by Mark Allen
She called for the guards. Just before they came in, she said quietly, “Good luck, Reaper.”
“Thanks,” he said, then silently added, I’m damn well gonna need it.
Chapter Twelve
Black Bog Federal Prison
Back on the prison compound, the guards took the cuffs off Kane’s throbbing, raw-red wrists and sent him on his way. He headed back up to Delta Unit, noticing that the inmates gave him a wide berth. No surprise there. In the span of twelve hours, he had taken out four inmates and challenged Nazareno. Call it a shortcut to a badass prison rep.
When he ducked back into his cell, Pedro was lying on his bunk reading a dog-eared Able Team novel. Without taking his eyes off the page, he greeted Kane with, “Welcome home, compadre.”
Kane glanced at the two empty bunks. “Our cellies haven’t come back yet?”
“Still being held down in medical,” Pedro replied. “Why? You looking for another round?”
Kane turned on the faucet and splashed some cold water on his face. “Negative,” he said, drying off with a towel. “I think I’ve kicked enough ass for a couple of days.”
“You can say that again.” Pedro put down the paperback and sat up on the edge of his bunk. “How’d it go with the warden?”
“Not as well as I hoped,” Kane admitted. “Gonna have to go with plan B.”
“What’s plan B?”
Kane grinned. “Don’t have one yet.”
Pedro chuckled. “Well, at least you’ve thought about it.”
The work-call announcement sounded over the prison’s public address system a few minutes later, and Pedro shuffled off to his job in the recycling center. He had explained to Kane the night before that every inmate, save those excluded by Nazareno, had a work assignment. Some toiled as orderlies, some worked in the carpentry shop, some did the cooking in food service. The list of where they could force an inmate to work ran a mile long. They were paid anywhere from a penny to ten cents an hour, depending on the complexity of the assignment. Slave wages, Pedro called it, then muttered a curse in Spanish that had something to do with Uncle Sam getting sexually violated by a diseased mule.
Kane, being new—not to mention off the books—had no job assignment yet. As inmates filed out of the unit like obedient drones, he flopped down on his bunk, laid his head on a pillow that was a second cousin to a concrete block, and stared at the bottom of the bunk above him. It was painted a dreary buckskin tan, but there was more graffiti than paint, all sorts of signs, sayings, and symbols crudely carved into the metal. How many hundreds, maybe even thousands, of men had laid here before him, staring at the same carvings? How many had been innocent like him?
He closed his eyes and fought off a wave of despair. He couldn’t let that emotion sink its talons into him. Couldn’t go down that dark dead-end road. Despondency weakened a man; determination gave him power.
To ward off the feelings of hopelessness, he thought about Luna. Not the way he had last seen her, brutally robbed of life by an evil, badge-wearing man whom Kane still vowed to put in a body bag. He refused to think about her death other than to stoke the coals of vengeance simmering in his heart. When the moment came, those coals would fan into a flame so hot it would turn mercy to ash and ensure Sheriff Duncan Dunkirk died hard.
Instead, his thoughts focused on the night before she died, the one and only night they got to spend together.
He was not some young fool who believed in love at first sight, nor was he dumb enough to dismiss it when someone special came into his life, even for the briefest of moments. He remembered her vibrancy, her energy, and the bright spirit that had done so much to burn away the darkness that had engulfed him when their destinies crossed. He thought of her gentle touch, her silken skin, the fierce tenderness of their lovemaking.
He would remember her as a beautiful angel, not a broken plaything.
With most of the inmates out working, the cellblock—or housing unit, to use the proper jargon—was fairly quiet, and Kane took the opportunity to grab a power nap. He slept fitfully, his dreams full of blood and fire, death and destruction, dead teenagers and murdered women.
He jerked awake when his cell door swung open. He came up off his bunk in one fast, fluid motion. His hand gripped the survival knife, tucking it just out of sight behind his right leg. If this was bad news coming into his room, they were going to catch seven inches of sharp steel right in the throat.
Kane was sick of playing nice.
But the visitor turned out to be Officer Simpson. Kane tossed the knife onto his bunk and made sure the guard could see his unarmed hands. “Morning, officer.”
Simpson grunted at him. “Heard you’re making a real name for yourself, Kane.”
“It’s prison. You’re either predator or prey, right?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“Thought you worked the evening shift?”
“Doing a double,” Simpson said. “Not that it’s any of your concern.”
“Right.” Kane shrugged. “No reason for me to give a shit.”
Simpson jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Roll out. Nazareno wants to see you.”
“He knows where I live.”
“That’s not the way it works around here, Kane.”
“Maybe it’s time for someone to change how things work.”
Simpson sighed. “You’re probably right, but not on my shift. You refuse to go see Nazareno, he’ll send twenty MS-13 gangbangers in here to snatch you up. Being the big, beefy badass you think you are, you’ll refuse to go quietly, and it’ll turn into a full-blown riot. Goatsack and his pack of psycho trigger-pullers will roll in here and fuck everything up seven ways from Sunday, and I’ll be left to clean up the goddamned mess.” He paused and looked Kane right in the eye. “So do me a favor, will ya? Just go see the man and save me a whole lot of aggravation.”
Kane detected the weariness and cynicism in Simpson’s voice. “You on Nazareno’s payroll, Simpson?”
Anger sparked in the officer’s eyes. “No,” he said, “I’m not. Do you think I’d need to work a double if I was on the take? But I happen to know how things work around this cesspool. Even those of us who don’t work for Nazareno know better than to work against him.”
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” Kane quoted.
“Yeah, that’s a real noble saying,” Simpson said. “But it don’t mean jack-all in the real world where good men are just trying to keep from getting their throats slit and their families safe. You have no idea what kind of power Nazareno has.”
“Oh, I’m getting the picture,” Kane said.
“So, will you go see him?”
“Point the way.”
Simpson gestured toward the front door of the unit. “Go outside, take a left, and follow the walkway until you come to Alpha Unit.”
“Do I need to report to the officer?”
“There ain’t no officer in Alpha Unit. That’s Nazareno’s home base.”
Kane made a disgusted noise deep in his throat. He couldn’t believe how much of a stranglehold Nazareno had on the prison. The corruption had to run seriously high up the Bureau of Prisons food chain to pull off this kind of total takeover.
Out in the fresh air, Kane breathed deeply. He hadn’t realized how stifling the housing unit was until he stepped outside and got a face full of the breezes coming off the surrounding mountains.
He strolled along the path toward Alpha Unit, taking his time, making Nazareno wait. He passed a couple of yard workers using short straw brooms to sweep up trash from the asphalt. They both lowered their heads and kept their distance.
The entrance to Alpha Unit was unlocked. Knowing attitude counted, Kane walked in like he owned the place.
A burly Hispanic with an inverted pentagram tattooed on his forehead immediately braced him. “Who the hell are you?”
“You know who I am,” Kane replied. “So cut the scare tactics and take
me to the guy who holds your leash.”
Pentagram’s eyes narrowed to glittering slits. “You calling me a dog, cabron?”
“Pretty much.” Kane flashed a wolfish smile. “Now, be a good bitch and take me to your boss.”
Right on cue, a knife appeared in the inmate’s fist. Kane was starting to think they handed them out like toothbrushes. “You begging to be cut, asshole,” Pentagram snarled.
Kane ignored the threat. “Cut the crap,” he said. “You and I both know you can’t do shit unless Nazareno says so.”
Pentagram looked like he was about to say something else—probably some standard-issue Spanish insult—but an agonized scream pierced through the housing unit, reverberating off the walls like the echoes of the damned.
The enforcer glanced over his shoulder at one of the six-man cells on the lower right tier, then turned back toward Kane with an evil grin. “You and I can dance later, cabron. Right now, I think there is something you should see.” He headed for the cell, clearly expecting Kane to follow.
Kane seriously considered turning around and walking out. It grated on him to be following the demands of a drug lord and his scumbag minions, but he also knew Nazareno commanded enough manpower to drag him here against his will. He preferred to stand on his own two feet.
He crossed the common area and stepped into the six-man cell.
It was like he had entered some kind of twisted hybrid of a luxury suite, a torture chamber, an abattoir, and a sublayer of hell.
The wall between two six-man cells had been knocked out, creating one long, spacious—by prison standards—thirty-five-foot by twelve-foot room. To Kane’s right, plush rugs covered the tile floor. There were silk sheets on the bunk, covering a mattress at least quadruple the thickness of the one Kane slept on. Satin drapes adorned the window, which came equipped with blackout blinds. On the wall hung paintings that Kane didn’t recognize but looked expensive. In keeping with Nazareno’s Christ persona, Catholic iconography like crucifixes and Virgin Mary statues also served as decoration. Or perhaps they served a more devotional purpose. After all, Nazareno wouldn’t be the first person to commit wickedness while claiming to serve God.
On the left, the room looked more like a regular cell—except the bunks had been removed, the floor sloped slightly downward toward a stainless steel drain, and a naked man hung by his wrists from a fire suppression system pipe. All the flesh below his knees had been filleted off, exposing a wet, glistening mess of musculature.
Nazareno, dressed in blood-splattered robes, stood beside the man, performing the same grisly operation on the right side of the man’s face with an oversized butcher blade that looked better suited for carving beef carcasses than peeling off layers of skin.
It took Kane a few moments, but once he got a good look at the horrible face twisted into a rictus of pain, he recognized Santos, the convict he had tussled with in the chow hall a few hours earlier.
Leaning against the wall by the sink was another face Kane recognized. He felt his guts tighten. The man’s presence here was bad news for Kane.
Nazareno turned to face his visitor. The blood droplets spattered on his shaved head gave the tattooed crown of thorns an eerily realistic appearance. The drug lord held the knife low by his side, blood dripping off the tip like a leaking faucet.
“We meet again, Kane.” Nazareno gestured toward the mangled man hanging from the pipe. “Recognize our friend Santos? I told you that if you killed him, it would be better than what I would do to him.”
Kane shrugged. “He’s nothing to me, and if you wanted to prove you’re a sadistic son of a bitch, you’re wasting your time. I already knew that.”
Nazareno smiled. “Well, I’ve been learning some things I didn’t know about you,” he said, “thanks to my special guest, Mr. Chance.” He nodded toward the man leaning against the wall.
Kane looked at Eddy Chance, a white guy with dreadlocks, and wondered why karma was kicking him in the nuts right now. It was pure bad luck that Eddy was here in this shithole along with Kane.
Eddy Chance had survived an autofire blitz Team Reaper had launched in New York City that had exposed an alliance between the upper echelon of the DEA and a Colombian cartel with ties to a homegrown al-Qaeda cell. To kick-start the kill count, Kane had shaken down Eddy, a street-level dealer, for information, and then let him scurry away like a rat while they torched his bar. He’d been a lowlife nobody who Kane had seen no reason to kill at the time.
Hindsight being 20/20, that might have been a mistake.
Eddy crossed his arms and sneered at Kane. “Remember me, hotshot?”
“Sure,” Kane grunted. “I never forget an asshole.”
“Yeah? Well, this asshole just made sure you’re screwed, dipshit. Consider it payback for what you did to my bar.”
Nazareno said, “Eddy claims you are not who you appear to be.”
“You believe everything you hear?”
“He was muy persuasive. Says you are a cop or narc or some kind of special agent.”
“I’m just a nobody who got locked up for a crime he didn’t commit.”
“I believe you didn’t commit any crime,” Nazareno said. “But I do not believe you’re a peon, a nobody. Your fighting skills alone prove that you’ve had extensive combat training.”
“My past is my business,” Kane replied. “But I’ll tell you this—I’m not a cop.”
“Prove it.” Nazareno tossed him the butcher knife. Instinctively, Kane caught it, fingers gripping the rubberized handle. The drug lord backed away and gestured at Santos. “If you’re not a cop, finish him off.”
Kane briefly considered going after Nazareno with the blade. Just kill the bastard right here and now. But it would be a suicide play. This was not one of those times where executing the head snake meant the rest of the vipers would slink off. No, if he cut Nazareno’s throat, he would be ripped apart within minutes. The drug lord commanded a small army. They would pull his arms off and use them to play softball, then yank his head off his spine and play a game of soccer with it.
Damn straight, Kane wanted Nazareno dead, but he didn’t want to die doing it. He wasn’t above sacrificing himself for the greater good if that was what it came down to, but a kamikaze blaze of glory was the last resort, not his first option.
Nazareno seemed to read his thoughts. An amused smile tugged at the corner of his lips. “Trust me, Kane, you wouldn’t even get close.”
Kane stared hard at the drug lord. “Another time, another place, maybe we’ll find out.”
“There won’t be another time or another place if you don’t finish off Santos and prove to me that you’re not a cop.”
In the end, Kane did it. Not to convince Nazareno of anything—thanks to Eddy Chance, the cartel king knew he was some kind of law enforcement, and nothing Kane did would change that—except to put the tortured son of a bitch out of his misery. He had no idea what crimes Santos had committed, but whatever they were, they didn’t merit being skinned alive. Kane wasn’t above torturing a bad guy when necessary, like when he needed information fast. But this? This was nothing but sick sadism.
Kane stepped close, careful not to slip on all the blood greasing the floor. He could hear Santos’ shallow breathing, the whimpers of pain convulsing deep in the convict’s throat. The lid had been sliced off his right eye, making it bulge in grotesque agony. His hacked-up lips moved in a whispered plea to Kane.
“Kill…me.”
Kane granted his final wish, slipping the knife into his ribcage. The sharp blade punched between the curved bones and stabbed into Santos’ frantically-beating heart. He stiffened at the metallic penetration and shuddered like a pinned moth, then his muscles slowly relaxed as Kane withdrew the knife. The life pumped out of him in a red river, and the light quickly faded from his eyes. His head slumped onto his chest as he took his last breath.
Kane turned to Nazareno. “Satisfied?”
Eddy came off the wall and stepped toward t
hem. “I’m telling you, Mr. Nazareno, this guy’s some kind of special agent or something. He had some bitch with him, and if you can find her—”
Kane’s hand moved in a blur, the butcher blade a silver streak as it sliced through the air and then through Eddy’s throat. His windpipe and jugular slit wide open, blood sprayed from the wicked gash as the dreadlocked drug dealer stumbled backward, bounced off the wall, and slumped to the floor in a sitting position next to the toilet, gurgling his last.
Kane didn’t waste time with a snappy post-mortem one-liner, instead settling for a simple, “Fuck you, Eddy,” as he glared down at the fresh corpse. He should have left Cara out of this.
Nazareno smiled. “You’re racking up quite a body count in a short amount of time. Then again, you probably have hundreds of notches on your gun-belt, being the leader of a covert anti-cartel strike team.”
Kane kept quiet. Nazareno already knew too much. Talking wasn’t going to help anything.
“Give me the silent treatment if it makes you feel better,” Nazareno said. “But I can see the surprise on your face.” He plucked a towel off a hook on the wall and wiped the blood off his face and scalp. “Trust me, Kane—or should I call you ‘Reaper?’”
Kane’s jaw clenched. How the hell did this son of a bitch know all this?
“I like ‘Reaper,’” Nazareno said. “Let’s go with that. So trust me, Reaper, when I tell you that my reach is vast and I own people in high places. I will admit I do not have all the details, but I do know that you are part of some black ops team that wages war on the cartels.”
Kane pointed at Santos. “Then why go through the theatrics of having me kill him?”
“Merely curious to see if you would do it.”
“They call me Reaper, not Mother Theresa.”
Nazareno tossed the towel on the floor. No doubt some boot-licking—or rather, sandal-licking—lackey would pick it up and wash it later. “That’s muy bueno to know because if you want to stay alive to see another sunrise, you will have to kill again. And again. And again.”