The Corruptions

by Vincent Zandri

  “I don’t report Moss dead and Sweet captured, I lose my job,” she said. “As it is, I need to get a forensics team out to the site of his death.”

  “But we can use Sweet to expose what’s happening inside the Crypt. You do that, you not only keep your job, you get a nice shiny new star.”

  She smiled. “Oh, well, I guess I never thought of that. A nice new star. You got a plan for exposing the so-called drug-slash-human trafficking ring inside the prison dungeon?”

  “Crypt,” Blood corrected her.

  “Crypt,” she repeated.

  “I do,” I said. I drank the rest of my whiskey, crushed the cup in the palm of my hand. “But it’s going to involve making a deal with Sweet. Probably his freedom or something close, for his cooperation.”

  She shook her head. “How are we going to manage that if we keep his capture a secret? We’d have to make an official appeal to the DA and the courts.”

  “Obviously that would take hours. So what you do instead is have the lovely Karla write up an offer that Sweet can live with. Then the two of you sign it.”

  “What then?” Blood said.

  “Then we come to the good part. You familiar with the Biblical story of the Prodigal Son, Bridgette?”

  “The wayward son unexpectedly returns home.”

  “Derrick Sweet is going to be our personal Prodigal Son,” I said, tossing my crushed cup into the basket.

  He sits on the edge of the stainless steel cot inside his small cell and feels the electrical pulse-like throbs of pain shoot up and down his arm. The thumb has turned black under the two blood-encrusted and useless butterfly bandages. Every now and then, a little spurt of blood shoots through the moist, thick, scaly purple and black scab. But the pain is nothing compared to his disappointment. No, scratch that. Not his disappointment. Rather, his fury. Fury at himself for following Picasso around like a little dog with a ring through his nose instead of doing the right thing, the smart thing, and taking off for Mexico as soon as they busted out of that shit-filled sewer pipe. So what if Joyce never showed up to provide them the help they’d need for getting south of the border? It was just as well she didn’t show up. It meant they didn’t have to waste time killing her retarded husband. It meant they could separate and may the best man make it to the border first.

  But he didn’t go with his gut. Instead he listened to Moss. Listened to him when he insisted they lay low at the established underground safe house. Lay low until the state troopers gave up on the local search, abandoned the road blocks and the cabin-by-cabin searches for something much broader, something much more porous. Only then did they stand the chance of slipping through the cracks, and even then, only if they were very lucky would they stand a reasonably decent chance of making it to Mexico. But they had to stick together, work together, back one another up. Be a team. Be as one.

  Bullshit.

  See what happens when your stick together? You end up stepping in a goddamned bear trap. You end up getting your fucking thumb chopped off. You end up getting smoked out of your hole, and you end up getting burned alive. Then, and only then, after you’ve suffered the physical torture, do you get your ass caught by a couple of private investigators who think they’re the fucking Lone Ranger and his trusty sidekick, Black Tonto.

  But if there’s a bright side in this shit storm, it’s this: men and women can be bought. Especially private detectives. Half of them are drunk or on their way to getting there anyway. All it will take to get them to agree on a plan that will ultimately lead to his grand prize of a permanent Mexican beach vacation, is three hundred thousand dollars. That’s gotta be way more than Valente was gonna pay them off. But here’s the catch: in order to get the money, he’s gotta get back inside the joint, get himself back down into the Crypt, head directly to the vault. He’s gotta pull off a break-in. And soon as he gets his hands on the cash, he’s got to once more break out. It’s the only possible way out of this mess and it’s the only alternative. Because if he goes back to Valente directly, he’s a dead man. If he is released back into Dannemora officially as a captured fugitive, he’s a dead man. At the same time, if he tries to escape the Clinton County Jail, they’ll shoot him on sight. No matter how you shake it up, he’s dead and buried.

  The only choice is to cut a private deal, pay for it with cash from the Crypt, hope for the best.

  Then, the sound of the back door opening. Boot steps. Jackboot steps, combined with the sound of voices. Manly voices.

  “You take four, I got one and two. No survivors…”

  Eyes wide, he thrusts himself up against the interior wall so that he can’t be seen if one of these jackbooted assholes peeks in through the narrow door glass. He makes out the unmistakable sound of automatic weapons being locked and loaded. Gun metal against gun metal. Followed by the shock and awe of dozens of rounds being fired through sound suppressed barrels. He hears glass shattering. Safety glass. He makes out screams. Female and male screams. The violent attack rocks his brain, nearly causes his ticker to stop pumping blood and oxygen.

  What the fuck is happening?

  They’re using high-powered semi-automatic weapons equipped with sound suppressors, like they don’t want the press to have a clue about the murders. It’s like the military or Clinton County SWAT has taken the law into their own hands. But he knows full well what the fuck is happening. Because no way would the military or SWAT be shooting the joint up.

  It’s Rodney and his men.

  “The motherfuckers have come to kill us all,” he whispers to himself. “Silence us. But Rodney doesn’t know I’m here. Or does he?”

  The cell door bursts open, a rifle butt raised high…

  Noise coming from the cell bay. Breaking glass. Screaming. Shouting. A series of short, sharp pops that I immediately translated as suppressed semi-automatic gunfire. The kind of noise that pierces the flesh as much as the metal jacketed rounds. Pulling my .45 from the shoulder holster, I run out into the general office area only to see Karla standing in the middle of the floor, her face pale with panic.

  “I thought it was the paramedics. They drove up in an EMT truck. Like the real thing. I let them in through the back gate.”

  “If you got a sidearm,” I said, “now’s the time to use it.”

  Blood ran out of the office, on my heels. Bridgette was directly behind him. They both had guns gripped in their hands, combat position. Pressing my back up against the wall before making my way into the corridor that accessed the cells, I raised my left hand up for Blood to clearly see. I extended three fingers. Dropping the first, he assumed a position directly beside me. I dropped a second finger.

  “I aim high,” he whispered, his voice steady, breathing even, not labored. “You go low.”

  The third finger dropped.

  We entered into the corridor just as two figures dressed in black, including black ski masks, began making their way for the back door. They’d taken a man hostage. Sweet. They both turned long enough to squeeze out a couple of wild rounds at us. Blood and I stood our ground, returned the fire while trying to avoid nailing Sweet in the cross-fire. I nailed the second man in the leg. He screamed and released his grip on Sweet. The con dropped to the concrete floor like a sad bag of bones. The two intruders didn’t dare attempt to retrieve their prize. The uninjured man grabbed hold of his injured partner, made for the back door. Blood and I fired again, but it was too late. They were already through the door.

  We gave chase. But the back solid metal door wouldn’t budge. Something was jammed in the exterior opener. Maybe a piece of two by four pressed up against the underside of the exterior latch. Or maybe a steel chair-back shoved up against it.

  “Son of a bitch!” Me shouting.

  Bridgette and Karla were positioned behind us now.

  “Karla!” I shouted. “Close the gate. Now!”

  She ran out and back into the general area. But through the door I could make out the truck engine revving, RPMs peaking, truck motor firing up
, tires spitting gravel. And I knew our efforts to capture the bastards was futile and stupid.

  “Stand down everyone,” I said, returning the .45 to its holster. “Check on the prisoners.”

  “Ain’t gonna be much left to check on,” Blood said.

  “Call D’Amico,” I said to Bridgette, “and tell him Clinton County Lockup is under siege.”

  Of course they were dead. Three of them, that is. Black Widow Joyce, her loyal-to-the-death husband, Larry, and Mean Gene Bender. Miraculously, Derrick Sweet managed to survive. Although the extent of his thumb wound was getting so bad, it would be a miracle if he didn’t lose his hand.

  I turned to Sheriff Hylton. “This has turned into a hell of a lot more than just a couple of escaped cons. This is about some serious bad shit going on in Dannemora max. Those invading bastards might have been wearing ski masks, but you and I both know that the big one was Rodney. We’ve got to scale the fortress walls, expose the Crypt to the world, before more kids get violated, or die.”

  “D’Amico is on his way,” she said. “It’s his call.”

  “This your town,” Blood said. “You make the call.”

  “The more we stall,” I said, “the better chance Rodney, Clark, and Valente have of whitewashing the Crypt operation. We need to get there now, while it’s in working order.”

  Outside the facility, the sound of emergency sirens. Fire, EMTs. The back door burst open once more. Men dressed in ballistic gear marched in. They were the good guys this time.

  “Down on the floor!” the lead man shouted.

  You didn’t fuck with these guys.

  Blood and I dropped our weapons, went down onto floor.

  “Hands over your head!”

  We did as they told us.

  “I’m the sheriff,” Bridgette said, while she too dropped down, setting her side-arm onto the concrete floor. “You know exactly who I am.”

  A man squeezed through the crowd. A short man with a solid build and an angry as all hell face.

  D’Amico.

  While EMTs and Clinton County Forensics worked the scene of the killings, Blood, Bridgette, and myself occupied her office. D’Amico stood foursquare on the floor. Blood and I sat on the couch, sipping more of Bridgette’s whiskey. She, too, sipped a whiskey while sitting back in her swivel chair.

  “That’s against regulations,” D’Amico said.

  “You ain’t the boss of me,” I said.

  Blood stood up tall. Taller than tall. He stood not beside D’Amico, but up against him. The trooper came up to the center of Blood’s sternum. He looked uncomfortable. Intimidated. I thought he might pee himself.

  “Let me guess,” Blood said. “This be the part where you tell us we had no business going after them two escaped cons on our own.”

  D’Amico stood his ground, looked directly up at Blood’s face. David and Goliath.

  “You willfully interfered with a state police investigation,” he said. “And now one of the two is dead and the other’s nearly dead. The two…no, make that three corroborating witnesses are dead, and now Clinton County is under siege by some rogue gang who murder at will.” He shot Bridgette a look. “I’m sorry for your loss, sheriff,” he added. “I know you and Maude were very close.”

  Bridgette nodded. “She was my godmother. I guess her murder means four innocents are dead, plus Moss. That’s the largest body count Clinton County has seen in a single day ever.”

  I stood up from the couch.

  “The good news,” I said, “is that Sweet is alive. And so long as he’s alive, I think we can use him to put an end to whoever is doing the killing.”

  D’Amico focused in on me. “You got a theory about who’s doing the killing?”

  “Isn’t it obvious, trooper man?” I said.

  He rolled his eyes.

  “Sure it is,” he said, “I just want to hear it from your mouth.”

  D’Amico was smarter than I thought. Maybe he’d even suspected something less than kosher going down inside the bowels of Dannemora Prison for some time now. But as a state policeman, his number one priority was the apprehension of the two cons. An investigation into wrongdoings at the prison would be the responsibility of the local police and Sheriff Hylton. At least at the outset. It would also be the responsibility of those two FBI agents who’d been sneaking around, and threatening a federal takeover of the escaped con investigation.

  But as for me, I had a job to do. Valente hired me to find Sweet and Moss before D’Amico did, and deliver the two cons to his doorstep. My first screw up came in the form of a dead Reginald Moss. I was now facing my second screw up, which was delivering Sweet to the Clinton County Jail, when I should have just kept driving south to Albany. But then there was his hand. The fact that he was still bleeding. That gangrene could set in at any time. Chances were, if I carted him to Albany, he’d eventually go into shock, followed by death.

  But now I had to make the best of an all-around bad situation, and for me that meant using Sweet to expose whatever the hell was truly going on inside the Crypt, and who it involved, which, at this point, was more than likely the governor of the Empire State.

  “Listen, D’Amico,” I said, “the only thing Sweet wants more than a new right hand is to get free of this place. He goes back to prison or he’s delivered to Governor Valente down in Albany, he’s as good as a dead.”

  The trooper blinked, shook his head.

  “You trying to tell me that what’s happening inside the prison…the attack that just occurred inside this jail…is somehow related to the fucking governor?”

  Blood crossed his arms over his chest. “That exactly what he trying to tell you, shorty.”

  That was when I poured myself another shot, and that was when I proceeded to recount for D’Amico everything that Sweet told me about the drug trafficking and child pornography ring being operated not only in the depths of Dannemora Prison, but potentially in dozens of maximum security pens all across this great country of ours. And just to add backup to the words I so eloquently enunciated for the little guy, I pulled out my smartphone, thumbed the record app, then pressed Play.

  As I suspected, D’Amico proved himself an attentive audience.

  “Gentlemen and lady,” he said after a long beat. “What we have here is a criminal conspiracy of Biblical proportions.”

  The normally stoic, if not rock hard face on the state trooper took on a decidedly soft patina. It wasn’t the truth about the system that was hurting him, so much as the now destroyed faith in his fellow law enforcement brothers and sisters in arms that had him so down. Or so I could only assume. His gait slow and pessimistic, he walked the few steps to Bridgette’s desk.

  “You got an extra one of those Dixie cups?” he said somewhat under his breath.

  She opened a drawer, retrieved one, handed it to him from across the desk. Then, she grabbed hold of the bottle neck, set that down hard onto the desk. He poured himself a shot. A double. Then drank it down in one swift swallow.

  He set the cup back down slowly, contemplatively, so that the only sound in the square office was the empty, hollow ring of the Dixie cup when it’s rigid waxed bottom rim connected with the hard wood desk. He nodded, as though answering a question he silently posed for himself.

  “You’re gonna need another bottle of whiskey soon,” he said. Then, taking a step back, as if to address us all, “We’re also going to require a smokescreen. Some kind of story we can make up to keep the press gathered outside this jail and Dannemora Prison from revealing the truth. That Moss is dead and Sweet is incarcerated.”

  “And that a team of corrections officers led by Rodney Pappas killed Joyce and Mean Gene.”

  “That too,” D’Amico said. “We need some real medical help for Sweet. Also, those three bodies are going to start to smell unless we get them down to the morgue.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” Bridgette said. “Forensics will need to sweep them. Christ, I haven’t even called the coroner.” She
shook her head. “Who knows what the press is reporting? They must have heard the gunshots.”

  “They used sound suppressors inside a reinforced concrete block jail,” I said. “Those little pops could be heard all the way out front, but they didn’t alarm anyone. What alarmed them was Mr. D’Amico’s cavalry.”

  “Somebody’s got to act like a real officer of the law around here,” the trooper said.

  “What are you going to do about the prison? The Crypt?” Bridgette said to D’Amico. “An army of FBI agents is about to come down on Dannemora, and when that happens, all bets are off.”

  I set my Dixie cup down on the desk beside D’Amico’s. I shot a glance at Blood. The wink of his right eye told me he knew what I was about to say before I said it.

  “I wanna go in,” I said. “I wanna go in with Blood, and I want to do it ASAP if not sooner.”

  Feigning a crooked expression, D’Amico looked at me like I was crazy.

  “And how do you propose to do that?” he said. “You can’t just walk through the front door, ask the guard sergeant to see the Crypt.”

  “You’re right, D’Amico,” I said. “But we can take Sweet up on his offer to break back inside the prison under the guise of his stealing our three hundred Gs in exchange for his freedom.”

  D’Amico walked back to the desk, poured another shot, drank it down. “You’re going to break into prison. Usually doesn’t work that way.”

  “How hard can it be?” said Blood. “COs always focused on cons trying to get out. Means they won’t be looking for cons to get back in.”

  “Still going to take some skill, and some trust in a man who not only killed a cop, but ran him over with Ford F150 twenty times.”

  “You think he knows a way back into the joint?” D’Amico said.

  “Again, it’s all about the trust. Depends on who he trusts on the inside to let him back in, and if that trust is reciprocal.”

  “Sounds complicated,” Blood said. “Like a relationship.”