Noble Warrior (17 page)

“No, thank you.”

“What? You ain't eatin'?”

“I keep to a pretty strict diet.”

“Then why'd you let me make the damn thing?”

“'Cause I could see how much joy it brought you.”

Fixer cocked his head sideways. “How much joy it brought me?” Fixer looked at the slice of uneaten cake. “You are acting way too civilized for a person facing more than four
more decades in here.”

“You know my bid?”

“Little hummingbirds,” Fixer said. “They tell me everything.” The old man set down the plate. “You know, you ain't never told me if you got a girl out
there.”

“Yeah, I got a girl.”

“You in love?”

“The worst kind,” M.D. said.

“I was, too,” Fixer said. “She's the reason I'm in here. Two guys raped her at a dance club but they never even got charged. Prosecutor said my gal was dressed too
sexy, dancing too suggestively, had been drinking too much, and was basically asking for it. Courts didn't even try the case.”

“So you took them out yourself?”

“Poisoned their pizza pie. People gotta eat, and there are a million ways to slip some shit into a person's food if you know what you're doing.”

Fixer took a bite of his dessert.

“Judge wanted to make an example out of me. Murder was one thing, but revenge killings based on the fact that the justice system had already weighed the evidence, and since I didn't
like the outcome I took matters into my own hands, and, well...he said society needed to know vengeance like that could not be tolerated.”

Fixer reenacted his judge's final words.

“‘As defenders of the Constitution we must uphold the Constitution.'” Fixer balled his hand into a fist and smashed it onto his knee as if hammering down a gavel.
“The court has spoken.”

“How many more years you got to go?”

“I woulda been out five years ago but I had some time added to my sentence for bad behavior.”

“How much time?”

“Seventy-nine years.”

“Whoa! What'd you do?”

“Killed four more people,” Fixer said, without a sense of remorse in his voice. “Not all at once, of course. At different times and in different ways. In here you do what you
gotta do to survive. It was me or them. Well, guess who's still here?”

Fixer took another bite of cake. “There's a lot of ways to ice a guy in lockup. Beat a man till his brain gives out. Strangle him. It's hard to stab a guy to death, though. The
human body is a lot tougher than you'd think,” Fixer said. “Shanks are dangerous, but unless you get a strike directly into the skull, heart, or neck, the best strategy is to just
go for the leg, that F artery.”

“The femoral artery,” said McCutcheon, a longtime student of human biology.

“Exactly,” Fixer replied. “Stopping the hemorrhaging with an ambulance on its way out in society is hard enough, but you slice that baby in here, it's a long way to a
doctor. Go for the leg and have a fella bleed to death, that's my strategy. They never see it coming.”

This old man has taken six lives, M.D. thought. Wow. Put Fixer in a delicatessen and dress him in a collared shirt and you'd think he was just a regular Joe eating a pastrami sandwich.

“Seventy-nine more years till I am eligible for parole, ain't that something?” Fixer picked up his cake and then set it back down, having suddenly lost his taste for dessert.
“Only two ways out of the D.T., parole or the morgue truck. Me, I've known how I'll be leaving this place for a long time now.”

A moment of silence passed before M.D. pried a little further. Usually, McCutcheon would have given the old guy his space, but M.D.'s next question tugged at him so hard he needed an
answer.

“So what happened to your girl?”

“In my heart, I know she loved me, but then, well...she moved on.” Fixer raised his eyes. “Once ladies come to terms with the fact that a guy ain't never coming back,
like any other creature they got needs, and they move on.”

Fixer walked over to the sink and set down his dish. “And really, who can blame them?”

McCutcheon, clearly not wanting to think about this possibility, hopped up into his bunk and lay down.

“Sorry,” Fixer said noting M.D.'s sudden change of mood. “Guess I shouldn't have said that. Young fella like you probably still holding on to the illusion
she'll wait for ya.”

“It's not an illusion.”

“Sure thing, kid. Sure thing.”

A guard's voice rang down the hall. “Lights-out, Tier Three!” A moment later, darkness arrived.

“Can I ask you something?” M.D. said.

“Shoot.”

“What's it like to kill somebody?”

Fixer scraped the uneaten cake on his plate into the toilet and began rinsing off his dish. The rest of the cake he kept on the shelf. Perhaps he'd use it to trade tomorrow for some
packets of soy sauce.

“What you discover about killing folks is,” the old man said, “that once you done one, there ain't much difference between adding on a second, a third, a fourth, or a
sixth.”

Fixer climbed into bed.

“And if the time comes to do number seven, you figure you'll go on do that one, too.”

C
lick!
The cell door unlocked. It was just after midnight.

“Rise 'n shine, sugar pie. Time for some late-night fun.”

Krewls, along with two other uniformed officers from the night before, stood at the front of McCutcheon's cell, waiting to escort M.D. to the Think Tank. Fixer remained in his bed, eyes
closed, feigning slumber. He fooled no one, yet still he lay there motionless.

After granting M.D. a moment to take a piss and slap some water on his face, the guards led McCutcheon to the same place where the prior night's festivities were supposed to have been
held. Again no audience awaited, no auditorium full of prisoners stood in attendance to cheer on their favorite gladiators in the hall. Instead, this match would be for the guards and the guards
only. Seven of them. Unlike the previous evening, however, when the group stood by the near wall, the guards now waited on the opposite side of the arena, closer to the entrance of Cell One One
Three. Other than that, everything looked very much the same.

M.D. spotted his next opponent, an angular Latino with buzzed hair and dark eyes. Not a big guy, M.D. thought. Wiry, with long arms for his body. Probably a boxing background. McCutcheon took a
closer look at the convict's hands and saw knotted, weathered knuckles.

A boxer for sure.

“And so we try again,” Krewls announced. “I do expect a far different result this time, however.”

A couple of the guards from Jentles smiled as if an inside joke had just been passed, and then one of the officers pushed M.D. forward with a hard shove.

“G'head. Get going.”

M.D. stepped into the center of the Think Tank, eye to eye with his opponent. A heartless glare stared back at him, made all the more intimidating by three small teardrop tattoos dotted beneath
his foe's left eye, the universal prison sign for
I have killed before
.

McCutcheon, calm and poised, glared back, no fear on his face, no fear in his heart.“I do not want to fight you,” M.D. said even though he understood the inevitability of
conflict.

“Wouldn't want to fight me, either,” the man replied with a broken toothed smile.

M.D. shook his head.
Does everyone in this place use the same line?

“Gentleman, I think you know the...”

“I cannot fucking believe this!”

Mends stormed up the corridor his index finger pointing squarely at Krewls.

“You think I'm messing around?” Mends grabbed the Latino prisoner by the arm and barked an order at one of the lower ranking guards.

“Take this man back to his cell right now.”

Silence filled the air. No one moved. Fury from Major Mends rose from his chest like hot steam. Clearly, he could not believe the audacity of these men. Particularly Krewls. For F. Franklin
Mends, this was the straw that broke the camel's back.

“I said now!”

After a look to see what he should do, Krewls nodded and the guard began escorting the Latino prisoner back to his cell.

“And you,” Mends said spinning around to face Krewls. “You are going to burn for this.”

Krewls didn't reply. Instead he just stood there smug and quiet, like he knew something Mends did not.

“You think this is a game? You think I am going to allow this to slide again? I warned you. I warned all of you that—”

Suddenly, the door to Cell One One Three popped open, and like a bat flying from its cave, Goblin leaped onto the shoulders of Officer Mends and bit his ear.

Pharmy stormed forward next, like a bull seeing red. Mends, not having seen either of the attacks coming, took a thunderous forearm from Pharmy to the back of the head, and the major was
stunned.

Though two prisoners attacked one of their fellow officers, not one of the remaining six guards in attendance made a move to help. That's when McCutcheon realized there was never going to
be a fight. It was a trap, and Mends had fallen into it. Teach the do-gooder a lesson, send a message about how things really work in the D.T., that kind of thing. The fighters were merely bait,
and now the fish was on the hook.

Pharmy clubbed the reform-minded Mends with a second forearm shiver to the head. Then a third. The impact of each blow from the nearly four-hundred-pound man hit the major like a sledgehammer,
and Mends's eyes clouded.

A fourth blow rendered him unconscious.

“FEEEEEEEEE!”
Goblin hissed. Pharmy, slow and lumbering, grabbed Mends by the collar of his shirt and began dragging him across the floor toward the entrance of his
cell.

Goblin hopped over Mends, popped inside, and smiled deliciously as if tonight would offer him unprecedented joy. He and his cell mate had been fed many a man before, but never a guard.
Extraordinary torment awaited.

McCutcheon scanned the faces of each of the guards as they watched their peer being dragged to doom.

“Dangerous patrol this corridor, huh?” Krewls chuckled. “Dang old cells; weird how they sometimes just don't stay locked.”

Of the six remaining officers in the Think Tank, three smiled, one remained stone-faced, and two others wore looks of soul-wrenching concern.

Should we stop this? Go help him?
Their faces revealed an inner struggle, a battle between the light and dark part of their hearts.
How had it gotten this far
, they wondered.
How deeply had they sunk?
Neither of them ever imagined something like this would ever occur, yet now it had, and they had no idea what to do.

Frozen by a combination of indecision, cowardice, and fear of reprisal from their corrupt and criminal peers, the two guards simply watched as a monstrously large mentally retarded inmate
dragged one of their own into the prison's darkest dungeon.

Goblin licked his lips.

Mends regained a bit of consciousness and looked up with frightened, pleading eyes. Brave as he was, Mends was not so brave that he was ready to face this. He looked to his partners, an appeal
in his eyes, the sad look of a terrified boy on his face imploring his daddy to help, to please stop this whole thing from happening before the Boogeyman became all too real.

His allies, led by Krewls, did nothing. Mends offered a last bit of struggle, a final attempt to crawl away, but Pharmy cocked another large right hand and punched Major Mends in the back of his
head. A
boom!
rang out. Mends went unconscious. Again.

There would be no more resistance.

McCutcheon led with a side-kick to the back of Pharmy's leg, and followed with an elbow to the giant's ear that caused him to yelp and release his grip on Mends. The major fell like
a sack to the floor, and the eyes of each of the guards from Jentles bulged from their heads, shocked by the sight of what they'd just seen.

He's gonna help him?

Like a demon, Goblin pounced from the darkness into the center of McCutcheon's chest, and the dwarf's momentum carried M.D. to the floor. With fanged, sharpened teeth Goblin bit down
on McCutcheon's shoulder the same way a feral coyote would bite down on the neck of an innocent deer.

McCutcheon screamed in pain as blood ran from the dwarf's mouth, but Goblin's success was short-lived. M.D. threw the dwarf off him with a surge of strength that sent the dwarf
flying nine feet high in the air. He landed with a thud and groaned. Seeing Goblin hurt, Pharmy stormed forward, an angry rhinoceros, and smashed McCutcheon like an offensive lineman mashing a
football sled. M.D. took the hit at full speed and the ferocious tackle bounced M.D.'s skull off the concrete floor, bringing cobwebs to his head. Staggered and instinctively sensing trouble,
M.D. jumped to his feet, knowing he needed to use his speed. Rolling on the ground to battle this monster would be a terrible strategy.