Sanctuary (10 page)

“Someone on the outside. It could even be unrelated to Randell’s beef with Danny. You said Danny confessed to killing two people. For all you know there were more. And he probably had run-ins with others he didn’t kill. Could be one of them. Was there any press on his arrest?”

“No.” His reference to Danny’s past sent a chill through my arms. Not only because he’d guessed the truth so quickly, but because his conclusion was one that had haunted me for the past two days. A ghost from our past had found us and wanted us dead.

“You can’t assume there were others,” I said.

“No, but it’s a possibility, and it makes more sense than Randell calling you. Actually, I think you could be as much the target as Danny.”

None of this was news to me, but again, hearing Keith say it made the threat sound more real. Why else would the caller have contacted me?

Keith’s reading of the situation didn’t fill me with fear as much as it focused my anger. I had been backed into a corner before, and Danny taught me to come out swinging. Or maybe I’d taught that to myself. Either way, whoever was coming after us wasn’t just going to pick us off like little varmints. They were playing the same kind of game Danny himself might have played before he’d taken the high road.

“And your point is?” I asked.

“Be careful.”

“I’m the most careful person in the world.”

“Good. You said Danny could take care of himself. So let him. Nothing from the outside’s going to help him. You could try an attorney, but even if one can get a message inside, warning Danny won’t help him as much as you might think. Prisons are a world unto themselves, understood only by those who live in them. Warning someone to watch his back in a prison is like telling a driver out here to watch out for other cars on the road. Unless he’s an idiot, Danny knows of the threat already.”

“You sure?”

He leaned back and shrugged. “Either way, there’s nothing you can do about it. If Randell really wants him dead, one of them will end up dead. That’s the kind of man he is.”

My gut felt like a sauna for bed bugs. Billions of them.

“So what do you suggest I do? Lock my doors and bar my windows and hope for the best?”

“No. I suggest you start trying to figure out who in either your past or Danny’s past might have a reason to come after you. You can’t stop Randell. He’s in a closed system. Forget him. Find out if someone else made that phone call. Find out who sent that shoe box.”

“Then help me do that,” I said, knowing that there was far more to the past than I could ever tell Keith.

It didn’t matter. He shook his head. “I can’t. I’m sorry. I wish I could but I just can’t.”

“You still have connections in the legal system, right? You know cops. You know the criminal world…”

“I also have a history that takes me out. I wish I could be more help.”

He was looking at me kindly enough, and if I wasn’t mistaken, his eyes betrayed interest in me as a woman, but he wasn’t going to bend. He’d made his point as plainly as he could. I’d probably said way too much.

“You can, you just don’t want to,” I said, standing up. “Where’s your cell phone?”

“My phone?”

“I’m going to give you my number. If you decide to help me out you’ll know where to find me. Or you could just call and breathe heavy.”

He studied me for a moment and smiled, then dug his phone out of his back pocket. “Give me your phone number.”

I did and he keyed it in. But I knew it was wasted time.

“Got it?”

“Got it,” he said.

“Can I have yours?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Of course not.”

But I hardly cared anymore. Someone was coming after me and there wasn’t a soul in the world who could stop them, including Keith Hammond. I was on my own.

It was time to go home and dig out the nine-millimeter.

THERE ARE TIMES
in life when everything a person thinks he knows is challenged. Undercurrents suck him under and threaten to pull him into a bottomless sea. Tsunamis rise up after an unannounced earthquake and sweep away every trace of reason in a matter of seconds. That’s why the wise man builds his house upon a rock.

But what happens if he unwittingly picks the wrong rock with the best of intentions, only to discover that the foundation under that house can crumble?

In Danny’s case, the storm that threatened to test his rock did not roar in like a tsunami in a matter of seconds. It rose slowly over the course of the three days he spent in meditation, and even then it managed only to erode a small part of his foundation.

Personal suffering he could manage, only because he’d faced so much of it through the war. But the suffering of others…​that was another matter.

He didn’t know the names or the crimes of those who suffered in segregation with him, only the odor of their excrement. Inmates came and went during his stay, and the routine became plain.

A code of complete silence was strictly enforced on the meditation floor. Any deviance was handled swiftly. A single loaf of heavily enriched and dreadfully tasting bread was delivered once every day. The water to the faucet ran for five minutes three times a day, signaled only by the hissing in the pipes. The toilet flushed only once a day.

Once every two days, each cell was properly hosed down with the occupant inside. The water and refuse drained through a trap door in the floor, opened during the cleansing. For the day following the bath, the entire wing stank of chlorine and whatever other chemicals they’d put in the water—Pape’s answer to sanitation concerns, which doubled as a mild form of torture, leaving them shivering in the damp cold. There were undoubtedly showers in the wing to meet all requirements set by the Corrections Standards Authority, but Danny guessed they weren’t used except during inspection.

What had the others done to deserve such inhuman treatment? They’d deviated from the rules established by the world in which they lived.

Who made up those rules? A few of them had been established by the warden, the rest of them by the department of corrections. By extension they were all the rules of society.

Why follow the rules? Because the consequence of
not
following them was painful. They should have all known better. It served them right, people would say. If a law says you stop at a stop sign, and you don’t stop, you are guilty and should pay a price. You run a stop sign, you pay a certain penalty, even if it’s on a deserted road at four in the morning and there isn’t another car within ten miles. Why? It’s the law.

If the law says you cannot look at a guard a certain way and you look at a guard that certain way, you will pay a penalty. Why? Because it’s the law. Looking at a guard wrongly at Basal might be compared to looking at a woman wrongly in some cultures.

Deviant behavior. Do the crime, do the time. Made sense.

After four days of shivering in Basal’s dark hole, however, it made less sense. Not because of Danny’s own suffering, but because of the suffering around him. Still, to maintain order, every society had to establish rules and follow them.

Even then, it wasn’t the plight of those around him that eroded Danny’s rock. It was the face of the young man named Peter Manning.

More specifically, the abuse the boy might suffer at the hands of Randell and his viper, Slane.

Even more specifically, Danny’s own reaction to that abuse. It was clear that any attempt on his part to intervene would constitute a deviation from the established law in this society called Basal. He would be taking the law into his own hands, so to speak, something he’d done before. But by doing so, he’d finally found it lacking. Man did not have the right to subvert society’s laws to enforce his own, even if doing so brought about good.

But therein lay the conundrum eroding his rock. Was it morally right to stand by while another suffered? What of the poor, the diseased, the hungry, the abused, the disadvantaged? Didn’t he have a moral obligation to come to their rescue?

If so, wasn’t he justified in wanting to prevent Randell from harming Peter? If he was required to break the law to save the boy, he would endure Pape’s punishment. At least the boy would be spared his suffering.

And yet this reasoning only delivered him back to the philosophy he’d embraced as a vigilante, saving the abused who were overlooked by the law.

Danny lay on the concrete slab, and he thought of the boy, and he thought about Renee, and he wept because he knew that if it were Renee up there instead of Peter, his wrath would know no bounds. And yet Peter was deserving of as much love as Renee. So, for that matter, was Randell.

But love wasn’t administered by a gun. He knew that. In his very bones he knew that. Randell was a monster because he’d been loved by hard steel instead of a warm heart his entire life, and such love was not love at all.

The facilitators came for him on the evening of the fifth day, the captain, Bostich, and a CO Danny hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting. They asked him to stand outside his cell and dress before cuffing him, which was itself a humiliating show of superiority. But Danny did as they asked, and they led him from the hall of silent, tormented deviants.

“I’ll take it from here,” Bostich said, locking the steel door that led down to the meditation floor.

The other guard nodded and stepped away.

“This way.”

Bostich led Danny to a sparsely furnished office in the administration wing and closed the door behind them. He motioned toward a gray metal chair next to the desk.

“Sit.”

Still cuffed, Danny sat.

Bostich leaned back on the desk, crossed his arms, and returned Danny’s stare. The dark-eyed man with bleached hair looked like he’d come out of the womb angry and hadn’t yet found a way to punish the world for accepting his birth. Danny felt compelled to glance away. A clock on the wall indicated that it was 8:37 p.m. They’d timed his release to coincide with lockdown. Why? Danny didn’t yet know, but he was sure that every detail in Basal was carefully orchestrated for maximum effect.

“Look at me,” Bostich said, then continued when Danny faced him. “I’m going to give you the same speech I give every member after their first stint in meditation. If you think that was hard, think again. If you think that was unfair, you should have thought about that before you did whatever you did to get here. The only one who decides what’s fair is God, and in Basal, the warden is God. Is that clear enough for you?”

“Yes.”

“And if you think opening your mouth about your sacred experience down there’ll bring attorneys running to set things straight, well then you just don’t understand the nature of your predicament, do you? You talk to any member about your time below and you go back down. You talk to anyone on the outside about it, ever, and anything can happen to you. The only thing protecting you in here is the warden. Am I clear?”

Danny had no reasonable choice but to answer in the affirmative.

“Good. I won’t lie. The warden thinks you’re good for this place, that you can somehow be a model citizen headed for early release. Me, I hate you. I don’t trust you. I see you and I see a knucklehead, and the only knuckleheads in my prison are the ones I know I can trust. One more stunt like you pulled back in the cafeteria and you’ll wish you were never born.”

That would make two of us,
Danny thought, but he said nothing.

Bostich glared at him. “Now that you know how things work, the warden thinks you should be given a little more freedom. He wants you to keep an eye out. Half the members in this place are snitching on their cellie but no one’s a snitch, if you catch my drift.”

Meaning no one was labeled as a snitch, because it would break the convict code and subject them to hatred, and yet half the members were giving up details when called upon to do so anyway.

“An efficient way to—”

“Shut up. If you see anything that strikes you as out of place, you have permission to inform the warden, but only directly or through me, you got that?”

“Yes.”

The captain stared at him for a full ten seconds without blinking once.

“Fine. You’re going back to your cell. You open your mouth even once before lockdown and you’re going back down. Stand up.”

The hub was deserted except for four privileged members who sat around a table, playing a game of checkers. Most of the inmates would already be in the housing units. Two members were in a discussion with the facilitator on duty in the commons wing when Danny stepped in. Another small group loitered near the top of the staircase. Several dozen stood at their cell doors or on the tier above, leaning on the railing, wasting away their last few minutes before lockdown.

The hall quieted the moment he entered. Heads turned and watched, silenced by his appearance. Danny’s last hose-down had been earlier that day. He still smelled of chlorine. His hair was a mess and his hands were scraped from the concrete, but his clothing covered the bruises that had developed on his hips and shoulders from hours of shifting on the hard bed in an attempt to ease his pain. He’d lost a few pounds since arriving; otherwise there would be no other sign that he was worse off for the wear.

“Up.”

Danny mounted the steel staircase, aware of the surreal silence interrupted by the sound of his feet thudding up the steps. Even if this was a common occurrence, his unearned reputation as the new deviant priest probably had more to do with this audience than his return from the hole. He was still a curiosity, singled out to be crushed with the help of Randell and his thugs.

As such he was a potential enemy to all. The warden expressly reserved the right to impose restrictions on the entire wing due to one person’s deviance. Most of the members were likely far more interested in Danny’s compliance than in his help.

A quick glance at the top of the staircase showed no sign of Randell or Slane. A member with a barbed-wire tattoo on his neck and a crooked grin on his face watched him from his cell door at the top of the staircase.

“Yo, ya priest,” he said with a slight southern accent. “Name’s Kearney.”

“Whoa!” Bostich stopped Danny and looked at the member who’d spoken. “You begging for trouble, boy?”

“No, siree.”

“Then keep your trap shut.” He lifted his chin down the tier. “In your cells, all of you.”

They pulled off the railing and stepped into their cells, some more quickly than others.

Danny headed down the tier, keeping his eyes ahead, but he could see the members in his peripheral vision, making idle use of their last minutes before the ward shut down. At Ironwood a similar hall might be cut with the sounds of a banging locker and loud laughter, punctuated by vehement demands or loud objections.

Danny’s thoughts were cut short as they approached his cell. A man stood inside the cell next to his own, fingers wrapped around the bars, peering out at him, wearing a thin grin. It was Slane. Hair greased back like a wedge on his narrow head.

Danny drew abreast of the cell and stopped. Beyond the grinning Slane sat Peter, rocking back and forth on the lower bunk, staring into oblivion. Bostich didn’t order Danny forward, didn’t shove him toward his own cell, made no effort at all to keep him from seeing what he was meant to see. They had transferred the predator into Peter’s cell with clear intentions.

Danny met Slane’s daring eyes and for a moment rage flooded his veins. He couldn’t seem to pry Peter’s plight from his mind. What kind of savage would place such a boy in the arms of a beast like Slane?

He told himself to move on, there was nothing he could do. He willed his feet to move, but his feet weren’t responding. There was the predator and there was his victim, and here stood Danny, helpless to stop the one or help the other. And even if there was a way to help, could he?

Would he?

A stick in his back finally pushed him forward and Danny moved on, pulling his mind back from that place of fury that had once swallowed him.

Godfrey lay on the bottom bunk, reading Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
, which he immediately set down. The door crashed shut behind Danny.

“Lights out in two.”

Bostich nodded at Danny. “Sleep tight, Priest.” He retreated down the pier, evidently satisfied that he’d escalated Danny’s misery by setting up Peter in the cell next to his.

Godfrey closed his book and laid it on the mattress beside his head. “So you survived your first opportunity to meditate. That’s good, everyone does.”

“When did they move Slane into Peter’s cell?” Danny kept his voice low.

The older man’s head swiveled toward the bars. “What do you mean?”

“The man’s in the cell next to ours.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

“Peter’s with him?”

Danny shrugged out of his shirt and walked to the sink. “Yes.” He turned on the faucet and splashed his face, ran his wet fingers through his grimy hair. There was no mirror.

“Lockup!” the CO shouted. The electronic locks on the cell doors engaged with a loud clank.

“You see what I mean?” Godfrey muttered. “There’s no end to their games. And there’s nothing you can do, don’t kid yourself. Guaranteed, this is as much about you as Peter. They are begging you to say something. Take my advice, don’t.”

“Lights out!”

Danny grabbed his towel from his locker and wiped his face. The bulb blinked off, leaving only pale light from the tier to reveal the outlines of the room. A faint whimper sounded from the cell on Danny’s right.

He stood still for a moment, unable to move, unwilling to give any more space in his mind to the rage boiling in his gut. For three years he’d methodically steeled himself against the fury directed at the monsters of society, fully aware that he was essentially one himself. His only reasonable course of action now would be to console the boy and provide him with a ray of hope in the morning.

Danny stripped, rolled into his bunk, and prayed for the boy’s safety. But he could not pray to be Peter’s guardian angel. That task would have to be left to higher powers.