ONE MORE RIDE

by Sophia Gray

  Nothing for it now, though. She wouldn't have another chance to get one until that evening, after her shift. She briefly contemplated buying one on the way into work and running the test in the bathroom, but she was too concerned about being watched. For all she knew, Butler could have the other guards spying on her, and they might find the results in the trash and use them against her somehow. She didn't know how, but she'd become accustomed to the idea that these people would find a way to use just about anything against her.

  Besides, whatever the results were, she couldn't allow herself to be distracted by them today. Not when she was trying to formulate a plan. She had the beginning of an idea, but it would be extremely risky, and it could even open her up to additional threats to her well-being.

  Still, she had to try. She had to do something. If she remained passive and let bad things keep happening to her instead of going on the offensive, she knew she'd go insane.

  She drove to Bluebonnet and changed into her uniform in the locker room again. This time, she was careful to make sure she was alone, and she searched her locker for any more contraband that might have been planted there. She didn't find any.

  Once she checked in for her shift at cell block G, Beth went through her usual routine of ferrying inmates to and from the showers until all of them had had a chance to clean themselves. Then she casually stopped by Roberto Torres's cell, where he was playing checkers with his cellmate.

  “Let's go, Torres. Dr. Spector wants to see you.”

  Roberto raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? What for, bitch?”

  Beth let the epithet roll off her. She heard it at least a hundred times a day in here. “Something about your vaccination records. Come on.”

  Roberto stood up, pointing a finger at his cellmate. “Don't even think of movin' the fuckin' pieces, maricon. I got 'em all memorized.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” the cellmate said, waving him away.

  Beth led Roberto to the stairwell where she'd first spoken with Hank after he got to Bluebonnet. She kept a hand on her baton at all times, aware of how easy it would be for Roberto to try to surprise her with an attack.

  “Yeah, I didn't think you was bringin' me to no doctor,” Roberto smirked, looking her up and down as he licked his lips. “So, you down to fuck, or what? There's rumors that you already fucked at least one of the cons in here. Most folks think it was Bull. You wanna see how that little white pecker holds up against some primo Latin dick?”

  “I never fucked a prisoner,” Beth lied, “and I damn sure won't be starting with you. I need to talk to you about something important.”

  Roberto rolled his eyes. “So talk, puta. I got nothin' but time up in here.”

  “I know you think Hank killed two of your guys, and I'm sure you've got some kind of big-time payback in mind. But you should know that you're being played. The Nazis framed Hank so you'd paint a target on him.”

  “Why the fuck would I believe that? He's been runnin' with 'em ever since he got here.”

  “He didn't have a choice. He didn't know the Warriors were bowing down for the Aryans in here. He needed protection, but when he found out what they did to your brother, he got pissed. Then they ordered him to carve a couple of your guys to send you a message, and he refused.”

  Roberto cocked his head mockingly. “Aw. You mean he stuck his neck out, just for us?”

  “That's what I'm telling you. The Knights took out your guys and stuffed the shiv under Hank's mattress, knowing you'd go after him.”

  “Cute story,” Roberto said. “Too bad it's probably bullshit.”

  “Dammit, Torres, don't you care that you're being manipulated? That if you take Hank out, you're playing right into Bull's hands?”

  “Okay. Assuming I believe you—which I don't—what the fuck am I supposed to do about it?”

  Beth took a deep breath, praying this would work. “Put Hank under your protection. Make sure the Sinners know not to touch him, and spread the word so the Knights won't make a play for him either.”

  Roberto threw his head back, laughing. “Lady, it sounds like I oughtta be buyin' my drugs from you. That's how fuckin' high you sound right now. You really think I'm gonna go tell my guys that from now on, some white boy is under our protection? That we're gonna stick our necks out for some biker?”

  “What will it take? Money? I can get you money.”

  He shook his head, still snorting with laughter. “An ask like that? Fuck money. You'd have to start doin' errands for me an' my guys, like you been doin' for Bull an' them skinheads. Oh, an' you'd have to give us some of that sweet pussy you got, too. Then maybe—maybe—I'd consider it. Otherwise, you're wastin' my fuckin' time.”

  “So you're fine with doing Bull Packard's dirty work, is that it? How's that going to look?”

  “It'll look like exactly what it looks like—Hank got busted for cuttin' my guys, so we responded in kind. No one's gonna look into that shit any more closely, an' no one's gonna believe your white conspiracy theory-peddlin' ass.”

  Fuck, Beth thought. This backfired in a big way. Not only has Roberto refused to help, but now that I've met with him secretly and asked him for help, he can hold that over my head, too.

  “Fine,” Beth said gruffly. “Guess it's back to the cell for you, then.”

  “Yeah, sure, that sounds good. I got a game to finish anyhow. Oh, an' D'Amato?” Roberto winked. “Thanks for confirmin' that you did fuck a prisoner after all. I was sure it was Bull, but yeah, I guess Hank makes sense too, the way you swung into the showers to protect 'im.”

  “I told you, I never—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Roberto chuckled. “Sure you didn't.”

  Beth led Roberto back to his cell. Her legs felt like they had lead weights tied to them. She only had one more thing left to try, and if that didn't work, she didn't know what she'd do.

  During her lunch break, Beth went to the prison library, trying to stay out of sight. She didn't know who might be tracking her movements, especially after her failed plea to Roberto.

  Since Dutton Greene was considered a model prisoner, he was allowed to run the library, and he'd chosen several other Shepherds to work there with him. He could generally be found there, and if he wasn't there himself, it would be easy to get a message to him through one of the others.

  But sure enough, Dutton was there, pushing the squeaky metal cart up and down the aisles as he re-shelved books.

  “You're here to ask for my help in protecting Hank Hall, aren't you?” he asked as she approached him.

  “How did you know?”

  “You already went to the Sinners for assistance. Not surprising, given your personal history with Hall. You see the noose tightening around his neck—and yours—and you're desperate for a way out for both of you.”

  Beth shook her head, amazed. “Wow. You Shepherds really do see everything, don't you?”

  “No. Just more than most.” Dutton shelved the last book on his cart, then turned to look at her. “So what do you expect me to do for him?”

  “You're the leader of the Shepherds. You can protect him.”

  Dutton smiled humorlessly. “Because we're just another gang to you, is that right? We're non-violent, Ms. Callaghan. We do what we can to look after our own in here, but the bottom line is, if the Sinners or the Knights decide to cut through us to get to Hall, there's very little we could do to stop them. Not without risking bloody confrontations or longer sentences.”

  It took Beth a moment to realize that Dutton had called her by her real name, rather than Officer D'Amato. If he knew that, how much else did he know?

  Well, whatever he knew, it didn't matter. It didn't sound like he was willing to help her.

  “I'm sorry I bothered you,” Beth said, turning to leave.

  “So that's it? You're just going to give up? I thought you cared about him more than that. I thought you cared enough to stop crawling around asking for favors and actually use your head.”

  Beth turned back. “Listen,
Greene—I've taken about all the insults I can handle for the day. You're willing to help? Good, I'm listening. You're not? Fine, fuck you. But don't tease me with a bunch of fortune cookie riddles and judgmental horseshit.”

  Dutton stepped forward, lowering his voice and putting a hand on Beth's forearm. The physical contact made her nervous, and so did the intensity in Dutton's eyes. Still, she couldn't pull away—she felt paralyzed, like a bird being hypnotized by a snake's glare.

  “You've been here long enough to see how this place works,” Dutton said. “It's not about who has the biggest muscles, the sharpest shivs, or the most cash to throw around. Bluebonnet runs on information. Who knows what about whom, and how they choose to use it.”

  Beth nodded slowly. “Butler keeps holding what he knows about me over my head. But what if I had something on him?”

  “Everyone has secrets. Even Butler. Even the guard who oversees Ad-Seg.”

  “And you'd be willing to provide me with useful information on them, so I could visit Hank and get Butler off my back?” Beth asked. “In exchange for what?”

  “Nothing too difficult. There's an inmate in your cell block named Raheem Jenkins. He's a good kid, and he was innocent of the crime he's been convicted of. If he stays out of trouble and makes parole, he could still have a life on the outside.”

  Beth shrugged. “So help him. I'm sure you've been able to do that for lots of kids who come here.”

  “We can't get close enough to reach out to him. He shares a cell with two other Sinners, and they're always surrounding him, making sure none of the Shepherds approach him. So far, they've protected him without asking him to do anything for them. But with every day that passes, the odds of them swallowing him whole and turning him into one of them grow greater. I want you to reassign him to a cell with one of us, so we can help him before it's too late.”

  “Sure,” Beth said. “I can do that. I'll put in for the transfer today, as soon as I get back from my lunch break. Now, what can you tell me?”

  Dutton told her what he knew. About Butler, and the guard who ran Ad-Seg.

  By the time he was finished, Beth was starting to believe there could be a way out of Bluebonnet for her and Hank after all.

  Chapter 29

  Hank

  The cells in Ad-Seg, also known as the hole, were little more than dark, filthy, stone-walled holes where the worst of the worst—those who posed a serious threat to the guards and their fellow inmates—were thrown for undetermined periods of time. If a man was sent there as a short-term punishment for a specific act of violence or defiance, he could be there anywhere from a week to a month. But if a man proved himself completely unable to follow the rules or restrain himself from murdering other prisoners, he could be there for months, years, or even the rest of his sentence.

  Every surface in the cells was covered with thick layers of grime and black mold, which frequently led to severe and permanent bronchial infections for those interred in them. There was a small toilet in the corner that looked like it hadn't been cleaned since it was installed. A thin plastic mattress was on the floor—it was designed to be tear-proof, fire-proof, and easily hosed off so the mildew in the room couldn't permeate it. Lying on it was almost as bad as lying directly on the hard stone floor.

  Part of the experience of spending time in Ad-Seg was the crushing sense of isolation. There was no contact with other prisoners, and the only brief contact with the guards was when they slid a tray of food and a plastic cup of water through the narrow slot in the door once a day. Depending on what the offender had done to be sent to the hole, it was common for the “food” to be horribly tainted somehow—moldy and rotten, or polluted with the guards' fingernails or feces—and for the cup to be cloudy with piss.

  Then there were the voices in his own head. Most prisoners in Ad-Seg started talking to themselves within the first few days. By the end of the first month or two, they were generally murmuring a constant stream of broken, inane babble that only made sense to them.

  Hank had been in the hole for two days, and he already felt his mind beginning to soften into mush.

  He could feel the walls leaning in further and further, until the room felt like it was about one square foot. He kept pacing from one wall to the other, over and over, counting each step so he could be sure the shrinking of the room was only in his head. Then he'd flop down on the mattress, insisting to himself that he was satisfied that the room was the same size it always had been.

  But no matter how many times he counted, the walls kept inching in until he inevitably got up and started pacing again.

  The trays that came through the slot were befouled, and after the first two, the growling of his stomach overcame him and he started to scream and scream—no words, just roars of incoherent rage and hunger. But the third tray was the same, and the fourth, and Hank could feel his stomach starting to devour itself. He was too weak to scream any more. There was no one to hear him anyway.

  No one to care.

  His breath was already starting to rasp and wheeze from the dank conditions of the cell. The air always seemed wet and chilly, and there was always a dripping sound coming from somewhere. He spent hours trying to find the source of the noise, but it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, until it threatened to drive him absolutely insane.

  Maybe nothing's dripping, he thought. Maybe it's just a recording they pipe through the cells to make us go nuts. If so, it's fucking working.

  Now and then, other sounds echoed from the cells around him, even though they were mostly soundproofed—shrieks, sobs, curses, and moans slipped through the feeding slots in the doors. They seemed as distant and inhuman as the cries of wolves and coyotes that Hank had heard when he was on long rides with the Warriors.

  But of course, that seemed like it had happened to someone else, a million years ago.

  Hank tried to hold his mind together by attempting to picture the world beyond these walls. There was a blue sky somewhere, he told himself, or a starry one—he'd lost all sense of time. There were wide open spaces with roads running through them, and men riding motorcycles with the fresh air blowing in their faces. There were families, husbands and wives and their children, laughing together and unpacking picnics like he used to do with Elena and Jason. People were drinking in bars and making love in bathrooms. Life was going on as it always had, even if he couldn't see it.

  But no matter how much his imagination insisted that these things were real, the only true reality seemed to be the walls around him—their thickness stretching out forever all around him, an entire planet of merciless metal and stone, built just to keep him from ever being free again.

  The rational part of his mind knew these thoughts were madness, and he hated the fact that being in here was breaking him down so easily. But he felt helpless against it. He hadn't allowed himself to imagine that anything could be worse than waking up in a gray prison cell in block G day after day, but oh, this was. This was so much worse than anything from his wildest nightmares.

  He felt like he would rather be dead than spend another second feeling like this. Beth and Bib would be upset, sure, but they'd get over it. Everything that had happened was his fault. He was a curse, a blight, a cancer. They'd have been better off if he'd never been born, and once he was dead, they could move on with their lives instead of trying to rescue him and getting themselves into deeper trouble. Maybe he'd even see his wife and son again in the afterlife. Even if he didn't—even if eternal nothingness awaited him, or hell itself—he'd still be gone from this wretched place forever.

  He'd be free.

  However, even that option seemed denied to him. His clothes didn't seem adequate to hang himself, and even if they had been, he couldn't find anything high enough to tie them to. The only metal object was the toilet, and it was too sturdy to break down into anything sharp.

  The only chance for suicide seemed to lie in biting through his own wrists. Could he bring himself to do that? He looked do
wn at them, considering...

  Suddenly, Hank heard the heavy lock on the door slide aside. It slowly started to swing open, letting in a sliver of fluorescent light from the hallway outside. For a moment, this crack in Hank's reality threw him off guard, and he even smiled. Could Beth have found a way to visit him down here? Or was it some other CO, coming to tell him that they figured out he'd been framed and they were letting him return to G block?

  But when Butler stepped in, Hank's heart sagged again. Even in his confused state, he knew that seeing Butler was never a good sign.

  “So I'm guessing right about now, cafeteria food and a bunk in block G doesn't sound so bad to you, huh?” Butler asked.

  Hank stared at Butler mutely, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of knowing how crazy, sick, and miserable he was feeling.