The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust Book 5)

by Craig Schaefer

  “So,” Jake said, “we good to go? We really doin’ this?”

  I spread my hands and smiled.

  “Gentlemen,” I said, “let’s break out of prison.”

  27.

  I met Westie back at my cell. He rolled his bucket past, pushing it by the mop handle, whistling tunelessly. He glanced both ways and pulled out the mop, kicking the empty bucket into my cell. I stopped it with my foot, dropped in the two pairs of night-vision goggles and the knife, and sent it rolling back toward him. He caught it, covered the contraband with the mop, and strolled away as if nothing had happened.

  Buddy’s cell was my next stop. He sat on the edge of his bunk, hands clasped in his lap, fidgeting. His mouth moved like he was having a conversation, but no words came out. I knocked softly on his open door. He jumped.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?”

  He just gave me a sad-eyed smile.

  “Listen close, okay?” I said. “This is really, really important. Soon a guard’s going to come get you and say you have a visitor.”

  His eyes lit up. “I have a visitor?”

  “No. I mean, yes, but…just follow the guard. You’ll see me there, too. Just stay behind me, okay? Right behind me, the whole time.”

  “It’s good if we leave soon,” Buddy said. “It’s not safe here.”

  “Is that what your, uh, sister says?”

  His shoulders sagged.

  “My sister is dead. Something ate her. It’s okay. I have lots of other voices to keep me company.”

  Jake met me on the way back to my cell, falling into step, speaking fast and low.

  “On my way to my work shift,” he said. “It’s all set up. Expect three guards, four max—one or two in the booth, two down on the floor.”

  “And the distraction?”

  “A fire. Small one, something we can put out fast before it sets off the smoke alarms, but it’ll get their attention. I soaked a rag in gasoline last night and stashed it.”

  “What about the other prisoners on your shift?”

  “Five, tops,” he said. “Could be trouble. We can’t take ’em with, not enough room in the buggies, and they aren’t gonna like that.”

  I shrugged. “So we corral them with the guards if they get feisty. Just keep an eye on the clock; your timing has to be perfect.”

  “It will be.” He thumped my shoulder with his fist. “Mexico, brother. Nothin’ to it, but to do it. I’ll see you at the big show.”

  I sat in my cell and waited.

  Mostly, I looked for a way to get those gates open. And I wasn’t finding one.

  I couldn’t see the outside sky, couldn’t imagine the slow descent of the sun, but I could feel it in my bones. Just like I felt the tension simmering in my gut, that old feeling of nervous energy before taking a score. Normally I’d have a pre-job drink to settle my nerves. With the only options being prison wine or another dose of Buddy’s nauseating pink glop, I figured I’d do this one on an empty stomach.

  A guard sauntered by, rattling cell bars with the business end of his truncheon. He glared at me behind beige-tinted sunglasses, his thin lips twitching at the corners.

  “Faust! Visitor.”

  Our next stop was Buddy’s cell. He fell right in line, shadowing my heels like a puppy. The guard—Vasquez, said his nametag—waved us ahead of him. He escorted us past the first gate and through the metal detector, a bulky old warhorse that would have been right at home in a 1970s airport. It didn’t make a peep.

  My mental map of the prison unfurled behind my eyes as we walked toward the visitor center. Here, I thought, as we prepared to round a bend to the left. This is the place.

  The next stretch of hall ran about fifty feet, with arrows and big block letters stenciled on the wall pointing the way to the visitor center, the front offices, and the motor pool.

  No cameras. Just a pair of convex security mirrors perched high in a corner at each end, like you might see in a convenience store. As close to privacy as we would get.

  And here was Westie, still whistling as he rolled his bucket along, strolling toward us from the other direction.

  I’d hoped to hit Vasquez from behind. That would have been the easy way. He wasn’t having any of it, though, forcing Buddy and me to walk directly in front of him. The bucket rolled closer, time running out fast.

  I dropped to one knee, quickly tugging at my shoelace. The knot unfurled, falling free. “Hey,” Vasquez said, looming over me. “On your feet.”

  I gestured to my shoe. “Laces came untied. Give me a second, huh?”

  Westie saw my play. He changed his angle of approach, moving closer to the middle of the hall. Vasquez didn’t give him a second glance. He was too busy standing over me with his hands on his hips, glaring like I’d personally ruined his day.

  Funny, that was the next thing on my agenda.

  I finished reknotting my shoelace as Westie passed, bringing the bucket right next to me. Without a word he yanked the mop from the bucket, twirled it in his hands, and hit Vasquez like a battering ram, pinning him against the wall with the mop handle bracing his shoulders. I snatched the knife from the bucket, spinning it in my grip. Vasquez already had his gun out by the time I lunged. He pressed the barrel into Westie’s belly, and I pressed the blade to Vasquez’s neck.

  “Pull that trigger,” I hissed, “and your wife’s a widow.”

  He froze.

  “Listen to me.” I pressed the knife harder. Not hard enough to cut, just hard enough to make him feel the blade every time he took a breath. “I don’t want to kill you. And you don’t want to die. So I’m going to take your gun now, and you’re going to let me. Understood?”

  His eyes narrowed in disgust, but he nodded as much as he dared. I clamped my free hand over the barrel of his pistol and gave it a tug. His fingers went limp as I pulled the gun away.

  “Turn around,” I said. “Get moving. Nice and easy.”

  I passed the knife to Westie. He kept it close to his hip. As we walked by the bucket, he crouched down, grabbed the two night-vision goggles, and handed them to Buddy.

  “Do I put these on now?” Buddy asked.

  “You guys,” Vasquez snarled, “are morons. Nobody’s ever escaped Eisenberg. Nobody. And more people have tried than you think.”

  “I’m an overachiever,” I told him.

  “You’re all dead men. Dead, or you’re heading straight for Hive B.”

  I jabbed the small of his back with the gun barrel. “What’s in Hive B?”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “Aren’t you a ray of sunshine,” I said. “Take a left up here.”

  “Motor Pool” read the black block letters on the wall, with an arrow pointing the way. At the end of the corridor, a barred access gate blocked our path. And behind that stood the tall steel double doors leading to our final destination.

  “When we get up to the gate,” I said softly into Vasquez’s ear, “you need to get us through. If you warn your buddy, if you stall, if you do anything that doesn’t result in that gate opening with zero delay, I’ll put a bullet in your spine. I said I don’t want to kill you. Doesn’t mean I won’t.”

  “The garage?” Vasquez replied. “Oh, yeah, nobody’s ever tried escaping that way before. Real good plan you’ve got there. Slick.”

  We approached the gate. On the opposite side, a doughy-faced guard who looked barely a day out of high school sat at a stool behind a small bank of controls. I kept the gun easy in my hand, making sure Vasquez could feel it pressed to his back.

  “Three coming through,” he told the guard through the bars.

  He shook his head. “You sure? Work detail’s almost over.”

  A tiny trickle of sweat beaded on Vasquez’s forehead.

  “Positive. C’mon, I’m late for my dinner break.”

  “Sure, sure,” the gate guard said. He turned a key in the console and pushed a button. The gate rattled open on electric tracks. As we walk
ed through, he glanced at the empty holster on Vasquez’s belt.

  “Hey,” he said, “where’s your gun?”

  “Here,” I replied and pressed the barrel to his forehead. Westie stepped in fast and got the knife back against Vasquez’s throat. Everybody turned into statues.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Mc—McGuiness,” he stammered.

  “You get the same deal he gets,” I said, nodding toward Vasquez. “You stay cool, you get to go home to your family tonight. Can you stay cool, McGuiness?”

  He nodded like a bobblehead doll.

  “Good man,” I said and took the gun off his belt. I passed it over to Westie and got McGuiness on his feet. “What time is it?”

  McGuiness raised his trembling hand just enough to glance down at his cheap Timex. “Four minutes after six.”

  Right on schedule. We pushed the guards through the double doors ahead of us just as Jake’s distraction fired off. I had the space of a heartbeat to take it all in: the cavernous garage, bay doors open to a violet Nevada sunset, and harsh white light pouring down from stark steel fixtures high above. The transfer bus parked on one end of the repair bay, buggies on the other, and a handful of sweaty, shirtless cons doing a wash-and-wax job on a couple of guards’ personal cars. Booth in the back at the top of a short flight of corrugated metal stairs, two guards sitting snug behind bulletproof glass. A third guard pacing the floor, his back turning as a flash of hot orange flared under one of the parked cars.

  “Fire,” Jake shouted, scrambling around the car. That got the booth guards moving; they came thundering down the steps, one with a fire extinguisher. Westie and I shoved our hostages to the floor. The guard by the cars spun, saw us, and froze; between the fire and the guns, it was one crisis too many for his brain to handle. He got his priorities right and reached for his pistol just in time to catch Jake’s granite fist across his jaw. He dropped, out cold, and Jake grabbed his piece.

  We kept our guns on the booth guards. The fire extinguisher fell, clanging as it bounced down the metal steps. One of the guards gave a shifty look toward the door and wavered on his feet, like he was thinking about running back to the booth and locking himself inside.

  “This bullet can fly twenty-five hundred feet in one second,” I told him. “Can you run faster than that?”

  He stayed put.

  “Jake,” I barked, “get that fire out before it sets off the smoke detectors. Westie, disarm the booth guards. I’ll keep you covered. Buddy, lock the doors behind us.”

  The motor pool was ours. No alarms, no blood, nice and clean. All I could think about, though, were the prison gates that stood between us and freedom.

  The hard part wasn’t over. It hadn’t even started yet.

  28.

  We patted the guards down, took their belts and their radios, and had them kneel in the corner of the garage. “Yo,” one of the cons on the work shift called out, “we gettin’ out of here?”

  “We are,” Westie said. “You can do whatever the hell you want. Just stay out of our way.”

  The two Wildcats stood sleek, polished and ready, scooped-back steel skeletons painted desert tan. There wasn’t much to them but fat wheels, two rumble seats, and an engine built for speed. Jake trundled over with two scarlet plastic gas cans, and I held them steady while he strapped them onto the first buggy with bungee cords.

  “This much gas should get us to civilization at least.” He nodded toward the open bay doors. Wispy clouds streaked a pearly violet sky as the last rays of sunlight escaped from the oncoming night. “Right across that tarmac, we take a hard left, and it’s a straight shot to the prison gates.”

  The gates I couldn’t open.

  I jogged up the stairs to the booth. A hard plastic box hung on the back wall, lined with tarnished keys tied to little paper tags. As I looked down through the bulletproof glass, the answer came to me. I just didn’t like it.

  The transfer bus. Heavy-duty and reinforced with cold steel to keep prisoners in and would-be rescuers out. A machine like that, at full speed…sure, it could crash those gates and carve a hole for the Wildcats to blaze through. It’d also set off alarms from here to the Aberdeen Police Department thirty miles away. They’d have choppers in the sky, roadblocks waiting up ahead, and hard-eyed cops with itchy trigger fingers and orders to shoot to kill.

  One person could crash the gates. And that person wasn’t going home. Not tonight.

  Westie or Jake? Not a chance they’d throw away their shot at escape to save the rest of us. They weren’t the altruistic type. The other cons on the work detail? They weren’t that dumb; a fast car might have a shot on the open road, pinned between the prison guards and Aberdeen’s finest, but the bus was a lumbering target just waiting to get taken down.

  Buddy? Buddy would do it. Set him in the driver’s seat, tell him what pedal to push, and point him toward the gate. He was so lost in his world of voices, he probably wouldn’t even ask me why.

  The perfect answer. But I couldn’t do it.

  Putting aside the vision, putting aside the possibility that the salvation of the world was resting in Buddy’s hands, he was…innocent. A genuine innocent. The fact that he’d never suspect a betrayal was exactly why I couldn’t betray him. Not if I wanted to live with myself.

  “Ruthless,” I muttered, remembering Naavarasi’s words. “Just not ruthless enough. Damn it.”

  I rummaged through the plastic box, checking tags and took the keys for the Wildcats. And the key for the bus.

  I jogged down the steps and tossed a key to Westie, underhand. He caught it with a grin. “We’re ready to roll. Buggies are loaded and fueled. So how are you gonna get those gates open for us?”

  “The hard way,” I said, waving Jake and Buddy over. “My original plan fell through, so here’s how we’re gonna do this. Jake, Westie, each of you take one buggy and a pair of night-vision goggles. Buddy, ride shotgun with Jake. I’ll be in that transfer bus, about a hundred feet ahead of you. I crash the gates; you blast right on by. Take a hard right the second you clear the second gate, point the buggies southeast and don’t stop for anything.”

  Jake’s brow furrowed as I tossed him the other key. “What about you? We’ve got a spare seat. We’ll stop for you—”

  “Look, once I hit those gates they’ll have a chopper in the sky within two minutes, with more on the way. If you get caught in a searchlight, it’s all over. And if you take the time to stop for me, you will get caught. I’ll keep the bus moving as long as I can, to try and draw their attention away.”

  Westie shook his head. “They’ll stop you eventually, friend. And they won’t be gentle about it neither.”

  “I told you I’d get you out of here,” I said. “Don’t get caught and make a liar out of me.”

  “Damn, man.” Jake looked down at the key in his hands like it was a million-dollar bill. “Thanks. Don’t know what else to say.”

  “My help isn’t free. First, make sure Winslow knows my debt is squared.” I pointed at Buddy. “Second, you get this guy wherever he needs to go, no questions asked. If he’s gotta talk to somebody at the bottom of the ocean, you make sure his ass gets on a submarine.”

  “It’s not that far,” Buddy murmured. Then he frowned. “I don’t think it’s that far.”

  “Deal,” Jake said, and he clasped my hand in a vice grip.

  I shook with Westie next. He let out a nervous chuckle. “You’re one weird bastard, but I’m glad to know you. If you make it out of this alive, first round of drinks is on me.”

  “I’ll hold you to that,” I said.

  I turned to Buddy. “This is why,” he told me.

  “Why what?”

  “This is why I told you I was sorry, back in my cell,” he said. “I saw when I closed my eyes. Saw the buggies. Three seats, not four.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Just get out of here and do whatever you need to do, all right?”

  He wrung his hands, shifting fro
m foot to foot, his eyes darting around the garage. Everywhere but on me.

  “There’s something else,” I said. “What is it?”

  “The voices told me something. They say it’s really important, that you have to hear it. But it’s bad news and I don’t want to say.”

  “I can take bad news, Buddy. Give it to me straight.”

  He scrunched up his face and tilted his head, listening.

  “They say…you’re going to die here. They say you have to die here.”

  “Tell your voices,” I said. “I don’t believe in fate, prophecies, or dying young. I’ll make it out of here. Just not tonight.”

  “I just deliver the news,” he said in a small voice.

  Outside the garage bay, the purple sky faded to black. Stars twinkled in the distance, as far away from here as I wanted to be. I patted Buddy on the shoulder and walked away.

  “All right,” I called out, “remember, stay about a hundred feet behind me. Once you’re through, hit the desert and don’t stop. No looking back.”

  “Hey,” shouted one of the other prisoners on Jake’s detail. “What about us?”

  I paused, my hand on the bus door, and shrugged. I looked at the two cars between us, freshly washed and waxed.

  “You’ve got two choices,” I said. “You can stay right here, turn yourself in peacefully, and maybe get some good-behavior time knocked off your sentence. Or you can grab the keys to those cars and follow us out. Odds are you get rammed off the road or gunned down before you reach I-80, and nobody’s ever gotten farther than that, but hey, maybe you’ll be the first. Somebody’s gotta win the lottery, right?”

  I climbed onto the bus while they scrambled for the key box, falling over each other in their desperation. I wasn’t surprised. Grimly amused, maybe, but not surprised.

  I sat in the stiff vinyl driver’s seat and buckled up. The engine fired to life with a throaty growl and the hood rattled like it had a stallion underneath trying to kick its way out. The cabin filled with the acrid smell of diesel and gunpowder.

  As I stomped on the clutch and wrestled the cracked plastic shift knob into first gear, I couldn’t help but smile. Corman always told me learning to drive stick would come in handy, I thought, but this probably wasn’t the situation he had in mind when he taught me how.