To The Lions - 02 (20 page)

“True,”
Gage responded, admiring the little lady’s spunk, “but in December, January,
February and probably March, you’ll be lucky to even get a showing.
 
Furthermore, judging by the plumbing and the
dust, this house could use a renter to get it back into shape.”

“Be
that as it may,” Señora Moreno said, obviously unaffected by Gage’s negotiation
tactics, “if I were to want to rent it, I
could
rent it.”
 
She turned to Justina and
smiled.
 
“And until today, I had no
desire.”

Expertly
stonewalled, Gage smiled humorlessly back at the older lady.
 
He turned to Justina.
 
“Well?”

“Can
we afford it?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

She
pecked him on the cheek.

Gage
walked to the Audi to retrieve a month’s rent.
 
As he stood outside, a light rain falling on him, he felt as if he were
wearing a leaden suit, the realization thudding down on him that this time two
days from now he would be inside the four walls of Berga Prison.
 
And here, all alone, would be the beautiful
Polish lady he’d so quickly grown to love.

He
tilted his head skyward, blinking the mist away, trying to imagine exactly what
he would be doing on his first day of incarceration.
 
He tried and tried, but he had no idea.

It’s
a good thing he didn’t.

Chapter Twelve

The
van was without any rear windows, equipped instead with a steel cage inside its
cargo area.
 
And in the midst of that
steel cage sat Gage Hartline.
 
There was
no seat or bench.
 
He sat on the hard
steel floor, his backside already aching a mere twenty minutes into the ride.

It
was mid-morning and he knew, from Barcelona, the drive to Berga would take about
an hour-and-a-half.
 
He knew this because
he’d left the cabin at four in the morning to drive to Barcelona, idly
wondering how many men had ever voluntarily driven themselves to the place
where they would be arrested.
 
Next to
him was a brown paper sack containing a bruised apple and a hard piece of
bread.
 
There was a bottle of water loose
on the floor, rolling between two bars each time the vehicle turned.
 
Gage had eyed it earlier—the seal had been
broken by someone else, leaving him without much thirst.

He’d
purposefully hydrated himself over the last two days and, though he knew he
should eat, he had no appetite.

Gage
closed his eyes and thought about last night.
 
Justina had surprised him with a small cake and wonderful meal, which
they ate early, before sitting by the fire pit down by the lake.
 
After ten minutes of discussion over how they
should communicate while Gage was in Berga, Justina stood from her
Adirondack-style chair and sat in Gage’s lap.
 
He ran his hands up and down her long, smooth legs, the feel of her skin
making his hands tingle.
 
They kissed for
what seemed an hour, a small fire crackling before them.

When
the blissful moment had passed, Gage had eyed Justina in the dusk.
 
“You forgot your cigarettes,” he said.
 
Justina always had a smoke after a meal.

“No,”
she replied with a shake of her head.

“Are
you out?
 
You could have gotten some when
we went to the store.”

“I
am out.
 
But I didn’t want to buy any.”

Gage
had stared at her.

“I
quit, Gage.
 
I quit for you.”

“You
didn’t have to do that.”

“You’ve
never complained, but I can tell you don’t like them.
 
It’s okay,” she smiled, playing with his
hair.
 
“I only smoked as a way to pass
the time.
 
Now, I have something better
to think about.”

“You’re
gonna want a cigarette when I’m gone.
 
It’ll be boring out here.”

“Every
time I crave a cigarette, I will write to you.”

“Remember
what I said.”

“I
know,” she replied.
 
“I will use the fake
address.
 
I will never write people’s
actual names or use real places.
 
I will
only mail the letters from far away.”

“That’s
my girl.”
 
The firelight had danced on
Justina’s face, somehow making her more beautiful than she already was.
 
“Thank you, Justina.”

She
kissed him.

Gage
had carried her back to the cabin where they made love well into the
night.
 
The last time, Justina insisted
it be slow and simple, holding Gage to her the entire time, his face next to
hers.
 
When they had finished, as Gage brushed
his lips over hers, he tasted the saltiness of her tears.
 
She had silently cried the entire time.

Remembering
the beauty of last night, Gage tapped his head against the bars of the van’s
cage, trying to stifle his anxiety over where he was headed.
 
While he was anxious about Berga, the thought
of being without Justina for two years made his stomach churn.

Gage
shut his eyes, banging his head again.

“Knock
it off!” one of the guards yelled.
 
They had
talked sporadically throughout the trip.
 
Their Catalan was beyond Gage’s grasp other than a snippet here or
there.
 
The one in the passenger seat
turned and glanced at Gage on occasion, usually curling his lip as if he were observing
a mangy dog.

Stretching
out as far as he could, Gage rested on his back, using the bottle of water as a
makeshift pillow.
 
He lifted his cuffed
hands in front of his face, viewing the tempered steel’s numerous dings and gouges
that dug into his wrists with every subtle movement.

“Be
glad we didn’t hogtie you,
pajillero
,”
the morose-looking passenger guard sneered, switching to Spanish.
 
“We were told to treat you nicely, and that’s
why you’ve got food and water.
 
Be thankful.”

Yeah
,
Gage thought,
everything’s just peachy
back here
.

The
two men spoke more Catalan, both of them suddenly braying laughter.
 
Again the passenger turned, rattling his
coffee thermos on the cage just as Gage had shut his eyes.

“Hey,
Pajillero
, do you know about Berga?”

“What
about it?” Gage asked, keeping his eyes shut.

“Do
you know about it?
 
I shouldn’t have to
say more.”
 
More laughter.

“I
know it’s a prison for murderers.”

“You
brave man, eh?”
 
When Gage didn’t open
his eyes the guard clanged the thermos again.
 
“Look at me when I talk to you,
puta
!”

Gage
opened his eyes, taking a calming breath.
 
Two years of patience, buddy
boy.
 
Live it, breathe it, accept it,
hour by hour.

“The
men in Berga are going to rip your ass apart.
 
Literally.”
 
The guard laughed so
hard that his wheezing overpowered his words.
 
When he recovered, he said, “They’re going to make you into a beautiful woman
if they don’t kill you first.”

Gage
held the man’s eye.

“Look
at you, acting tough now, but just wait.
 
I hope you packed plenty of petroleum jelly.”
 
The guard translated this to the driver and
they both roared with laughter.

Closing
his eyes again, spurred by the man’s mocking, Gage reviewed everything that had
been in the notes provided with the money and satellite phone.
 
There had been a layout of the prison and the
yard.
 
Gage used Google Earth’s satellite
view to augment this information, spending two hours on a library computer
memorizing every feature of the prison property.
 
Also included was an estimate of how many
gang members existed in Berga—the estimate was nearly eighty percent of the
prison population—and what each gang stood for.
 
Such intel could be very useful to Gage in the coming days.

As
the van drove on, Gage thought through all he’d ever learned about hand to hand
combat.

Most earlobes will detach with a
strong yank from pinched fingers.

Eyeballs can be pressed in with thirteen
pounds of thumb pressure.

Pinkie fingers are the easiest
digit to snap, with adult male pinkies typically cracking at their base with no
more twenty-three pounds of pressure.

The best bodily weak points for
attack are at the temples, base of skull, larynx, kidneys, genitals, and the
tibial nerve at the back of the foot.

Feeling
his pulse coming up, Gage reminded himself that he was going into a prison for
violent murderers.
 
There’s no reasoning.
 
No
talking.
 
No fist fights.
 
No ignoring.
 
When you’re confronted, you attack.
 
When you attack, you attack to kill.
 
It’s them or you.

Deep,
steadying breaths.

Them or you.

* * *

Gage’s
first experience in Berga Prison was nothing like he imagined.
 
Expecting to see an arena of unpainted
concrete and rows and rows of iron bars, instead, the inside walls of Berga were
painted a soft yellow.
 
The floors were
linoleum, their color an extremely faint blue and buffed to a high shine that
reminded him of his Army days.
 
He’d not
been treated to an outside view, though he’d seen it the day before during a
reconnaissance drive.
 

Today,
when they’d approached the prison, the guard in the passenger seat, Gage’s
heckler, dropped a black shroud down over the front of the cage, shutting off
all of Gage’s vision.
 
Several times the
van stopped and voices outside the van could be heard, speaking Spanish.
 
Eventually the tires thumped over a ridge and
the sound of a garage door shutting could be heard.
 
Once stopped, the rear doors were opened and
Gage was led from the van by two new guards, both with a hand on his upper arm.
 
Once situated, his cuffed wrists were
unlocked and re-cuffed behind his back.

Glancing
around, happy to stand up, Gage surveyed the details.
 
He was facing the garage door the van had
just driven through.
 
It was
electric.
 
Sliding his eyes upward, Gage
looked at the door’s motor.
 
He then
followed the heavy-duty stainless steel conduit’s path to the switch housing.
 
It was inside a raised guard shack with
mirrored windows on the outer wall.
 
His
eyes moved down to the garage door itself.
 
He noticed, on both sides, clamp-style electromagnetic locks that
probably disengaged when the door switch was flipped.
 
Though he had no plans of trying to escape,
perhaps such a reconnaissance was in Gage’s blood, and he felt somewhat silly
over his crestfallenness that Berga’s security measures seemed, at least
initially, quite good.

The
rest of the warehouse-like room was unremarkable.
 
With a high ceiling of horizontal steel supports
under a corrugated, slightly canted roof, there was little else to see.
 
Painted the faint yellow, the walls were standard
cinderblock, probably one layer thick and likely bolstered by internal rebar.
 
To the left of the garage door were a number of
cardboard boxes of various supplies.
 
Beyond that, where the wall made its ninety-degree turn, Gage could only
see empty shelving.
 
When he dared look
beyond his left shoulder, he was viciously pinched in his left upper arm,
followed by a growl from the guard telling him to stare straight ahead.

Then
they waited.
 
And waited.
 
No one talked and Gage assumed the two guards
in the van were still sitting there.
 
After what must have been fifteen minutes of numbing silence, Gage heard
a door click followed by one person’s footsteps approaching from the rear.
 
They were exactly what he expected, coming
quickly and marked by their distinct tapping.
 
The room must have been quite lengthy because there were a total of 62
clicking steps and they didn’t change pace, meaning
she
was almost certainly walking in a straight line.
 
He did the math…
Calculating those clicks at an average 27-inch female pace count, added
to the thirty or so feet in front of me to the garage door, I’m going to make
the room as about 160 to 170 feet long
.
 

Gage’s
primary assumption was confirmed as a woman emerged.
 
She moved well around him, circling and
standing a good ten feet in front of him.
 
This would be the warden—
la
capitana
, actually.
 
He’d learned a
little about her but he hadn’t envisioned her looking this way.
 

She
was of average height for a woman, her long brown hair held up in a tight bun
behind her head.
 
Wearing a powder blue lab
coat like that of a doctor or a scientist, she held a clipboard in her right
hand, rounding out her erudite appearance.
 
Gage guessed her age as somewhere in her mid-forties and, while she was
still certainly quite attractive, he assumed she had once been striking.
 
Her face, due to the heavy makeup she wore, now
seemed somewhat severe.
 
But her full,
smiling lips and large brown eyes softened her appearance.
 
She was trim with a proud bust-line and, from
below her knee-length skirt, what appeared to be well-toned runner’s legs.
 
As he surveyed her, she surveyed him, finally
asking him, “Habla Espanol?”

“Sí,
un poco.”

Despite
his answer, she spoke excellent English as she viewed her clipboard.
 
“Gregory Harris, United States Citizen,
convicted of second-degree murder in Melilla, our crime-riddled province next
to Morocco.”
 
She looked up, viewing him
behind her large glasses.
 
“And whom did
you kill, Gregory?”