Marilyn and Black Widow peeled off Bolan’s dungarees. Marilyn gasped. Black Widow started to cry. Bolan’s legs were sheathed in vast swathes of black and purple welts from the rubber hoses. His bruises had bruises, and those bruises swam in their own nebulae of blues and yellows. There wasn’t much recognizable Caucasian flesh left. Kal produced two small brown bottles with labels covered in Chinese characters. Bolan raised a hopeful eyebrow as Marilyn and Black Widow pulled off his socks. “Dit Da Jow?”
Kal nodded. Dit Da Jow was a Chinese bruise liniment favored by Asian martial artists. It was popularly known as hit medicine, and God only knew Bolan had taken some hits recently. “Where’d you get it?”
“The Asians in D-Town are housed as a unit in D Block. A guy named Gau runs them and runs the heroin traffic in here. Link introduced me years ago. Every six months when I renew my Iron Palm training I have them smuggle me in some.” Kal held up the first bottle. This is ‘cold’ liniment. We’re going to hit you with it now, before bed, and when you get up in the morning, to try to deal with the bruising and soft-tissue damage. This one is ‘hot.’ It’s too soon for it, but we don’t have any choice. We hit you with that midday and right before the fight, so you’re at least some kind of limber.”
“Thanks, Kal.”
“Lay back.” Kal tossed the first bottle to Marilyn. “Ladies.”
Marilyn poured some liniment into her palm and rubbed her hands together. “Ooh!”
Black Widow did the same.
The ladies went to work on Bolan’s legs. He gritted his teeth and stopped just short of writhing. The “cold” liniment wasn’t. Tingling, burning and prickling sensations began fighting with the throbbing and the pain of bruised flesh being pushed around by feminine hands that were anything but.
Kal smiled in mixed sympathies. “No need to be gentle, ladies. Rub it in good and do it again. Front and back.”
Rudy and Patrick watched the proceedings in fascinated horror. Bolan focused, took a deep breath and forced himself to relax.
“They give you the phone book and the hammer?” Kal asked.
Bolan sighed as he genuinely relaxed into his therapy. “Just below the rib cage on the right in back, and low to the left abdomen in front.”
“Kidney and colon.” Kal’s face twisted with anger. “You peeing blood?”
“Like a racehorse.”
“Motherfuckers. Here.”
Kal produced one last bottle.
It was a standard water bottle from the commissary that appeared to have been used as a spittoon. Bolan eyed the brown backwash that filled about a fifth of the container. “This is a personal gift from Gau,” Kal explained. “I have no clue, except that I figure it must be some kind of Chinese prison pruno internal medicine. He told me to tell you to take half now and half tomorrow, and to kill that motherfucker Love.”
Bolan took the bottle and chugged down half of what tasted like yard clippings that had been simmered in a provocative broth of old gym shoes. “Awesome.”
“Ladies, put some of the hot on his belly, and use the cold on his lower back and kidneys when you flip him over.”
Bolan’s back felt like rigor mortis and his guts like a broken furnace leaking coal embers. Whatever Gau had sent along blossomed in the soldier’s stomach. He let out a long belch and some of his pain seemed not necessarily to ease, but to turn from agony into some sensation that could only be described as strange. Yet the change was welcome. Bolan sighed involuntarily and sagged into his bunk.
Kal nodded. “I’ll be back later.” He tipped his head at Rudy and Patrick, and they followed him out.
Marilyn winked and whispered as she began rubbing “hot” against Bolan’s belly. “Happy ending?”
“I’m in training.”
Marilyn tossed off a “your loss” kind of shrug.
“But if a happy ending is tomorrow night I win and you ladies get a chicken dinner—” Bolan let out another sigh “—then winner, winner chicken dinner and that happy ending is definitely on.”
* * *
BOLAN SIGHED AND kicked the flush pedal.
It wasn’t good, but the bowl was a pale pink rather than scarlet, and his morning ablution came with a dull ache rather than the sensation of urinating battery acid. It was better, and he could feel his legs beneath him as if they were actually a part of his body. Kal, Gau, Chinese medicine, a few hours of sleep and the strictly chaperoned fingers of the ladies of Cell Block C had done him a world of good. Bolan did a slow deep knee bend. His battered legs protested, but they obeyed. He twisted through a few slow-motion repetitions of kickboxing knee-to-elbow lifts and was pleased his insides didn’t squirt fire. He could move. He could fight. But if Love managed to land one solid fist or, God help him, a knee or a kick to the gut, Bolan was fairly sure his insides would tear apart like old wet towels and slide out of him.
But the soldier felt he had at least a shot at staying out of a wheelchair, and failure wasn’t an option.
Rudy leaned on the tier railing outside and flashed a flash drive. Bolan walked out onto the tier without a discernable limp. “Is that what I think it is?”
“I downloaded a bunch of Link’s files. I’m pretty sure he won’t know.”
“How sure?”
“Like, fifty-fifty.”
Bolan gazed around C Block. “In here those aren’t bad odds.”
“No, they’re not.”
“Did you break the code?” Bolan asked.
“Not yet, but would you like some more good news?”
“I could use some.”
“You saw the movie Shawshank Redemption?” Rudy asked.
“Yeah, bits and pieces here and there.”
“You remember how the hero was a banker and got a leg over on the inside by doing the guards’ taxes for them?”
Bolan smiled at the good news. “The guards ask you for help with their laptops.”
“And their phones, and their iPads, and downloading the latest patch on World of Warcraft, why they’re having problems posting videos on YouTube, pirating first run movies. You name it.” Rudy produced a pencil and a piece of paper without being asked.
Bolan wrote down an internet address and a password that would attract the Farm’s attention. “Memorize that, then eat it.”
Rudy glanced at the paper once and popped it in his mouth with a grin.
“You have any clients with an internet connection today?” Bolan asked. “I may not be around after tomorrow’s Hunger Games.”
“Yeah, Barnes.”
Bolan’s brow furrowed. He liked Barnes.
Rudy read Bolan’s mind. “Yeah, I like him, too. He’d lose his job if it came back on him. Of course, if it comes back on me, a visit to the lounge with the wrecking crew is probably the best I can hope for. But by the same token, Barnes is technically illiterate. I can send the data to whoever you want while he’s watching, and he’ll thank me for it.”
Patrick came out onto the tier bearing the last of the internal hemorrhage home brew. “Time to take your medicine, Coop.”
Bolan reminded himself not to breath through his nose, and downed about half of it.
“So what does it taste like?” Patrick asked.
“It tastes like Chinese medicine.” Bolan held out the bottle. “You want some?”
Patrick held up his hands. “No, man, it’s for you. You need it.”
He nodded and polished off his medicine.
“So,” Rudy asked. “Barnes, today?”
“Do it.”
Bolan handed Patrick the empty bottle. “You get what I asked for?”
“Bobbie-John got it for me, but yeah.” Patrick looked both ways and handed over a tube of wood repair epoxy stolen from the workshop. “I don’t think Love is going to stand around
while you try to glue his feet to the floor.”
“I expect you’re right.”
“So what’s it for?” Patrick asked.
“I’m going to sniff it before the fight.”
The young man gaped. “You’re kidding.”
“Yeah, I am, but I need to ask you for one more favor.”
“What’s that?”
“Lend me your toothbrush.”
Patrick stared at the glue. “You’re kidding.”
“No—” Bolan shook his head “—I’m not.”
Chapter 12
The Computer Room, Stony Man Farm, Virginia
“BEAR!” TOKAIDO SHOUTED. “You need to look at this!”
Aaron Kurtzman tapped a key and his screen filled with files. He heaved a huge sigh of relief. Bolan had found a way to communicate outside the library. Kurtzman chose a file with the provocative title Look Familiar?.doc. It opened simultaneously on Tokaido’s screen and the young hacker made the appropriate response. “Holy shit!”
Kurtzman nodded. Holy shit was right. It was different, less advanced to the computer expert’s eye, but it looked distinctly like the code Bolan had captured from the Lancaster farm before it had gone up in flames. He opened a file called Suggestions.doc. It was a short, bulleted list of someone’s progress on breaking the code, and possible word matches. Kurtzman shook his head. “This is above Mack’s pay grade when it comes to computers. Who sent this?”
“Tracking...” Tokaido rapidly clicked keys. “It came through a private server, but a service area that includes Duivelstad’s county. Definitely came from within D-Town.” His forefinger hovered. “If do this we’re breaking U.S. privacy law and violating a state employee’s—”
“Do it.”
He clicked. “It came from the laptop of Officer Barnes.” Tokaido pulled up Barnes’s records from the hacked Duivelstad employee files and stared at the man smiling happily in his photo ID. “I can’t imagine this guy being in cahoots on this.”
“No, I think Mack got this Rudolpho guy he told Carmen about to take a big chance.” Kurtzman began opening more files. The disk Bolan had retrieved from the Lancaster probe was damaged. This new information might just be enough to plug the gaps. That and the suggestions Rudolpho had sent along would— The computer expert stopped on a file and smiled. “Akira! Prisoner records! Look up everything D-Town has on file for one Whitmore, Lincoln Cornelius, aka ‘Link,’ and then I want his entire life story from cradle to conviction.”
“Bear, it’s fight night in fifteen minutes,” Tokaido warned.
Kurtzman sighed. “I know.”
Duivelstad Prison
“FIVE MINUTES!” ZAVALA’S voice echoed in the locker room as he shouted through the door. Marilyn rubbed Bolan’s shoulders. Rudy was in the gym coordinating the AV feed, but the younger Rudolpho was in the locker room acting as Bolan’s manager. The soldier self-assessed. He’d had his two “hot” Chinese hit medicine treatments this day, three rubdowns and two showers as hot as he could stand it.
Bolan figured he was operating at a pretty solid twenty-seven percent of optimal.
He had fought wounded many times before, wounded far worse than he was now. The only difference was that here the battle had rules. Bolan never fought by any rules other than his own, but this battle was a horrible, artificial construct. The rules of the Hunger Games were simple and there were only three of them: no eyes, no balls, and except for chokes and strangles, no throat attacks.
That took far too much for liking out of Bolan’s arsenal, wounded and outweighed as he was.
“Coop?” Patrick asked.
“Yeah.”
“Remember that joke you told about sniffing the glue?”
Bolan was pretty sure where this was going. “Yeah.”
Patrick had a bad habit of looking both ways before he produced contraband in prison. He literally pulled a mixed bag of powder and pills out of his pants. “I figured if you wanted it, you would have asked for it, but I also figured maybe you’re the kind of who wouldn’t ask for it even if you did need it.”
“Thanks.” Bolan eyed the bag. “Meth?”
“I wouldn’t dignify it with the name, but yeah, it’s crank.”
“No, thanks. The pills?”
“OxyContin.”
Bolan thought about that long and hard. Banishing the pain was a terrible temptation in his condition, but by the same token his condition was the condition he was in. His guts were a mess, and the only food he’d been able to tolerate in the last twenty-four hours were flavored gelatin, butterscotch pudding and milk. In a battle with Love, Bolan couldn’t afford the likely side effects of nausea or light-headedness. “No, but thanks.”
“I figured, so I figure after we can—”
Bolan tilted his head toward the toilets. “Flush it.”
“What!”
“You don’t deal and you don’t use, not in front of me and not while you live in my house, and your father wouldn’t approve.”
Patrick was appalled. “You know what this cost me?”
“I appreciate that, and I don’t care.”
Marilyn spoke quietly as she kneaded Bolan’s traps. “I’ll take the oxy, and Widow definitely wants the crank.”
Bolan had voluntarily stepped into the worst maximum-security prison in the United States. He had known he would have to leave most of his scruples at the gate. By the same token his circumstances made paying his debts a samurai-like duty.
“You heard the lady.”
“But—”
“I owe the ladies, Patrick, and that means you do, too.”
Patrick manned up admirably. He grinned and handed over the bag to Marilyn. “Thank you, and thank Widow, for all your help.”
Marilyn beamed in so similar a fashion as her namesake it was heartbreaking. “You’re most certainly welcome.”
“Showtime!” Zavala bawled. Marilyn made the baggie disappear and resumed shoulder rubbing as Zavala marched in. He scowled as Bolan laced up his prison issues. “Shoes?”
“I jammed my toes bad on Tavo.” Bolan gave Zavala a bitter look. “And we both know I’m not throwing a lot of round kicks tonight.”
Zavala grinned nastily. “No, no you’re not. Now let’s see if your girlfriend or your bitch slipped you anything. Weapons check.”
Marilyn stepped back as Bolan rose. The soldier held out his arms as Zavala gave him a final pat down before the fight.
Zavala had already missed it.
“Let’s go.”
Patrick stuck out his hand. “Coop, cripple the dick.”
Bolan shook his hand. “I will.”
Marilyn took out a lipstick and painted her mouth red. She tilted her head coquettishly. “For luck?”
Bolan bent down and presented his right cheek.
Marilyn branded her favorite animal.
Bolan figured the fans would love it. He cracked his knuckles at Zavala. “Let’s do it.”
The permanent scowl Zavala had developed since Bolan’s incarceration deepened. “Your funeral, fuck face.”
Bolan followed him into the gym with Marilyn in tow.
The crowd erupted at his entrance.
The audience was bigger than last time. Bolan was pretty sure some of the cons had paid the warden for the privilege of ringside seats. He was shocked to see Kal in the audience, but kept it off his face. Kal nodded once and spoke a single word. It was lost among the cheering and whistling, but anyone could have read his lips.
“Win.”
Black Widow smiled and blew Bolan kisses. Marilyn blew kisses into the crowd. Bolan’s fans were slightly in the minority, but vocal. His detractors sat in conspicuous silence as he entered. The Aryans suddenly stood with Nazi-like precision, sieg heiled
as a unit and began chanting, “Love! Love! Love!”
Bolan considered his opponent as he approached the ring. Sawyer Love usually radiated adrenaline. It wasn’t good that he stood in the ring simply looking relaxed and ready. The Mad Dog was in his zone. He’d broken a sweat back in his locker room, and he lazily shifted his weight from foot to foot and rolled his head. He wore mixed marital arts trunks and fingerless gloves. His head was freshly shaved.
The new addition to the ring was a gate, but it was still topped with razor wire. Bolan didn’t feel much like climbing tables, and welcomed it. The crowd hushed as he stepped into the ring and the gate was locked behind him. Bolan was six foot three and two hundred twenty pounds. He was an impressive figure of a man. Even without steroids, Sawyer Love was a freak of nature. It was a pure David versus Goliath matchup. Bolan was sure the fans on pay-per-view were going berserk. His problem was that David was peeing blood, there wasn’t a sling in sight and the only stone was the floor beneath them.
Schoenaur raised his revolver off camera.
Love ran his eyes up and down Bolan, trying to read what kind of shape he was in. The Mad Dog didn’t make any boasts or threats. This wasn’t the mess hall or the yard. Sawyer Love was a genuine twenty-first century gladiator, and he let his actions speak for him. They were actions people in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Moscow and various points east and west were willing to pay five figures to watch. He nodded once. “Coop.”
Bolan nodded back. “Love.”
Cheers and jeers restarted.
Schoenaur’s Magnum revolver echoed in the gym like a cannon shot.
Love just stood waiting.
Bolan looked right, looked left and spit on Love’s chest.
The crowd howled.
The Mad Dog never took his eyes off Bolan. “Nice.”
“What does it take to motivate you?” Bolan asked.
“Blood, your blood,” Love answered. “And the more of it I see the more motivated I’m gonna get.”
“Nice.” Bolan stepped to his left.
Love instantly dropped into a crouch and brought up his hands. He kept his eyes on Bolan’s crippled legs, watching to see how he moved. The soldier shook his head, curled his hands into claws and spit on the floor. He grimaced and put his toe in his spit and smeared it in a line across the concrete.
Prison Code Page 12