feel so tired that they’ll simply remain closed. And then you will sink into a very peaceful hypnotic sleep.

  “One. Two. Three. Allow your body to become more and more comfortable and at ease. Four. Become aware of that spot again. Five. Six. Seven. Your comfort is increasing. You are relaxing. Eight. Nine. Just let go. Ten. Eleven.

  Twelve. Now, your eyelids stick. You can’t open them . . . It’s okay. Be at peace. Perfect peace. Total rest. After this procedure, you’ll never have felt so rested and so well in all your life.”

  The door to the exam room opened, and I ducked into the nurses’ station.

  Alvarez walked into the infirmary wearing green surgical scrubs, his thick black-and-gray hair covered by a sterile green head covering.

  I pulled out my phone and began to record.

  After a few moments, they rolled him out of the infirmary, down across the hall, and into the exam room.

  I followed.

  I recorded as they continued to make all the preparations, then snuck back into the nurses’ station to call security. I didn’t think handling Alvarez or Baldwin would be a problem, but it’d be nice to have more witnesses to what was going on.

  I punched in the number for the control room. The officer on duty answered on the second ring. “Did y’all find the inspector?” I whispered.

  “Hold on. Let me check with the sergeant,” she said. “It’s the chaplain. You find the inspector yet? Hold on, she’s on the phone now. You still looking for Miss Ling?

  She’s on her way out. I can—”

  “Yeah. Let me speak to her.”

  “John?” Hahn said. “Where are you?”

  “Brent Allen’s grandfather was the motive,” I said. “Find the OIC. I need backup in—”

  Something bit me on the neck. I slapped at it, hitting a hard plastic object and a . . . what? Hand?

  I spun around to see Alvarez standing there with a syringe.

  I swung at him, but my knees buckled and I fell to the floor.

  “What’d you give . . .” was all I could get out.

  From the fallen receiver next to me on the floor I could hear Hahn, but I couldn’t respond, couldn’t . . .

  Everything grew dim, distancing itself from me, as if I were sinking into a . . .

  “They’re criminals,” Baldwin was saying. “You really think it’s wrong to save an innocent person’s life by taking an organ a criminal can live without?”

  I tried to say something but was unable.

  “He cannot respond,” Alvarez said. “All he can do is breathe and blink.”

  “Well, we’re saving lives and I want him to know.

  Innocent lives. People who deserve to live, who are doing good in the world, not killing and stealing and cheating and hurting their wives and abandoning their children like these poor excuses for human beings we’re removing non-essential organs from.”

  The two thieves hovered over me, their faces floating in and out of view.

  I was lying on one of the infirmary beds, unable to do anything but breathe and blink, wondering if the death that seemed to always surround me was about to lay claim to me.

  “This gives us the second kidney we were looking for,” Alvarez said.

  “His?” she asked, nodding toward me, eyes wide. “I don’t have time to put him under and—”

  “There is no need. We are leaving.”

  “Well, be quick.”

  He drifted away from view and I wondered if he was already slicing me open.

  “He’s looking at us,” Baldwin said. “Can’t you put him to sleep?”

  I didn’t hear him answer, but within another few moments, unconsciousness rolled in on me. I fought to stay awake, to keep my eyes open, but . . .

  45

  When I woke up, I was lying on a bed in the infirmary, Merrill looking down at me.

  I tried to sit up, but only got part of the way. In the process, I noticed a needle in my arm.

  “IV,” he said. “They pumpin’ out the shit Alvarez put in you.”

  “Where is . . .”

  “In custody. Lawson’s with them in the security building, making the handoff to your dad. He’ll hold them for FDLE. Both kept sayin’ they ain’t killed nobody and can prove it.”

  “Hahn?”

  “She the one brought backup down here. Saying something about Allen’s granddad. Told Lawson you’d explain everything when you woke up. She took Phillips back to the quad. Down there checking him out now.”

  I tried to get up again, and again I got about halfway up and fell back down.

  “Help me up.”

  “Just tell me what to do. You stay—”

  “We gotta get down there.”

  He pulled me up as I snatched out the IV. The nurse ran in, but we waved her away.

  “Tell me Hahn ain’t involved in this,” he said.

  I stepped and stumbled and he half carried me through Medical, out into the night, and through the center gate toward the lower compound.

  My hands were tingling, my whole body stiff and weak, not responding the way I wanted it to.

  “Did Hahn help the docs kill Jacobs and Allen?”

  I shook my head, still finding it difficult to talk.

  “They didn’t . . . Why this was the last one.”

  “Hell, I usually can’t follow you when you able to talk . . . so this’ll be . . .”

  I said, “What . . . would their . . . motive be . . . for trying to kill Lance?”

  “Cover-up.”

  “Before . . . they operated . . . on him? They took organs . . . from inmates . . . didn’t kill . . . them. When Allen was kille
d, the autopsy revealed what they had been doing.”

  “Not that, who tryin’ to kill Phillips?”

  “Allen was the real target all along.”

  “Got to be Emile Rollins then. Only one left.”

  Even with his help, I was moving slowly. The best I could do was small shutter steps like an inmate in shackles.

  “First attempt on Lance was in a confinement cell.

  Emile couldn’t’ve done that.”

  “Got to be staff. Baldwin? Alvarez? Foster?”

  “Only one person . . . could’ve done it,” I said.

  I could feel myself waking up, the stiffness in my muscles breaking up and dissipating, the fogginess in my brain clearing, my vocal chords loosening, but my head throbbed and my vision was blurry.

  “Who?”

  I took in a breath.

  “Lance himself. His cell door . . . was never unlocked. No one drugged him or . . . hypnotized him. Danny brought him the rope, but he did it to himself. It was smart. Make himself look like the intended victim from the very beginning. It was convincing too. In fact, I think he pushed it a little too far and nearly killed himself. If the nurse hadn’t gotten in the cell in time . . . He continued to play the victim and deflect suspicion by hiring the inmates to stage the attack on him in the chapel.”

  “So he killed . . .”

  “Danny and Brent. Switched bunks with them, made up that shit about his mattress being more comfortable and Danny feeling safer up there to make it look like their deaths were really attempts on him. This whole thing was never about an attempt on Lance or the actual murder of Danny. Those were attempts to disguise the real motive for the murder of Brent Allen.”

  “Which was?”

  “Money. The motive for all this elaborate deception, and the taking of life, is money. It is all about greed.”

  Up ahead the dorms rose up out of the darkness, floodlights illuminating their bulky, blocky gray masses.

  “That why he used the cards?” he asked. “Make sure everybody know it was murder and not suicide so insurance company would pay?”

  I shook my thick head slowly. “Nothing to do with that. He used the cards so he could make himself look like a victim. It was never about the life insurance. The Suicide Kings was something he used for subterfuge.”

  “Thought you said it was about—”

  “Money, yeah. The small fortune left to Brent Allen by his grandfather. The life insurance scheme was just a cover for the real motive. The coverage had already lapsed. What he wanted was to be in Allen’s will, not the beneficiary of the policy. He’s about to get out. Allen’s grandfather just died. He will inherit. A lot.”

  Merrill shook his head.

  “I think maybe he talked Danny into attempting or pretending to attempt to hang himself since he had just done it in Confinement, and then he made sure it really worked—or maybe he didn’t care. Just wanted it to look like another attempt. But with Brent . . . he couldn’t take any chances. He traded bunks with him, strangled him, then let him lie on the floor beside his bunk before he hung him. He’s the only one who could’ve. He was right under him.”

  “So Baldwin and Alvarez . . .”

  “Didn’t have anything to do with the murders,” I said. “In fact, they were the last thing they wanted. They got caught because one of their victims, Allen, was also Lance’s. They didn’t kill their victims—that brings autopsies and investigations. They just stole their organs.”

  “You think he knows you know?”

  I nodded. “He didn’t stick around Medical—and Hahn to take him back. I think she might be—”

  “Think you can move your slow ass any faster, or I gotta carry you?”

  “I’m starting to come out of it.”

  “Then quit doin’ the inmate shuffle and get you ass in gear.”

  46

  We were buzzed in to the massive hangar-like structure of D-dorm, then into Quad-3 to find Hahn standing on the top rail of the second-story catwalk, a noose tied around her neck.

  Lance stood just behind her.

  Made of several sheets tied together, the noose was looped through a metal support beam in the high ceiling. The beam worked as a pulley. Every time Lance pulled down on the noose, it pulled up on Hahn’s neck.

  Her hands were tied at her sides with an inmate belt, the tips of her shoes barely touching the top bar of the railing.

  Face puffy and pale, eyes bulging, little helpless, fearful whimpers escaped from her constricted airway, out of her tight mouth, and into the enormous open space of the concrete-and-steel enclosure.

  To our left, the empty metal staircase leading to the upper rows of cell doors and the cement catwalk provided a clear path to Hahn, but it was too tall, would take too long to climb. She would be dead before we could get to her.

  Below the walkway, the solid steel cell doors in front of us were closed, dark behind their small strip of glass.

  “Don’t come any closer,” Lance yelled.

  The quad was so large, its ceiling so high, his words were quickly lost in that airy, white-noise sound of the huge space.

  He yanked on the sheet wrapped around his arms and it snatched Hahn up, her shoes slipping off her feet and falling down to the bare concrete floor below, taking a moment to reach the floor because of the distance, bouncing as they smacked the cement, the loud sound of their crash ricocheting off the hard surfaces.

  Hahn gasped, the pitch of her whimpers becoming more shrill, more childlike, more panicked.

  Most of the men had been in their cells, many of them sleeping, but a small group was beginning to gather on the ground floor. They looked up in silence, obviously shocked at what they were seeing.

  “Get them outta here,” Merrill said.

  A CO had just rushed in from the officers’ station, but was too busy looking up wide-eyed at Hahn to respond. “Now.”

  He began to slowly herd the resistant inmates.

  Merrill turned and took a few steps toward them and they began to move much faster.

  Within a few moments we were alone with Lance and Hahn in the quad.

  If he didn’t release some of the tension in the sheets soon, there would just be three of us.

  “Ease off on the pressure some,” I yelled up at him. “Lower her down just a little. Please.”

  “Why should I?”

  “What do you want? Why’re you doing this?”

  “My whole life . . . nothin’ ever works out for me.

  Everybody’s always . . . everything’s been against me. I’m . . .”

  “You’re a very rich man now,” I said. “The world is a different place for someone with the kind of money you have.”

  He cocked his head and seemed to think about it.

  Looking down at me, he said, “But they’ll never give me the money now.”

  “It’s yours. Nothing anyone can do. Oh, they may try to get it back, but you can hire the best lawyers.”

  “Hell,” Merrill said, “you can OJ all this shit away.

  Beat the charges. Live the good life on the golf course every day. All it takes is money.”

  “If you let Hahn go,” I said. “You can’t kill her in front of us, with us standing here watching, and expect . . .”

  He fed a little slack to the noose.

  Hahn’s feet touched the rail again and some of the color began to come back into her face.

  “The response team will be here any minute. Place’ll be full of officers with guns. Let her go now. Let us take you in. We can protect you. You know I will.”

  The PCI riot squad was a group of trigger-happy adrenaline junkies with far more testosterone than judgement. Its members were correctional officers who were good shots and gung-ho, all of whom had the required ego and requisite sophomoric swagger. We had to resolve this before they stormed the quad.

  “I let go, she hangs,” Lance said. “She’ll fall and snap her neck. They shoot me, she dies.”

  “Don’t let that hap
pen. Go ahead and let her down.”

  “It took you a while,” he said. “I almost fooled you, didn’t I?”

  “You did.”

  “I’m smarter than people think.”

  “You are.”

  As we spoke, Merrill slowly eased under the overhang of the second-story walkway and over toward the stairs.

  “If you could’ve just made them look like suicides and not used the cards . . .”

  “But I had to look like a victim. I knew I’d be suspected as soon as people found out about Brent’s will.”

  “Hiring the inmates to attack us in the chapel was a nice touch.”

  “You like that? I thought so too. I told ’em the most they could be charged with was assault and I’d make them rich for it. I knew they’d talk eventually, but I’d be long gone by then. Some warm tropical place without extradition, sipping champagne and earning interest.

  Fuckin’ doctors fucked it up for me.”

  “It was a great plan. Ingenious. I mean really, really smart. I think you could get a book deal out of it.”

  He seemed to think about that, but only for a moment.

  His head exploded a split second before the deafeningly loud report rang around the enormous concrete-and-steel box.

  The riot squad ran in. Boots on concrete.

  Barking orders. Radios blaring.

  As Lance fell, he released his hold on the noose.

  The sudden release of tension made Hahn lose her balance.

  She tried to get it back, but couldn’t and fell off the rail.

  She didn’t fall far.

  The slack snapped out of the sheets, the noose tightening around her neck.

  From the moment the shot was fired, Merrill was running up the stairs.

  I tried to get beneath Hahn to catch her, but she didn’t fall far enough. Not even close. She was some two stories above me. Dangling. Dying.

  When Merrill reached the place where Hahn had been a moment before and where Lance now lay dead, he couldn’t reach the rope. Hahn was hanging from the high ceiling, the noose caught in the beams, too far away from the balcony for him to reach.

  “What the fuck do I do?” he yelled. “I can’t reach her.”