The Killing Floor Blues (21 page)

“It was all Cesar’s idea,” Raymundo said. “See, this whole alliance between the Calles and JJ? That was Gabriel, our boss. Cesar, he’s second on the totem pole. He figured our cut was way too small, said that bitch should have been working
for
us, not as an equal partner.”

“Call my friend a bitch,” I told him, “
one
more time.”

He flinched.

“Few weeks ago, Cesar’s shooting dice with a guy who knows a guy, and they get to talking. I guess these heavy dudes from Chicago have been putting out feelers, trying to move into Vegas, and they were looking for friendly faces.”

“So Cesar figured he’d sell out Jennifer, stab Gabriel in the back, and join forces with the Chicago Outfit,” I said.

“First time we talked in the yard, man, I was tellin’ the truth. All I knew was she’d gone missing. Then Cesar called me and filled me in. He’s got a whole crew of Calles who are sick of Gabriel’s crap. They’re all gonna jump ship and throw in with Chicago.”

“And Jennifer?” Caitlin asked. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

Caitlin uncrossed her arms.

“I
swear
,” Raymundo said, pressing his back to the wall. “All I know is she’s got all kinds of shit locked up in her head. Like where all her grow houses are at, all the people on her payroll, and she’s got, like, stacks of cash stashed in a Cayman Island bank account, but only she knows the account number and the passcode. Cesar wants
all
of it before they cap her.”

My jaw clenched. They wouldn’t be getting that information out of her by asking politely.

“If they’ve hurt one hair on her head—” I started. Raymundo shook his head, panicked.

“No, no, man, it ain’t that easy. You—you know. You can’t make that
chica
bleed, man. Shit gets freaky when she’s around blood. Her own or anybody else’s.” He crossed himself with his good hand. “That shit’s
el diablo
. Ain’t nobody with any sense gonna take a razor to her. She’ll just laugh and spit poison at you. So Cesar talked to these Chicago guys, and they got a solution.”

“Which is?”

He fell silent. His gaze flickered between Caitlin’s cold eyes and the floor.

“Do I need to start counting to ten?” she asked him.

“All right, all right!” He winced. “Chicago’s got this guy, they call him the Doctor. Pure fuckin’ evil, man. Used to be CIA or something. They say he can get anything out of anybody, no problem. Like he just looks in your eyes and
knows
how to break you. Cesar warned ’em about the blood thing, and they said it wasn’t no big deal; the Doctor’s got a hundred ways of hurting somebody without leaving a single mark.”

“And this ‘Doctor,’ he’s…” My hands curled into fists at my sides.

“He’s on his way. I paid off one of the guards to smuggle a burner into solitary for me. Fucking thing shorted out when Jablonski gave me the fire-hose treatment, but I talked to Cesar last night. He said the Doctor and a bunch of Chicago heavies were getting in a car and driving out here for a meet-up. See, they can’t fly with, uh, his…equipment. They’ll be in Vegas any day now.”

“And this meeting?” Caitlin asked. “Where will it be?”

“I don’t know. God’s honest truth, there’s tons of places it could go down.”

“This Cesar,” I said, “he got a last name?”

“Gallegos. Cesar Gallegos. That’s all I know. Swear to God, that’s all I know.”

Caitlin and I shared a glance.

“Shall I?” she asked.

“Nah,” I said, “I think he’s had enough for one day. Let’s get moving. Time’s not on our side here. Congrats, Raymundo, you get to live.”

He had the most hopeful look on his face, right up until the moment I slammed the cell door behind me and locked it.

“But you’re also staying in prison. And we’ll make sure to let all your old Calles buddies know how you stabbed them in the back.”

“Hey,” he shouted from the other side. The stout door rattled. “Hey, you can’t do me like that!
Hey!
”

“I think we just did,” I said.

Caitlin nodded in agreement and gestured to the stairs. “Shall we?”

The front offices were a wasteland of overturned furniture and smashed windows, with the occasional body—inmate, guard, or too blood-soaked to tell the color of his uniform—littering the walkway. We headed out the same way I’d come in on my first day in prison, through the processing wing. All I could see was Jennifer’s face.

We had a chance to save her. How slim, I didn’t know, but we had a chance.

The stars shone down on a deserted tarmac. Floodlights from abandoned watchtowers cast random, desolate pools of light. The mass exodus of Warden Lancaster’s “guests” and his smarter henchmen was long over; nobody wanted to go down with this ship. We stayed low as we ran, just in case, keeping to the shadows, but nobody stood in our way as we made our escape through wide-open gates.

A tinny horn beeped. Up ahead, a van parked by the roadside fired up its engine and cast headlight beams across the desert flats. The side door, emblazoned with a Channel Five Eyewitness News logo, swooped open as we jogged up. Bentley waved us on board, while Corman looked back from the driver’s seat.

“Cuttin’ it close, kiddo,” he said as he threw the van into gear.

I pulled Bentley into a hug with one arm, reaching out to squeeze Corman’s shoulder with the other. I didn’t have words just then. Bentley patted my back.

“We were unavoidably delayed,” Caitlin said, glancing around the back of the van. It was windowless, lined with steel bins for storing camera equipment. She crouched down, perching on the raised wheel well, while I helped Bentley into the passenger seat up front.

“Yeah,” I said, “good news is we have a lead on finding Jennifer. Bad news is, she’s in deep trouble. We’ve gotta move, and fast.”

As we drove, I filled them in on the details. We’d only gone a couple of miles down the road before blinding high beams washed across the van window. National Guard trucks, draped in camouflage green, roaring in the opposite direction. I counted five in all, followed by a parade of highway patrol cruisers painting the desert in red and blue light.

Nobody tried to stop us. All the same, I held my breath until we’d passed them.

“I-80’s gonna be locked up tighter than Fort Knox,” I said. “You’re sure you can get this thing through a checkpoint?”

“Our press credentials are immaculate,” Bentley said. “As is the vehicle registration. Paolo does exceptional work.”

Aberdeen was thirty miles south, a sleepy little burg that more or less existed to give the prison staff a place to live and buy groceries. It was all trailer parks, churches, and bars with blue neon lights advertising longneck bottles of Budweiser long into the night. We navigated along a string of back roads, while I squinted at faded street signs.

“Up here,” I said. “I think this is my stop.”

Bentley handed me a grocery bag from Vons. A couple of plastic water bottles nestled inside, along with three slim energy bars in bright orange foil.

“It’s not the gourmet meal you should have for a proper homecoming,” he said, “but it’ll tide you over.”

“Not home yet.” I hauled open the side door as the van rolled to a stop. “But I’ll be there soon. Just have one last loose end to tie up.”

Caitlin rose, and her fingers trailed down my shoulder.

“Be swift,” she said.

“I will. And while I’m gone, do me a favor: get in touch with Pixie. We’ll need her tech toys for this job. Tell her it’s for Jennifer. Pix was a little freaked out in Chicago, and I don’t think I earned any favors when I made her go home before we went after Damien Ecko, but I don’t think she’ll refuse if she knows Jen’s in danger.”

I squeezed the doorframe, wincing as a sharp wave of nausea hit me. It passed as suddenly as it arrived.

“Dan?” Corman asked, eyeing my grimace.

“And get Doc Savoy on standby,” I said. “I’m fine. Don’t worry. Just…better safe than sorry, right?”

They pretended to believe me, which was nice. I jumped out and scurried into the shadows, disappearing into the bushes behind a quiet ranch house.

The sun rose over the sleepy streets of Aberdeen, warm light washing away the sirens and the chaos of the long and terrible night. Sitting behind an old walnut-stained desk in the back room of his house, Warden Lancaster sipped from a mug of coffee that read “World’s Greatest Grandpa” on the side and pecked at his keyboard.

“Working from home today?” I asked, casually leaning against the doorframe.

He jumped. One hand shot under the desk.

“Looking for this?”

I showed him the long-barreled revolver in my hand. His fingers pulled out slow from under his desk, away from the empty holster.

“Now, now, son,” he said, holding up his hands, “let’s not do anything rash here. We can work this out.”

“Can we?” I strolled toward him, keeping the gun aimed at his chest. “After what you did to me, do you really think we can ‘work this out’? Because if you’ve got any ideas, I’d love to hear ’em. You must figure I want
something
. If I was just here to kill you, I’d have done it hours ago.”

He blinked. “H-hours ago?”

“It’s all about the great quandary. The reason nobody’s ever escaped the Iceberg. Desert’s a natural barrier, and by the time anybody passes through Aberdeen, the highway patrol will already be on high alert and have I-80 barricaded in both directions. Everyone told me you can’t get out that way.”

I loomed over him, wearing a grim smile.

“So I didn’t. The way to defeat a roadblock isn’t to sneak through it; it’s to
outlast
it. All I had to do was let myself into your house—the last place anybody would be looking for me—and wait until morning. Now? Roadblock’s gone. I can just drive on out of here.”

“You were…
here?
”

“I was hiding under your bed. All night long,” I told him. “Listening to you
snore
. You sleep like an innocent man, Warden. Me? I didn’t sleep at all.”

Lancaster shrank into his high-backed leather chair.

“Look, son, I…I know you must be upset—”

“Upset? You forced me to kill a man.”

“You killed
plenty
,” he snapped, the fear on his face turning into an angry, pinched scowl. “You killed plenty of men before you came into my prison, and you killed plenty on your way out. You’re a murderer, Faust, plain and simple. What’s one more body on the pile, huh?”

I felt my finger tighten against the trigger. I had to take a deep breath and force it to unclench.

“I never killed anybody who didn’t deserve it,” I told him.

Lancaster snorted. “And who decides that?
You?
Who died and made you God? If you get to decide who lives and who dies, so do I. You’re no different from me.”

I paced the floor in front of his desk. I didn’t want to think about it. Maybe I was afraid that if I thought about it too much, he might start making sense.

“Look.” He reached for his inside pocket. I spun, sticking the gun in his face, and he froze. “Easy, easy now! This is something you’ll want to see.”

His fingers trembled as he tugged out a business card, resting it gingerly on the desk between us. Gold-leaf letters in neat cursive swirled over creamy-white parchment. “Weishaupt and Associates,” it read, “Attorneys at Law.”

“I know what you are,” Lancaster told me. “You and that woman. I know what I saw. You’re sorcerers, ain’t ya?”

I sent out psychic feelers, squirming invisibly across the room, brushing over the skin of Lancaster’s mind. Not a spark of magic there.

The card, though, was another story. It glowed ultraviolet in my second sight, seething with absorbed power like a nugget of enriched uranium.

“You know what that is, right?” He tapped the card. “That’s a
golden ticket
. A genuine, authentic golden ticket. And you can have it.”

“Unless you’re about to introduce me to Willy Wonka,” I said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Something tells me we move in different social circles.”

He waved off the question. “Doesn’t matter. All you need to know is you take that card, call that number, and tell ’em I gave it to you.”

“And then?”

He laughed. “And then you get whatever you want, that’s what! You want money? Girls? Boys? One of those fancy Italian sports cars? They can make it happen. They
will
make it happen to show their gratitude for you letting bygones be bygones.”

“And who are ‘they,’ exactly?”

“Friends of my family. We go way back. Now, there’s a flip side to all this largesse. You decide to pull that trigger instead, and there’s no place on earth you’ll be able to hide from them. They’ll find you in Timbuktu. And you won’t die easy, or quick. Make the right choice, son. Take the golden ticket.”

I didn’t know if the offer—or the threat—was legit, but I knew one thing:
he
believed it. Lancaster’s fingers stroked that card like it was a magical talisman that could turn him bulletproof.

“You can promise me the sun and the moon,” I told him, “but right now there’s only one thing I really want. You’re filing the official reports, I assume. Your version of what went down last night.”

“My little contingency plan.” He smirked. “All tracks covered, all hands clean, and we can start the show all over again as soon as the reconstruction’s finished. It’s easy to control the narrative when everybody who knows the truth is locked up or on board. Are…you on board, son?”

He nudged the card an inch closer to my side of the desk.

“That card won’t do me any good if I get caught and sent right back to prison.” I nodded at his computer. “I need you to amend the official story.”

I’d been thinking, long and hard, about Buddy’s last words to me. The message from the voices in his head.

“Well, sure,” Lancaster looked uncertain. “What do you need?”

“Daniel Faust,” I told him, “died in the riot. Confirmed kill, body cremated.”

They say…you’re going to die here
, Buddy had told me.
They say you have to die here
.

It wasn’t a prophecy. It was a plan.

I walked around the desk, keeping the gun on him, to watch over his shoulder as he worked. Lancaster pulled up his reports, the account of the riot and its aftermath, and the lists of the dead.

“Now just so you understand,” he said as he added my name to the list, “I can’t do nothin’ about your fingerprints and such. You’ve got a ViCAP file now. That’s a federal database. So if you ever get arrested again and they run your prints, your boat is sunk. Your mugshot’s on file, too.”

“Then I guess I’d better not get arrested again. You let me worry about that.”

He rattled a few more keys and sat back, resting his hands on the desk.

“All right,” he said, “done is done, and it’s all official. As far as the entire world is concerned, you died last night. Only you and me know different. Don’t you worry, long as we’ve got a truce, I’ll keep your secret.”

I chuckled. “Yeah, okay.”

He relaxed, sinking back in his chair, mirroring my smile.

“But you know the old saying,” I told him.

His brow furrowed. “What old saying?”

“Two people can keep a secret,” I said, “if one of them is dead.”

He barely had time for the shock to register on his face as I grabbed his wrist and yanked up his right hand. I pressed the muzzle to his temple and his hand to the barrel. “
No
,” he gasped, just before I pulled the trigger and painted his desk cherry red.

I let go. His corpse slumped sideways in the chair. I headed for his kitchen.

I came back with a terrycloth dishrag and wiped down the gun. Then, carefully, I worked it into his limp fingers, making sure to press his fingertips in to leave solid prints. I had put his hand to the barrel as I fired to make sure it’d be covered in plenty of juicy particles in case the coroner ran a gunshot residue test. A world-class CSI would know the blast pattern was all wrong and figure out he wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger, but prison bosses in blue-collar towns didn’t
get
world-class CSIs.

On a surface-level examination—which was exactly what Warden Lancaster’s corpse would undergo—he was a textbook suicide.

I opened a text file on his desktop and whipped up a quick note, something for the first responders to find: “
I can no longer live with the monstrous things I have done. May God forgive me
.” I figured brevity was best.

I took Emerson’s tiny camera from my hip pocket and weighed it in my hand. Then I opened it up, slid out the storage card, and slotted it into Lancaster’s computer. The footage was all there, blurry and jumpy but unmistakable: Emerson’s murder at Lancaster’s hands, the fights to the death, even a few clear glimpses of the audience.

Those glimpses were the key. I counted five minor celebrities—actors, athletes, cable pundits—whose faces and voices were unmistakable. If the video went public, they’d go down as accessories to murder.

I nestled the camera in my palm and drummed my fingers against it, thinking.

At least five celebrities, and any or all of them would pay to keep this quiet. And
keep
paying as if their lives depended on it. Because they did. Blackmail wasn’t my usual game, but I could turn this video into solid gold.

If I did that, nobody would ever know the truth. The dead prisoners, Emerson’s murder, all of it would be swept under the rug and forgotten. And that would be on my shoulders. The only person who could bring a little justice to this whole sorry mess was me. That was my choice: justice, or a lifetime supply of cold, hard cash.

I leaned over the keyboard, sighing as I typed. “Sometimes,” I muttered to the empty room, “doing the right thing
sucks
.”

Most of my business was secrets and lies. Every once in a while, though, I could inflict more damage with the truth. I opened Lancaster’s email client and attached the video file. With a single click, it went to the newsrooms at CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and CBS. What Emerson had given me wasn’t a camera after all; it was a hand grenade, and I’d just pulled the pin and lobbed it at the world.

I think he would have appreciated that.

The golden ticket sat on Lancaster’s desk, but now the gold was flecked with scarlet stains, one corner soaked in drying blood. I picked it up and eyed it thoughtfully. Even if anything the warden had told me was true, his “friends” at Weishaupt and Associates wouldn’t be coming after me; they wouldn’t even know there was a murder to avenge. Good. I didn’t need any more enemies.

Still, I had to wonder how much juice they really had. Could they kill a scandal before it hit the nightly news? I laughed when the solution came to me.

Then I opened a YouTube account in Lancaster’s name and threw the raw footage up on the Internet under the title “
Celebrities and Murder in Prison Scandal—Explicit Violence!
”

By the time I wiped down the keyboard, the door handles, and everything else I might have touched, erasing my tracks, it already had over three thousand views.

I pocketed the golden ticket, out of curiosity more than anything else, and traded my prison uniform for one of Lancaster’s suits. He was bigger and broader shouldered than me, so it fit like a tent, but it was better than nothing. The uniform didn’t have a name or number stitched to it, nothing to identify me as the one who’d worn it, so I shoved that in a plastic bag and buried it deep in the garbage cans behind the house.

I found around three hundred bucks in his top dresser drawer, a little rainy-day stash. Not much, but it would get me where I was going.

Home.