The Corruptions

by Vincent Zandri

  The fire spread down along the walls then, the heat inside the small room intense and unbearable. Like an oven on broil. He fired again, this time shuffling himself towards me, his face bearing a broad smile, like he was having fun while dying.

  I planted a bead on him, pressed the trigger. But it jammed. I tried slamming the housing with the ball of my hand, but it was no use. I tossed the weapon at him, but it fell short and slid across the concrete floor.

  He shuffled himself closer to me, his smile having grown even wider.

  “Good news,” he barked. “Looks like we’re going to hell in a handbasket together.” He cocked the hammer back with his thumb, wrapped his finger around the trigger.

  “Speak for yourself, you son of a bitch,” I said, pulling the .45 from my shoulder holster, and shooting him between the eyes.

  I crawled my way to Moss’s body. Pulled what I could from his pockets, including a wallet and what could only be a counterfeit passport. Shoving them into my cargo pants pocket, I went to the ladder, just as the fire began to consume all the walls. It was a mistake to grab hold of the rungs with my bare hands, because the hot metal nearly melted the skin.

  Making my way quickly back to Moss, I ripped the shirt off his back. I covered my hands with it, then shuffled back to the ladder. I could still feel the heat coming from the fire-baked rungs while I climbed. I was three or four rungs from the top when the fire flashed, and I was blown out of the hole, like a human cannon ball out of a cannon.

  I lay on my back on the damp ground, looking up at Blood. He stood over me, looking big and strong, like a dark Adirondack Mountain, a smile plastered on his face.

  “Where’s the AR-15?” he said. “Don’t tell me you left it down there. That was a loan.”

  “I’m fine, Blood,” I said. “Thanks for your concern.”

  I stood up, assessed the damage. Nothing on fire as far as I could see. Nothing too terribly burnt. Not even the palms of my hands, although they would no doubt blister up. My shoulder felt like hell though, and when I touched it, blood came away on my fingers. Reaching into my pocket I pulled out my kerchief, shoved it into the open neck on my T-shirt, shifted it to my right arm, pressed it against the slight grazing. The wound stung, but I’d live.

  Down on his knees a few feet away from me, was Derrick Sweet, the lone survivor of the two escaped convicts. His right hand looked like it’d been shoved through a meat grinder and his thin, if not gaunt, scruffy face looked pale and defeated.

  “Who are you guys?” he said.

  “We’re your new best friends,” I said.

  Then I told him our names and that we weren’t the law. That we were freelancers working for a private contractor.

  “Our job was to capture you both alive, and do so before the state troopers or the FBI do.”

  “Looks like you fucked up by half,” he said.

  Blood looked at me. “The con can count.”

  I thought about what he said. About Moss dying down there in that hell hole. And I suddenly felt a wave of guilt pass through me. His death, although warranted, was on me and me alone. I’d failed. Valente would be none too happy about that. In a way justice had been served. But that was only in terms of the law. Both New York State’s version of it and God’s. In terms of the job I agreed to take on for the governor however, I was one short of a perfect pair. I wondered if it meant I was slipping, or simply getting old, or that in this case anyway, circumstances beyond my control prevented me from capturing Moss alive. Maybe in the end, it meant only one thig: Valente would now be missing out on a PR opportunity for parading both escaped convicts on live TV.

  “So who hired you?” Sweet said.

  “None of your business,” Blood said. Then, grabbing hold of the convict’s collar, he pulled him up off the ground. “Let’s get moving,” he added. “Before more of the local yokels come out of the woodwork, attempt to steal you for the one hundred grand.”

  “Fifty grand,” I said. “Do the math.”

  We started walking back in the direction of home. It was slow going through the thick stuff. By the time we made it out onto the railroad bed, we were coated in a layer of sweat. Sweet was breathing heavily and tightly gripping the wrist on his mutilated hand. He was still bleeding and, for a moment, I thought he, too, might not make it. Which would make our mission a complete bust.

  “You never told me who you work for,” he said as we walked in the middle of the bed, single file. Me out front, the con in the middle, Blood taking up the rear, his AR-15 at the ready should the bad guy decide to make a run for it through the woods.

  “Does it matter?” I said.

  “It’s the governor, ain’t it?”

  I felt a start in my heart. Moss had guessed the same thing without my dropping any hints whatsoever as to who might be paying me for my services. When I didn’t answer, I heard him snicker.

  “Yup,” he said, “it’s Valente. You see, Mister, ummm, what did you say your names were again?”

  “We didn’t,” Blood said.

  “That’s okay, Blood,” I said. “Maybe we should mind our manners after all.” Speaking over my shoulder, I said, “I’m Keeper Marconi, and this is my associate, Blood. Blood is bad ass. He also bites the heads off rats. So be careful.”

  Blood rolled his eyes, snickered.

  “I’ve already decided not to mess with Mr. Blood,” Sweet said. “Where’d you get a name like Keeper?”

  “The real name is Jack. But way back when, when I was the warden at Green Haven Max, the inmates started calling me Keeper and it stuck.”

  “A former warden. Now this is really beginning to make sense.”

  Another start in my heart. Something was up. What precisely was up, I couldn’t yet put my finger on it. But it most definitely had to do with my employer, and, if my gut served me right, some crucial information he was hiding from me.

  “What he talking about, Keep?” Blood said.

  “Not sure yet, Blood. But I’m sure Mr. Sweet won’t mind opening up about it on the drive back home.”

  “Where’s home?” Sweet said.

  “Dannemora Prison,” I said. “Solitary confinement. By way of Clinton County lockup.”

  Back at the 4Runner, we sat Sweet in the back seat. Blood took the seat beside him, both his big hands still gripping his semi-automatic rifle. I got behind the wheel and pulled out of the secluded spot. Pulling out my cell phone, I called Bridgette, told her we were coming in, and to be ready for us. She asked me if I had both men. I told her we only had one. She sighed, asked me what happened. “Unfortunate accident,” I said. I felt the pain in my shoulder and I could practically smell the blood leaking from Sweet’s finger and told her we’d need some emergency medical assistance.

  “No press,” I said. “I don’t want anyone knowing we’re bringing Sweet in.”

  “When you get to the sheriff’s office,” she said, “pull up around back. No one will see you there. Or suspect anything.”

  I hung up, concentrated on the rural road.

  “Why do you keep asking me if the governor is my employer, Sweet?” I said.

  “Why you wanna know?” he said, his tone caked with sarcasm. “You’re not the cops, Keeper. It’s none of your business.”

  This was where things got a little fuzzy for me. Sweet was right. He might be an asshole, but his relationship with the governor…his and Moss’s…truly fell within the category of none-of-my-damned-business. I’d been hired to find Sweet and Moss and then deliver them, alive, to Valente’s Albany, Eagle Street address. I hadn’t been hired to look into my employer’s relationship with the escapees and what the relationship might entail, even if it turned out to be illegal.

  Problem was, I couldn’t help myself when it came to right and wrong. In other words, if the governor was engaged in some kind of illegal activity with the two cons, as crazy as it sounded, then maybe I had a moral obligation to get to the bottom of it. For better or for worse.

  “How do you
know it’s none of my business?” I said.

  “I’m guessing Valente hired you because you and the monster back there, who I’m guessing is an ex-con because I can smell one from a mile away, know prisons and screws and inmates. You also know all about our habits.”

  “For instance?”

  “For instance, Keeper,” he said, “you knew we wouldn’t be in Mexico yet. That we’d lay low for a while until the state troopers gave up their fuck-all-ridiculous search, the FBI came in and expanded it to other states.”

  “That would be the time to move,” I said. “When the eyes weren’t focused on you anymore.”

  “That was the plan.”

  “But your plan didn’t work,” said, Blood. “Joyce ditched your ass. Mean Gene ratted you out. And now you’re on your way back to the pen via the governor. To rot.”

  “Maybe,” Sweet said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe is not an option.”

  “Maybe I don’t go back to the pen,” he said. “Maybe instead, we make a little deal.”

  “You make a deal with us,” I said. “Now that’s rich, buddy.”

  He exhaled. “What would you say if I offered you three hundred thousand cash to split between the two of you?”

  I locked eyes with Blood in the rearview. He winked.

  “We listening,” my partner said.

  Sweet was holding his wrist. His damaged hand was so swollen, it looked like it was going to explode in a haze of blood, puss, and rotted flesh.

  “Money talks,” he said.

  Then he told us his plan.

  So here was what we found out about the madness that was going down inside the depths of Dannemora Prison. Turned out the voices we heard inside the prison, the high-pitched wails, weren’t just figments of our imagination, or breeding cats for that matter. Because if what Sweet revealed to me and Blood bore even a semblance of truth, Dannemora wasn’t just a place for incarcerating a few thousand dangerous convicts, it was also a place that made some serious casheshe on the black market. In fact, the place was a goddamned money factory.

  Once more I looked Blood in the eye. His eyes were wide, unblinking and intense, as if to say, “Can you believe the shit this guy is telling us?”

  Here’s the short of it: according to Sweet, the basement, dungeon depths of Dannemora, or what affectionately had been dubbed the Crypt, was being utilized not only as a meth lab, but also as a ground zero for child sex trafficking.

  Sweet said, “The kids are pulled off the street. Runaways most of them. Or they hire a teenage kid to act as a front man. A kid maybe sixteen or seventeen. He pretends to be a thirteen-year-old girl’s boyfriend, maybe take her out to dinner and then go for a drive in the country. That drive might end up in a section of woods outside Dannemora, and that’s where the fuckers pounce on them. Once inside the prison, they keep them locked away where no one knows about them other than a select group of trusted people. Some of the big time meth buyers are offered first dibs.”

  Sweet had no way of being aware of it, but I’d managed to pull out my phone while turning on the recording application. I couldn’t be sure I was getting everything that spilled from his mouth, but it was worth a shot.

  “Who’s they?” Blood asked. “The fuckers you speak of.”

  “Rodney Pappas. His select band of merry on-the-take screws. His little secret Crypt army.”

  “Go figure,” I said.

  “You’d be surprised how much a thirteen-year-old boy or girl goes for on the black market. What a sixty-year-old man might drop for one of those kids besides his BVDs. Then, when they’re through, the kids are shipped across the country to another site. It’s an entire network of trafficking and a lot of it is occurring inside maximum security prisons. They all talk to one another.”

  “Just how lucrative is this business?” I asked, my stomach twisting and sickened by his confession, however true or false. That said, his description was too detailed for him to be lying. So the question that loomed large was this: how could the warden of Dannemora Prison not be aware of the evil that lurked inside the depths of his own iron house?

  The answer hit me upside the head. Clark did know about the human trafficking and drug lab because he was facilitating it. It was the only explanation that made any sense.

  “Profits for Dannemora alone are in the tens of millions,” Sweet said. “But that’s just a guesstimate.”

  “So you’re in on it?” I said.

  “More than a few inmates are in on it. I was a small time player in the racket. So was Moss. We were like soldiers or slaves, depending on your point of view. Paid to do what we were told to do. It beat the shit out of sitting inside our cells all day.”

  “Paid how?” Blood interjected.

  “Meth mostly,” he said. “Sometimes cash. There was the offer of sex with one of those kids, but you gotta be one sick fuck to get into that kind of thing.”

  “Joyce and Mean Gene? They in on it too?” Blood said.

  “Excellent, Blood man,” he said, “you pick up fast.”

  “So what’d you have in mind?” I pushed. “What’s your plan?”

  “More like an offer,” he said. “You don’t put me back in that prison, I’ll make sure you guys collect. Collect big time. Three hundred K.”

  “I’m not putting you back in prison,” I said. “First we head to the jail to get patched up, then I’m delivering you to the governor as planned.”

  “Either way,” Sweet said, “I’m a dead man. Don’t you get it?”

  “Get what?” I said, eyes back in the rearview, eyeing both Blood and the con.

  “The fucking governor,” he said, laughing despite the pain in his hand. “The Dannemora Crypt is his personal pet project.”

  Up ahead, the gray concrete walls of the Clinton County Sheriff’s Department loomed large. I told Sweet to get down, become invisible. Then I pulled into the lot past the sea of reporters and gawkers and drove around back. The back was fenced in, but the electronic lock had been triggered from the inside and the gate was already open in anticipation of our arrival. After we pulled in, the gate automatically closed back up. I drove up to the back solid metal door. It opened, and Karla came rushing out.

  “Saw you coming,” she said as I stepped out of the Toyota. “The medics are on their way. Are you hurt bad?”

  “Not me, but our guest is on his way out, we don’t get him patched up.”

  The rear driver’s side door on the 4Runner opened, and Blood quickly dragged Sweet out by the collar before anyone noticed. The con looked like forty miles of chewed up roadway. Karla opened the facility’s back metal door and we entered the jailhouse just as the reporters flocked to the back gates like hungry vultures.

  I found Bridgette standing outside the four jail cells.

  “You okay?” she said. There was a look of genuine concern on her face. “The paramedics are almost here.”

  “I know,” I said. “Karla told me.”

  Sweet was placed inside cell number three, the door locked behind him. That was when I turned to Bridgette.

  “We need to talk,” I said. “You, me, and Blood. In your office.”

  “By all means,” she said. “I’ll make some coffee.”

  “Whiskey would be better,” Blood said.

  It didn’t come as a surprise that Bridgette Hylton enjoyed a nip or two during the day. Which was why she kept a bottle of Jack Daniels in her bottom desk drawer. Rather, an “emergency bottle,” as she referred to it. We stood around her desk drinking the whiskey from yellow Dixie cups, while I recapped not only the capture of the Moss and Sweet down in the that backwoods bomb shelter, but also what Sweet relayed to me about the child trafficking and drug running going on in the depths of Dannemora Prison. Inside a place Sweet ominously called the Crypt. I also played her the recording of Sweet’s statement with the smartphone recording app.

  She poured us another shot of whiskey apiece.

  “Those reporters out there have no idea y
ou just brought Sweet in,” she said. “Or else they’d be tossing rocks through the windows trying to get in. They also don’t know that Moss is dead. I need to alert D’Amico on both counts just for starters. You know that, right?”

  I nodded.

  “FBI needs to know also,” I said. “But here’s the catch. I tell my employer the news, he’s liable to take control of the situation.”

  “What’s that mean?” Bridgette said.

  “What I mean is, what if Valente is involved in the drug-slash-human trafficking ring? In fact, what if he’s the major player?”

  “He gonna wanna protect his assets,” Blood interjected while pouring himself a third shot. “Some politicians become governors as a stepping stone to the Presidency of the United States of America. Maybe Valente choose to be governor so he can make himself tens of millions of non-taxable dollars.”

  “Stranger stories have been told, Blood.”

  The sheriff looked at me with a tight face. A face that was feeling the effects of stress over two escaped convicts. But ironically, now that one of them was dead and the other recaptured, she seemed even more stressed.

  “So what is it you want to do?” she asked.

  “Here’s what I’m thinking,” I said. “Maude’s dead, which means we already have one murder we can link directly to the illicit activity going on in the prison.”

  “In other words,” Blood said, “some key players in this thing never intended for us to find Moss and Sweet in the first place. Key players who are supposed to be on our team. The A team.”

  Bridgette drank down what remained of the whiskey in her cup. She crushed the cup in her hand, tossed it into the metal waste paper basket.