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Chapter 54

Frank Nickerson led eight guards into the armory. Blacklock had ordered him to make sure it was secured, and then—if the situation permitted—position himself and his people as snipers on the roofs.

The armory itself was empty. Just beyond, they found Geoffrey Kidd on the floor, with his back propped against a wall. He looked to be bleeding pretty badly. Carter Leffen was kneeling next to him, fussing and fidgeting and obviously doing the man no good at all.

Frank looked around. The bodies of four convicts were scattered around the area. All of them had been shot in the neck or upper chest.

Kidd's work, obviously. Frank didn't care what the general attitude of the guards was. He was starting to get very fond of Geoffrey Kidd.

"Leffen, leave him alone. You're probably doing more harm than good."

Frank looked over the people he had. Bird Matthews, he thought, had the most medical training of any of them.

"Matthews, you stay here and do what you can for Kidd. Jenkins, you stand guard. The rest of you, come with me."

"What do I do?" asked Leffen plaintively.

"I have no idea. Just stay out of the way. And don't burn anything down, fiddling around."

"Why would I do that?" Leffen said, more plaintively still. "Ain't no insurance companies left."

 

In the machine shop area that he used for his war room, Adrian Luff moved three tool bits across the diagram of the prison. "Haggerty, get out there and tell Hancock, Olszanski, and Thaxton to get their squads up to cover the entrance. Those guys there will need reinforcements."

Haggerty left. Luff moved another couple of tool bits, while crooking a finger at Walker. "Jimmy, you go round up Metcalf and Michaels. We need to take back the armory."

Walker left. Whatever reservations or doubts he or any of Luff's top lieutenants might have had about the situation, they were buried deep in their brains and out of sight. By now, Luff's authority was absolute. And there was something very reassuring about the way he kept calm and collected under any circumstances.

Walker even thought they were going to win this battle.

 

Haggerty could have warned him otherwise, by the time Walker reached the area where Metcalf and Michaels were supposed to be. But Haggerty was dead by then.

Haggerty had passed through D-block on his way to find the squads Luff had sent him to find. The building was mostly empty, by then, with not more than a fourth of the cells still occupied. He was caught completely off guard by seven convicts rushing out of one of the cells. All these cells were supposed to be locked! There weren't any reliables in D-block.

He only got off two shots with his rifle, and neither of them hit anything but the walls of an adjoining cell. The first con who grabbed him had gone for the rifle and had wrestled it aside.

Haggerty would have died eventually from the beating that ensued. But a sharpened pork bone driven through his eye and into his brain made sure of it. Not even Luff's maniacal regime, it turned out, had been able to keep inmate ingenuity suppressed.

When they were done with Haggerty, the convicts went back into the cell and hauled out one of Luff's men. One of his "reliables," as he called them. His name was Jack Mayes. The man had remained cowering in a corner, after agreeing to unlock the cell for them.

Seeing the convict yanking the pork bone out of Haggerty's eye and coming toward him, Mayes squawked. "Hey! We had a deal!"

By then, two other cons had him by the arms. A third con, standing behind, kicked his legs out from under him. A fourth con seized him by the hair and jerked his head into position.

"We lied," were the words that came with the pork bone.

 

Dino Morelli led the attack on the next tower. James had planned to do it himself again, but the Boomers simply wouldn't let him.

They wouldn't allow Boyne to take part, either. At some indefinable point between towers, those men had started accepting that they might actually have a future.

"You ain't got nothing to prove, boss," was Morelli's comment. "Neither does John."

Morelli did a better job anyway. He wasn't as purely murderous as Kidd would have been. But a man doesn't commit that many armed robberies without leaning how to use a pistol, even if a smart armed robber like Morelli never actually fired a shot in the course of his crimes. The reason for his long sentence—the judge had thrown the book at him—wasn't because he'd hurt anyone in the course of the robberies. But he'd terrified lots of people and he'd done so damn many of them.

Six shots were all he fired, and he took down two men with them. The Boomer with him, on the other hand—that was Quentin Jackson—emptied his whole clip at his target.

That was mostly just personal, though. Jackson was quite good with a pistol and knew perfectly well his first three shots had taken care of his man. But since the man involved was Tom Davidson and they had plenty of ammunition, Jackson saw no reason not to satisfy an old grudge.

"How does it feel being shot to doll rags, you fuck?" He started unzipping his coverall.

"Jackson, cut it out," said Morelli. "We ain't got time for you to piss on him."

"Sure we do. You and me supposed to stay here and guard the tower. We got plenty of time."

"Fine. I don't want to smell it, how's that?"

In the end, Jackson satisfied the last of his grudge by muscling Davidson's body out of the window and letting it plunge to the concrete far below. Between that and all the bullets he'd put in him, the man would spend his afterlife a mangled mess. Jackson was a Rastafarian, of sorts—a one-man sect in the creed—and believed firmly that you went into the afterlife looking the way you did when you died.

"Think there's any weed in the here and now?" he asked Morelli, a half hour later.

Morelli had been wondering the same thing. From what he could see and hear, they'd be having a celebration tomorrow. And Morelli didn't approve of liquor. The stuff was bad for you.

 

Frank took down the first two convicts advancing on the armory with four shots, two for each. The fusillade that followed from the guards with him took down three more. The rest ran.

"Anybody hurt?" he asked.

Thankfully, nobody was.

 

Behind them, Bird Matthews finished with her first aid.

"Amazingly enough—assuming nothing gets infected—I think you're going to make it."

"Hope so." Geoffrey hissed a little at the pain. "I'm worried about my kids."

Matthews shifted to a squat and looked at him. "Wouldn't think you would be. That much."

"Meaning no offense, ma'am, but what you know about the heart and soul of a big city hit man could be written on the head of a pin. Where were you born and raised? From the accent, I'd say Podunkville, Middle-of-the-Sticks. Population, five hundred."

Matthews smiled. "Okay. Fair enough. Why'd you do it, then?"

He started to shrug, but the pain that gesture caused drew another hiss. "Hard to explain, exactly. Looking back on it, I think I'd've done better to take up hamburger-flipping. In the long run, anyway. At the time, though . . ."

His eyes studied nothing in particular on one of the walls. "When you're a kid growing up in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood, with a whore for a mother and a string of men coming through instead of a father, your options look pretty limited. And you got the moral code of an alley cat. By the time I was fifteen, though, I knew two things for sure. And two things only. First, I was queer. Second, I was tougher'n anybody I knew. Way, way tougher than anybody my own age. So . . . one thing led to another. It doesn't take too long before you realize you've burned every bridge that might have existed, behind you. After that . . ."

He was silent, for a while. "The funny thing is, the only thing I really regretted was that I figured I'd never have kids. And now I do. So, here I am. For the first time in my life since I was a kid myself, worrying about something."

"Well, I know that feeling. It's the one thing—the only thing, and I stress that—I miss about not being straight."

Kidd peered at her. "You're the dyke, right? The one they say has a motorcycle jacket?"

Matthew chuckled. "Yep, that's me. Of course, I never wore it on duty. But if I can get my locker back, I'll show it to you."

He managed an actual grin, despite the pain. "I'd surely like to see that jacket. The prospect's enough to keep me living, I figure. Between that and the kids."

 

They were at the administration building, now. Andy Blacklock and Jeff Edelman worked their way across the building's large entryway. A half dozen guards bolted up the stairs, checking the upper floor offices. Another dozen went through the main level payroll offices looking under desks and inside file cabinets. And another half dozen went downstairs, to the basement area, checking behind boilers and inside tool rooms.

A few slow minutes passed and the all clear call came from everywhere.

The gates to the prison's interior were closed and locked, but they had a key. It slowed them down, but didn't stop them. None of the prisoners had stayed behind to protect the area.

They went through the first set of gates. The second set, the ones dividing the guardhouse from the prisoner holding area, was open. So was the third set leading from the building to the main street inside the walls.

"Where are they?" Andy muttered. He was starting to get a little rattled, almost. Except for one brief firefight with a small group of convicts shortly after they took the entrance, they hadn't run into any opposition. And that firefight hadn't lasted more than a few seconds. One guard went down, with a leg wound, and two convicts were killed. The rest ran.

In fact, the prison seemed eerily deserted.

 

At Andy's command, four COs left the main body of guards and veered left. They went through a door and up the stairs to the holding area reserved for men who needed close watching. The stairway was narrow, just thirty inches across. And instead of the normal eight inch run and eight inch rise with a tread of eight or nine inches, the stone stairs had a six inch tread. And their rise and run varied from step to step. Eight inches, six inches, nine inches, four inches. The stairs, built without a handrail, had been designed to slow prisoners down. They were difficult to climb and treacherous to descend at any pace above a snail's.

The guards, four members of the prison's extraction team, went up the stairs sideways, at a pace most people wouldn't have thought possible. Once at the top, they fanned out. It didn't take long to check the cells, bathrooms, and guard's station. The wing was clear. No prisoners.

Inside one of the cells was a small wooden sculpture of a woman. Her perky nose, full hair, and large eyes almost matched a photograph lying on the bottom bunk. Scrawled on the wall opposite the bunk was a message written in bright green paint:

I am murdered

Beneath that message was another:

No honor among thieves

The men looked at the graffiti. After a few seconds, Lowell Van Wagenen sighed. "It's not like Mark to leave his wife's picture on the bunk."

The others nodded. Mark Huston carried Peggy Huston's photo everywhere he went. The man showed it to anyone who would look at it. He had once said it was his life ring, the thing that kept him sane. No one ever pointed out that sanity was not the man's strong suit. Or that Peggy's photo looked just like Reba McEntire when she was young. Or that, according to his prison records, Mark had never married. Instead, they were grateful.

From the time the picture showed up until the day of the Quiver they hadn't had to rush him to the infirmary because he had eaten glass or razor blades. They hadn't had to put him on suicide watch or in the hole for fighting with other prisoners. And not once did a CO get gunned down with a bucket of piss and shit.

Mark loved his Peggy and their two children, a boy and girl who looked like kids out of a Sears catalogue. He was always full of stories about their antics in school and how they helped their mother. He made no phone calls and received no letters. But he could always tell you what they did over the weekend. A three-time loser who would never see the outside, he talked about the things he would do with his family once he got home. The fishing trips they would take, and the vacations to Yellow Ray and Disney World. He even took classes at the prison school so he could earn a living once he was on the outside. He planned to go straight. He was going to do it for the kids. He wanted them to grow up right. He wanted his son to be a doctor and his girl to marry well. There would be no jailbird for her.

Gently, Lowell put the photograph in his shirt pocket and said, "Let's go."

A few minutes later they rejoined Andy and the other guards, who had just finished with cellblock A. It was as empty as the one the extraction team had checked and no one was happy about it.

The prison felt like a trap waiting to be sprung. The empty buildings and empty walkways echoed with their footsteps and whispers. The mix of guards, Cherokees, and U.S. soldiers no longer fanned out quite as quickly when they entered a new area. They wanted to stay clustered together; their faces mirrored their emotions.

They crossed the prison checking each cell house, garbage dumpster, and abandoned vehicle they passed. Methodically, they worked their way to the exercise yard.

They could hear an occasional gunshot from somewhere in the prison, and a fair amount of shouting or screaming. But not enough. Not two thousand prisoners enough.

 

Rod Hulbert was on the roof of the administration building watching Captain Blacklock and Chief Watkins. Marie Keehn and two dozen of the guards were waiting at the east gate. Their plan had been pretty straightforward. They would attack the prison from the front and the west, herding the prisoners through the safe-looking east opening. Once through the wall, Marie and her people would start dropping them until and unless they surrendered.

Rod was nervous. So far, he had counted only thirty-three prisoners moving around. Most of them were dead, thanks either to him or Blacklock's people. And Cook's Boomers had taken out three of the towers, which accounted for another half dozen to a dozen.

That was way too low. Things were about to get deadly. They had to. There were only four buildings left to go through: C-block, D-block, the infirmary, and the machine shop. And for two thousand men to be in those buildings, it would be elbow to elbow.

He watched, ready to take down anyone he could spot. Andy and a dozen guards, backed up by Kershner and his men, were about to storm the infirmary. Most of those who would remain outside surrounded the building, their weapons trained on every window and door. A dozen others stood with their backs to the buildings. If any prisoners had been missed, and tried to come at them from behind, they would be ready.

 

"Goddamit, where's Haggerty?" Luff demanded of the two lieutenants he still had with him in the war room. "And Jimmy should be back by now, too."

 

But Jimmy Walker was in pieces, by then. Preoccupied and worried because he hadn't been able to find Michaels and Metcalf, he'd made the mistake of passing too closely by one of the locked cells in C-block packed with unreliable inmates. Hands—many hands—had seized him and yanked him against the bars. The hands tried to take his rifle, too, but the rifle had come loose and fallen on the floor too far away to be reached.

Still, the hands had Walker. And while the men who owned those hands couldn't get out of the cell, they could go to work on him. And when they tired, pass him to the hands in the next cell.

He spent the rest of his life seeing nothing but hands. Black hands, white hands, brown hands. Some of them were very strong. All of them were very eager.

He didn't see anything, after a while. His eyes were gone. Soon after, he stopped screaming. His throat was gone too.

 

"What do we do, boss?" asked Boyne. "We didn't expect this."

James didn't have an answer. He'd thought they'd be occupied the whole time taking the towers. But after the second tower, that Morelli had taken, the towers were empty.

Somebody had been in those towers. Cigarette butts were strewn all over. But they were gone now.

* * *

In a clearing in the woods just out of sight of the prison, Jenny Radford and Barbara Ray did another check of their supplies. There was no point to that, really. They'd gotten their improvised battlefield medical center set up long since. The handful of guards Andy had left to protect them—against predators, more than the possibility of convicts coming out—at least had that duty to keep them busy. Jenny and Barbara had nothing. Another useless check of the supplies at least kept them from having fits.

 

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