The Killing Floor Blues (16 page)

At that moment, I didn’t care. I didn’t care about Hive B or what horrors might be waiting behind those sealed doors. Anywhere was better than here. I swallowed hard. My mouth was dry, and a fresh wave of nausea washed over me.

“All right,” I told Emerson. “What’s the plan?”

“When they take you out of solitary, I’ll give you a new uniform. Inside the pocket, you’ll find a miniature video camera. Whatever’s going on in there, I want footage. As much evidence as you can document.”

“From what I hear, a trip to Hive B is a one-way ticket. How am I supposed to deliver the goods?”

Emerson passed a sheet of paper through the slot. I held it up to the thin band of light and squinted. It was a partial map of the prison, photocopied from the original blueprints.

“Right there.” Emerson’s finger wagged through the slot. “See the circled spot, in yellow highlighter? That’s an access passage adjacent to Hive B. You’ll need to get there, somehow. Given how far your last escape attempt got, I’m figuring you’re clever enough to handle it.”

“Speaking of,” I said, letting the question hang in the air.

“Your buddies in the dune buggies? Vanished without a trace. If they didn’t get themselves killed off-roading in the desert, they’re probably halfway to the border by now.”

I closed my eyes for a second, breath gusting out in a sigh. At least I’d done something right.

“So I get to the passage,” I said, “then what?”

“There’s a floor panel providing access to the maintenance tunnels. Normally it’s locked down tight. I’ll make sure it won’t be. Follow the passage, and about fifty yards in I’ll leave a cell phone with my number on it. Call me and I’ll slip you out.”

“You’re gonna help me break out of prison?”

“Not exactly,” Emerson said. “I’m going to take you straight to the DOC, where you’ll present your footage and eyewitness testimony.”

“And what do I get out of the deal?”

“I can’t get time taken off your sentence, but I
can
have you transferred to the facility of your choice. You can do your time in a minimum-security country club.”

“One of those places for white-collar criminals, where they’ve got tennis courts and cable TV?” I asked. “And you’re pretty much on the honor system not to run away?”

“Exactly.”

I liked the sound of that. I’d have to come up with a brand-new escape plan, but this time it’d stick.

“So you’ll slip the camera in with my clothes,” I mused. “Can you smuggle me anything else?”

“You’ll go through a metal detector on your way in, so no weapons. Don’t worry, the camera’s smaller than your palm and it’s ninety-nine percent plastic. I’ve already walked it through a few of the detectors myself, just to make sure it won’t set any alarms off.”

I thought fast. Time was running out, and I’d only have one shot to bring in something I could use.

“I’m going to give you a phone number,” I told him, “for a man named Bentley. Call him and tell him everything.”

“This is a confidential operati—”

“Tell him
everything
, or no deal.” I recited Bentley’s number, waiting for Emerson to scribble it down. “And tell him I need some alchemist’s clay, pronto. He’ll give you a location to meet up with him.”

“Alchemist’s…clay? What is that?”

“It’s a special kind of clay,” I said.

“And it won’t set off the metal detectors?”

I stared at him through the slot.

“No,” I said. “Because it’s
clay
.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” His eyes darted left. “Shit, incoming. I have to go. We have a deal?”

I didn’t have much of a choice. At least with Emerson’s help I had something I didn’t have ten minutes ago: a fighting chance.

“Deal,” I said and passed the photocopy back to him. I’d etched it all down on my mental map.

Then he ratcheted the slot door shut and left me in the darkness.

I didn’t sink into a stupor this time. The wet and the cold just woke me up. I welcomed the pain and the bruises. And when Jablonski returned a few hours later, giggling as he unleashed the hose and plunged me into another freezing hell, I silently thanked him. He’d given me a gift. The gift of hatred.

Because whatever was waiting for me in Hive B, now I had to survive long enough to see Jablonski dead.

*     *     *

When they came for me, I was ready.

The door swung open, flooding the tiny cell with piercing light. I squinted, eyes tearing up. Three guards stood outside: two I didn’t recognize, and Emerson, holding a bundle of clothes in his arm. A fresh prison uniform.

“Get dressed,” the guard on the left barked. “You’re being transferred.”

Emerson handed me the clothes, carefully passing the bundle so that I could feel something small and hard against my palm. I turned to one side as I pulled on the tan trousers, subtly glancing to make sure I wasn’t showing any suspicious bulges in my pocket. If I got searched now, Emerson and I were
both
screwed.

“We’ll take it from here,” the other guard told Emerson once I’d finished buttoning up my shirt. I left it untucked, the tails drooping over my pockets for a little extra camouflage. As I smoothed my shirt my fingers dipped into my right pants pocket, just long enough to brush against a square of smooth plastic and a tiny, grainy lump of clay the size of a gumball.

Perfect.

As they shackled my wrists to a padlocked waist-belt, I felt like Houdini getting ready for an escape act. It must have shown on my face. One of the guards gave me the side-eye. “What are you smiling about?”

“Just happy to be stretching my legs a little.”

“Don’t get used to it,” he said and gave my shoulder a shove.

As we marched through the labyrinthine corridors, I watched the walls and made notes. The arrows pointing the way to “Central Security” caught my interest. If I judged right, the name was literal—it was right at the center of the underground passages, between the three hives.

When we came to the spot marked on Emerson’s blueprint, I recognized it at once. A short stretch of hallway festooned with exposed piping and water valves rising up from the floor and running along the brick at chest level. My shoes clanged over a corrugated metal hatch, a trapdoor on new-looking hinges. That was my exit, then; wherever they took me, whatever happened next, all I needed to do was escape to this spot and slip through the trapdoor without anyone spotting me.

Easy enough. I hoped.

It didn’t take long for my hopes to hit the rocks, as the guards led me past a metal detector, another gate checkpoint, and into Hive B.

Instead of the raucous noise and milling bodies of the other hive, I was greeted by an empty gallery floor leading up to a central guard tower. Instead of tier after tier of bars, I looked up at stark iron doors. Hundreds of them.

The entire hive, all seven stories of it, had been converted into cells for solitary detention.

They walked me up to the fourth tier. We passed cell after cell where a narrow slot stood open, the occupants’ only window to the outside world. In some cells, cowering figures huddled in corners, hiding their faces from the light. In others, eyes stared back out at me. Hard eyes. Distant eyes. Mad eyes. I stopped looking.

My new cell was identical to the one they’d just pulled me out of, with one exception: on the back wall, a frosted panel under a wire-frame cage glowed with soft light. There wasn’t anything to look at, but at least I wouldn’t go blind in the meantime.

They took off my shackles and waved me inside. As soon as the door swung shut, clanging behind me and sealing me in, I fought a surge of claustrophobic terror. Was this the great mystery of Hive B? That they were keeping everyone in permanent solitary?

It made a sick kind of sense. Eisenberg Correctional only cared about minimizing expenses and maximizing profits; rehabilitation wasn’t on the menu. Providing recreation cost money, and so did hiring enough guards to watch all the prisoners. Medical care and patching up cons after the occasional brawl cost money too. So much easier to toss every prisoner into his own personal tomb and let him rot.

All the convicts I’d been told about, the ones who had been snatched in the night and transferred to Hive B, had violent records—or in Simms’s case, attacked other inmates. Exactly the kind of prisoners who gave the administration a headache. And then there were the ones who wouldn’t ever be getting out and squawking about this to the press: the ones on life sentences, with no parole.

Like me.

I paced the seven-by-seven prison cell. Possibly my new home, for the rest of my life.

No
, I thought.
There’s no such thing as an unsolvable problem, and there’s no such thing as an impossible escape
.

I did push-ups against the wall, ignoring the twinge from my tortured muscles. Working my body helped to work my brain and get the ideas flowing.

What I didn’t know then—what I wouldn’t find out until later that night—was that I was working the wrong problem. I thought I’d solved the puzzle of Hive B. I hadn’t.

The truth was so much worse.

First, I heard the sounds. Murmuring voices, echoing footfalls, rising up from the gallery floor far below my cell. Like they’d opened all the doors and let the inmates out for some recreation time. I felt a spark of hope; maybe the situation wasn’t as bad as I’d imagined.

Then the guards came for me.

One had a checklist on a clipboard, lined with names and cell numbers. The other two had a fresh pair of shackles for me. They marched me out onto the tier under dimmed-down lights. As we rounded the stairs, headed down, I got a look at what waited below.

Mahogany tables and candlelight. White-tuxedoed waiters with towels draped over their sleeves, ferrying drinks from a rolling wet bar. The gallery floor, surrounded by iron doors and standing in the shadow of the guard tower, had been turned into a bizarre imitation of an upscale nightclub.

“What the hell is this?” I said, hesitating. A guard’s fist jabbed into my kidney, sending me stumbling.

“You’ll find out. Shut up and do what you’re told.”

I wasn’t the first prisoner down on the floor. Four others stood in a silent, grim line off to one side of the “nightclub.” I recognized one of them. Simms looked different from when we’d tussled back in my cell. A long scar ran along one puffy eye, sealed with a row of black stitches.

I kept my mouth shut and my eyes open, trying to get a read on the situation. The waiters set out more tables and chairs, lighting elegant candles. Two men in black tuxes rolled in a baby grand piano and opened a sleek black case, taking out a polished bass. Soon the jaunty strains of a jazz duo filled the air.

The guests arrived in pairs and foursomes, dressed for a night on the red carpet. Perfect hair and designer suits,
haute couture
and diamond necklaces. They mingled and laughed and ordered cocktails from the bar, as if finding a swank lounge in the heart of a prison was perfectly ordinary.

I risked a whisper, glancing sidelong at the convict next to me. “Hey. What’s going on here?”

He gave a timid shake of his head and muttered, “Don’t talk. Just don’t react to anything. Safer that way.”

Given the look of the guards patrolling the floor—and the Tasers they openly carried—I took his word for it.

Still, I knew an opportunity when I saw one. My shackles had just enough give to let me reach my pocket. My fingers dipped in, scooping out the tiny plastic square of the video camera, and I palmed it like a playing card. My pinky slid across a textured switch, clicking it on. As I surveyed the room, I swiveled my wrist from side to side, furtively filming as much as I could.

I caught some familiar faces in the growing crowd. Not anyone I knew personally, faces from television. A famous golf pro, with a woman who definitely wasn’t his wife, shared drinks with an actress I’d seen in some summer action-movie blockbuster. A political pundit wore a huge lantern-jawed grin as he crossed the floor, rendezvousing with Warden Lancaster.

“Uh-oh,” Lancaster chortled, “the media’s here! Not gonna blow the whistle on us, are ya?”

The pundit laughed and raised his glass. “What, don’t you watch my show? I always say we should be tougher on crime.”

Lancaster handed him a glossy pamphlet. “On that note, here’s tonight’s program. Enjoy, enjoy.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.

A few more prisoners came down from the tiers, filling out the line beside me, while Lancaster greeted his other guests and passed out more pamphlets. Two of the new arrivals headed our way. The woman, in a pink sundress and a floppy hat, I vaguely recognized from TV. She was some kind of socialite reality-show star, famous for being famous. The man at her side, a hunk of muscle in a tailored jacket, I didn’t know. They walked up and down the line, glancing from us to their pamphlets. I slipped the camera back into my pocket before they got too close.

“Ooh, this one,” she said, pointing at me. “Definitely this one. Did you read this? He’s a former
assassin
, sweetie. Isn’t that just the
coolest?
”

The man rolled his eyes. “Sure, if it’s cool to throw your father’s money away. Never bet on a first-timer. How many times do I have to tell you that?”

“Longer odds.” She held the pamphlet in his face and rapped her fingernail against it. “Bigger prizes.”

“You did this exact same thing at the Kentucky Derby last May. Do you even know how statistics work? Have you ever taken a
class?
”

They carried their argument back to the wet bar, leaving me to stew in silence and wonder what the hell was going on here.

Lights from the guard tower flickered, strobing behind the smoky glass. Conversation hushed. The prisoner on my left tensed up, manacles rattling as his hands clenched into fists. I palmed the camera again and started filming.

Warden Lancaster took the floor with a microphone in his fist. When he spoke, speakers crackled and his sonorous voice echoed throughout the gallery.

“Ladies and gentlemen, how fine it is to welcome you to another grand event. We’ve got quite the show planned for you tonight, and a delightful time indeed. But first…I’m afraid we have a bit of unpleasant side business to take care of.”

Jablonski and another guard hauled a limp prisoner in front of the crowd, chained at the wrists and ankles with a burlap sack over his head. They ripped off the hood, and the breath caught in my throat.

Emerson squinted, dazed, through swollen eyes. His face was a mask of bruises and freshly dried blood.

“We had a bit of a…weasel in the henhouse, it appears,” Lancaster told the crowd. “This man is an undercover informant. Now, now, don’t fret. He never set foot in this hallowed hall—well, not until
now
, anyway.”

“Please,” Emerson gasped, his lips purple and puffy. “You can’t do this. This is wrong—”

Lancaster talked over him, leaning into the microphone. “Fortunately, he was
not
very good at his job.”

That drew a ripple of laughter from the audience.

“I highlight this incident,” Lancaster said, “simply to reassure you that your safety and your privacy is of utmost importance to myself and my staff. We found the problem, and we’ll fix the problem.”

He reached into his jacket. His hand came out, slow and smooth, with a long-barreled .45 revolver. The gun gleamed in the candlelight as he held it aloft for the audience’s approval. Someone in the back let out an eager hoot.

I gritted my teeth and kept the camera steady.

“Please,” Emerson begged, “I won’t tell anyone. I won’t—”

“I know you won’t, son,” Lancaster said.

Then he put the barrel to Emerson’s forehead and pulled the trigger.

The revolver boomed like a thunderclap as the bullet tore a hole through Emerson’s skull, sending him tumbling to the concrete in a haze of blood mist and shattered bone. Polite applause rippled through the crowd along with a chorus of clinking glasses, as Jablonski and the other guard dragged Emerson’s body away by his ankles.

The cavalry wasn’t coming to my rescue. The cavalry was dead.

“We’re just about ready to begin,” Lancaster told the crowd, “so get those bets in. Odds are printed in your program guides, and we’re happy to cover all requests…minus the house’s customary ten percent, of course.”

Another ripple of laughter. I stared down at the concrete floor, at the bloody smear where Emerson had fallen.

Working in pairs, the waiters rolled out something new: a pair of tall wire frames festooned with hooks, like tool racks in a mechanic’s workshop. Tools hung on the display: hammers, drills, chisels.

A bloodstained machete. A chainsaw. And a baseball bat wrapped with coils of barbed wire.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Lancaster said, the crowd falling into an excited murmur. “It is my great honor to welcome you to tonight’s entertainment.”

He spread one arm wide, taking in the room, and flashed pearly teeth like a game-show host.

“Welcome,” he said, “to the Killing Floor.”