The Killing Floor Blues (3 page)

This wasn’t Chicago’s work. No, the Outfit had framed me for murder, pretty as a picture, but they couldn’t have wiped the memories of my trial. They didn’t have that kind of magical juice. And even if they could, why do it in the first place? The end result—getting me out of the picture while they laid siege to Las Vegas—was the same.

And where was my crew? There was no way they would have let me rot behind bars for four months. If the trial had been going that badly, Caitlin would have torn the county jail apart with her bare hands to get me out.

Assuming she wanted to
, the traitor in the back of my mind piped up. The one who’d listened when Nadine told me that Caitlin was only using me. That once she was done with me, she’d throw me away.

No.
No
. I believed in Caitlin. And even in the worst-case scenario I could imagine, even if she’d turned her back on me, the rest of my family would still come to the rescue.

So where were they?

I struggled to think back, walking through the events of four months ago—or in my muddled mind, the last few days. There’d been the botched heist at Damien Ecko’s jewelry store, the underground poker tournament, then handing off that Aztec dagger and finding out my “client” was really a hostage in his own mansion. I’d flown home to Vegas and got the call from the Outfit’s rakshasa imitating Jennifer’s voice, and walked right into their—

Wait. Back it up.

The store robbery. We’d worn monster masks because it was mid-September and Halloween stores were sprouting up like weeds in strip malls across the suburbs. That would make it January now.

So why did it still feel like late summer when I got off the prison bus? A hot, dusty day. Not that we often got a white Christmas in the Mojave Desert, but there was still a difference between September and January temperatures. The weather felt
exactly
the way it had when I’d flown back to Vegas.

I stepped outside and glanced into the next cell. A human skeleton with a conga line of needle marks running down his arm slouched on his bunk, staring at a magazine.

“Hey,” I said, “you know what the date is?”

“Seventeenth,” he told me.

“Yeah, but what month?”

He arched an eyebrow at me. “September.”

I went back to my bunk.

I was busted in September. Sentenced four months later. But it was still September. Yesterday was the sixteenth. I’d flown home on the sixteenth. Gotten busted on the sixteenth. Then I spent four months in the legal system. In one day.

Sudden pain flared behind my eyes and inside my nostrils, a fire raging in my sinuses. I squeezed my eyes shut and pinched the bridge of my nose until it passed.

I read the date on the paperwork again. But now it wasn’t a date at all. It was a blur, a blob of ink that shifted and squirmed. A liar unmasked, its hold on my mind broken.

It was a con. None of it had happened. Somebody, somehow, had thrown me behind bars with a mix of bogus paperwork and magical mind-hacking. How, I didn’t know, but that was secondary to my real problem.

As far as the state was concerned, I would spend the rest of my life in this cell.

Unless I could prove otherwise. How far did the setup go? If I found the judge who supposedly oversaw my trial, would she remember sentencing me? Hell, all I had to do was match the trial transcript to my arrest report, and that would
prove
the trial couldn’t have possibly taken place. More than ever, I needed to get the ear of somebody in authority, somebody with the pull to—

“New guy.”

I looked up, jolted from my thoughts. I had a visitor. A visitor the size of a professional wrestler, showing off the kind of muscles you only get with vigorous and enthusiastic steroid abuse.

“I’m Simms,” he said, sounding friendly enough. There was something in his eyes, though, a predatory edge he couldn’t hide.

“Faust,” I told him.

“Thought I should introduce myself. See, I handle security for this tier.”

“Security,” I echoed, my voice flat.

“Yeah, I mean, it’s a prison, right? Lotta bad guys around here. Some of these lifers, they’ve got nothing to lose. They’ll take everything you’ve got and shank you just for kicks. You need a buddy, somebody to watch your back.”

“I thought that was Brisco’s job.”

He flinched just a little at the mention of Brisco’s name. Guess he hoped he’d catch the new guy before I learned the lay of the land. Didn’t slow down his sales pitch, though. He was too single-minded for that.

“Nah, forget him. Look, know how many whites are living on this level?
Six
. On the whole tier. If a riot pops off, you think Brisco and his boys are gonna run down from tier five and save you? Not happening. But me, I’m just two cells away.” He nodded to the left. “And I’ll take care of you.”

“For a price,” I said.

“Sure. You scratch my back, I scratch yours, right? That’s the American way. You give me, say, ten percent of your commissary goods, and I’ll make sure nobody messes with you.”

He came closer. Glanced down at the plastic bag at the foot of my bunk and nudged it with the toe of his canvas shoe.

“Case in point. This? This is just unsafe. Some big guy could walk in here right now and rip you off, take
all
your stuff. But if you sign up for my protection plan, I’ll only take half, and we can be buddies.”

“Half?” I asked. “What happened to ten percent?”

“First-day sign-up fee.”

It wasn’t hard to read between the lines. Simms was running a by-the-books extortion scam, and from the tension in his voice he was about ten seconds from escalating to the hard sell. The kind that, out in the civilian world, usually involves smashing up a store and doing some property damage to make a point.

In here, the only thing I had worth smashing up was
me
.

I weighed my options. Back down? Let him rob me? Not happening. Once word spread that I’d bent over for Simms, I could expect a parade of thugs outside my cell door, lining up to take the rest of my stuff and whatever else they wanted. I strongly doubted Simms’s “protection” would be worth a bent nickel. That left me with one option. And facing down a guy at least a hundred pounds heavier and a foot taller than me while I didn’t have a weapon or any of my magical gear didn’t leave much doubt about the outcome.

The knowledge that I was probably about to get my ass kicked left me oddly tranquil. Pain was inevitable. Death wasn’t. Once I accepted I was about to pick a fight and lose, I could focus on strategy.

What did I need? To get rid of Simms and show everybody else I wasn’t afraid to brawl. That meant a change of venue.

“Well, that sounds reasonable,” I said, leaning forward on my bunk as if to reach for the bag.

Then I shot to my feet with no warning, barreling toward him in a sprinter’s launch and throwing my shoulder into his chest. It felt like hitting a slab of beef. He staggered back a step, grunting, then grabbed me in a clinch and swung me around. The cell bars rattled as I slammed against them, pain rocketing through my skull and shoulders. His fist hit my gut like a pile driver.

“Come on,” he said, clenching my shoulder as he pulled his free hand back for another punch. “Don’t be stupid. Just give it up—”

I turned my head and bit down on his hand as hard as I could, teeth breaking skin and grinding bone. It tasted like chewing into a rotten steak. He yelped, jerking his hand away, and I spat blood onto the cell floor. He was off-balance for a second, but I didn’t press the attack. Instead I slipped to one side and took a running leap backward, throwing myself out of the cell and onto the tier walkway.

My back hit the walkway handrail as if Simms was the one who had thrown me, my arms flinging against the steel railing like a boxer on the ropes. I took a deep breath.

“
You’re fucking dead
,” I roared at the top of my lungs. The dramatic cell exit had drawn a few eyes. Now
everybody
was watching. Heads popped out of cell doors all along the tier like woodchucks on Groundhog Day, and the crowds on the floor above leaned over the railing to get a view.

If Simms were smart, he would have cut his losses and backed down. He wasn’t smart. Balling his bloody hand into a fist, he charged. He hit me like a freight train, his weight pulling me down to the walkway floor, both of us tumbling and throwing wild punches.

His fist cracked across my left eye, cut my eyebrow, and blotted out my vision in a trickle of blood. I kicked at him, couldn’t connect, and he hammered my face again. My ears rang, a klaxon that wavered from one eardrum to the other, warbling across my brain. No, the alarm was real, as real as the boots thundering toward us from the tower walkway.

I looked up as they hit us with the pepper spray.

A torrent of bright orange foam splashed across my face, setting my eyes on fire. It felt like I’d just stuffed a fistful of hot peppers in my mouth and started chewing, the burn choking my nostrils and streaming down my throat, washing out my entire world in white-hot pain. They hauled Simms off me and pulled me back by my armpits, but all I could do was sputter and choke and claw at the foam on my face, smearing it in deeper.

I was worse than blind as the guards dragged me off, but I could hear the other inmates. Cheering, catcalling, hammering on cell bars and hooting. They’d gotten an unexpected show to liven up their afternoon, and they liked what they saw.

I had, I presumed, made my point.

Lancaster
read the brass nameplate on the warden’s desk. A miniature Nevada state flag framed it on one side. On the other, Texas.

The warden was a big man with expansive body language and a powder-blue suit. When he spoke, eyeing me across his immaculately clean desk, he had a genteel Southern manner about him. He made me think of smoke and old hickory.

“I’d like to say that you set a record, son, getting into a fight less than two hours after arriving at my facility. I’d dearly like to say that.”

My manacled hands sat idly in my lap, chained to a belt like I’d worn on the prison bus. They’d rinsed my eyes and slapped tiny bandages on the cuts on my eyebrow and cheek. I ached, mostly. My back throbbed, my face felt like a tenderized steak, and my ribs stung if I poked them. So I stopped poking them.

“What’s the record?” I asked.

“Thirty-seven seconds. I watched the security camera footage and timed it with a stopwatch, for posterity’s sake.”

His office was plush, with a carpet that matched his suit and neo-Victorian furniture. A shrink’s office, or a lawyer’s maybe. We might have been standing in the heart of a prison, but the warden didn’t skimp on comfort.

“That’s the problem with criminals,” I told him. “They tend to commit crimes.”

I glanced back. A pair of stone-faced guards flanked the doorway, eyeing me like a roach that just scurried out from under their refrigerator.

“And yet, it is my sworn duty—as bequeathed upon me by God, the great state of Nevada, and the shareholders of Rehabilitation Dynamics of America—to impose some measure of order and safety upon this forlorn place. You are not making my job any easier, son.”

“I’m not in the habit of looking for trouble,” I lied.

The door opened. A prisoner came in—no shackles, toting a plastic bucket full of cleaning supplies.
One of the trustees
, I thought,
maybe the one Brisco had check me out
. He paused in the doorway, looking to Lancaster.

“Window cleaning, boss?”

“Go on.” Lancaster gave him a nod. As the trustee shuffled across the office and sprayed the window down with blue cleaning fluid from a squirt bottle, the warden turned back to me. “I understand that sometimes fights are one-sided things. For example, in your case. This other man, Simms?”

My cheek ached. “It wasn’t all that one-sided. I got a few good punches in.”

Lancaster let out a polite chuckle. “What I mean is you may not have had a choice. I’ve gotten several reports that Simms is shaking down the weaker inmates. Extorting food and money. Is that what happened? Did he try to rob you?”

Over by the window, the trustee took his time wiping the glass clean. He wasn’t being thorough; he was being slow. Making sure he didn’t leave the office before he heard what I had to say.

If I told Lancaster what he wanted to hear, I might have a shot at winning him over. Maybe I could get him to dig up my case files and prove I didn’t belong in here. Then again, every word that came out of my mouth would go straight to Brisco’s ear. If there was one absolute, unbreakable rule of the underworld, written in blood and stone, it was this:
don’t snitch
. Acting like I wanted Lancaster to solve my problem with Simms would make me look weak, and I couldn’t afford that reputation if I wanted to survive long enough to escape.

“No,” I told him, hating the words but saying them anyway. “It was me. I started the fight. Simms was just minding his own business.”

Lancaster knitted his brows. “Minding his own business. In your cell.”

“What can I say?” I shrugged. “He made a wrong turn and got lost. In his defense, all the cells look the same. Easy mistake to make.”

“And you got the sudden notion to attack a man twice your size…why, exactly?”

“That’s what the movies all say to do.”

He tilted his forehead my way. “Pardon?”

“Prison movies. They all say that you’re supposed to find the biggest, baddest guy in the yard and pick a fight on your first day.” I paused as if reflecting. “Did…did the movies lie to me? That’s the problem, warden. My brain’s been corrupted by violent media and rock music.”

Lancaster sighed. “While I’m certain it has, I find your explanation a bit far-fetched. Are you afraid of reprisal? Just tell us what really happened. We can protect you from Simms.”

“I started the fight,” I repeated.

The trustee finished. The window gleamed.

“All done here, boss,” he said as he slunk out the door.

Lancaster folded his hands on the desk. “Normally, we have several means of addressing inmate-on-inmate violence. Loss of privileges. Time in administrative segregation. Criminal charges and additional years on your sentence. And if I truly believed you started that fight, we’d be pursuing one or several of those corrective measures. As it happens, I don’t. But if you insist on refusing our protection, I just hope that the next time we speak, it isn’t in the infirmary.”

*     *     *

The prison yard made me think of a carton of Neapolitan ice cream. Instead of strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla, the yard split along racial lines, but the invisible border between each color was just as real.

I didn’t like it, but then again, I didn’t like Neapolitan ice cream either.

The setup wasn’t too shabby. A couple of weight sets alongside a jogging track, picnic benches here and there, a few two-seater tables with chessboards set into the plastic tabletops. I could imagine I was on a college campus, if it weren’t for the fences, the gun towers, and the razor wire.

Paul walked the track, smoking a cigarette, keeping to himself. He gave me a wave and I wandered over. He shook his head at me.

“Wow. You just jump right in with both fists, don’t you? Gonna have a beauty of a shiner there, too.”

I touched the skin under my eye and winced. Puffy and raw.

“Well, shit,” I told him, falling into step as we walked along the oval track, “there goes my modeling career. Hey, read something for me?”

I tugged the last sheet of my paperwork from my pocket, folded into a neat square, and unfurled it.

“They have a literacy class here, meets every Tuesday.” Paul reached for the page. “You should look into that.”

“Here,” I said, tapping the corner of the sheet. The dates still blurred in my vision, like newsprint smudging under a gob of liquid soap. “How much time passed between my arrest and landing in here?”

“You tell me. You lived it.”

“Humor me. What does it say?”

Paul shrugged. “Four months, give or take?”

I tapped another line. “When was I brought into custody?”

“September sixteenth.”

“And what day is today?”

“The seventeenth,” Paul said. “Why? What’s the big deal?”

“Paul, how could four months have passed between yesterday and today?”

He blinked. Squinted at me.

“It…didn’t. That doesn’t make sense.” Suddenly on edge, he pressed the page back into my hand. “I don’t do riddles.”

“Not a riddle. How could I have been tried and convicted if I was just arrested—”

He held up a hand, grimacing like he felt a migraine coming on. “Please, drop it, okay? My head is killing me.”

This was bad. I’d hoped that whoever was behind all this, screwing with my memory and my sense of time, had kept it localized to me and anyone involved with putting me behind bars. I’d never met Paul before today, and even he couldn’t push his brain through the teeth of this trap. Under normal circumstances, most people would assume a time discrepancy like that was a typo or a filing mistake, but that’s not what was happening here. Anyone thinking about my trial just couldn’t parse time at all. And thinking
too
hard earned them an instant burst of sinus pain, encouraging a change of subject.

How many people had been affected? The whole prison system?

The whole planet?

More important question: who had the power to weave a curse like that, and what had I done to piss them off?

Prince Sitri. This deal had his name written all over it. One of his little games, maybe: drop me in prison, bury me deep, and see if I could claw my way out. Exactly the kind of dick move he’d pull if he was bored enough, or if he wanted to make some kind of point.

And what if the point is
“Caitlin isn’t coming to help you”?

I shoved that thought into a mental box already cluttered with all the things that kept me up at night. Not a lot of room left in that box.

I was good at two things: leading my crew, and magic. Now my friends and family were on the far side of an electrified fence, and I couldn’t work a ritual in a place with zero privacy and guards standing watch around the clock. If there was a better way to keep me caged, I couldn’t think of one.

Despair started to creep around the edges of my mind, like lead weights tied to my wrists and ankles. I shoved that into the box, too.

Dig deeper
, I told myself.
There’s no such thing as a no-win situation. Think fast, fight hard, and breathe free air again
.
No matter what it takes
.

“Back in processing,” I said to Paul, “Emerson told us that nobody’s ever escaped from the Iceberg. That true?”

“No, but…well, sort of. It’s compli—” He froze, eyes darting left. “Oh shit, hold on, here it comes.”

I saw it too. Two guys from the black corner of the yard, shirts tied off around their waists, marching hard and fast with murder in their eyes. Coming up on a skinny Latino with a full-chest tattoo of the Virgin Mary, all on his own by the chess tables. A lone gazelle, separated from the herd and blissfully unaware of the doom heading his way.