Behind the Iron

by William W. Johnstone

  “Why kill the lawyer?” Fallon asked, not expecting a reply and getting none. “Was that Ness fellow putting together something against the warden? Did he know? Was he working with Jernigan?”

  The doctor sighed. “Ness was killed . . . for money.”

  Fallon blinked. Murder for hire. They had started with Killer Cain, who was a hired assassin. Now they used anyone they could.

  “For fifteen years?” Fallon asked. “Longer? They’ve been sending out convicts to commit murder. They got paid to do this?”

  “That’s what Miss Jernigan had learned. I don’t know how.”

  Fallon wanted to vomit. “How long have you known?”

  The doctor shook his head. “I guessed. But I didn’t know. Not until I read . . .” His finger pointed to the afternoon newspaper.

  Fallon leaned back in the chair. He had been sent to The Walls to find out the location of money stolen during a bank robbery. He had stumbled upon something much bigger, horrible, unthinkable. Fallon had lived through hell in Joliet, even in Yuma. But nothing that he had witnessed in those prisons compared to what he had just learned was going on here. The prisoners weren’t all to blame, either. Those who had masterminded this . . . this . . . Murderers Incorporated . . . were those men in charge.

  Dumbly, Fallon rose. He crossed the room, trying to think of what he needed to do. He was at the door before he realized it, staring at the prison yard. It struck him that he had been inside the hospital for maybe forty minutes. He felt fifty years older.

  Fallon blinked and swore. He stepped out of the door, and Malachi, his escort, leaped around, startled, almost dropping the line stick. Somehow, Fallon managed to smile as he pulled his cap onto his head.

  “I’m done,” he said. “Doc Gripewater says I need to stretch my legs some. Back to the exercise yard, I guess.”

  Malachi blinked, shrugged, and stepped back. The line stick was firm in his hands. “You first, fish. Lead the way. You got fifteen minutes left before you get off to supper and back to your home. So stretch those legs out good, ’cause you ain’t got no longer than that.”

  “Yes, sir.” Fallon lowered his head, kept his eyes down, and started walking.

  The guard left Fallon alone and wandered to a corner to talk to other guards. Fallon made himself blend in with the inmates. He moved casually, but with a purpose. He checked the guards in the towers along the wall. He stopped to tie his work boot and slipped the knife out of his sheath and into the pocket of his jacket. He let a prisoner walk past him, and then Fallon came up and put his right hand on that inmate’s back.

  Fallon pressed the blade of the little knife against the man’s back. The point cut through the wool and pricked the skin. The man tensed and stopped.

  “It’s not what you used on that lawyer in town, or that young girl in her hotel room, and it’s not what you tried to use on me,” Fallon said in a whisper. “But it’ll get the job done sure as hell.”

  “Fallon,” Ford Wagner whispered.

  “Keep walking,” Fallon told him. “Smile. We’re old friends. We knew each other back in the Indian Territory. Right?”

  They moved into a crowd. It would be harder for the guards to see what was going on, and inmates in the bloodiest forty-seven acres in America knew to mind their own business.

  “The first part’s easy,” Fallon said. “I ask the questions. You nod or shake your head. Do you understand?”

  Ford Wagner’s head nodded.

  “You killed the lawyer?”

  Another nod.

  “And the woman reporter?”

  “Yes.”

  The knife cut deeper, but not deep enough for blood to start showing on the soiled striped shirt and jacket. “Nod. Remember?”

  Wagner nodded.

  “They pay you?”

  This time, Wagner shook his head.

  “Threaten you?”

  That answer was more of a shrug.

  “Were these your first killings? In prison, I mean.”

  This answer surprised Fallon, too. Wagner’s head moved up and down.

  Fallon considered this. They moved from that gathering to another. “Your cousin,” Fallon said. “Kemp Carver. Did he do any of these . . . jobs?” He hated using that word.

  Wagner nodded.

  “Someone had to tell you who to kill. Was it Brandt?”

  The head bobbed.

  “Brandt got you out of our cell the other night. Right?”

  The head nodded.

  “You’ll answer this one. Quietly. Who was with Brandt?”

  “Fowlson,” came the answer.

  “Nod or shake again. Did Underwood know about all of this?”

  The head nodded.

  “Did Underwood order the murder of the girl?”

  Wagner shrugged.

  “All right. Was Brandt outside with you? Did he get you to the lawyer’s office? I know you didn’t do this alone. Brandt?”

  The head shook.

  “Fowlson?”

  Another shake.

  He hated this one. “Gripewater?”

  The head shook, and Fallon sighed with relief. Who? One of the guards? He took a long shot. “Underwood?”

  The head bobbed. Fallon couldn’t believe it.

  “And the woman?”

  “Brandt,” Wagner answered. He coughed.

  They moved away from the crowd. “I’ll ask questions. You’ll answer. Quietly. How did they sneak you out of The Walls?”

  “The Mole,” Wagner said.

  Fallon blinked and shook his head. “The Mole guided you out?”

  “No. We used his cell.”

  That would explain it. “A tunnel?” he asked.

  Wagner nodded.

  “All right. They didn’t pay you for this. They threatened you. How?”

  Wagner had to cough again, and Fallon let him wipe the white phlegm with his sleeve. “They said they’d leave Kemp in a solitary till he died. Kemp was supposed to do the job. The lawyer. I didn’t know about the woman till later.”

  “Kemp?”

  “Yeah. He killed the congressman five months ago. And the banker a year or more back.”

  Fallon stopped walking. Wagner stopped, too.

  Running everything he had heard through his head, Fallon figured out what had likely happened. Kemp Carver was the assassin. But Carver was dead, and Captain Brandt had let the murderer die. Why?

  “Of course,” Fallon said aloud. Hanging from the support of the catwalk, Carver had said he would tell Fallon everything he knew. Brandt couldn’t let that happen, so he had sent the killer plunging three stories to his own death. And since Ford Wagner was unconscious, he had not witnessed the cold-blooded murder of his cousin. They simply used him.

  “Ness was killed for profit,” Fallon whispered. “Jernigan was killed to shut her up.”

  “I don’t know,” Wagner whispered. “They just told me that the only way they’d let Kemp out of the dungeon was if I did what they told me to.”

  “So you carved up a lawyer? And a woman?”

  “He’s my cousin, Fallon. I ain’t got long to live anyhow. And it’s not like God would ever welcome me through the Pearly Gates.”

  Fallon lowered the blade from the consumptive’s back and discreetly slipped it inside his jacket pocket.

  “You’re going to break into a coughing fit when we reach that guard straight ahead,” Fallon said. “I’ll say we have to get you to Doc Gripewater. Make it look good. Because those ruthless devils used you and your cousin good. And you’re going to make everything right and get revenge. Walk.”

  They moved toward Malachi and Ryan, maybe the only two guards of lesser rank whose names Fallon actually knew or at least remembered. “Now,” Fallon whispered, and Wagner began coughing harshly. Fallon did not know how much of this was acting and how much of it came from what was left of the dying man’s lungs. Malachi and Ryan turned, and Fallon wrapped an arm around Wagner’s waist.

  “Hey,” Fallon call
ed out. “He’s real sick here. Need to get him up to the hospital.”

  Wagner spit out blood. That wasn’t acting.

  Malachi and Ryan stared at Wagner—Ryan even took a slight step back—and quickly glanced at each other.

  Grumbling, the bigger of the guards spit, sighed, and said, “You take him, fish. We ain’t touchin’ him.”

  Apparently, the guards at the pen had been educated that consumption was passed on through germs, and not something that you were born with or God just decided you needed. With a nod, Fallon helped Wagner away from the exercise yard and to the doctor’s office.

  “But we’re right behind you, fish,” Malachi said. “So don’t try nothin’.”

  This might just work, Fallon thought.

  The biggest hurdle was getting the guards to let him take Wagner to Gripewater’s office, and that’s what was happening now. Fallon hoped the frail man could make it to the doctor’s office, write out a confession, and then maybe Doc Gripewater or Eve Martin could take that to the governor, the district attorney, or one of Jefferson City’s newspapers.

  But that wasn’t going to happen.

  The gates of hell were about to open.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  “Fowlson!” a voice thundered across the prison compound. “Fowlson!”

  Fallon hurried his step. The voice, even at that distance, Fallon recognized as Warden Harold Underwood’s.

  “What the hell . . .” Ryan Getty said.

  “Stop him!” Underwood shouted. “Stop them both!”

  Fallon looked. Underwood and Captain Brandt were running past A-Hall. The black cat scurried out of their way. Underwood was pointing in the direction of Fallon, Wagner, and the two guards. The warden had to mean Fallon and Wagner, but why would he yell for Fowlson, whom Fallon could not see anywhere, and not Malachi or Ryan? It didn’t make sense.

  “Kill them! Shoot them, Fowlson. Shoot them now!”

  The prison yard, always hushed, quieted into an unnerving silence.

  “They’re escaping!” Underwood yelled.

  Fallon let out a breath. Then the warden couldn’t mean Fallon and Wagner, for they had reached the steps to the doctor’s office.

  That’s when Fallon heard the buzz of a bullet and heard the sickening impact as a heavy slug tore through Ford Wagner’s chest and exited through his back, the impact knocking Wagner to his knees and pulling Fallon down with the consumptive prisoner.

  “Hell’s fire!” Ryan Getty was screaming, and the second shot whined off the rock wall above Fallon’s head.

  Fallon rolled, as a third shot dug into the dirt where he had been lying a second earlier. He saw Wagner lying faceup, eyes open, his shirtfront covered with blood. Most likely he was dead, but if he still held any life, that left him an instant later when a bullet blew off the top of his head.

  “Hell’s fire!” Ryan Getty shrieked again.

  Fallon saw Malachi, too. The guard lay behind Wagner. He wasn’t moving either, and Fallon realized that the bullet that had gone through Wagner’s body had slammed into the big prison guard.

  A bullet zipped over Fallon’s head, but that one had come from another direction. Fallon looked, saw Captain Brandt spreading his feet. The brute had stopped running and had pulled a pistol. Brandt had to be a good shot to cover that kind of range with a handgun.

  “Hell’s fire!”

  Fallon was growing mighty tired of the little guard.

  Brandt leveled his big gun but stopped. Warden Underwood had stopped running, as well, and had fallen silent. Because the prisoners—those in the exercise yard, those being marched to the washhouse, those being marched from the various plants at the rear of the prison—maybe every one of them had taken up various cries.

  “They’re murdering us!”

  “Butchers! Killers!”

  Guards began pulling their line sticks. Others merely turned and ran. Fallon felt a bullet fired from above tear through the collar of his jacket. That’s when he saw Mr. Fowlson. The deputy warden stood on the edge of a guard tower, working the lever of a repeating rifle. He brought the stock to his shoulder, aimed again, but quickly stopped. Fallon just saw the flash. Over the din of noise from prisoners, he could not hear the sound as the line stick hit the deputy warden in the side. Fowlson slipped, and stumbled, and cartwheeled over the edge. The lever-action rifle hit the ground first.

  And the prisoners were all over him.

  “Fallon!”

  He turned, saw Charley Muldoon racing across the yard, carrying the black cat in his arms. Ryan Getty was running. Other guards weren’t so lucky. The rifle spoke, but this time it was held by one of the inmates. The guard in the tower staggered back, dropped another rifle into the yard, and slumped against the outer wall of the watch post.

  Line sticks crunched sickeningly against the skulls and backs and ribs of guards who had been overpowered by inmates.

  “Fallon!” Charley Muldoon was almost to Fallon. Others hugged the wall, trying to make it to the front gate. Underwood made a beeline for A-Hall. Captain Brandt started toward Fowlson, which was a stupid thing to do, and he realized it—but too late. A mob swallowed him.

  That gave the prisoners three weapons, Fallon figured, not counting the line sticks or the knives every inmate likely had on his person. Maybe more guns, too, if some of the unfortunate guards they had caught had been carrying hideaway weapons.

  “Inside!” Fallon stood before Muldoon reached him and pointed to the front door—the only door—to the hospital.

  The door was being opened. Fallon saw the frightened face of Eve Martin as she took in the scene across the prison yard.

  Fallon started after Muldoon and the cat, but stopped, and he quickly ran back to Malachi’s body. He grabbed the belt, unbuckled it, all the while placing a finger on the guard’s throat, hoping to find a pulse, but feeling none. He had the keys, and the line stick, and that was all he had time to get.

  Rioting prisoners, Fallon knew from experience, did not always try to beat the hell out of guards and prison officials. They’d hit, kick, slice, bash, burn, and rip apart prisoners they didn’t like, trusties and friends, and, definitely, former federal lawmen.

  Seeing Charley Muldoon, the big matron started to slam the door shut, but Ryan Getty was right behind Muldoon. The fear in both men’s eyes, or maybe just because it was a prison guard, stopped her, and she widened the door and let both men stumble inside. Fallon ran, too, holding the dangling belt and the line stick. The matron didn’t shut the door until Fallon was inside, dropping the belt and the stick onto the floor, and looking around.

  The door shut. The lock was bolted. A bar was placed in the wooden holders—none of which would keep the prisoners out if they remembered that women were in here. Charley Muldoon huddled in the corner, clutching the cat, which looked more frightened than the arsonist.

  “Damn!” Fallon was up, running past Bedbug and Claire, and sliding to the floor, where he stopped beside the prostrate body of Jess Harper.

  Whistles began shrieking. Horns blared. Rifles fired.

  Fallon grabbed the girl’s wrist. He felt the heartbeat, but it was far faster than normal, and he saw the sweat dampening her face, hair, and clothes. Jess Harper moaned. Fallon made himself look between her legs. He saw no blood.

  Eve Martin was beside him. She looked calm. The matron had a hell of a lot better nerves than Harry Fallon.

  “Help me lift her,” Martin said. “We’ll get her to the table. Gently. Gently.”

  Gentle as they tried, the girl, maybe conscious, maybe out of it, yelled in pain as they lifted her off the floor.

  Bedbug, Liza, and Claire were pulling back blankets on a table.

  “Hot water!” the matron shouted, and Claire took off to the stove.

  Fallon set Jess Harper’s head on a pillow. Eve Martin frowned.

  “Honey,” the matron said in a soft voice. “You’re going to be fine. And your baby’s going to be fine.”

  “She’s n
ot . . .” Fallon started.

  “She is,” Eve Martin said.

  “But it’s too early.”

  “Yes,” the matron said. “But not all babies follow a calendar.”

  Liza started praying. Fallon moved to the chair and knocked the bottle out of Thaddeus Gripewater’s hand before the gin reached his mouth. Then he slapped the doctor’s face.

  “Listen to me, you drunken sot. You’re getting out of this chair and you’re doing what you get paid to do. Now!”

  He found a bottle on a table and tossed the contents in Gripewater’s face.

  Claire was back with the water. Bedbug was helping Eve Martin undress Jess Harper. Fallon jerked Gripewater to his feet but had to let go as soon as the doctor’s boots dropped back to the door.

  Somebody had just kicked in the front door.

  Fallon turned, saw two men in striped uniforms coming inside. He scooped up the belt by the buckle, and swung it, the keys slamming hard into a wild-eyed bald man’s head, knocking him to the floor, where he slid into Muldoon. The cat leaped out of the little man’s hands and landed on the bald convict’s face.

  Fallon ducked underneath the punch thrown by the man who came in with the bald man. Bringing his head up quickly, Fallon felt his skull catch the wiry man’s jaw, and he threw a left into the man’s side, stepped back, and slammed a right into the man’s nose. Cartilage gave way, blood poured out, and Fallon brought his knee into the man’s groin. As the man doubled over, Fallon grabbed his close-cropped hair and slammed the man’s head down while he raised his knee again. The man slumped onto the floor, rolled over, and lay still. By now Liza and Claire were pounding the bald man with chairs. The cat had screeched its way toward the rear of the building, and two more men were coming inside.

  Desperately, Fallon grabbed the bottle of gin at his feet. He broke it against the corner of a cabinet, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to take them all. Two more men had come in through the door. Fallon brought his elbow back, preparing to thrust the jagged end of the bottle into the closest prisoner’s gut. But the man was pulled back just in the nick of time.