Godchild

by Vincent Zandri

  As Shaw stood up, I glanced up at the guards. All eyes from all six men were planted on the scene, as expected. They continued to eye Shaw as he shook the hands of each and every man on his digging crew. They, in turn, let loose with wild cheers, triumphant fists raised in the air. Christ, even I had to smile, because I knew goddamned well that Shaw hadn’t discovered anything other than a rock. It was all just a part of an act for the guards in the towers. An act that continued with the foreman now taking his turn at the trench, going down on his knees just like Shaw had done only a few seconds before.

  Only this time, something went wrong.

  This time the operator of the digger mistakenly started the machine back up when the foreman decided to reach down into the trench with his right hand.

  From where I stood I could see the blood coming from the gash in the old man’s forearm, just above his wrist. For a split second or two, I could have sworn it had all been a major mistake, that this old man in dust-caked jeans, loose-fitting canvas jacket, and work boots with the steel toes worn through the old leather had actually come close to losing his right hand to the claw of the trench-digging machine. Don’t think I didn’t feel the slight jolt of panic blast through my veins when Shaw grabbed the old man by his good arm and shouted, “Keeper, help me get this man inside.”

  I took hold of the old man’s apparently damaged arm as gently as I could, placed it around my shoulder so that Shaw and I both were supporting him, acting as his legs. As we began leading him toward the front gates, I couldn’t help but look up at the Number One Tower and the three men who manned it. They were standing at the edge of the parapet, elbows planted firmly on the chest-high wall. Maybe the reflective aviator sunglasses they wore shielded their eyes, but from where I stood with an injured old man in my arms, their smiles were clearly visible.

  Of course, I had to believe it was all a part of Shaw’s original plan to fool the guards of Monterrey Prison into believing we had a real injury on our hands. As far as I could see, we did. One of his workers appeared to have sustained a wound severe enough to require immediate medical attention. The most accessible place for the treatment was inside the prison hospital.

  I had to give Shaw credit.

  So far the plan was working.

  Shaw left me alone with the old man while he attended to business inside the prison gates. The gates themselves consisted of a large set of steel doors embedded into the pentagonal wall. Surrounding the double doors was an elaborate, cathedral-shaped stone arch and keystone set into the solid concrete. Two guards stood outside the open steel doors, both of them dressed in standard olive green uniforms — short-sleeved shirts, tight pants tucked into tall black combat boots, matching baseball caps, sidearms at the hip, and vest-mounted radio transmitters and receivers. The guards were smoking and talking, leaning their shoulders up against the solid concrete door frame.

  Shaw approached the men while I held up the injured foreman. I got a good look at the two guards as they slowly turned away from each other and stared into Shaw’s face. They were about the same height, with dark complexions and black hair that stuck out from underneath their prison-issue baseball caps. Could they have been guests at Shaw’s party the night before? Tough to tell in the daylight.

  But when he spoke to the guard on his left-hand side while slipping a single, number-ten business envelope to the man on his right side, I knew for sure these men had partied up the night before at Shaw’s ranch. In turn the guards stepped aside, allowing us to pass on through. The area was guarded by yet another man who sat inside a booth hewn out of the twenty-foot-thick concrete wall and shielded with special bulletproof Plexiglas.

  Shaw reached into his jacket, pulled out another envelope, slid it through the mail-slot-sized opening in the transparent shield. The guard never gave us a first or second look. He simply took the envelope, slipped it into his breast pocket, issued a backhanded wave that gave us the green light to proceed on down the hall, no registering our names, no surrendering our weapons.

  Easy, just like Shaw insisted the operation would be.

  Maybe too easy.

  But, then, I had no way to gauge my experience against another operation of its kind. After all, I had spent the better part of my life keeping men from escaping prisons just like this one. Here I was, the Keeper—the former warden—involved in a breakout, and I was completely at the mercy of Shaw and his experience.

  He turned away from the Plexiglas shield, faced me. All the blood seemed to have drained out of it suddenly. In a low voice he told me we’d been granted access to the prison hospital for twenty minutes only. No more. “That money I just distributed, all the favors I called in last night, that’s all they’re worth. Twenty fucking minutes. Then they come after our asses. So I suggest we move.”

  “It’s your party,” I said.

  “And everyone else’s ass,” he said.

  I dragged the foreman into the elevator.

  The door closed behind us. Shaw hit the button for the basement. There was the jolt of the car and the sinking gut feeling that let me know we were on our way down. The heat inside the elevator was stifling.

  Shaw looked at his watch once more.

  “Eighteen minutes, forty-five seconds,” he said. “Not enough time.”

  “Enough time,” I insisted. I didn’t believe it either. But what choice did we have?

  I looked at the ceiling for a closed-circuit TV camera. I saw nothing. My cue to take a quick break from holding the foreman. “Shaw,” I said. “Tell the old man he can relax.”

  The foreman groaned when I released him. He would have fallen to the cab floor if Shaw hadn’t caught him.

  “That’s part of the problem, Keeper,” he said, his eyes going from the overhead light-up floor indicators to his watch and back again. “He can’t relax. Nor can he stand on his own. Not with that injury.”

  I looked at the floor. A puddle of the old man’s blood.

  “I thought the point was to make it look like an accident,” I said, taking hold of the man once more.

  “He was supposed to just graze his hand, maybe break the skin enough to bleed,” Shaw explained. “Instead, the old bastard nearly severed the limb.”

  “The old man is willing to lose a hand for money?”

  “You see, Keeper,” Shaw explained, “in an operation like this, one must rely on realism.”

  The old man was growing dead heavy on my back in the overheated elevator car, his blood now warming my right leg as it soaked through my jeans and spilled out onto the rubber-covered floor of the cab. “How much money?” I said.

  “Two thousand dollars,” Shaw said. “American.”

  “Two grand to lose a hand.”

  The elevator abruptly stopped. The doors opened up onto a corridor filled with pipes and ductwork mounted to the concrete ceiling and walls.

  “Two thousand dollars is more money than this man or his children and grandchildren have ever seen in their lives.”

  “That makes it right?” I said.

  “Save the moral lecture for later on, amigo.” He pulled out his six-shooter, stepped out into the hall. “Now, do you want Renata or not?”

  I dragged the old man out into the basement corridor of Monterrey Prison. What I really wanted was the Bald Man. But Renata would have to come first. “I want her,” I said.

  Shaw looked at his wristwatch once more. “Good,” he said. “You’re not back in fifteen minutes, you find your own way out.”

  Chapter 37

  I shot down a narrow corridor that I hoped would connect the basement of administration to the basement “cage area” of A Block. In my right hand, poised at shoulder height, my Colt .45.

  Both walls of the low-ceilinged corridor were lined with metal conduits and cast-iron pipes stacked horizontally along metal racks. The caged lightbulbs mounted to the ceiling lit up the place in an iridescent half light, the air damp and clammy, the moisture beading along the surface of the pipes and dripping to the c
oncrete floor.

  It took only about thirty seconds to sprint the entire length of the shaft. But what difference did it make, since the access to A Block was secured with a steel door padlocked from the inside?

  I took a step back from the door, positioned the barrel of the .45 an inch away from the padlock, triggered off a round. The bullet blew the lock into three pieces.

  That was the good news.

  The bad news was that the explosion surely served as one hell of a wake-up call for the guards on the other side.

  I stood shielded by the metal door, both hands clasped around the .45, my breaths coming and going more rapidly than the beating of my heart. I tried to swallow. I wiped the sweat from my eyes with the backs of my hands, filled my lungs with the warm, wet oxygen, and exhaled only half of it. Then I raised my left foot, pressed the heel of the boot flat against the metal door. I let go with the rest of my breath and kicked the door open.

  I put two rounds into the Plexiglas guard shack. The man inside dropped his sidearm, fell forward onto the electronic panels. I immediately went into a crouch, waved the .45 from left to right and back again.

  The area was clear.

  I took a few steps inside. When I got a better look at the guard shack, I could see the man sprawled out on top of the control panel. The same mustached man I’d seen at Shaw’s the night before. The one with the bandaged hand.

  The warden.

  I’d killed the warden, for Christ’s sakes.

  The six cells were arranged piggyback style, with three facing in a northerly direction, another three facing south, all six cells sharing a common sanitary pipe chase. I set about making a check of each cell. The search didn’t take very long. By the time I’d reached the number-two cell, I’d located Renata. She was alone inside an iron box, curled up on her left side on the concrete floor—fetal position —facing the wall that separated her cell from the number-one cell beside it.

  I called out for her.

  No response.

  What I mean is, not only did she say nothing, she didn’t make a move. Not a jolt of a leg or an extension of her arms or a mumble-filled rollover on the cot. Not so much as a twitch of her little finger. I thought for sure she was dead. Seeing her lying there, perfectly still, no evidence of even the slightest expansion and contraction of her lungs, it was as if she had died in her sleep and all this had been for nothing.

  But I wouldn’t know for sure until I broke into the cell, felt for a pulse.

  Or some other sign of life.

  Monterrey might have resembled Attica in layout and construction. But that’s where the similarities ended. It was a prison like no other. At least, none that I had ever experienced before. The place was silent. No sound. Not even when the inmate from cell one pressed his soiled face up against the vertical bars. He said nothing. The old, gray-bearded man just stood there like a zombie, staring at me with wide black eyes and a pale face, his naked, sack-of-ribs torso drowning in the overhead sodium lamplight.

  When he opened his mouth, it nearly scared me to death.

  “She’s dead,” said the old man. “The poor girl is dead, don’t you see, mister? It’s me you want now. She’s a good girl, but they shot her up with too much shit and now she can’t go nowhere. Take me with you, mister.”

  I did my best to ignore him.

  “Renata!” I shouted once more. “Renata Barnes!” Still no response.

  “I’m telling you she’s dead,” the old man repeated. “She’s gone, don’t you see?”

  “Shut up!” I screamed at the old man. “Shut! Up!” I was panicking.

  “Go to hell,” the old man said, his voice suddenly no more than a resigned whisper. “But what am I saying? You’re already in hell.”

  I took a deep breath, tried to calm down.

  I was a former warden, after all. I knew prisons, how they worked.

  I knew the cell doors were controlled electronically, via the control panel located inside the guard shack. I peeled the warden off the panel, dropped him to the floor. A quick scan of the controls revealed the trigger release for each of the six individual cells. I thumbed the round red button for cell number two. An electronic buzzing shot through the concrete cage. There was the unmistakable sound of the cell door sliding open along its iron tracks.

  I shot around the corner into Renata’s cell. Collapsing to my knees, I brought the middle and index fingers of my right hand to her carotid, my ear to her mouth. I felt a pulse, however slight, and her warm breath against the skin of my ear.

  “There’s no helping that poor girl,” the old man insisted.

  I rolled Renata onto her back, took hold of her hands, swung both her arms over my right shoulder, hefting her up in a fireman’s hold. She was as light as air. I carried her out and made a bee-line for the open tunnel. I didn’t have to look at my watch to know that no more than nine minutes could possibly remain before Shaw’s deal with the Monterrey Prison guards went bad.

  The old man called out for me, just as I made it to the steel door. “Take me,” he pleaded. “You can’t leave me here. My son died. Yesterday. I must see my wife. You can’t leave me here.”

  I felt the light weight of Renata draped over my right shoulder. I sensed what little time I had left slipping through my fingers like so much desert sand. “Goddammit,” I said to myself.

  “Please,” the old man shouted. “For God’s sakes, they’ll kill me too. Please.”

  For a few more seconds than I could spare, I stood there at the opening to the tunnel, hesitating. I didn’t want anything from anybody anymore. Why should I give out? Until I finally said, “Screw it,” to myself and headed back to the guard shack with Renata slumped over my back, stepping over the dead guard, coming down hard with a clenched fist on the general switch that would release every single cell door.

  The place exploded in alarms and the violent clanging sound of iron against iron as the doors on all the remaining five cages opened up.

  “May God bless you,” came the voice of the old man as I turned once more and carried Renata into the tunnel toward Shaw and, God willing, our getaway.

  Chapter 38

  She dreams of riding a horse across a busy city street.

  A horse, of all things, in New York City.

  It’s hot. Summer. But raining. The rainwater pouring out of the gray clouds that hide the tops of the skyscrapers…

  But then she is awake.

  Not completely. Half awake.

  She opens her eyes, just a crack.

  She swears she being carried. Not on a horse but on a man’s back. Through a brightly lit tunnel, warm water dripping from the ceiling onto her head. She can feel the warm wetness on her hair, on her scalp.

  Maybe she’s not awake at all. Maybe she’s dreaming again.

  The next thing she knows, she’s cradling Charlie in her arms. She has him dressed in a pair of little overalls and a Tee-shirt that says Baby Gap and little white sneakers and ankle socks. She stands all alone, holding her baby in the wide open cemetery with the green grass and the leaves shaking on the trees in the wind. She knows this day. She has lived it and died in it once before.

  The warm spring day they should have buried Charlie.

  Chapter 39

  Renata slung over my shoulder, sprinting the tunnel from A Block to the administration building, praying to Christ that Shaw would still be waiting.

  There he was when I reached the end of the passage.

  Standing inside the open elevator car, holding the sliding door open.

  “How we doing on time?” I said, stepping inside.

  “Less than six minutes.” He released his hold on the button, the elevator doors sliding closed. “Tell me she’s alive.”

  “A little,” I said, shifting Renata’s dead weight on my shoulder.

  The elevator, rising.

  A bucket placed in the far right corner of the square car. A small, bright yellow bucket with the words HAZARD: MEDICAL WASTE printed on the si
de in orange Day-Glo letters.

  “What about the old man and his hand?” I said. “We’re gonna just leave him?” The upward thrust of the elevator pushing against the inside of my stomach.

  “It’s too late for him,” Shaw said, forever glancing at his wrist watch.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I said, now grabbing his right arm with my left hand. “The goons will kill him.”

  Shaw broke my hold.

  I nearly dropped Renata.

  “If the old man’s not dead now, he will be any minute,” he said. “The proof is right there.”

  “Where?”

  “In the bucket.”

  The elevator, approaching the first floor.

  I steadied Renata while, bending at the knees, I peeled the lid off the bucket. Inside, the old man’s hand, severed at the wrist. Jagged edges of the white bone sticking through the red and white flesh. Like it’d been hacked away with a dull hatchet.

  Hot bile shot up from my stomach, filling my mouth.

  I tossed the lid back on the bucket, turned away, swallowing.

  The car came to an abrupt stop.

  The doors slid open.

  “Emergency amputation,” Shaw said.

  “You let the doctor do that?”

  “Not a doctor. Just some jerk, works in the clinic. Part of the price we’re paying for Renata.”

  “Part of the price,” I said. “What price?”

  “I didn’t let the drunk bastard do anything,” he said. “I was standing out in the hall waiting for you.” The doors of the elevator opened wide. “We have to move,” he said.

  My hold on Renata, tight. Solid.