Seeing something in her eyes, not quite tears, but a pain that caught me off guard, I couldn’t answer her at first, or even think. I couldn’t help but hear the truth of her words. I read her mind without hesitation, and found more or less what I’d expected to find.
She’d seen Hawking shot.
More than that, she and Hawking had been involved.
“Goddamn it,” I said. Tears came to my eyes without warning. They blinded me before I could really think about that, either.
When I’d blinked back enough that I could see again, I saw that pain in her eyes grow more intense. It hit me that she probably hadn’t fully let the information in until just that moment. But I couldn’t make myself care enough to not ask the next question.
“Did you see them take Black?”
After a short pause, she nodded. “Yes.”
Looking at her, then looking her over, I realized she’d been shot. Her shoulder was wrapped in a makeshift bandage, but she probably needed to go to the hospital.
“He saved our lives,” the woman said.
That time, one of the men standing beside me spoke. I realized only then that both of them had let go of my arms. When I looked up, a buffed Latino man with hazel eyes met my gaze.
“Your husband was the big guy, right? Black hair? Blue uniform?”
I stared at him. “Uniform?”
That time, Mozar answered. He still sounded exhausted, not like himself at all. “Miri? I had him wear a uniform, remember? We talked about that.”
Somehow, my mind stuttered on that, of all things.
Maybe it was the realization that I really wasn’t going with them to find Black. Maybe it was knowing there was nothing I could do right then, even if I did go. I was useless until Black woke up from whatever they’d hit him with and I could feel his mind again.
I had to believe that was the only reason I couldn’t feel him.
Black was unconscious. Mozar told Nick on the phone that they’d knocked him out.
I would feel him again as soon as he woke up.
I would feel him, he would tell me where he was, and I would go get him. If I had to, I’d bring a fucking army with me to do it.
Until then, I couldn’t do much. The kidnappers were gone. Nick told me over the phone that members of the SWAT team saw them loading Black onto a boat. The few remaining officers in the unit had been wounded, low on ammunition and heavily outnumbered, so they’d been forced to remain under cover while they took Black away.
But Black had been alive.
Nick was adamant that Black was alive.
But I didn’t want to do this again. I couldn’t fucking do this again.
So I found myself just standing there, watching numbly as SWAT and Homeland Security piled into the two armored vans like I wasn’t even there. Within seconds, the last one climbed inside and both sets of rear doors slammed closed.
The engines started. Without a pause, the vehicles began exiting the lot.
More cars followed them to the front gate.
I watched them bump their way through the gate’s main opening––not the one where the patrol car blocked the way to the street, but a different entrance further up, past the security booth at the end of the loop of parked vehicles. I could barely see the cars passing right in front of me. My mind was entirely blank.
Then Mozar’s words reached me. Fighting to remember what we’d talked about before dinner––to remember any of what happened before I got that phone call from Nick about thirty minutes earlier––I nodded, but it was to no one, really.
Mozar exhaled, sounding tired.
“Miri, if they wanted him dead, they would have just shot him and left him there, like they did with Hawking. They went to a lot of trouble to get him alive.”
I turned, staring at him.
The woman in front of me stared at Mozar too, although I suspect for a different reason. That suspicion was confirmed when a plume of fury left her.
Somehow, the sheer depth of her rage snapped me out of my fugue state.
Still staring at Mozar, I remembered I didn’t trust him at all.
In that same half-second, I was reading his mind. Ethics didn’t even cross my mind. I found myself going through a smattering of memories. The SWAT leader who shot Hawking in the head and chest, Mozar’s shock and fear as gunfire erupted all around them. Black crashing the unmarked police car into a giant metal storage unit. Black leading them through a maze of those crates, SWAT guys pushing at Mozar’s back to keep him moving at Black’s pace.
I saw Black go down.
I choked when I saw it; I couldn’t help it.
I saw the woman standing in front of me run to him then kneel, trying to turn Black over, yelling at him, trying to yank him to his feet...
Then a weapon flashed and she was down too.
That’s how she got shot. She’d been trying to save Black.
She’d lived through it by lying there, unmoving... then closing her eyes and playing dead when the extraction team approached. She’d realized they wanted Black alive. I felt her determination, her mind churning around how she could keep them from taking him.
I barely noticed that I’d gone from reading Mozar to reading her, but I could feel her so tangibly now, my heart hammered in my chest.
She’d considered shooting when they got close enough. Try and take out as many as she could right then and there.
She’d considered trying to take one hostage.
She’d counted over a dozen armed operatives by then, though.
Dying in a hail of bullets wouldn’t have helped her team or Black.
So she lay there and didn’t move while they took Black away. She didn’t even move when one of them pressed a booted foot down on her thigh, hard enough to hurt like hell. She let them kick her rifle away from her hands. After they’d finally gone, she’d found Mozar and the two remaining members of her team, the same two guys standing with us now, and led them down to the edge of the water. That’s where they’d seen Black loaded into a boat.
The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side, was written on the boat’s stern.
My vision cleared.
“The Mirror Crack’d,” I blurted the words, unthinking. “Have they found it?”
She blinked.
Then, as if pushing aside how I knew, she shook her head.
“I called it in on my cell... before we even got back here. The Coast Guard has been out looking ever since. They’ve got satellites on it now, Miriam. I’ve been checking in...” She looked up, shaking her head a second time. “Given how fast we called it in, they should have found it right away. The Coast Guard says they must have had another pick up... or they’ve hidden it somewhere, maybe in one of the nearby docks. I’m waiting to hear back from my guy about the boat’s registration...”
Her mouth twisted as she studied my gaze. It struck me again what an unusual face she had, angular and strong-jawed with those dark eyes. She might be part Native American, like me.
“I’m sorry, Miriam...” She trailed, as if not sure what else to say, then added, quieter, “Evan really liked you.” Biting her lip, she shook her head, wiping her face with a gloved hand. She let out a short laugh. “He thought your husband was a trip. But I think he liked him, too, honestly.”
She stared at the asphalt.
Her scowl returned, right before she met my gaze.
“Your husband saved our lives, Miri. He tried to save Evan’s life.” Her jaw hardened more. “We’re going to find him. We’re going to find him and kill every one of those pieces of shit who took him. I promise you.”
I stared at her for a long moment.
Then, unthinking, I grabbed hold of her in a hug.
A total stranger, but at that moment, I didn’t care.
After the barest pause, she held me back. Something about the contact crumpled her angry shield... or melted it, maybe. Either way, the grief that expanded off her in those few seconds nearly buckled my knees. She st
ill didn’t cry though.
Neither did I.
In those few seconds at least, we felt perfectly aligned.
Nine
OF THE PEOPLE
“WHAT THE FUCK is that? You wearing a dog collar, Holmes?”
It was lunchtime.
A few others hooted with the first one who spoke, dissolving into laughter at the end. A mountain of a guy, whose stained white tank top stretched and distorted around bulging dark muscles, grinned at Black with even more stained teeth, slapping the first guy on the back, a skinny African-American man with a shaved head.
The big guy stepped briefly into Black’s path, but Black didn’t move.
He barely gave the speaker so much as a glance.
Instead, he straightened to his full height, lifting his tray covered with food off the end of the chow line. The black guy with the bulging muscles looked up at his height and briefly, the confidence in his eyes turned to a harder, more calculating appraisal. He stood there for a few extra seconds, measuring him openly, then seemed to concede the fight for the time being and stepped aside. Not by much, but enough for Black to pass.
Not waiting for the man to finish making up his mind about him, Black pushed through the line of him and his friends without knocking into any of them aggressively, or shying away from them, either. A bare second later, he stalked away from the line altogether, planting his feet heavily, his shoulders back. His energy hardened into a “don’t fuck with me” cloak he hadn’t worn to that degree in at least a few decades.
His mind continued to churn.
Following the line and the motioning of the guards holding batons, he entered the main dining area. He’d done his best to line himself up to sit where he wanted, but he confirmed that now, scanning the open tables.
He stood there a few seconds too long though, and a uniformed guard frowned, motioning at him more sharply to follow the others. When Black glanced over, the same guard nodded him towards the row where everyone else was queueing up to take their seats.
Black fell into line, conscious of the men standing behind him, the same men who’d been laughing at him seconds earlier.
He wasn’t overly concerned about them, but he couldn’t read them for their intentions so he couldn’t ignore them entirely, either.
Luckily, he’d planned his location in the mess hall in advance.
He would end up sitting more or less where he wanted. He didn’t have much time. He needed to establish some kind of connection before he ended up in the yard, where he’d be a lot more likely to be singled out.
Given his size, it was inevitable someone would come after him.
Following the line, he walked with deliberate strides alongside the metal, bolted tables on either side, and the round seats bolted to the floor in even rows.
He’d mapped out the gang stratifications already.
They were pretty straightforward, from a human perspective.
A few jokers already went after him in the corridors outside his cell, but it had been posturing mostly, like the guy in the chow line.
Now the bigger cats in the park were checking him out more seriously.
They’d decided he required caution, likely due to his size, but Black knew a real challenge would be coming soon. He knew that would be true no matter what kind of prisoner he was.
Given how he’d gotten here and the collar, however, he knew there were other reasons he might be jumped. Hell, it might not even come from another prisoner. It might come from the guards. But prison rules would still hold, no matter what side they hit him from.
They’d demand he pick a side.
Normal politics in a place like this––they likely wouldn’t tolerate him being a straddler, not unless he had serious connections, which he didn’t.
He remembered that from the pens back home, too.
Back there it had been region and clan and sight rank and sometimes age. Here the lines were cruder and in some ways more straightforward. He’d also more or less decided which of those groups he intended to belong to if he could, at least in the short term.
Eventually the line came to a stop. When it did, he moved to position behind the appropriate seat in his row. When the row filled up behind him, the guard motioned at them from the other end of the table.
Black, along with everyone else in his row, sat.
Once he had, he glanced to his right, finding the profile of an older man with long, gray-streaked black hair. The man felt his stare and turned, and Black made direct eye contact with him. He’d already determined the gray-haired man was likely in charge of one of the five groups he’d so far identified in this part of the prison.
Without lowering his gaze, Black nodded at him––making his preference clear.
The man with the long black and iron gray braid frowned, staring back.
The one next to him, who had an angrier face and a lot more tattoos, scowled.
“You lost, paleface?” he said, his voice cold.
Before Black could answer, a big white guy, maybe two hundred and fifty pounds and also covered in tattoos––if of a distinctly different variety––stopped in front of the stool opposite him. That row was also filling up with prisoners holding trays. The white guy witnessed the exchange between Black and the other men, and now he looked Black over with hard eyes.
He frowned.
Noting the swastika tattoos visible on the man’s upper chest under a stretched out T-shirt and the iron crosses tattooed on the back each hand, Black didn’t change expression. Instead, he took a spoonful of the canned beef stew to his mouth and chewed, ignoring him.
The man didn’t like that, either.
A guard motioned for his row to sit and he sat, plunking down his tray loudly and scowling at Black. Before he’d taken a bite of his food, he placed two meaty hands on the metal table between them, leaning towards him.
“You’re winking at the fucking chiefs, fish?” swastika guy said. “What you doing? Trying to hurt your brothers’ feelings?”
Black looked up, chewing. He didn’t answer.
“What you wearing there, anyway?” The man pointed at Black’s collar. “You someone’s bitch already, new guy? That why you sitting here trying to get in with the scalpers and the baby fuckers?”
When Black didn’t answer, swastika guy slammed a hand down on the table, causing the guard to turn, frowning. The big white guy didn’t seem to notice.
“You going to answer me, brother? Whose bitch are you? You only suck red cock, is that it?”
Black finished chewing his mouthful of stew then swallowed, staring up at the guy’s watery blue eyes and blond flat-top. He raised another spoonful of stew to his mouth and started chewing again without lowering his eyes.
Seeing something in his face maybe, the other frowned.
He leaned back on the bench, picking up a piece of bread and tearing it in half.
He ate a few mouthfuls of his stew, using the bread to sop it up.
“Look.” He chewed as he spoke, but his tone grew more conciliatory. “You’re new here, so I’m going to cut you a break. There’s rules, see? We stick to our own kind in here. You don’t go mixing those kinds... it’s bad, see? These redskins don’t want you with them, brother. Trust me on this. They’ll scalp your white boy ass as soon as you close your eyes at night.”
Black looked up. He spoke more for the old man to his right than he did for the Nazi.
“What makes you think these aren’t my people?” he said.
In his periphery, heads turned from the group of Native Americans seated around the older man. For a long moment, the group of them just stared.
Then the older one, the one Black pegged as their leader, spoke.
“You’re of the people?” he said. “What tribe?”
Black spoke without looking away from the blond man in front of him.
“Wazhazhe.” He deliberately used the Native American name for the Osage tribe, not the Western one. “And T’lingit, in the l
ast two generations.”
He wasn’t lying entirely.
His wife had blood from both of those tribes. To him, that made them family.
And he sure as fuck wasn’t about to paint swastikas on his body or hang with those Aryan assholes around the weight area, trading horror stories about killing blacks and Mexicans.
The old man sitting with the group to his right spoke to the others, too low for him to pick up. Then he raised his voice to Black.
“What T’lingit? Which tribe?”
“Hinyaa Ḵwáan,” Black said.
Miriam’s grandmother’s tribe.
His throat tightened briefly at the thought.
He found himself touching his bicep unconsciously, fingering the freshly stitched cut there, which also appeared in the last ten hours or so while he was unconscious. They’d cut the RFID chip right out of his arm. Which meant someone knew to look for it.
He heard murmuring from his right again, but kept his eyes on the big white guy, who was now frowning at him like he was a piece of dog shit he’d just scraped off his shoe.
None of them stopped eating.
Black knew why. He wouldn’t have much time in here, so no one could afford to not fill their bellies while they had the chance.
For the same reason, he didn’t stop eating either. Shoveling more of the beef stew into his mouth, he gulped water between bites. He needed to do whatever he could to keep his head clear and to flush the drugs they’d used on him out of his system.
As for his attempt to establish a link to the “chiefs,” as they were called in here, he knew he had maybe a 50/50 chance of being taken in, if that. He couldn’t quite pull off the Native look, but he also knew not all tribals looked the same.
Even as he thought it, the old man spoke again.
“You got white blood too?”
Black nodded, still staring at the blue eyes across from him. “Obviously.”
“You look white... wasichu. Why don’t you go play with your white friends?”
Black’s voice remained as expressionless as his face.
“I don’t like them very much.” He continued staring at the blond guy with the crew cut. “And where I grew up, they didn’t agree with you on the passing part. I don’t think my mom would like it much, either.”
Black And Blue (Quentin Black Mystery #5) Page 11