The gun moved onto David. “What’s there to talk about, David? Tom’s dead. You delivered his son three months ago. These… monsters…”
“Monsters?”
Ava had flinched at the word, fighting a new dizziness now that the gun had come out, but Sara’s voice had come out strong. Strident. It was as if the old Sara had climbed out of the new Sara like a butterfly crawling out of a cocoon.
“Who are the monsters here, Ralph? Both Ava and I saw people just like you and me being taken to that prison and executed at the gates—executed—only because they tried to get away! Their heads blown open in front of their friends, women and children. What did you expect us to do? We had an opportunity. Should we not have gone? Should we not have tried? Should we have left them all to rot and die?”
The gun swung back to Sara. “My little brother! You killed him!”
Sara shook her head, shifting so that she stood more in front of Ava, who could only look on.
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t, and I’m sorry for your loss, but we were trying to do something, Ralph. Something good. I led that raid and, apart from Ava, nearly one hundred of my friends were killed. One hundred, and we didn’t release one person from that place. Not one… We—no, I—failed.”
She stepped forward, putting herself directly between Ava and Ralph. Blocking his shot completely. “And I’m damned if I’m going to lose the last one to you.”
Ralph took another step toward them, and Ava saw his family shrinking against the wall. “You want me to kill you where you stand?”
“Killing me doesn’t fix anything in this broken land.”
“Maybe it won’t!” Ralph yelled. “But it’ll sure make me feel better.”
And then he pulled the trigger.
25
Parker had been holding the gun to his own head for minutes, frozen and trying to figure out what he should do. For himself, but also to honor Sara’s memory. So much of the anger he’d been feeling over the past weeks had drifted away in the face of what Grayland had shown him of her last moments, and what the world thought of him, but there was still some resistance in him. Something keeping him from pulling the trigger. More minutes passed, and he realized it was confusion. The question itself was so targeted that he shifted his grip, loosening his finger on the trigger he’d had readied against his skull.
Why kill Henshaw?
Parker realized he didn’t know Henshaw; they didn’t have a connection. None. It didn’t make sense.
Why tone down the threat level?
The fact that they’d done that suggested they’d had no other cards to play, and their guess had been that anyone would do the trick. But it brought up the question… why hadn’t they waited and killed Sara in front of him? Why, if they needed him to really and truly bend to their will? They couldn’t have known for sure that he’d break because of Henshaw.
In the torturer’s handbook, the way to manipulate Parker was to up the threat level—to torture Sara in front of him maybe, and threaten to make him watch her die… in person. To use his connection to her—father and daughter—to the maximum advantage to exact maximum damage. If they hadn’t done that, and she hadn’t died in the riot, as had been implied…
How could he be certain it was Sara on the film? Film could be doctored; that could have been anyone. And the image had never been all that clear.
Killing Sara gave Parker nothing to live for. And if she hadn’t been killed by accident, in the riot… killing her didn’t make any sense. None.
So maybe Sara wasn’t dead after all. Maybe they’d thought to torture him with the idea that she’d been killed, pushing him to believe it because they had no way to torture him with her death—because they’d never had her in custody. That made the most sense. More sense than killing her out of his presence and taking goddamned pictures.
Parker lowered the gun. Was he just playing into their hands now? Believing them to such an extent that he’d actually end his own life? Was that why Calhoun had given him a gun? Were they waiting for him to pull the trigger? But no… she’d seemed serious; that mass killing and mass grave had gotten to her. Killing himself might be playing into Spencer’s hands in the end, but he felt pretty sure that wasn’t the case. Calhoun wanted revenge for those innocents who’d been slaughtered. Grayland and Spencer wanted a public execution. His suicide wouldn’t address any of those goals.
A new idea swam around his mind now, like a ravenous shark biting through all the excuses that had made suicide a viable option.
Two seconds ago, he had reached the end of the road. The final solution. The coward’s way out. The ultimate release—whatever you wanted to call it.
Knowing it, he felt like kicking his own ass around the room. He’d taken the most horrific idea which had been offered, that they’d killed Sara, at face value. He’d believed Grayland and Spencer without question. Perhaps because he’d still been suffering the aftershock of addiction and the psychological tortures that had been visited upon him. Spencer had first shown him those photos soon after he’d come off the methadone, after all.
But now he knew. That wasn’t Sara in those pictures, or the video.
She might still be alive. Still out there somewhere. Still fighting.
It hurt his guts to think that some poor innocent woman had been killed to trick him, but nevertheless, he’d finally dug his nails into some ledge of hope.
Parker set the gun’s safety and put it into the band of his underwear inside the jumpsuit. He put a magazine in each of his socks and the other on his hip, opposite the gun.
Then he sat on his bed and waited for the riot.
As she opened her eyes, the stink of a gunshot spiking her nostrils, the first thing Sara saw was that Ralph was on his knees, the magnum spun away, blood pumping from his ruined wrist.
Sammi hadn’t left her gun in the Blazer after all. “Stay down or the next one will put you down,” she said. “David…?”
David nodded, and reached into his bag for supplies. Other than him rustling around, the only sounds in the room were the rain peppering the windows, the steady thick drip of blood from Ralph’s wrist hitting the floor, and his pathetic whimpering. His family had fled when they’d realized he really meant to shoot Sara. David approached Ralph with a bandage and wound pad, but before he started working, he kicked the magnum to Sara. “Do something with that,” he said grimly.
Sara stared at the gun, and then looked at Ava, who was still on the sofa, her eyes wide with shock.
Do something with that.
The magnum, blue-black steel, tooled and precise. Engineered to near perfection.
Yes. What will I do with it?
From the disastrous prison raid to her flight from Terre Haute, and then the weeks with David and Sammi spent healing and helping, Sara had hardly held a gun, let alone taken one up again in battle.
But Ava was right. She’d never be free of people like Ralph, or able to avoid capture forever. Who will be the next Ralph?
A long line of faceless enemies zoomed through Sara’s mind. She’d thought she was free of it, but now she knew what a naïve hope that had been.
Sara wasn’t a healer. She was an assassin.
Locking eyes with Ava as David began to dress Ralph’s wound, Sara bent down and picked up the gun.
The gunfire started exactly at the time Calhoun had predicted it would.
First, there was the sound of Mandingos shouting to each other, and then cell doors crashing open. Two screams came from people who Parker assumed were corrections officers coming to investigate the disturbance, not knowing that the cell doors had been opened. Echoing clangs of metal signaled a succession of more doors thudding against walls as they were kicked outward, and shooting split the air, which quieted the screams.
There was shouting and cheering, and the roof klaxon alerted the whole prison of the C-Block breakout.
Parker wanted to use the key right away; he wanted to open his door and get the hell out of hi
s cell, but he needed the Mandingos to draw as many corrections officers toward them as possible. That had to happen first
Feet ran down the hall outside his door. He couldn’t tell whether they belonged to Mandingos or corrections officers. The footsteps went past on the metal gantry tower, and then all Parker could hear were gunshots firing and the odd scream in the distance.
Parker unlocked his door and peered out. The smell of smoke hit him. Someone had started a fire. It added to the chaos, spreading the authorities too thin while they tried to deal with two emergencies. In the early minutes of the riot, a fire would give the edge to the rioters. Parker knew he could use that to his advantage, too.
He stepped fully out from the cell and looked down into the rec area.
Two corrections offices lay dead. One of them had had his head stamped on until the skull had shattered, and the other’s head had been near lifted off by pistol shots, the upper portion raised like the lid on a saucepan. Broken dolls, they lay twenty feet below in spreading pools of blood and brains.
From the bloody footprints leading past the table tennis set-ups, Parker could see the direction the main riot had gone. He went to the stairs at the opposite end of the landing and jumped down them four at a time until he was in the rec. The exit he wanted was close enough to touch; he fisted the key and moved toward the door.
“Fuck you think you’re goin’?”
Cold metal hit him in the back of the neck and forced him into the wall.
“Crazy bitch Calhoun must think I is crazy as her.”
Parker raised his hands. It was Kleet, alone and armed with a pistol, sticking it hard into the back of Parker’s neck.
“I knew they wasn’t on the level.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Bitch wanted us for a diversion, while you got the fuck out.”
Calhoun had made the same mistake so many others had with Kleet—she had underestimated him. That’s why he’d hung back while the Mandingos went to do Calhoun’s dirty work for her.
“I had nothing to do with it,” Parker said. “I couldn’t get a message to you. I thought you’d already gone with the others.”
“But yo got a sweet way out, yes? Yo ain’t following my brethren now, are you? I saw the way you were cat moving. You got some different plan, right?”
With the gun still against his neck and Kleet’s intelligence burning as brightly as his anger, there was no point in lying. Parker told him about the key, the south compound. The waiting truck.
Kleet seemed to think for an age before he spoke. He moved the gun away from Parker’s neck, clapped him on the back, and nudged him toward the port. “Jackpot, muthafucka. Anything else and yo brains be decorating that wall. Let’s move, man.”
They pushed on through the gates as quickly as they could move. Parker dealing with the locks, Kleet keeping the gun ready in case they met any resistance.
As they moved toward the administration block, all that suggested trouble in the prison was the wailing roof klaxon and two corrections officers running ahead of them. Kleet shot them both with clean headshots before they had a chance to open their mouths. Moments later, Kleet threw a Beretta to Parker so he had another gun and collected the other gun and magazines for himself.
“What about the rest of your gang?” Parker asked as they made their way down another featureless corridor, following signs that read South Compound.
Kleet was pragmatic. “They got enough firepower. We fixed a rendezvous point outside, and they’ll be out soon—they lettin’ other mean bastards out who’ll take this riot all-out. And Gace will take over as pack leader if I don’ make it out with you.”
“You’re smarter than you look.”
“You sound like my counselor in juvie, man.”
Parker felt himself grin as they moved forward. “You know it’s true.”
They moved through another sally port, the last before the entrance to the administration block. Kleet shrugged as he covered both directions with his pistol, glancing back and forth. “Ain’t no easy way for a boy from the projects to make his way in this world, brother. You know dat true.”
Parker held his hand up to Kleet. “We ain’t so different, man.”
Kleet grinned. “Yeah, but you po-po. I ain’t ever gonna stoop that low.”
Before Parker could reciprocate Kleet’s friendly grin, the bars around them sparked and sang as machine pistol bullets sprayed into the confined space from behind them. It was a miracle that Parker wasn’t hit; Kleet wasn’t so lucky. Two bullets slammed into the back of his thigh, and one he took a little higher.
“Muthafucka shot me in the ass!” he shouted, spinning and returning fire down the corridor they’d just exited. Two marshals ducked behind a guard station door, returning fire around its edge.
It gave Parker little time to finish unlocking the gate, sliding it across as he pulled the still-firing, rabidly-angry Kleet through the doorway with him.
“I gonna kill yo ass, muthafucka! I gonna kill your sorry ass deader ’n dead! I’m gonna kill yo whole family!” Kleet screamed, still firing as he was propelled backwards.
Backing into the wall, Parker slid the port gate back across the gap, twisted the key, and then fired three rounds directly into the lock, shielding his face from the spits of sparking metal that came up off it.
“Yo only think of that now?” Kleet shouted.
Sweat was bubbling out all over his forehead, and his jumpsuit was blossoming patches of blood. The bullet in his ass cheek might not be painful by Kleet’s standards, but the two that had smacked into his thigh might be fatal if they’d clipped an artery. But Parker had no time to assess Kleet’s injuries now. “Can you walk?” he asked, sliding another mag into his Beretta and keeping the marshals pinned through the sally port.
“Fuck it, man, I can run. I a muthfucken lion!”
Parker and Kleet took off into the administration block, leaving a trail of blood and brags from Kleet as he leaned on Parker and made forward in a hobbled sprint.
The door to the south compound burst open, and Parker came out carrying Kleet. The lion was losing more blood than was healthy, and as they’d moved through the building, Kleet had become progressively weaker, half stumbling, half dragging his leg behind him.
Whipping rain thrashed the compound. A broiling sky showed clouds and lightning racing overhead like galloping horses moving for the horizon. The rain hit them in bursts, drenching them immediately so that the blood on Kleet’s jumpsuit thinned from arterial red to rusty orange.
“Man, I hate rain,” Kleet gasped bitterly. “I don’ wanna die in the rain.”
Parker pulled him on.
The truck was a FEMA appropriated M939 series 5-tonner. It stood in the center of the rainstorm, rain ricocheting off it. Parker dragged the ever-weakening Kleet toward it, rain hacking into his head and eye.
“You’re not dying today, Kleet, not today,” he muttered.
“I… like your style… Parker, but… you ain’t no doctor. I know the score. Without a hospital, I… is gonna bleed out.”
They reached the truck, and Parker was grateful to lean Kleet against it to get some respite from his weight. He fumbled beneath the wheel arch of the front tire. His hand settled on the key just as the ricocheting rain was replaced by bullets. A line of MP5 slugs from marshals who had burst from another door into the compound, tore up the dirt in muddy splatters. A stitch of bullets sewed itself across the door of the truck as Parker ducked behind the vehicle, dragging Kleet down with him.
The marshals were running and firing toward them. Parker aimed at one and took out his legs; Kleet fired with his Beretta, but he didn’t have the strength to aim accurately and his bullets smashed into the wall of the administration block.
The two marshals split, firing as they moved. Bullets tanged around them with ear-shattering closeness and sparks stung Parker’s cheeks. The marshals were trying to outflank them and, through the fizzing rain and from the low
position, Parker was finding it almost impossible to get a bead on the running men.
It came as a complete surprise when a pistol dug into the left side of his face. Had there been another marshal he hadn’t seen while he’d been concentrating on the first two? He had to turn his head fully.
Kleet was sticking the gun in his cheek.
“Wha…?”
“I know you ain’t gonna leave me unless I make you, man. Get out now. Take the truck; let me shoot their asses. Give you the time to go…”
Bullets thudded into the truck. Glass shattered and crashed down, the sound almost indistinguishable from the heavy rain.
“I can’t…”
“Don’t give me that shit, man. Get in the truck, or I will fucking kill you now.”
Parker couldn’t believe Kleet was willing to sacrifice himself. The ultimate gang criminal, with all the social conscience of a dog with distemper digging up the White House rose garden.
“Man, don’t look at me like that, with that one stupid eye. If’n I wasn’t dying anyway, I’d be getting the fuck out of here wid you, but there’s no sense in us both checking out. Right? Now go.”
Parker swallowed his argument, hearing the truth in the man’s words. Even if he got Kleet out, the man had lost too much blood to be saved by Parker. And he knew this gang leader well enough to know that he’d rather die than go back to that cell.
“Just take these assholes down. All of them.”
Parker nodded, his lips set. “I will.”
As Parker began crawling backwards, Kleet rolled onto his front and began firing his two pistols at the marshals, who were now only twenty yards away, if that. Kleet’s shots remained inaccurate, but they still made the officers dive sideways for cover. One went behind a pyramid of oil drums, the other rolling to a wire cage filled with recycled metal. The cover gave them the ability to bob and fire as Kleet’s bullets crashed against their hiding places.
Dead Reckoning (911 Book 3) Page 20