The Killing Floor Blues (6 page)

Her name was Jenna Rearden, and she kept her hands clasped tight before her, like a penitent nun, to keep them from shaking. It wasn’t me she was afraid of.

Not entirely me, anyway. This wasn’t long after I’d broken company with Nicky Agnelli. A heist went bad, shook my confidence, threw me off my game. Instead of getting back on Nicky’s payroll, I shifted gears and tried something new. I hung out my metaphorical shingle, offering vengeance for hire. Dirty deeds done at premium prices.

It was mostly curse work, though I passed myself off to my clients as a mundane “fixer” who could arrange convenient accidents for anyone who had done them wrong. Cheating spouse? Sexually harassing boss? Cross my palm with silver, and I could make your problems go away.

Then came Jenna. Young, mousy, freshly divorced with a six-year-old daughter. A daughter who had gone from vibrant and outgoing to sullen and stormy, a pattern that grew worse with every weekend visit to her father’s house. Jenna got smart; she slipped a voice-activated recorder into her daughter’s Hello Kitty knapsack. The audio told her everything she needed to know.

“My lawyer says there’s no guarantee how much prison time he’ll get,” Jenna told me, “or if he’ll get any at all. There are cases where men have…done this to their children and even kept
visitation rights
. I can’t do it, Mr. Faust. I can’t. I’ll take her and run if I have to. I’ll spend the rest of my life as a fugitive before I’ll—”

I held up a hand. “You won’t. Go home, and go about your business like it was any other day. I’ll handle everything.”

“How will I know when—”

“You’ll know.”

I didn’t need to hear the audio, but I still listened. I listened to every cry and muffled whimper. All two hours of it. I needed the hatred, coursing through my veins like high-octane gasoline, to do what I did next.

Two days later, a noise complaint led the cops straight to Jenna’s ex. He was sitting up in bed and screaming. Just staring into space and shrieking, endlessly, until his vocal cords tore and nothing but agonized wheezes gusted over his blood-flecked tongue. Last I’d checked, he was still in a padded cell at Napa State Hospital, under heavy sedation.

He’d be there for the rest of his life. Even if I wanted to, what I did to him couldn’t be undone.

I wouldn’t bring that kind of doom down on somebody’s head under normal circumstances, unless they truly deserved it. These weren’t normal circumstances, though, and a weapon was a weapon.

It was time to call upon the King of Worms.

*     *     *

I’d found the king’s name in Bentley and Corman’s back-room collection, a trail that slid in and out of history like a wisp of sulfur smoke. Here, a mention in a sixteenth-century French black magician’s manual. There, a casual aside in a colonial witch hunter’s diary. Puzzle pieces scattered across time, waiting for someone foolish enough to put them back together.

It was never quiet in prison. Even at midnight, even in the darkness, the hive was a cacophony of snoring, wheezing, coughing, whispering. Faint metal clanks and the sudden strangled sound of a sob muffled by a pillow. I pulled the paper-thin blanket aside and sat up in my bunk, crossing my legs and resting my upturned palms on my knees.

If I leaned forward and craned my neck, looking toward the tower in the heart of the hive, I could make out shapes through the darkened windows at the top. A couple of guards stood watch, looking out over the tiers through the bug-eye glass of night-vision goggles.

I straightened my back and closed my eyes.

All magic starts with a breath. I inhaled for four seconds, held my breath for four seconds, exhaled for four seconds. Then again. And again, as my thoughts slipped into the background, taking the noise and the prison along with them. My heartbeat slowed with the clock, seconds squeezing by like drops of molasses through an hourglass.

It was dark behind my eyes, but I saw a light in the distance. A silver pinprick. I walked toward it.

A chant reverberated through my skull, half in my voice, half in a stranger’s. A litany of ancient names. A warning in a language I didn’t speak. Now I walked along a winding ribbon of tarnished pewter, inlaid with swirling Hebraic script reading
Malkhut, Yesod, Hod, Gevurah, Da’ath
.

The ribbon rose and twisted, taking me along with it. Plunging into worlds of shadow that billowed like black smoke. I wasn’t in my cell. I wasn’t not in my cell. I was in between.

The shadow in-between
, I thought as the ribbon became a road.

In the darkness, looming up before me, was a throne. A throne eighty feet tall, a mountain of crumbling black basalt. The king who sat slumped upon that throne, a giant in moldering robes with a rusted crown upon his skeletal brow, had been dead since time began.

“I come as a pilgrim,” I said, “with hands empty and cold.”

My gifts are free
, rasped the King of Worms in a voice that came from everywhere and nowhere.

“Decay is the fate of all life.” I clasped my hands before me, giving the ritual response.

And madness is the fate of all sanity
.

“I seek to spread your wisdom upon the flesh of the world once more.”

This would please me. Come. Receive your sacrament
.

Figures emerged from the shadows at the foot of the throne. Two of them shuffling toward me in spasmodic convulsions, walking with muscles gone stiff from rigor mortis. They were women, perhaps, wearing the habits of nuns but their garb adorned with crimson symbols from no earthly order. Empty eye sockets turned my way.

I stood my ground and counted my breaths. Four seconds in. Hold. Four seconds out.

The king’s servants converged upon me. One shambled in a slow, painful circle, neck bones crackling as she kept her eyeless face trained upon mine. The other reached for me with one slender, rotting hand. Her flesh, what little remained of it, was a hive of maggots. No, some alien species
like
a maggot, with skin glistening, jet-black, and reflecting the pinprick light from distant stars.

The nun stroked my cheek, gentle, like a lover.

I didn’t flinch.

The other nun laid her rotted hand upon my scalp and yanked my head back with ferocious strength as she pushed downward, forcing me to my knees with my face upturned.

The one before me reached up to her throat and plucked a single, squirming maggot-thing from her rotten skin. It twisted and writhed, pinned between thumb and forefinger, as she held it above my face. Panic welled up and I fought to keep my fear in check, holding very, very still as her hand came down.

I smelled mildew, and decay, and sweet rose water. Just before she dropped the maggot into my left nostril.

I lurched forward, eyes wide open, the vision torn away and the stench and sounds of the prison hammering my senses. Suddenly free and suddenly entombed. I clutched the thin blanket, pressing my face to the foot of my bunk, clenching my jaw until it ached. I could feel it, the alien
thing
inside my body, crawling up my sinuses and spreading a rash of pain like I’d just snorted chili powder. I felt the maggot squirm across the back of my eyeball, my vision blurring as it left a burning trail on its way to my brain. I wanted to claw at my skin, rip out my eye, anything to get the damned thing
out
. All I could do was count my breaths and hold very still, clutching the blanket, waiting for the feeling to end.

But it didn’t. The insect curled up on the skin of my brain—against all logic, against everything I knew about the human body, I could feel it there—and went to sleep. An unscratchable itch beneath my skull. A parasite made of cosmic filth.

It would only sleep for so long. I had two days, three at most, before it would start to
burrow
. It needed a warm, safe place, after all.

A warm, safe place to feed.

That was the number-one reason I’d only done this once before and hoped to never do it again. I had two days to pass the king’s “gift” to another victim, or it would devour me alive from the inside out.

Nothing in this universe is ever really free.

I slept, if you could call it sleep. A few fitful hours of tossing and turning on the quarter-inch mattress, waking up with my back aching and my eyelids sagging, more tired than when I’d laid down in the first place. And I could still feel the maggot, nesting inside my skull. Paul chuckled as he pushed himself up from his bunk.

“Don’t worry, it gets easier,” he said. “My first week, I couldn’t sleep a wink. Eventually you just tune everything out. It’s amazing what you can get used to when you don’t have any other choice.”

I didn’t plan on being here long enough to get used to it.

The tiers showered in shifts, and we waited for the guards to pop our cell door, calling us out to stand along the railing in single file. We shuffled downstairs and through an access corridor, like the world’s slowest conga line at the world’s saddest party.

The movies had told me to expect a big, open room lined with shower nozzles, the space filled with milling naked bodies and the threat of violence. What I got instead was more like the showers in a college dorm. Individual stalls lined in white ceramic tile—with dingy plastic curtains, no less, though they didn’t quite cover the entire opening. Stepping into that stall and pulling the curtain shut behind me was the closest thing I’d had to privacy since I arrived at the Iceberg. I let out a faint sigh of pleasure and luxuriated under the sputtering lukewarm spray, running my fingers over my scalp. I only had five minutes, but it was enough.

Outside, toweling off with my uniform folded on a long wooden bench at my side, I got Paul’s attention and nodded left. Two men stood with crossed arms outside a curtained stall, staring daggers at anyone who came within ten feet.

“What’s up with that?” I asked.

“Like I said, usually don’t have to worry about being raped in the showers,” he told me, “but it’s a
great
place to get stabbed. Sometimes guys trade off like that, two standing guard while one showers, to make sure nobody pulls anything funny. Heck, put up some commissary goods and you can hire your very own bodyguards. Bet you never thought a chocolate bar could save your life.”

I had chocolate on the brain as we fell in line again down in the cafeteria. It was better than the watery scrambled eggs they were serving up, falling from the server’s ladle to my paper plate in a messy
plop
.

“So when does Hive B eat?” I asked the server. “I only see A and C on the schedule.”

“They don’t. Lockdown means all the meals get delivered to their cells. We cook ’em up and send them all over on rolling carts for the guards to pass out.”

“There a lot of guys in Hive B?”

He stared at me like I’d found his last nerve and planted my heel on it. Behind me, the line kept getting longer. I moved on.

The prisoners in Hive B were still eating, which meant they weren’t dead. One possible explanation down, countless more to go.

The back of my neck prickled as I walked the aisle, looking for a place to sit. I caught glances out of the corner of my eye, mostly from the Latino wedge of the cafeteria. Hard, narrowed eyes and soft murmurs. I slipped into an open spot not far from Brisco.

“Might have a problem,” he said, shooting a quick look over his shoulder.

Ray-Ray, sitting next to him, snorted over his eggs. “Yeah, and his fuckin’ name is Jablonski.”

“You may have felt,” Brisco told me, “a little shade from our brown brothers over there being thrown your way.”

“I noticed,” I said.

“That’s not by accident.
Someone
slipped a copy of your jacket to the browns’ shot-caller, and he passed it on to the Cinco Calles. They know who you are.”

“Not seeing a problem,” I said. “They’re tight with a friend of mine on the outside. She can smooth it.”

Ray-Ray shook his head. “You’re in here for icing one of their dealers, bro. They gotta do something about that. Mexican honor, you know?”

“I was framed. And I’m pretty sure they’re Puerto Rican.”

He furrowed his brow at me. “What’s the difference?”

“Seems pretty clear Jablonski and his boys want to turn this black-brown feud into a three-way,” Brisco said. “Get us all fighting so they can justify a hive-wide lockdown, sit on their asses, and collect overtime pay ’til Christmas. And you’re the wedge.”

“I can smooth it,” I said again. “Point out a Calles big shot for me. I’ll have a chat.”

“Never point your finger at anybody in here,” Brisco said. “That’s a good way to die. But if you’ll look a little more to your left—see the guy at the end of that table? Skinhead with a hooknose and the double-teardrop tat at the corner of his eye? That’s Raymundo. Thinks he’s Don Corleone, which he ain’t, but he’s hooked up with the Calles from end to end.”

“End to end?”

“Yeah,” Brisco said, “cradle to grave. Old-school gangster. Listen, Faust, you gotta understand something. I’m not letting my people get sucked into this fight. We’re outnumbered, big time, and any kind of race-war-type-situation is going to end with a lot of my guys in the infirmary or the morgue. That’s just how it is. We’ll watch your back if we can…”

“But if it gets hot, I’m on my own.” I stirred my plastic fork in the eggs, leaving a slug trail of yellow water on my plate. “Message received.”

“Well we’re not
giving
you to ’em.” Brisco nodded at Ray-Ray. “Stay close. And Ray-Ray and Slanger’ll watch your curtain while you shower. Just make sure to return the favor. Safety in numbers.”

Safety in numbers was the first thing I had to shed out in the prison yard. I spotted Raymundo quick. He was over by the weight benches, shouting encouragement as one of his buddies lifted the equivalent of a small car on his barbell. Five guys in all, mostly shirtless and flashing calligraphic
CC
tattoos on their pecs or shoulder blades, one keeping a hard-eyed watch while the others pumped iron and joked around.

The joking stopped, dead cold, when I walked up alone.

The barbell rattled onto its rack and the weightlifter sat up, shooting a lethal glare. Everybody froze except for Raymundo. He went on the offensive, strutting up with his hands spread wide.

“Look at this,” he said in a sibilant rasp. “You believe the balls on this
pendejo
? What’s up, you in a
hurry
to die?”

I took a deep breath, locking eyes with him. Showing my open hands, keeping my tone light and my moves easy.

“I come in respect. I hear you’ve been told some falsehoods about me. I want to set the record straight, before the situation gets out of control.”

“No, no.” He wagged his finger. “There’s no falsehoods. Jacket’s a jacket, and we’ve seen yours.”

“Sure. And who gave you that jacket? A guard who wants to set off a race war.”

He shrugged. “So what if he does? Doesn’t mean you didn’t shoot Little Konnie.”

Konstantin Floros
, I thought. My alleged “victim,” a low-level pot dealer on Jennifer’s payroll.

“Floros wasn’t even part of your set,” I told him. “He didn’t fly your flag. You don’t have to go to war for him.”

“He worked for our partnership. He was an earner. If we let you skate, that makes us look weak.”

“Good news, then. I didn’t kill him. You can get in touch with the outside, reach out to Jennifer. She’s family. She’ll tell you there’s no way in hell I pulled the trigger on one of her guys.”

Raymundo’s bushy eyebrows fell into a straight line, sharp as the path of a bullet. He got inside my personal space.

“Jennifer?” he said. “What do you know about JJ?”

“Enough to know she’ll vouch for me. I’ve known her longer than you have. We’ve been places together. We’ve seen things.”

He thought that over. The scowl didn’t leave his face, though.

“Can’t call her,” he said. “She ain’t around right now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what I mean. She ain’t around.”

She’s just hiding
, I told myself, forcing my gut to unclench.
She heard about the cops going after Nicky, and she went underground to wait out the heat. She’s smart. She’s fine. She’s safe
.

But with a turf war brewing, I couldn’t know that. I couldn’t know anything for certain—not until I got the hell out of here and fought my way back home.

“You should wait to talk to her before you do anything she might not like,” I told Raymundo.

“Maybe,” he replied.

That was all he had to say. I took one step backward, then another. He mirrored me. I didn’t turn my back and walk away until I was well out of arm’s reach, and even then I held my breath until I’d taken a good twenty steps. Nobody ran up on me from behind. I was safe.

This time.

I found Paul walking the oval track, sucking on a cigarette. He glanced my way.

“So how’d
that
go?”

“I’m still breathing.”

“That bad, huh?”

“I’ve got to get word to the outside,” I told him. “And without being listened in on. Anybody ever smuggle a cell phone in here?”

Paul flicked his cigarette to the track and snuffed it under the heel of his canvas shoe.

“Sure,” he said, “pricey, though. Burner with an hour or two of call time on it can run you four, five hundred bucks in commissary credit. Oh, there’s one other problem. In Hive C, there’s really only one reliable supplier.”

“Yeah? Who’s that?”

Paul nodded back toward the weight benches.

“Raymundo. Wanna go back over there, ask if he’ll talk business?”

“Shit.”

Paul lit another cigarette. Offered it to me. I passed. He took a deep drag and looked up to the cloudless sky.

“You are so right, my friend,” he said. “And we are all neck-deep in it.”

As we walked, I could feel the alien maggot crawling across my brain. Writhing over gray meat, leaving a burning slug trail in its wake. How long, I wondered, before it would stop wriggling and start
chewing?
Swallowing down my revulsion, I took a walk, alone, along the fence line. I knew that wasn’t safe, but I hoped I’d bought myself a little time with Raymundo and his boys. I needed a few quiet minutes to think.

Instead, I saw an unexpected arrival hobbling my way. The Prof. He goggled at me, eyes wide and bulging, coming closer in a limping shuffle-step like one of his legs was an inch longer than the other.

I stopped cold by the fence and waited for him.

“You,” he said, sounding as perplexed as he looked, “are
not
the Thief.”

“To the contrary. I’m a pretty damn good thief.” I shrugged. “Current situation notwithstanding.”

“You’re not
the
Thief. You—you shouldn’t be here.”

“That’s what I keep telling people.”

He grabbed a handful of his wild snow-white mane, yanking it in frustration and squeezing his eyes shut.

“
No
,” he snapped. “This is all wrong. He’s telling the story wrong.
You aren’t supposed to be here
. You…you need to talk to my sister. She can explain. Better than I can. I get…confused. My head is foggy.”

“Hey, if they ever have an open visiting day, feel free to introduce me. I just don’t think—”

“No. She can’t come here. But you can talk to her from my cell.”

I grabbed his shoulder.

“Are you telling me,” I said, “that you’ve got a cell phone? Let me borrow it for five minutes, and I’ll talk to anybody you want. Just one phone call, that’s all I need.”

His lips curled, and he gave me a slow, mad-eyed smile.

“Come with me.”