The Killing Floor Blues (5 page)

My heart sank like a stone in the ocean, my lifeline cut.

Nadine extended a hand, beckoning me to a table in the back corner. Her blond bob gleamed like spun gold under the harsh fluorescent lights. She’d dressed for the occasion, wearing a stylish sweater with muted black and white stripes. Cute.

“You like?” she asked, following my gaze.

“You’re behind the times,” I said. “Cons mostly wear orange jumpsuits now.”

“How…seventies of them. I think I’ll pass.”

As I came close, she reached for my hand. I barely had time to flinch before one of the officers—spread out along the walls like angry statues—stepped in.

“
No
physical contact,” he barked.

She frowned and sat down. I pulled out a chair on the far side of the table. Nadine might have been the last person in the world I’d want to speak to under normal circumstances, but these weren’t normal circumstances. And at this moment, any familiar face—even an enemy’s—was a tiny comfort.

“In the 1930s,” she murmured, “Henry Harlow conducted experiments on rhesus monkeys to study the effects of maternal and social deprivation. He subjected them to long-term isolation, denied them affection, even simple
touch
. The monkeys went quite mad. Primates need to be touched, regularly and with care, to stay healthy. It’s ingrained in your brain chemistry.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I’m just wondering how long
your
sanity will last.” She held up a smooth, pale hand. “Can you feel it? That hungry crawling beneath your skin? The pain of knowing you’ll never feel a tender touch upon your body again? Wouldn’t you kill for the comfort of a gentle embrace, even
mine?
It must be torture.”

I didn’t answer. I turned my chair at an angle, looked at the wall, and fell into a sullen silence. I figured I’d wait until she had something useful to say.

“I came to your trial,” she told me, “every single day.”

“No. You
really
didn’t.” I paused. “But tell me the truth: do you actually remember a trial? How long has it been since we last saw each other?”

Her ruby lips pursed in a pout. “What kind of a question is that? You know when it was. The airport in Chicago. About four months ago.”

Except it was yesterday
, I thought, my hope draining like sand through a sieve. There had to be a way to break this curse, to force someone to see the blatant contradiction.

“Before they took your belongings away,” Nadine said, “did you happen to open the envelope?”

The envelope. The ticking time bomb she’d dropped in my lap at O’Hare. Containing, allegedly, proof that Caitlin was out to stab me in the back. No, I hadn’t opened it. I hadn’t thrown it away either.

“Is that what you came here for?”

“No. I came here as an emissary of the Court of Night-Blooming Flowers. To show our respect and prove that we want you on our team.”

“Oh?” I didn’t buy it. “And how will you do that?”

“By saving your life.”

She leaned as close as she dared, pitching her voice in a low whisper.

“This morning, one of my operatives was approached in hopes of hiring him for an assassination.
You
were the target.”

“Me?” I touched my chest. “Did they know I’m in prison?”

“Absolutely. He was supposed to infiltrate, as a prisoner or a guard, and take you out from inside the walls. The one absolute criteria of your death was pain. You were meant to suffer, as grievously as possible, before you died.”

I drummed my fingers on the table, thinking. That kind of hit had
revenge
written all over it. I could see the Chicago Outfit ordering up a kill like that, but why bother? They’d already gotten me thrown in prison. It’d be crueler to make me live out a life sentence.

Damien Ecko maybe? I’d ruined his business and run him out of Chicago with a bounty from two infernal courts on his head. He wanted me dead in the worst way, I had no doubt, but hiring a
living
hit man wasn’t the necromancer’s style. Besides, he’d never reach out to the Dead Roses for help. Nadine’s crew were among the demons competing to hunt him down.

What about Angus Caine, Lauren Carmichael’s mercenary captain? He’d gone into hiding along with what was left of Xerxes Security Solutions after Carmichael died. So had those two mad-scientist whackjobs on her payroll.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Nadine said.

“Just realizing,” I told her, “that I really need to stop letting my enemies live. The second I get out of here, fixing that becomes priority one.”

“Speaking of which—” She fell silent. A guard lazily patrolled past our table, taking the time to look her up and down like a butcher eyeing a prime slab of meat. She puffed her hair and smiled at him until he walked out of earshot. “Speaking of which, only say the word. We have a plan.”

“We?”

“The Flowers, Daniel. Your new court. Join us. Swear fealty to Prince Malphas, and Royce and I will have you out of here before midnight. It’s that simple.”

“Caitlin might have something to say about that.”

Nadine shook her head, putting on a wistfully sad face for me. I almost believed she felt bad.

“Oh, Daniel. Isn’t it time to face the truth? She abandoned you. She went home to Prince Sitri’s court the night you were arrested, and she never looked back. She never will. Your usefulness was at an end. She’s probably already forgotten your name.”

I had to fight to keep the smile off my face. I knew something Nadine didn’t.

When I was in Chicago, getting ready to break into Damien Ecko’s jewelry store, Caitlin was making preparations of her own. Prince Sitri had a gala planned. That meant Caitlin’s job, as his right-hand woman, was going back to hell so she could stand next to his throne and look menacing while the nobles partied it up.

“I’m leaving Emma in charge while I’m gone,”
she had told me on the phone.
“She should be able to keep the wolves at bay for a few days.”

I never actually got in touch with Caitlin the night I came back to Vegas and got busted. If she’d had to leave early…that had to be it. Caitlin had left town all right, but only for the party. A party that, since only a day had really passed, was still in full swing.

That meant as soon as it was over, she’d be coming home to Vegas. And she’d be looking for me.

“That’s a generous offer,” I told Nadine, “but I have faith.”

She frowned. “You don’t get it. As long as you’re in this prison, you’re defenseless. My operative turned down the contract, but the client will keep looking until she finds someone who
will
kill you, and then what good will your ‘faith’ do you?”

“She?”

“A
human
.” Nadine wrinkled her nose. “Possibly a sorcerer of some pedigree. My operative was…unnerved by her presence. She called herself Mater Tantibus.”

I scraped the rust off my Latin. “Mother of Nightmares?”

“Pretentious, right?”

Said the Grand Matriarch of the House of Dead Roses
, I thought, but I was smart enough not to say that out loud. Instead I asked, “Anything else to go on? I’ve pissed off a lot of people, but this ‘Mater Tantibus’ isn’t jogging my memory.”

Nadine shrugged. “Curly black hair pinned in a bun, dark skin, tailored suits and mirrored sunglasses—she had money. British accent, very clipped.”

I leaned back in my chair and sighed. I knew exactly who wanted me dead.

“Fleiss.”

“Hm?”

“Her real name, at least the name she gave me. ‘Ms. Fleiss.’ Her ‘boss’ commissioned me for a heist. Except, as far as I can tell, she was the one pulling his strings.”

Normally, answers were a relief. This one just sprouted more questions. My business with Fleiss was over, and if she’d wanted to kill me, she—and Pachenko, her slab of imported muscle—had plenty of chances to do it before we parted ways. Kill me? Hell, she’d
paid
me and flown me home on her private jet. If I’d put together a list of all the people with a motive to send a hit man after me, she wouldn’t have even made the top fifty.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “I don’t think my family knows I’m in here. Can you get word to—”

“I only do
favors
for members of my court.” Nadine smiled sweetly. “And your ‘family,’ as you call them, can’t help you now. Only we can.”

A man in a fitted black pinstripe suit and an earpiece, looking like a Secret Service agent, approached our table and leaned in. As he did, I noticed two fingers were missing from his left hand. His right was a twisted blanket of faded burn scars that crept up his wrist and disappeared into his sleeve.

“Ma’am,” he said, “we’ve just received word. Nyx has arrived in Talbot Cove. Her hunt is underway.”

Nadine slid back her chair and rose, making a purring noise as she stretched her arms above her head.

“You’ll have to excuse me, Daniel. My daughter is having a…recital of sorts, and I believe she’s about to make me very proud. I’ll come back in a couple of days to see how you’re enjoying prison life. Maybe you’ll have come to your senses by then. That is, of course, assuming you’re still alive.”

Chow time was seven o’clock. Another chance to fill in my mental map of Eisenberg Correctional. If I had my bearings right, the cavernous cafeteria squatted at the intersection of the hives, serving all three in staggered shifts. The concrete ramp on the way inside had a subtle slope, but that and the lack of windows in the dingy tile walls told me we’d gone underground.

The ceiling was unfinished, just girders and the occasional vent interspersed among harsh white industrial fluorescents. If the vents were for circulation, they weren’t doing their job: the air was swampy, stagnant, stinking with the kind of wet sweat-sock odor that comes from packing five hundred men into a room built for three hundred and turning up the heat.

Any other time that would have killed my appetite, but my stomach growled in eager anticipation as I shuffled into the serving line.
After all, I haven’t eaten in four months
, I thought. Black humor was about the only weapon I had left.

I felt like I was in high school again. I came away from the line with a gray plastic tray, paper plate, and three small dollops of food from a surly inmate’s ladle. Dinner was watery mashed potatoes the color of a soap bar and what you might call creamed chicken and rice, if you were in the mood to be charitable and squinted a little.

I thought about eating beef Wellington at Gordon Ramsay’s and sharing the sticky-toffee pudding dessert with Caitlin. Imperial Peking duck at Saffron East. Fat slices of pepperoni pie at Secret Pizza. Hell, at that moment I would have killed for the greasy shrimp toast and a mai tai from Tiki Pete’s.

That was when the reality of the situation hit me, a full-bore shotgun blast straight to my reptile brain. I was a prisoner here. I was a
convict
. And all the things I loved, all the things I dreamed about, were just that: dreams. Everything I couldn’t have. For the rest of my life.

I swallowed down my sudden animal panic, pursing my lips into a taut line, and looked for a place to sit.

The cafeteria tables were more Neapolitan ice cream. Vanilla on the left. Paul caught my eye and waved me over, scooting to make a spot beside him.

“Welcome to Chez Eisenberg,” he said, nodding across the table as I swung a leg over the bench and sat down. “You know Jake and Westie?”

“Yeah, we met in the yard. Hey, guys. Speaking of, remember our talk out there, Paul? You had started to say something about breakouts.”

He dipped his plastic spoon in the chicken and rice, giving it a dubious sniff. “Huh? Oh, right. Okay, so it’s not totally true. People
have
broken out of the Iceberg—”

“Lucky bastards,” Westie grumbled.

“Wait for it. They have, maybe three or four times, but they either get caught or gunned down right after.”

Paul pressed his spoon against his mashed potatoes, separating them into a pair of lumps and drawing a thin potato road between them. I sampled a mouthful of the chicken and rice and struggled to hold it down. The meat was half gelatin and half gristle, in a sauce that tasted like warm mayonnaise.

“This food is…not food,” I said, chasing it with a swig of lukewarm water. “They seriously feed you this slop?”

“All meals meet a minimum caloric and nutritional standard,” Paul said, engrossed in his potato sculpture building, “emphasis on
minimum
. Food budget’s something like four bucks a day per prisoner.”

“Now you know why people shank each other over commissary goods,” Jake cast a cautious glance across the room. “And why aren’t we on lockdown after that shit that popped off in the yard today? The blacks and browns are givin’ each other snake eyes, and I’ve seen two guards so far with their fingers
on
their triggers.”

“Probably hoping it gets worse,” Westie said, following his gaze. “Hell, a full-on cafeteria riot? They could put the whole hive in lockdown for a
month
. Gotta get all that overtime in before Christmas shopping, right?”

I took a deep breath, steadying myself as much as I could manage, and stretched out my senses. Psychic tendrils, glistening in my second sight like purple sea anemones, drifted across the room. Touching brains, scooping up surface thoughts, sifting through emotions like panning for gold in a vat of sludge. Fear. So much fear. The kind of anxiety that turned a man feral. Anger, but that was mostly surface bluster. A crude dam to keep the terror from breaking loose.

The way I saw it, the cafeteria was a hair’s breadth from going nuclear. One wrong move, one jostle or a second of eye contact with the wrong person, and blood would spill.

I wasn’t sure what worried me more: standing at ground zero in the heart of a riot, or the idea of being locked in a cell for a month afterward.

“Okay,” Paul told me, wagging his spoon at his mashed-potato map. “It’s like this: we’re in the middle of a desert.”

“You don’t say,” Jake muttered.

“Nearest town is Aberdeen, thirty miles south. This two-lane road was built at the same time the prison was. Most of the guards, support staff, even the warden lives in Aberdeen. Interstate 80 brushes the edge of town, heading east and west. Those are pretty much your only travel options.”

“So you need wheels to get out of here,” I said, thinking it through. “You’ll die on foot in the heat. And by the time you reach Aberdeen—”

Paul tapped the mashed-potato road with his spoon. “You got it. Total lockdown. All they have to do is put two roadblocks on I-80 and you aren’t going
anywhere
. Most escapees either get caught at the roadblock or on the way there. Nobody’s ever gotten farther than that.”

“Why take the road at all?” Jake asked. “It’s a desert. Just pick a direction and ride.”

Paul shook his head. “It’s not a
flat
desert. Sand dunes, drifts, rocks…yeah, you could do it in an ATV, easy—but only if you can see where you’re going. Do it during the day, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb. Helicopters’ll spot you in seconds. Do it at night, without headlights, you’ll end up in a wreck before you make it five miles.”

“Why do you wanna know anyway?” Westie asked me.

I shrugged.

“I’ve got restaurant reservations. Don’t want to be late.”

*     *     *

After lights out, I rested on my back on the slab of concrete that passed for a bunk and tried to ignore the cold. The Iceberg earned its name after sunset. I imagined arctic wind whistling over a frozen tombstone. And there, under the snow and the permafrost, entombed I lay.

Thinking.

I’d already spent all the time I wanted behind bars. And the amount of time I wanted was zero. I was
leaving
, and I didn’t care if I had to climb a mountain of corpses to do it.

Couldn’t be reckless, though. While my reptile brain thrashed its tail against the back of my skull, kicking me into fight or flight, I clamped down hard and forced myself to think it through. Going off half-cocked would just get me shot or worse. I needed a plan.

So nobody had ever successfully escaped from Eisenberg Correctional. I was willing to bet they’d never had a prisoner like me, but then again, that was probably what every other would-be escapee thought before he ate a bullet. The prison, the town, the highway…I played around with my mental map for a while, floating possibility after possibility like helium balloons and shooting each one down.

That was fine, for now. A solo escape act was my last resort. If I could crack the curse around my imaginary “trial” and get somebody in authority to see I’d gone from arrest to prison in the blink of an eye, that would solve everything. The confusion would at least be enough to gum up the legal works. All I needed was a hearing, and then I’d be on my way to a country with no extradition treaty faster than you could say “bail money.” If nothing else, worst-case scenario, they’d have to move me to a county jail until everything was sorted out.

It’d be a hell of a lot easier to break out of county.

Speaking of hell, Caitlin would be back to Vegas in a few days, and she wouldn’t waste any time trying to track me down. Did I have that long, though? If Nadine was telling the truth—and I couldn’t find a good reason to doubt her, much as I tried—I could expect a hired killer or two to come hunting for me. Soon. It was in my best interest to be long gone before that happened.

No, waiting for Caitlin to find me was too risky. I needed to take this bull by the horns and find a way to get word to the outside. I had a few thoughts in that direction, but my head kept coming around to Fleiss. I couldn’t figure out why she wanted me dead—she and I were going to have a chat about that as soon as I got loose. For now, though, I was a sitting duck in here. I needed a weapon. Not a sharpened broom handle or a razor blade either.
My
kind of weapon.

No grimoires, no ritual tools, no herbs or oils, no privacy. Trying to do magic behind bars was like trying to build a nuke with a nine-volt battery and some chewing gum. Still, I knew one spell that would get me exactly what I needed.

A spell I’d only cast once in my entire life, for a damn good reason.