The Killing Floor Blues (14 page)

Jake and Westie waited for me outside the tier-three bathrooms, where I’d had my run-in with Mister Kim. I needed an hour with privacy, no guards and no cameras, and that grimy hellhole was my best bet.

Jake handed me a plastic bag. “Everything you asked for.”

Westie just slid his mop and bucket my way. His usually ruddy cheeks were as pale as Paul’s.

“All right,” I said, “you guys stay out here and stand guard. Don’t let
anybody
come in after me.”

“Mind telling us what you’re gonna be doing in there?” Jake asked.

I smiled. “That’d spoil the surprise.”

Inside, I checked the stalls and made sure I was alone. Then I fished Paul’s soggy hand out of the bucket, tearing off fistfuls of toilet paper and patting it dry. I tossed the damp wads of paper into the closest sink.

I knelt down, the filthy tile hard and cold against my knees, and unfolded Bentley’s instructions before checking the bag Jake had handed me. Everything I needed. Well, almost.

My hacker buddy Pixie had once asked me to explain magic. I’d tried to put it in terms she’d understand and told her magic was the cheat codes for the universe. You carried out the right gestures, the right phrases, made the right sacrifices, and suddenly things that shouldn’t have happened, happened.

That was the simplified version. There was more to it, the foundations every sorcerer had to learn: visualization, breathing, how to raise and channel raw power without giving yourself a heart attack or burning your brain into a charcoal briquette. I could talk to a Taoist alchemist from Hong Kong, a Senegalese medicine man, or a blood witch from the backwoods of Kentucky, and up to a certain point we would all be speaking the same language. Working with the same primal cosmic forces, even if we gave them different names.

The deeper you went into a given tradition of magic, the stranger stuff got. Could I explain why offering the blood of a white dove over graveyard dirt on a Saturday at midnight could help break a family curse? Nope. But I’d been paid to do it, and I knew it worked. That was why, when you were working with somebody else’s spells—especially the really old, really esoteric stuff—it paid to steer as close to the original as possible. You never knew when one tiny change might yank out a metaphysical load-bearing wall and make the whole ritual come crashing down.

I was making a
lot
of tiny changes here.

Instead of a meditative circle of candles, I had a filth-smeared floor and broken toilets. Instead of a murderer’s hand pickled in brine, it’d been marinating in soapy mop water. And
technically
, the murderer was supposed to have been not just executed, but specifically hanged.

The last execution by hanging in the United States was in 1996. You can’t always get what you want.

I laid the hand before me and rested my hands on my knees, palms up. My breath slowed, my pulse slowing with it. The stench and the outside clamor faded away, and so did the light, my world eclipsed in a glowing darkness.

I could hear my heartbeat in my ears. Glacial now, like distant rumbling thunder. A drumbeat for a dirge.

Bentley’s cramped handwriting glowed like blue neon. I felt the words more than read them, the half-Latin, half-English chant rolling off my tongue in a sibilant whisper. As the chant hastened, my pitch deepening, my upturned fingers clenching at shadows, a lance of fire burned up my spine. Power from the dark, raw and eager to be used.

Sleep, now sleep. Silent in my wake. Be as the dead for this dead man’s sake
.

I bent back the rigor-clenched fingers, one by one. The fire in my spine arced across my arms, from my fingertips to the hand’s. Then came the twine, and the final ingredient.

Traditionally, a Hand of Glory’s light burns from white candles, candles rendered from a human corpse. I didn’t have those. What I had was a suspicion that what really mattered wasn’t the candle, or even the flame: it was the smoke.

I unwrapped the cellophane from a pack of Marlboros and shook out five cigarettes.

The chant unceasing, my voice and my hands working in unison, I lashed a cigarette to each of Paul’s fingers with twine. They stood like tiny smokestacks at the end of each bloodless fingernail. I held the hand high above my head, energy coursing into it. The grimy bathroom mirrors rattled in their steel frames, and my ears filled with an electric hum.

“Sleep, now sleep,” I hissed at the climax of the spell, “silent in my wake.
Be as the dead for this dead man’s sake
.”

With a faint
crump
, the cigarettes ignited.

Their tips glowed vivid orange, like alien suns, and sent up wispy streamers of silver smoke. The streamers wrapped around me like tinsel garlands as I rose with my prize clutched in both hands.

Outside the bathroom, Jake and Westie’s energetic conversation suddenly fell silent as the enchantment washed over their senses. They stood there, slack-jawed and empty eyed, toys with their batteries yanked. I walked past them, and the silver smoke trailed behind me. As I climbed down the metal stairs to the hive floor, an oppressive silence spread in all directions.

Heads drooped. Shoulders sagged. Men stood like broken statues, lost in opium dreams. Where I walked, no one saw me. Where I walked, no one saw anything at all.

Ahead, the ultimate test: the ring of red paint around the base of the central guard tower and the sign reading “NO WARNING SHOTS WILL BE FIRED.” I steeled myself, took a deep breath, and stepped over the line.

No shots rang out, and the silver smoke swirled as I strode toward the tower door.

“No lock deters the Hand of Glory,” I whispered, focusing on the key-card reader beside the steel door. “No secrets shall I be denied.”

The red light above the reader flickered and turned green. The door handle clicked. I let myself in.

As I climbed the stairs, weaving past stupefied and slumbering guards, my heartbeat quickened. I had a new problem, and I wasn’t sure how to fix it. My version of the Hand worked just how it was supposed to, despite my substitutions and corner-cutting, but it wasn’t built to last.

A proper Hand was supposed to endure for hours. My improvised cigarette “candles” had already burned halfway down. I had just enough time, if I was lucky, to snag the night-vision goggles and get them back to my cell before the cigarettes burned out and shattered my spell.

The original idea had been to hide the Hand, take it along to help with the raid on the motor pool, and use it to get the prison gates open once we’d secured our rides home. Now I was jogging up the steps two at a time, just to make sure I could get the
first
part of my plan done.

No Hand, no open gates. The shining road to freedom was turning into a great big electrified roadblock.

Focus
, I thought, swallowing down a surge of sudden panic.
Worry about that later. We’ll find another way
.

Another part of me, the part that squirmed in the back of my brain like a cornered rat, wanted to run. Run for the front offices, steal some clothes, and get out. If I were fast, I’d have just enough time to reach the open highway. Hitch a ride to Aberdeen—jack a car if I had to—and figure it out from there.

I couldn’t do it. I’d given my word to Jake and Westie. I could escape alone, right here and now, but I wouldn’t like how I’d feel about myself when the deed was done. Then there was Buddy. If any part of that craziness his twin had shown me was real, the fate of the world might hang on his “message” getting to the right ears.

And I was the only person who could make that happen.

Jablonski sat in a chair overlooking the hive floor, stupefied, sniper rifle cradled in his arms like a newborn son. I resisted the urge to pitch him through the window headfirst. It wasn’t a sense of mercy, just the knowledge that a mysteriously dead guard would lead to the entire prison getting locked down tighter than a bank vault. I turned my gaze to a rack of equipment and monitors along the back wall. There they were: four pairs of black rubber binocular-style scopes with head straps and icy winter-green lenses. I helped myself to a couple and hustled back downstairs.

The cigarettes burned low as I pounded up the steps to my tier, racing for my cell, and flecks of hot ash spilled down onto my hands. I made it just as the first light burned out. The wreath of silver smoke convulsed around me, fraying as if slashed with invisible knives. Then the other four cigarettes burned out one after another, and the magic died.

I stashed the now-useless severed hand under my mattress.
Have fun coming up with a reasonable explanation for that
, I thought. The image pleased me, until I realized they’d probably assume I was a necrophiliac.

Outside the cell, life was back to normal. Cons milling around and shooting the breeze, guards on the catwalks. Nobody noticed the lost minutes.
And there’s Emerson again
, I thought, glancing up,
keeping tabs on the other guards and doing a crap job of being subtle about it
.

I met Jake and Westie outside the bathroom. Westie did a double take, while Jake pushed open the door and peered inside.

“How the hell did you get out of there without us seeing you?” Jake asked.

“Magic. Hey, out of curiosity, if the guards found a severed hand under an escaped prisoner’s bunk, what would they think?”

“Necrophiliac,” Westie said.

“
Major
necrophiliac,” Jake agreed.

Okay, so there might be some embarrassing newspaper articles in my near future. I’d live with it.

“Changing the subject,” I said, “we might have a little hitch in the plan. Don’t worry about it, though. I’m working on it.”

The confidence in my voice was a dirty lie. Without a working Hand of Glory, I had no idea how I was going to get those gates open. With every night in this place bringing the risk of a one-way trip to Hive B, though—and my cell number next on the hit list—we’d never get a better chance than now.

“So,” Jake said, “we good to go? We really doin’ this?”

I spread my hands and smiled.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “let’s break out of prison.”

I met Westie back at my cell. He rolled his bucket past, pushing it by the mop handle, whistling tunelessly. He glanced both ways and pulled out the mop, kicking the empty bucket into my cell. I stopped it with my foot, dropped in the two pairs of night-vision goggles and the knife, and sent it rolling back toward him. He caught it, covered the contraband with the mop, and strolled away as if nothing had happened.

Buddy’s cell was my next stop. He sat on the edge of his bunk, hands clasped in his lap, fidgeting. His mouth moved like he was having a conversation, but no words came out. I knocked softly on his open door. He jumped.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

He just gave me a sad-eyed smile.

“Listen close, okay?” I said. “This is really, really important. Soon a guard’s going to come get you and say you have a visitor.”

His eyes lit up. “I have a visitor?”

“No. I mean, yes, but…just follow the guard. You’ll see me there, too. Just stay behind me, okay? Right behind me, the whole time.”

“It’s good if we leave soon,” Buddy said. “It’s not safe here.”

“Is that what your, uh, sister says?”

His shoulders sagged.

“My sister is dead. Something ate her. It’s okay. I have lots of other voices to keep me company.”

Jake met me on the way back to my cell, falling into step, speaking fast and low.

“On my way to my work shift,” he said. “It’s all set up. Expect three guards, four max—one or two in the booth, two down on the floor.”

“And the distraction?”

“A fire. Small one, something we can put out fast before it sets off the smoke alarms, but it’ll get their attention. I soaked a rag in gasoline last night and stashed it.”

“What about the other prisoners on your shift?”

“Five, tops,” he said. “Could be trouble. We can’t take ’em with, not enough room in the buggies, and they aren’t gonna like that.”

I shrugged. “So we corral them with the guards if they get feisty. Just keep an eye on the clock; your timing has to be
perfect
.”

“It will be.” He thumped my shoulder with his fist. “Mexico, brother. Nothin’ to it, but to do it. I’ll see you at the big show.”

I sat in my cell and waited.

Mostly, I looked for a way to get those gates open. And I wasn’t finding one.

I couldn’t see the outside sky, couldn’t imagine the slow descent of the sun, but I could feel it in my bones. Just like I felt the tension simmering in my gut, that old feeling of nervous energy before taking a score. Normally I’d have a pre-job drink to settle my nerves. With the only options being prison wine or another dose of Buddy’s nauseating pink glop, I figured I’d do this one on an empty stomach.

A guard sauntered by, rattling cell bars with the business end of his truncheon. He glared at me behind beige-tinted sunglasses, his thin lips twitching at the corners.

“Faust! Visitor.”

Our next stop was Buddy’s cell. He fell right in line, shadowing my heels like a puppy. The guard—
Vasquez
, said his nametag—waved us ahead of him. He escorted us past the first gate and through the metal detector, a bulky old warhorse that would have been right at home in a 1970s airport. It didn’t make a peep.

My mental map of the prison unfurled behind my eyes as we walked toward the visitor center.
Here
, I thought, as we prepared to round a bend to the left.
This is the place
.

The next stretch of hall ran about fifty feet, with arrows and big block letters stenciled on the wall pointing the way to the visitor center, the front offices, and the motor pool.

No cameras. Just a pair of convex security mirrors perched high in a corner at each end, like you might see in a convenience store. As close to privacy as we would get.

And here was Westie, still whistling as he rolled his bucket along, strolling toward us from the other direction.

I’d hoped to hit Vasquez from behind. That would have been the easy way. He wasn’t having any of it, though, forcing Buddy and me to walk directly in front of him. The bucket rolled closer, time running out fast.

I dropped to one knee, quickly tugging at my shoelace. The knot unfurled, falling free. “Hey,” Vasquez said, looming over me. “On your feet.”

I gestured to my shoe. “Laces came untied. Give me a second, huh?”

Westie saw my play. He changed his angle of approach, moving closer to the middle of the hall. Vasquez didn’t give him a second glance. He was too busy standing over me with his hands on his hips, glaring like I’d personally ruined his day.

Funny, that was the next thing on my agenda.

I finished reknotting my shoelace as Westie passed, bringing the bucket right next to me. Without a word he yanked the mop from the bucket, twirled it in his hands, and hit Vasquez like a battering ram, pinning him against the wall with the mop handle bracing his shoulders. I snatched the knife from the bucket, spinning it in my grip. Vasquez already had his gun out by the time I lunged. He pressed the barrel into Westie’s belly, and I pressed the blade to Vasquez’s neck.

“Pull that trigger,” I hissed, “and your wife’s a widow.”

He froze.

“Listen to me.” I pressed the knife harder. Not hard enough to cut, just hard enough to make him feel the blade every time he took a breath. “I don’t want to kill you. And you don’t want to die. So I’m going to take your gun now, and you’re going to let me. Understood?”

His eyes narrowed in disgust, but he nodded as much as he dared. I clamped my free hand over the barrel of his pistol and gave it a tug. His fingers went limp as I pulled the gun away.

“Turn around,” I said. “Get moving. Nice and easy.”

I passed the knife to Westie. He kept it close to his hip. As we walked by the bucket, he crouched down, grabbed the two night-vision goggles, and handed them to Buddy.

“Do I put these on now?” Buddy asked.

“You guys,” Vasquez snarled, “are morons. Nobody’s ever escaped Eisenberg.
Nobody
. And more people have tried than you think.”

“I’m an overachiever,” I told him.

“You’re all dead men. Dead, or you’re heading straight for Hive B.”

I jabbed the small of his back with the gun barrel. “What’s in Hive B?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Aren’t you a ray of sunshine,” I said. “Take a left up here.”

“Motor Pool” read the black block letters on the wall, with an arrow pointing the way. At the end of the corridor, a barred access gate blocked our path. And behind that stood the tall steel double doors leading to our final destination.

“When we get up to the gate,” I said softly into Vasquez’s ear, “you need to get us through. If you warn your buddy, if you stall, if you do
anything
that doesn’t result in that gate opening with zero delay, I’ll put a bullet in your spine. I said I don’t want to kill you. Doesn’t mean I won’t.”

“The garage?” Vasquez replied. “Oh, yeah, nobody’s
ever
tried escaping that way before. Real good plan you’ve got there. Slick.”

We approached the gate. On the opposite side, a doughy-faced guard who looked barely a day out of high school sat at a stool behind a small bank of controls. I kept the gun easy in my hand, making sure Vasquez could feel it pressed to his back.

“Three coming through,” he told the guard through the bars.

He shook his head. “You sure? Work detail’s almost over.”

A tiny trickle of sweat beaded on Vasquez’s forehead.

“Positive. C’mon, I’m late for my dinner break.”

“Sure, sure,” the gate guard said. He turned a key in the console and pushed a button. The gate rattled open on electric tracks. As we walked through, he glanced at the empty holster on Vasquez’s belt.

“Hey,” he said, “where’s your gun?”

“Here,” I replied and pressed the barrel to his forehead. Westie stepped in fast and got the knife back against Vasquez’s throat. Everybody turned into statues.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Mc—McGuiness,” he stammered.

“You get the same deal he gets,” I said, nodding toward Vasquez. “You stay cool, you get to go home to your family tonight. Can you stay cool, McGuiness?”

He nodded like a bobblehead doll.

“Good man,” I said and took the gun off his belt. I passed it over to Westie and got McGuiness on his feet. “What time is it?”

McGuiness raised his trembling hand just enough to glance down at his cheap Timex. “Four minutes after six.”

Right on schedule. We pushed the guards through the double doors ahead of us just as Jake’s distraction fired off. I had the space of a heartbeat to take it all in: the cavernous garage, bay doors open to a violet Nevada sunset, and harsh white light pouring down from stark steel fixtures high above. The transfer bus parked on one end of the repair bay, buggies on the other, and a handful of sweaty, shirtless cons doing a wash-and-wax job on a couple of guards’ personal cars. Booth in the back at the top of a short flight of corrugated metal stairs, two guards sitting snug behind bulletproof glass. A third guard pacing the floor, his back turning as a flash of hot orange flared under one of the parked cars.

“
Fire
,” Jake shouted, scrambling around the car. That got the booth guards moving; they came thundering down the steps, one with a fire extinguisher. Westie and I shoved our hostages to the floor. The guard by the cars spun, saw us, and froze; between the fire and the guns, it was one crisis too many for his brain to handle. He got his priorities right and reached for his pistol just in time to catch Jake’s granite fist across his jaw. He dropped, out cold, and Jake grabbed his piece.

We kept our guns on the booth guards. The fire extinguisher fell, clanging as it bounced down the metal steps. One of the guards gave a shifty look toward the door and wavered on his feet, like he was thinking about running back to the booth and locking himself inside.

“This bullet can fly twenty-five hundred feet in one second,” I told him. “Can you run faster than that?”

He stayed put.

“Jake,” I barked, “get that fire out before it sets off the smoke detectors. Westie, disarm the booth guards. I’ll keep you covered. Buddy, lock the doors behind us.”

The motor pool was ours. No alarms, no blood, nice and clean. All I could think about, though, were the prison gates that stood between us and freedom.

The hard part wasn’t over. It hadn’t even started yet.