The Killing Floor Blues (17 page)

I got the idea, fast, when the guards dragged two prisoners out of the lineup. They stood them front and center before the audience, unshackling them while Lancaster worked the room. They kept a ten-foot buffer between the open floor where the prisoners stood and the first rows of tables. A buffer thick with old, dried stains on the concrete.

“Diego Antunez,” Lancaster boomed, “a triggerman for the Cinco Calles, with an estimated seven kills to his name on the outside. Of course, he eliminated his enemies with a gun and by surprise, so take that for what it’s worth.”

Laughter from the crowd. Clinking glasses. My stomach clenched.

“And Russell Finch. Stick-up man. No kills on the outside,
two
on this very floor. He’s smaller, but is he faster on the draw? Betting closes in thirty seconds, ladies and gents, so make your choices now!”

Slips of paper, some pink and some green, flew like a ticker-tape parade. The audience shoved them in fistfuls at the waiters and piled them on serving trays.

Lancaster stepped aside and nodded to the guards. They made their selections from the wire racks: a short-hafted sledgehammer, and a Black and Decker chainsaw with a fourteen-inch blade. The weapons went sliding across the smooth, hard floor, skidding to a stop near the convicts’ feet.

Antunez and Finch stared at each other, bodies tensed, knees bent and ready. Frozen in time. Then a klaxon rang out from the guard tower—one short, sharp air-horn burst. They scrambled for the weapons, snatched them up and jumped back, trying to get some fighting room. Finch hefted the chainsaw. He pulled the cord to start the engine. Nothing happened.

Antunez saw his chance and charged, whipping the sledgehammer down for a killing blow. Finch darted out of the way, frantically tugging the cord, wearing his terror on his face. Antunez overshot, stumbling, almost tripping over the hammer as he tried to recover.

On the fifth pull, the chainsaw sputtered to life, deadly teeth whirring with a screech like nails on a blackboard.

Antunez spun with another wild, desperate swing for Finch’s head. Finch brought up the chainsaw; its teeth chewed into the hammer’s handle, the sudden kickback sending them both staggering, fighting to keep a grip on their weapons. Finch screamed, shrill as the saw in his double-handed grip, and charged with the blade pointed straight for Antunez’s belly.

Antunez backpedaled, raising the hammer high, and brought it down on the saw. The chainsaw jolted from Finch’s grip, hitting the floor, kicking up hot orange sparks as the blade chewed into concrete. Stunned, Finch needed a second to recover. Antunez didn’t.

The iron head of the sledgehammer slammed against Finch’s skull like the grill of a freight train, buckling his head back and snapping his neck. Finch might have still been alive when he hit the floor. Antunez wasn’t taking any chances. He dropped the hammer and grabbed the now-silent chainsaw, revving it back to life with one brutal yank on the cord.

He pressed the grinding blade to Finch’s throat, wet gore spattering his face as he sawed what was left of the man’s head from his body, and the crowd went wild. I looked away from the carnage, but what I saw in the audience only made me feel sicker. They hooted and cheered, pumping their fists in the air like frat boys at a strip club. One couple, shadowed in candlelight, were wrapped tight in each other’s arms. Making out while a man was chainsawed to death for their entertainment.

The teeth chewed into Finch’s spine, got caught in the bone, sputtered again, and died. Antunez left the blade half-buried in his victim’s neck and staggered back, panting. His eyes were as glassy and dead as his victim’s. The guards quickly shackled him again, leading him away while the audience hammered their tables and screamed for more.

Warden Lancaster took center stage, laughing, waving the crowd into silence while his staff cleaned up the mess behind him.

“Now, how was that for an appetizer? Do we not deliver, ladies and gents?
Do we not deliver?
”

Under a fresh torrent of applause, the guards came back to our lineup. One grabbed Simms. Jablonski grabbed me.

“Time to pop your cherry,” he said, grinning like a hyena as he clamped his hand around my elbow.

“Hey,” I said, “Jablonski.”

He paused. Our eyes met.

“Just so you know, I’m going to kill you.”

He snorted. “Better do it fast. I’m betting you’ve got about three minutes left to live. Got a chunk of my next paycheck riding on it, as a matter of fact.”

They stood us in front of the crowd, side by side, and unlocked our shackles. I felt the heat of the audience’s eyes, a gang of hungry raptors eager for their next meal. They sized me up like I was a piece of meat in a butcher-shop window.

“Leroy Simms,” the warden announced with a flourish. “Stick-up man, extortionist, arsonist. One-time winner—and what a fight that was! Can’t go wrong betting on this big bruiser.”

He gestured toward me now, his smile bright.

“Or can you? We’ve got a new contender tonight: Daniel Faust, former hit man for a Vegas crime syndicate. This one’s a wild card, ladies and gents, with long-shot odds to match! Thirty seconds to go, so get those bets in now.”

He looked on as the tickets flew and the waiters scrambled to collect the bids. “Warden,” I said.

Lancaster turned, eyebrows raised. Like he was surprised I had a voice.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “This is…this is
sick
. You have to know that. These are human beings.”

He cupped his palm over the microphone and shook his head.

“Son, you stopped being a human being the second you came into my prison. You’re a
commodity
. Think about it: you ain’t never gonna see the outside one way or another. Civilized society wants you
gone
. Locked up ’til you rot. So why shouldn’t I capitalize on that? You oughta thank me. I’m making your death mean something.”

He gestured to the guards by the weapon racks. As he walked off to the sidelines, he glanced back at me over his shoulder.

“Besides,” he drawled, “I got a retirement fund and a brand-new Cadillac to pay for.”

I turned to Simms. He wasn’t the same man who’d tried to shake me down my first day behind bars. His one good eye had a thousand-yard stare and he twitched like a caged animal, over two hundred pounds of muscle and barely constrained rage.

I hadn’t stood a chance against him the first time we fought. And this time, if he got me on the floor, no guards were coming to my rescue.
So don’t let him
, I thought.
No matter what happens, can’t let him turn this into a ground fight
.

His right eye, that was the key. Whatever had happened in his debut fight, that ragged line of stitches meant he was good as blind on one side. If I could get on his right and stay there, I might have a fighting chance.

The guards picked out our weapons for the bout. A baseball bat came rolling toward me, jolting to a stop against my shoe. Barbed wire wrapped the length of the stout wooden shaft, spikes caked with dried blood.

Simms got a machete.

The air horn blared and the crowd cheered, and I snatched up the bat. Simms barreled at me, roaring like a bull, swinging the machete wild and fast. I darted left, aiming for his blind spot, and brought up the bat with both hands to knock the blade aside. His beefy fist cracked against my cheekbone like a pile driver, sending me crashing to the concrete and seeing stars. No time to recover: I rolled, fast, as the machete swooped down and chopped into the floor with a thundering
clang
.

I came up in a crouch on his blind side, pulled back, and swung the bat two-handed with everything I had. Simms howled as his kneecap shattered like a porcelain plate. He fell as I rose. No time for thought, no hesitation, I just gritted my teeth and whipped the bat around and slammed it against the back of his skull.

Simms lay sprawled at my feet, face to the concrete. Panting, spent, I unclenched my fingers. The bat tumbled from my hand and clattered onto the killing floor. Applause and cheers washed over me, but I could barely hear it over the ringing in my ears. Everything was a million miles away. Everything but Simms.

Lancaster frowned and nodded to a guard. The guard crouched at Simms’s side, putting his fingers to the big man’s neck. He shook his head at Lancaster and stepped back.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the warden announced, “the fight’s not over yet! Our friend Simms is still breathing. What weapon will Faust use for his finishing move? Will he make it fast, or slow? C’mon, give him some encouragement, folks!”

I stood transfixed by the frenzied cheering. Paralyzed. Cold blood trickled down my cheek from a stinging gash. I could barely remember how I’d gotten it.

“Fight’s not done until only one man’s breathing,” Lancaster told me, growling into the microphone. “Time for the money shot, Faust. Give these people what they paid for. How many people have you killed? This is just one more body.”

“No,” I said, and the crowd fell into a confused hush.

I looked to the audience, seething.

“Forget it,” I shouted. “I don’t kill for fun. I’m sure as hell not going to kill for
your
fun. You want him dead? Do it yourself.”

Now the applause turned into scattered boos and jeering. The warden calmed them down with a reassuring wave of his hand.

“Folks, folks, it’s all good. Our new contender just doesn’t know how this works yet. Lemme clarify for him.”

Lancaster raised his hand high and snapped his fingers. I followed his gaze down to my chest.

A neon-green pinpoint hovered over my heart.

“The rules are, kill or be killed,” Lancaster told me, “no exceptions. You’ve got thirty seconds. If Mr. Simms is not dead at the end of those thirty seconds, well…I’m afraid my sniper in the guard tower will have to invoke the ‘sudden death’ playoff rule.”

He glanced at his watch.

“And the clock starts…now.”

You can go your entire life believing you have principles. Believing there are lines you’d never cross, deeds you’d never commit, even at the cost of your own life. And if you’re lucky, nobody will ever put those principles to the test.

I picked up the bat.

Lancaster was right. I had plenty of blood on my hands, and while I’d love to pretend I’d only pulled the trigger in self-defense, that’d be a dirty lie. All these years, though, I’d held myself up by one fragile string, one solitary rule I kept sacred: I’d never killed anybody who didn’t have it coming to them. Criminals like me and monsters like me, sure, they were fair game. People who willingly lived the life and knew the risks. But not civilians. And never innocents.

Simms might not be what most people would call “innocent,” but in my book he was. He hadn’t asked to be a part of this, hadn’t signed up for these bastards’ sick game. They’d put a weapon in his hand and forced him to fight, and only the luck of the draw put him facedown on the blood-slick concrete instead of me.

“Twenty seconds,” Lancaster said, eyeing his watch.

When you don’t adhere to many principles in life, you guard the ones you do have. They’re the only things that let you look yourself in the mirror in the morning, that let you pretend, every once in a while, that you’re a good person deep down inside.

“Fifteen seconds,” Lancaster purred into the microphone. “Son, you’d best get to it.”

When I decided, I decided in a heartbeat. It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t a debate at all.

I wanted to live more than I wanted to feel like a good person.

I raised the bat with both hands and brought it down on Simms’s head, gritting my teeth as the wood cracked and the handle snapped, sending a jolt up my arms. He didn’t die. He spasmed, arms and legs flopping like a fish drowning on dry land. I left the broken bat embedded in the back of his skull, splintered wood and barbed wire matted in crushed flesh and bloody bone.

“Seven seconds,” Lancaster said.

I snatched up the fallen machete. The first chop went halfway into Simms’s neck, snapping his spine. He still wouldn’t die. He let out a rattling, wheezing gasp as he convulsed. I wrenched the blade free and raised it one more time.

The second chop, the one that drained the last of my strength from my aching muscles, the one that left me standing slump-shouldered in front of the roaring crowd—that one killed him. One more step past the line of damnation.

“Now you might call that beginner’s luck,” Lancaster told the audience, “but every once in a while, a long shot wins.”

I stood, limp, while the waist-belt and wrist shackles went back on. The guards led me away, already forgotten by the blood-hungry audience, as the warden announced the next bout.

*     *     *

“You know,” I said to Valentino. I sat on his vinyl exam bench, my cheek ice numb from a local anesthetic while he sewed the gash in my cheek shut.

“Only two stitches,” the prison doctor murmured, leaning close and studying my face under a penlight. “That should heal up nicely.”

“You know what’s going on in Hive B,” I said. “You have to know.”

“You’ve also got a mild concussion,” he said, shining the penlight in my eyes. “Probably from your escape attempt—I heard about the bus crash—though tonight certainly didn’t help matters. I’ll give you some acetaminophen.”

“Yeah, let’s talk about
tonight
,” I said.

He shot a furtive glance toward the infirmary door.

“I can’t,” he said softly.

“The hell you can’t. You’re an accessory to this,
doctor
. You still have to take the Hippocratic Oath when you get your degree, right? Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you, but—”

“They’ll kill my family.”

He bit his bottom lip, turned, and put his surgical thread in a drawer. When he looked back at me, his eyes were moist.

“I have a wife and a daughter,” he said. “They told me…if I even think about blowing the whistle, if I
don’t
help…they’ll be on stage at the next event.”

“So take them and run. Go to the feds. They’ll put you in protective custody.”

“You don’t understand.” Valentino shook his head. “You think some prison warden and a gang of corrupt guards could pull this off all by themselves? Lancaster is
protected
. He has relatives in high places, old money,
very
old money. There’s nowhere they couldn’t get at us.”

“It’s all right,” I said, holding up one hand. “We’ll find a way. Nobody’s going to hurt your family.”

In the quiet of the infirmary, away from the chaos and the fear of the fight, I took a deep breath and sorted my mind out. Time to take inventory and figure out what I had to work with.

The footage from the fight? Damning evidence, and Valentino could smuggle it out, get it to the cops or the media—but there was no telling how Lancaster and his goons would react. They might run for the hills, or they might try to cover their tracks by going from cell to cell and putting a bullet in every last one of us. No. Too unpredictable, too risky. For now, the camera stayed with me.

Emerson wasn’t coming to the rescue, but the plan he’d put in place before he died—the unlocked hatch and the cell phone stashed in the maintenance tunnels—was still waiting for me. I could use that.

And I could use Valentino.

“When’s the next big event?” I asked him.

“Wednesday night.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I guarantee you’ll be fighting again. When a long shot wins like you did tonight, everybody wants to see an encore. More bets means more money for the warden.”

“What if I told you I had a way to bring this whole place crashing down?”

He let out a nervous chuckle. “I’d say you should have already done it.”

“I need your help.”

“Are you not listening?” he said. “They will
kill
my
family
. I’m sorry, I’m genuinely sorry, but I’m not going to—”

“Hold up. It’s something they can never connect back to you. No risk on your part whatsoever. If I succeed, you and your family are free. If I fail, nobody will ever know you had anything to do with it.”

He wavered on his feet, chewing his lip, and glanced to the door again. When he looked back at me, his voice was soft.

“What do I have to do?”

“It’s easy,” I told him. “You need to tell the guards, tomorrow morning, that you have to see me for a follow-up exam.”

“Impossible. We don’t do follow-up care. My instructions, when it comes to the Hive B prisoners, are to patch you up and send you back in the best shape I can manage. Most of the time, the second visit is the one that ends, well”—he nodded toward the door to the morgue—“in there.”

“You said they’ll want to see me fight again, right? And the more bets that get placed, the bigger a commission Lancaster rakes in. So I’m worth money to him, win or lose.”

“That’s right.”

I tapped the side of my head. “Not if I
can’t
fight. You said I’ve got a concussion. Tell him it could be worse than it looks, and if you’re not careful, it could kill me before the next event.”

Valentino rubbed his chin. “That…could work, actually. All right, and then what?”

“Then nothing. The rest is on my shoulders.”

*     *     *

Back in my cell, alone with my thoughts, I tossed and turned under the stark fluorescent light. The tiny plastic square never turned off, not even after midnight, glowing under its wire cage and flooding the room. It buzzed endlessly, a low-grade hum that set my teeth on edge.

The escort to the infirmary would take me right past the access hatchway. My one and only shot at getting out of here. All I needed was a plan to go with it. The maintenance tunnels could take me anywhere but
out
; no matter where I came up, I’d still have to deal with the exact same problems as my first escape attempt. Even if I could steal some civilian clothes, jack a car, and get out of the prison, they’d be onto me long before I reached Aberdeen. Once the alarm went up and the highway patrol sealed off I-80, I’d be sunk.

I lost track of the hours. Then a slot at the bottom of my door rattled open, and a plastic tray slid through. Breakfast was a cardboard carton of warm milk and half a bowl of greasy, cold oatmeal. I thought back to the prison cafeteria, asking the line cook how the inmates in Hive B got fed.
Lockdown means all the meals get delivered to their cells
, he’d told me.
We cook ’em up and send them all over on rolling carts for the guards to pass out
.

As I slowly stirred the oatmeal with a plastic spoon, a wave of nausea washed over me. Not from the food either, considering how my vision blurred in time with the queasiness. I tried to remember anything I could about concussions—specifically, how fast they could kill you—but I drew a blank. I needed real medical treatment, and fast.

I kept staring at the plastic tray. The food service was the only line of direct communication between Hive B and the rest of the prison…but only in one direction. Still, there had to be a way I could use that.

As my cell door rattled and swung open, the answer hit me.

I wasn’t going to break out today.

I was going to break in.