“Another poor bastard gone to Hive B,” Westie said. “Everyone’s heard. What of it?”
“We heard them talking. Our cell’s next on their hit list. Only reason they didn’t grab one of us last night is because one of the guards had a grudge against Simms.”
Jake let out a long, low whistle. Westie offered me the cigarette. I was tempted, but I shook my head.
“Did they let on what they’re taking people for?” Jake asked.
“Nope, but it’s nothing good. All that matters right now is making sure we’re long gone before their next shopping trip.”
“Hold up.” Jake’s eyes narrowed. His head was on a swivel, glancing left and right. We slowed to a near stop.
“Aw, Christ,” Westie muttered. “Apaches on the warpath.”
I frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
“You ain’t been here long enough to read the signs. All right, casual-like, take a peek over toward the weight benches.”
Body language was the same book, inside prison and out. Raymundo and his crew were taut as steel coils compressed to the breaking point. That much I could see.
“Watch the blockers,” Westie told me.
I figured he meant the men only pretending to work out, the ones who just happened to be standing in the line of sight from the guard towers, inching sideways to cover the convicts behind them.
The ones crouched in the scrub, digging with their hands.
Over at Brisco’s table, his boys jumped up like ants boiling out of a kicked-over hive. Some ran for other patches of scrub; others walked fast, hands casually down by their waists but flashing finger signals like they were sending out an emergency telegraph in rapid-fire sign language. Silent panic washed over the yard, a dry tsunami of looming dread.
One of Raymundo’s diggers came up from a crouch. The sunlight glinted off the steel spike in his hand.
The world froze, for just a heartbeat, under the Nevada sun. A single moment crystallized in time.
Then the crystal shattered.
A convict fell with a grunt, blitzed from the side, a shiv buried in his guts. Another went down under a pile of bodies, kicking and punching. The violence swirled around us, a siege in miniature as the Calles launched their attack, war-cries splitting the air. Jake, Westie, and I went shoulder-to-shoulder, forming a loose triangle.
“Where’s Paul?” Jake shouted.
“By the picnic tables,” I said. Then a wave of panic hit me. “Where’s Buddy?”
Talking to his chess pieces. Oblivious to the world as a Calles with a shiv ran up on him from behind.
The air turned to molasses. I charged, too slow, trying to close the gap. “Hey, asshole,” I shouted. “I’m the one you want!”
I lunged, throwing a wild punch, and he turned just in time for me to feel the cartilage of his nose splatter under my knuckles. He staggered back, but he wasn’t alone; hands looped under my arms, grappling me and pinning me in place. They hauled me around, and the next thing I saw was Raymundo’s fist slamming into my stomach like a pile driver, blasting the air from my lungs.
Raymundo held up his weapon—a razor blade wedged onto the end of an old toothbrush—so I could get a good look.
“Gonna bleed you like a pig, cabron,” he snarled. He was too focused on me to see Jake coming in hot. The biker’s fist cracked across the back of Raymundo’s skull just as Westie tackled my grappler, all three of us crashing into a struggling pile in the dirt.
The tower alarms shrieked across the yard, reverberating with the blood roaring in my ears. I didn’t know how long they’d been blaring, nothing but background noise for the brawl. Then a rifle shot boomed like a peal of graveyard thunder, and the brawl was over.
All across the yard, prisoners dropped to their knees and laced their fingers behind their heads. I pulled myself out of the tangle, rolled onto my belly in the dirt, and knelt up, struggling to catch my breath.
The hive doors burst open and uniforms filled the yard. All was silent but the groans of the injured, loaded up on stretchers and carted out one by one.
“This ain’t over,” Raymundo hissed, kneeling a few feet away.
“When Jennifer gets back,” I said, “you are gonna owe me one hell of an apology.”
“She ain’t comin’ back,” he sneered.
I locked eyes with him. He gave me a bloody-toothed grin.
“What exactly do you mean by that?”
“Just sayin’. Word from the outside is JJ ain’t in a position to call any shots, not anymore. Change in management. Pretty soon she ain’t gonna be in a position to do anything.”
I took a deep breath and struggled to keep my fingers laced behind my head. They wanted to be wrapped around his throat. They wanted it more than anything.
“Raymundo, I’m going to ask you a question. And I want you to consider it the most important question you’ve been asked in your entire life. Where is Jennifer?”
Two guards seized him from behind, hauling him to his feet and shackling him, while another scooped up his razor-blade toothbrush from the dirt.
“Take this one to solitary,” the guard with the blade said. “Gang unit’s gonna want a word with him.”
“Raymundo,” I shouted, “where is she?”
He just laughed as they dragged him away.
“Easy,” Jake told me, “calm down, man. Don’t give ’em an excuse to get trigger happy.”
Westie hadn’t said a word. His head was turned, gazing across the yard. His shoulders sagged.
“Aw, no,” he whispered. “Damn it all. Damn it all to hell.”
I followed his gaze.
We’d heard the rifle go off, the thunder that ended the fight. The last word of the argument. I just hadn’t seen where the bullet landed.
Paul lay sprawled in the scrub, his beige uniform soaked with blood where his heart used to be. His eyes wide and glassy, staring up at the cloudless sky. A perfect kill shot.
Up on the tower catwalk, I saw Jablonski. Clutching his rifle and grinning like a big-game hunter who’d just bagged a rhino. Another guard strolled by and gave him a pat on the back.
22.
They locked us down in the hive while the prison investigators worked to sort out the whole sorry mess. I paced my five feet of freedom, trying to take a maelstrom of worries and turn them into some kind of coherent plan.
Paul’s tattered paperback, Sartre’s No Exit, sat abandoned on his bunk.
All I could think about was Jennifer. If Raymundo was telling the truth, her alliance with the Calles had gone off the rails in the worst way. I wouldn’t have believed it—the last time I’d visited their little urban fortress, it looked like a perfect match—but things were different now. Nicky Agnelli had kept the reins of the Vegas underworld in an iron grip for years; now with Nicky on the run, nobody was running the show. No force in nature was deadlier than a power vacuum.
Anything could be happening out on the streets. All I knew was my friend was in trouble, and I wasn’t there to help her.
“Kite coming left!” shouted a voice from the cell next door.
An elaborately folded piece of paper flew through the bars of my cell, with a length of dirty twine strung through a hole in the corner of the packet. Kites were a prison version of a telegram: you could get a message to any cell in the hive with one—eventually. Since the lockdown kites had been flying fast and furious, one passing my cell every five minutes or so. I crouched and picked up the paper, reeling in the line.
The number 248 was scrawled in blue ballpoint on the outside of the fold. I gathered up all the twine—a good ten feet of it—and slid the paper back out through the bars before calling out “Kite coming left!”
Kneeling by the door with the twine in both hands, I gave it a good swing. The paper rustled as it flew, arcing almost out of sight but falling short of its next stop. I swung it back and forth, gathering momentum, and gave it more line this time. Now I felt a quick double tug, letting me know the prisoner
on my left had caught the paper. I let go as the length of twine slithered away.
All right, I told myself, focus. You can’t do a damn thing if you’re distracted in five different directions. Nothing’s changed. The plan is the plan, which means I still need to figure out how I’m going to open that gate and get my hands on a pair of night-vision goggles.
I was staring at Paul’s empty bunk when the answer came to me.
Another kite swung through the cell door. I passed it along, then reached under my mattress and slid out the cell phone. The charge was in the deep amber now, twelve percent and dropping. I dialed fast.
“Scrivener’s Nook. Whatcha need?” Corman’s voice was a little touch of home. I wanted to cling to it with everything I had.
“Corman, it’s me. Listen, I don’t know how much time I’ve got left on this phone, but tomorrow’s the big day. I’m going to give you a couple of names; we need a ‘visitor’ for each one of them, and they all need to show up at the prison a little after five p.m. Is that doable?”
“Sure thing, kiddo. What do they have to do when they get there?”
“Not a damn thing. We’ll be taking a little detour on our way to the visitor center. There’s one other thing I need. You’ve got a copy of Bruhn’s Ruminations on the Spirit in your private collection, right?”
“Sure. It’s an oldie and a goodie.”
“I need the ritual for creating a Hand of Glory.”
He paused. When he spoke again, I could hear the uncertainty in his voice.
“Kiddo,” he said, “you do know what you need to make one of those, right? I mean, the basic ingredients?”
I looked over at Paul’s empty bunk.
“Yeah. It’s not a problem.”
“If you say so. Sure, I’ve got the info, but how do I get it to you?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “Communications with my lawyer are privileged; the guards can’t even listen in. I don’t need the whole book, just the pertinent pages. If you can copy them and slip them inside a few sheets of legal paperwork, it’ll be easy to smuggle it inside.”
“You’re forgetting one thing. Perkins took a powder, remember? He thinks your girlfriend’s going to skin him alive for losing your trial. He’s no dummy. He’s probably halfway across the world by now.”
“Been thinking about that too. I think we can find a stand-in. You know…the one in Denver.”
Corman let out a grumbling hrm. “You sure about that, kiddo? Probably gonna cost you a favor or two.”
“If it gets me out of here, it’s worth it.”
I glanced at the battery indicator. It had dropped another hair-thin notch and the readout had turned stoplight red.
“Gotta go, this phone’s just about dead. I’ll see you, okay? I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
“We’ll have dinner ready. Anything you want, just name it.”
A parade of gourmet cuisine marched through my mind’s eye. I chuckled. “Y’know what? Honestly, I’d kill for a cheeseburger right now. A thick, medium-rare cheeseburger and Jack Daniels on ice.”
“I’ll fire up the grill. Hey, you be safe out there. We’ll be waiting up for you.”
I cradled the phone in my hands for a while after he hung up, not wanting to let it go. Then one of my neighbors called out, “Kite coming right!” and I hid the phone away, ambling to the bars to pass along another message. This one, though, had my cell number on it.
I carefully unfurled the page. With no staples or tape, kite writers secured their “envelopes” with complex folds that reminded me of origami butterflies.
“Good news,” it read, “heard some guards talking, pissed. Warden said ‘no’ on total lockdown, some peeps got punctured in that scrap but no casualties. We should have some ‘free time’ tomorrow hahaha. Raymundo and his buddies are all in the hole, so stay tight tonight + all is roses. We’ll pour one out for Paul. Cheers from your pals in 431.”
I grabbed a blue pen from Paul’s tiny desk. Dents and furrows covered the cap, like a beaver had spent a few weeks gnawing on it. I crossed out my cell number on the back of the page and scribbled in 431.
“Salutations from 232,” I wrote under the first message. “I’m lining up everything we need to arrange a fitting memorial for our fallen friend. I will need a little help from you both in the morning. No worries, I’ll do the heavy lifting. Meanwhile I’ve been assured that well-wishers are coming to the visitor center to express their condolences, just as we’d hoped. All is well. D.”
I mimicked the elaborate folds as best I could and sent the kite winging on its way back to Westie and Jake.
After that, there was nothing to do but wait.
Behind bars, time mocks you. You’ll think an hour’s gone by, but then you check the clock and realize your sentence is only five minutes shorter than the last time you looked. It was just me, my boredom, and a litany of fears, sealed behind iron bars painted eggshell white.
Thinking about Paul made me think about Jablonski. I didn’t know Paul well, but I liked the guy. I liked him enough to want that score settled. I wouldn’t endanger our escape plan to take a crack at Jablonski, but if the opportunity came up, I’d seize it.
And if not, I could always find out where he lived and come back in a few months once the heat died down. Pay him a little visit after business hours.
Dinner came on wheeled carts and plastic trays shoved at us through foot-wide horizontal slats in the cell bars. Emerson, the new guy, was on zoo-feeding detail. “Room service?” I asked him as I took my tray. “Sir, there’s been a mistake. I clearly ordered the filet mignon.”
Emerson rolled his eyes. “Funny. I’ve only heard that line thirty times in the last hour.”
“I’ll get some new material,” I told him. I set the tray down on the writing desk and gave it a dubious eye. My final dinner in prison was chipped beef in white gravy—at least I hoped it was chipped beef—a slice of burnt toast, and a ladleful of anemic green peas. I poked an experimental finger into the gravy. Ice cold.
My last dinner behind bars, I thought. This time tomorrow, I’ll be in the middle of a prison break.
Then, freedom. Well, that or we’d all be dead.
No pressure.
* * *
Lights-out brought new anxiety. I knew my cell was next on the list for “transfers” to Hive B. Then again, they’d just taken Simms, and according to Jake and Westie, the abductions were always spaced out by days or weeks. Never twice in two nights.
That said, there was a first time for everything.
I tried to relax, but every metallic clang, every footfall on the catwalks, jolted me awake with a fresh rush of tension. Eventually, my body shut down from sheer exhaustion.
A faint whirring woke me up. Like the fluttering of a cockroach’s wings, just beside my ear. The metallic hum dragged me from a dreamless sleep, and my fogged brain tried to place it—
Phone!
I rolled onto my side, digging under the thin mattress and tugging out the phone. It vibrated against my palm as I flipped it open and pinned it between the pillow and my ear to keep the glowing screen out of sight.
“Hello?” I whispered.
“Daniel! I just got back. What have they done to you?”
Caitlin’s Scottish burr wrapped my heart in rose vines, from the bright red blooms to the prickling thorns. I wanted to sweep her up in my arms and hold her until the death of the world, but that just reminded me that I was trapped here, entombed in iron, separated from everyone I loved. I’d never been so happy to hear her voice. I’d never been so miserable.
“Cait,” I said, my throat suddenly bone dry. “It’s all right. I’ve got a plan—”
“It is not all right. It is the last possible thing from all right, and everyone who had any part in committing this insult is going to pay grievously for it. Bentley and Corman talked me out of tearing that place down with my bare hands, but I might just change my mind.”
“I’ve got
a plan,” I told her again. “I’ll be home tomorrow night, I promise.”
She made a sound halfway between grumbling and purring.
“And then,” she said, “we punish those responsible.”
“Yeah, that might be tricky. I’ll explain when I see you in person. Listen, Caitlin, I lo—”
The phone clicked and went dead. No battery.
“I love you,” I whispered to the piece of dead plastic.
I didn’t try to push away the longing, or the pain. I didn’t try to distract myself from how I felt here: trapped, helpless, angry. I embraced it. Bathed in it and let it fuel me. Tomorrow night, I’d need every last bit of that pain to give me the strength to make it home alive.
23.
Lockdown lifted with the sunrise. Our cage doors rattled open on electric tracks, and shuffling sleepy lines formed for the showers and the cafeteria. The endless tedium of prison life back on its cycle.
Around nine, a guard came to fetch me. “Faust,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder, “your lawyer’s here.”
Legal consults weren’t held in the visitor center. They got a special venue right next door, in a foursome of glass-walled booths flanking a corridor where a pair of guards lazily strolled back and forth. Clever setup: they could see everything, to watch for contraband or other funny business, but hear nothing.
J.T. Perkins waited for me in booth three, wearing his sharkskin suit and wolfish grin. His hair and his teeth were in a competition to see which could be more perfect. As the guard ushered me into the booth, Perkins shot up from his chair and pumped my hand.
“Mr. Faust,” he said, “I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to be working with you again.”
“Feeling’s mutual,” I replied.
The guard shut the windowed door behind him, sealing us in. Perkins gestured to the small interview table, and I took the chair on the opposite side.
Perkins sat down. Paper cup of coffee to his left, Louis Vuitton attaché case to his right. He ran his fingertips over the leather like a piano player warming up for an audition. With his back to the glass, the guards couldn’t see his face.
The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust Book 5) Page 13