The Killing Floor Blues (9 page)

I hid the phone under my mattress, along with the knife. I’d be screwed if the guards decided to search my cell, but then again, it wasn’t like they could add more years to my life sentence.

Then I waited.

I paced. I did push-ups against the eggshell-white wall. I hooked my feet on the end of my cot and did sit-ups until my stomach muscles burned. Killing the hours, one endless minute at a time. Christmas was never really a thing at my house when I was young—every dollar my old man earned went straight to the liquor store—but now I could imagine what it’d feel like to be a kid on Christmas morning, waiting until I could finally open my presents.

My present arrived in the form of a bored-looking guard coming to escort me to the visitor center. We didn’t go straight there; two other prisoners on the tier had guests waiting, and he collected us all before marching us single file down the maze of corridors.

Once we arrived it took everything I had to keep from running over to Bentley and Corman, throwing my arms around them, and hugging them like a drowning man hugs a life preserver. As it was, all it took was Bentley’s hand on my shoulder to draw a bark of “
No
physical contact” from one of the guards.

I bit back the urge to tell him where he could stick his rules. Instead, I sat down, took a deep breath, and tugged my folded rap sheet out of my pocket.

“You need to see this,” I said. “But first, were you able to get hold of Jennifer?”

Bentley’s brow furrowed. “Nobody’s seen her. Her, Nicky, Nicky’s, er, little helpers…”

“And your lawyer too,” Corman muttered, “but we know why
that
shyster went into hiding. Caitlin told him she’d skin him alive if he lost your trial.”

I unfolded the printout, smoothing it out on the table between us.

“I didn’t have a trial.”

“What do you mean?” Bentley asked. “Cormie and I were there, every single day.”

I tapped the corner of the page where the words faded into a smeared blob. “What’s this say? What day was I arrested?”

“September sixteenth,” Corman replied.

“And what day is today?”

“The eighteenth.”

“And how did four months pass between then and now?” I asked.

Bentley fished inside his vest, taking out a slim pair of bifocals. He slipped on the glasses, squinting at the page. Corman just frowned like he was trying to do long division in his head.

“Don’t know what you mean,” Corman said.

This wasn’t working. I had to find some way of attacking the curse at its root. Pointing out the impossibility of the date didn’t seem to dent it; the facts just slipped in one ear and out the other.

“Okay,” I said, “you were both at the trial. Who was the first witness?”

“It was—” Bentley started. He looked at Corman, who blinked.

“I think it was one of the cops,” Corman said. “Wasn’t it? It was.”

“It was,” Bentley agreed. The momentary confusion on their faces ebbed away, replaced by absolute clarity. Clarity that only became stronger as they told me about the polite young officer, filling in each other’s half-finished sentences and painting more and more details—more detail than anyone could possibly remember four months after the fact.

It’s like a virus
, I thought.
The damn curse is rooting itself deeper in their heads while I’m trying to purge it. Like a self-defense mechanism
.

I tried a second time, asking about the jury. Starting from halting reminiscences, over the course of five minutes they went on to completely “remember,” and describe in photographic detail, all twelve jurors down to the color of their socks.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s try this. You both remember the last day of the trial?”

“Of course we do,” Corman said. “What are you getting at anyway?”

I held up a finger. “One question. Not about the trial, not about the courtroom, just that day. That morning. I want you to tell me…what you had for breakfast.”

“It was…” Bentley’s voice trailed off, leaving a space as empty as the look in his eyes.

Corman just stared at me, uncertain.

“C’mon,” I said. “It was the last day of the trial. I’m sure you can remember how you felt, the lawyers’ summations, all of it, right? It was a big, big day for all of us. So tell me what you had for breakfast.”

“I don’t seem to recall,” Bentley said. “Maybe my stomach was too upset to eat.”

“How about dinner?” I asked.

Corman winced. He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed a calloused knuckle against his forehead.

“Tell me anything about what happened
outside
the courtroom in the last four months,” I said. “Anything you remember. Bentley, you read at least one book a week. What were the last five books you read? Who were the authors?”

Bentley touched his glasses with trembling fingertips, staring down at the rap sheet.

“Oh dear,” was all he said.

“Corman, how’s your fantasy football league going? You play every year. I’ve seen you obsess over your team’s stats like it’s a matter of life or death. So. You winning?”

Corman leaned his head back, taking a ragged breath. His eyelids snapped open.

“You see it now,” I said.

“How did we not?” Bentley whispered, horrified. “You were arrested two days ago. I see it, plain as day, but just a moment ago I couldn’t. I just
couldn’t
. There was no trial, but I…I
remember
it. I was
there
.”

Corman dragged the printout closer, his fingers rapping against the blurry text.

“Someone laid one hell of a whammy on us,” he growled.

“Not just on you. On
everybody
. People I’ve never even
met
somehow lose the ability to understand a calendar the second my so-called ‘trial’ comes up.”

“I’m not fond of the word ‘impossible,’” Bentley said, “but if you’d asked me yesterday if such a thing could be done, I’d have dismissed it out of hand. Troubling. Very troubling.”

“It gets worse,” I said and gave them a rundown of my vision trip with Buddy and Cassandra. I left out the part about the assassins in the shower; they didn’t need me piling any more worry on their shoulders.

“It appears—” Bentley fell abruptly silent as a guard strolled past our table. He waited, then spoke in a grave whisper. “It appears that what we require, first and foremost, is an
exit strategy
.”

“You’re reading my mind,” I told him. “I’ve got some interested parties who might want to join in on the fun. What I’m going to need, on your end, is logistical support. Specifically a few books in your back-room collection.”

Corman shook his head. “We can mail you a care package, but I gotta think everything gets searched and double-searched. They gonna let that through?”

I hadn’t thought of that. Antique books of black magic probably weren’t on the approved-items list. I could make do with just a few relevant pages once I knew exactly what I needed for the plan, but my gaze drifted to the big block-letter rules on the wall.
No passing of materials between convict and visitors
.

“But legal paperwork,” I said, thinking out loud. “I have a right to that, don’t I?”

Corman arched an eyebrow. “What’s the angle, kiddo?”

“Still figuring that out. You’re sure Perkins ran for the hills?”

“If he was subject to the same illusion we were,” Bentley said, “then he fully believes he lost the case. Remembers it happening, even. I don’t expect he’ll show his face anytime soon.”

A red-tinted light on the wall flashed and emitted a short, sharp electric buzz. Visiting hours were over.

“I’ll call you,” I said quickly, “and Emma Loomis—you remember her, from that whole Redemption Choir mess? She’s going to get in touch with you first thing in the morning. Tell her everything I told you. She’s trying to get a message to Caitlin.”

We all rose together, plastic chairs squeaking on the tile floor.

“Watch your ass, kiddo,” Corman told me, “and let us know once you’ve got a game plan.”

“You’ll know the second I do. Do me a favor: hit the books and see if you can find anything that resembles what Cassandra told me. It all sounded…archetypical. Like some weird-ass take on a tarot deck.” I thought back, rattling off the names I could remember. “The Prophet, the Enemy, the Paladin…the Thief, the Witch and her Knight. I think she said it all originated in some kind of story. Maybe a fairy tale, I don’t know. It’s worth following up on.”

Bentley held up a finger. “I’ll see what I can dig up. Just one question: how did
you
break the curse?”

“Easy,” I said. “C’mon, sentenced to life in prison? That’s how I knew something was fishy. You would have moved heaven and earth to get me out of here.”

Bentley smiled thinly, with a mischievous glint in his eye.

“You make the plan, son,” he said, “and we’ll warm up the bulldozers.”

*     *     *

We hid in plain sight. Down on the open floor, in clear view of the central guard tower and surrounded by milling convicts, I commandeered a folding table and Westie bummed a deck of cards. Jake and Paul joined us, a perfect foursome for bridge. That was what we pretended to play, anyway—ignoring our hands and idly flipping cards to look busy—while we talked it out in low, furtive voices.

“Seems to me,” I said, “the main road’s a no-go. No guarantee we can get out without setting off an alarm, and if we do, we’re sunk. The highway patrol will have roadblocks up on I-80 twenty minutes before we get there.”

Westie shot a glance over his shoulder. “The desert, then? We’ll stick out like a devil in church. Choppers’ll run us down before we make it five miles.”

“Not if we play it right. Paul, you said it could be done on an all-terrain vehicle. On my way to the visitor center, I saw a sign pointing toward the prison motor pool. Do the guards actually
have
an ATV?”

“I said it could be done,” he murmured into his cards, “and I also said you’d be seen by day and crash by night. There
is
no ‘right way.’”

“They got ’em, though,” Jake said. “I work the garage detail. They’ve got dune buggies, two of ’em. Supposedly for rescue and retrieval, in case some prisoner’s dumb enough to try to escape across the desert on foot, but mostly the guards just take ’em out to tear around and have fun after hours.”

“And they can go the distance?” I asked.

“Hell yeah they can. They’re Wildcat Sport XTs. Four-stroke engines, double A-arm suspension, front differential locks. Those babies can haul ass.”

“Which isn’t going to mean a thing,” Paul said, “when you ram straight into a boulder in the dark. Or run off a ridge and flip over. And forget daytime—I don’t care how fast they are, they’re not faster than a helicopter.”

“You work garage detail,” I said. “So you have access to those buggies?”

Jake snorted and slapped a couple of cards on the table. “Yeah, to wash and wax. All the keys are in a lockbox up in a guard booth, and there’s always at least one guy on duty, usually two. Might as well be sealed up in Fort Knox, for all the chance I’d have to snatch ’em. Garage detail mostly means cleaning the guards’ personal vehicles. That and scrubbing sand off the transfer buses.”

“So what’re you thinking about?” Westie asked me.

I laid my cards down, spreading them out on the table.

“Our exit strategy,” I said. “Here’s how we’re going to do it.”

“Jake,” I said, “how late do the garage details run?”

He shrugged. “Depends on the day. Sometimes as late as five. We knock off just before the dinner bell rings.”

My fingers danced over my cards, turning them, laying them out like a crude pasteboard map as I drew upon my memories of the walks to and from the visitor center.

“Here’s the hive,” I said, tickling the face of the jack of hearts, “and here’s the exit checkpoint. From here you can reach the visitor center or, turning left on this corridor, head toward the motor pool.”

“Yeah,” Jake said, “there’s another checkpoint at the end, though. Sealed gate, and the guard on the other side has to buzz you through.”

“Speaking of guards,” I said, “they don’t have nearly enough of them. That’s the flaw in their armor. One flaw, anyway. I just had a visitor; so did a couple of other guys. They sent one guard to walk us all there and back again. Is that common?”

“Sure.” Westie nodded up toward the central tower. “They all want to play at being a badass sniper up in the towers. Prisoner-escort duty is shit work.”

I tapped the card that stood in for the access hallway.

“That’s how we do it. See, right around the end of visiting hours, while Jake’s working in the motor pool, the rest of us are going to get visitors.”

Paul shook his head. “Nobody’s come to visit me in years.”

“That’s okay. I’ve got a bunch of friends on the outside. They’ll be your friends, too. It won’t matter anyway, because we won’t be
going
to the visitor center.”

Jake put the pieces together quick. “Four men against one guard.”

“I figure you all heard about the dustup in the showers this morning,” I said. “I took a knife off one of the hitters. Mean-looking mother of a blade, too, not some two-bit shank. Right here, at the hallway bend, that’s where we do it. Convex mirrors here and here, but no camera coverage.”

“You gonna carve him a new smile?” Westie asked.

I shook my head. “Not if I don’t have to. A live hostage is more valuable than a corpse. I figure we introduce ourselves and ‘convince’ him to walk us over to the motor pool. If he can talk us through that checkpoint, we’re halfway home. If not, I take his gun and
make
the checkpoint guard open up for us. Either way, once we’re through, we bum-rush the place. Jake, you’ll already be on the scene, so we’ll need you to create a distraction. Something to draw the guards out of that booth with the keys, so we can jump them from behind.”

Jake rubbed the thick stubble on his granite jaw. “Yeah, I can do that. I’m pretty good at causing a commotion. Now, those Wildcats are two-seaters. There’s five of us, so somebody’s gonna have to hang on tight to the back. Strap a couple of gas cans to each buggy, so we can go the distance…damn, I think this might actually work.”

“Two problems,” Paul said. “First, no matter which way we go, there are two ten-foot gates standing between us and freedom. One of which is electrified.”

“We’ll have hostages,” Westie told him.

“Uh-uh. Getting through a checkpoint by threatening a hostage? That’s one thing. But if we call up Warden Lancaster and tell him we’ve got his men, he won’t open the gates for us. He’ll lock the whole prison down and send in a ‘rescue’ team with orders to shoot us on sight.” Paul tossed a card onto the table and scooped up another pair. “And I repeat, once again, you can’t cross the desert in the dark. We won’t make it five miles without headlights.
With
headlights, we get spotted by the choppers. Same outcome.”

I glanced up to the tower. The shadows of men prowled behind the smoky glass, rifles slung over their shoulders. I thought back to my first night behind bars, watching them in the dark.

“After the hive goes into lockdown for the night,” I said, “the tower guards put on night-vision goggles. Fancy gear. I figure, we get our hands on a couple of pairs, and whoever drives the Wildcats—”

“Dibs,” Jake said.

“—whoever drives,” I repeated, “won’t
need
headlights to see.”

Paul nodded toward the span of open space around the tower, marked off by a fat stripe of red paint.

“You see that line?” he asked me. “That’s not a joke. You take one step across it, even by accident, they
will
gun you down. I’ve seen it happen. How the hell are we going to get to the top of the tower, let alone steal two pairs of night-vision goggles?”

“That’s my job,” I said. “Opening the gate, too, that’s on me. I just need to know if you’re down for the rest.”

Westie gave me a long, hard look. Taking my measure.

“I’m game—for my part of the job—but if you foul this up, we’re all gonna be flatliners. You’re sure you can pull this off, friend? Would you bet your life on it?”

“I
am
betting my life on it,” I told him.

“I’ve heard things about you,” Jake said. “Some of the shit Winslow’s said when he’s drunk…yeah, all right. If it was anybody else, I’d walk away. But if you say you can do it, you can do it. I’m in.”

Paul looked down at the cards in his hands, like he was searching for some meaning there, or just a little good advice. His shoulders slumped.

“This is reckless, stupid, and probably going to get us all killed,” he said with a sigh, “but maybe that’s better than another forty years in this hellhole. Sure. What the hell. I’m in. What about the Prof? Are we sure he’s up for it?”

“He’ll be up for it,” I said. “I think we’re all in agreement that we go sooner rather than later, yes? It’s going to take me a couple of days to get everything I need, so I say we do it the night after tomorrow. Two days between us and freedom. All in?”

Jake and Westie bumped fists. All in. I looked to Paul.

“I know this prison is run on a shoestring, but do they have any kind of a library?”

He shrugged. “If you can call it that.”

“Do they have atlases? Maps?”

“They have some middle-school American history books,” he told me. “Close enough?”

“It’ll have to be. You’re on navigation duty. ‘Drive south until we hit the Mexican border’ is a good idea in theory, but a lousy plan. I want you to figure out the best course to take. What roads we’ll eventually cross over and which cities and towns we might pass close to on our way out of Nevada. Ideally, we’ll want to find a remote spot close to the edge of civilization, dump the buggies, and steal fresh transportation to cover our tracks. Can you handle that?”

“I’m on it,” Paul said.

“Good. Westie, we’ve got one checkpoint—and one metal detector—to pass through on our way out of the hive. Now, I know people manage to get shanks through there; I saw somebody get stabbed my first hour on the yard. How do they do it?”

“Easy as peaches,” he said. “Lots of ways. Routine makes the guards sloppy. Case in point, I’m on cleaning detail most weeks. They give me an old wheeled rust bucket to slop water around in, and it sets off the detector every single time. They pat me down, but they don’t give the bucket a second glance.”

“So if you stash something in there,” I said, “and rest your mop on top of it—”

“Like I said, easy.”

“I need you to find a secure spot, right about here,” I said, sliding my finger along the playing-card ‘map,’ “and arrange to be mopping the floor when the rest of us pass by with the guard. I’ll give you the knife beforehand to smuggle through the metal detector. Is that doable?”

Westie pursed his lips, staring down at the cards. He tossed down his hand and crossed his arms over his chest.

“Aye. Got some ideas already.”

“Jake,” I said, “your part’s obvious: the motor pool. Scope it out from end to end. I want guard numbers, rotation timing, layout, anything that’ll give us an edge. And figure out a good distraction for when we make our play. We’ll need to take control fast to keep anybody from radioing for help. We’ve got zero margin for error here.”

“Can do,” he said.

“And while you’re all doing that, I’ll work out the gate and the goggles.” I gathered up the ‘map,’ shuffling the cards back into the deck. “When we get to Mexico, first round’s on me.”

We played cards for real after that, with nothing to wager but bragging rights. Anything to kill a little time. My head wasn’t in the game; I was attacking the problem, trying to figure out what I could pull from my bag of tricks. My gaze kept drifting upward, to the tower and the maze of metal walkways that filled the hive like the strands of a steel spiderweb.

Emerson—the guard who’d brought me in from processing, the one Paul said hadn’t been here long enough to pick up bad habits—strolled the upper walkways. It didn’t take long to realize what was off about him, and another few minutes of casual observation confirmed it.

He wasn’t watching the prisoners. He was watching the other guards.

I filed it away in the back of my mind, something to ponder—or not—once the real work was done. I’d taken the two biggest parts of this escape plan onto my shoulders, and it wasn’t just
my
ass in the fire if I couldn’t pull it off. While I played cards on autopilot, doing back-brain math and moves I’d learned by rote, my thoughts drifted back to older, happier times.