The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(17)
“Do me a favor,” I said. “I don’t think my family knows I’m in here. Can you get word to—”
“I only do favors for members of my court.” Nadine smiled sweetly. “And your ‘family,’ as you call them, can’t help you now. Only we can.”
A man in a fitted black pinstripe suit and an earpiece, looking like a Secret Service agent, approached our table and leaned in. As he did, I noticed two fingers were missing from his left hand. His right was a twisted blanket of faded burn scars that crept up his wrist and disappeared into his sleeve.
“Ma’am,” he said, “we’ve just received word. Nyx has arrived in Talbot Cove. Her hunt is underway.”
Nadine slid back her chair and rose, making a purring noise as she stretched her arms above her head.
“You’ll have to excuse me, Daniel. My daughter is having a…recital of sorts, and I believe she’s about to make me very proud. I’ll come back in a couple of days to see how you’re enjoying prison life. Maybe you’ll have come to your senses by then. That is, of course, assuming you’re still alive.”
9.
Chow time was seven o’clock. Another chance to fill in my mental map of Eisenberg Correctional. If I had my bearings right, the cavernous cafeteria squatted at the intersection of the hives, serving all three in staggered shifts. The concrete ramp on the way inside had a subtle slope, but that and the lack of windows in the dingy tile walls told me we’d gone underground.
The ceiling was unfinished, just girders and the occasional vent interspersed among harsh white industrial fluorescents. If the vents were for circulation, they weren’t doing their job: the air was swampy, stagnant, stinking with the kind of wet sweat-sock odor that comes from packing five hundred men into a room built for three hundred and turning up the heat.
Any other time that would have killed my appetite, but my stomach growled in eager anticipation as I shuffled into the serving line. After all, I haven’t eaten in four months, I thought. Black humor was about the only weapon I had left.
I felt like I was in high school again. I came away from the line with a gray plastic tray, paper plate, and three small dollops of food from a surly inmate’s ladle. Dinner was watery mashed potatoes the color of a soap bar and what you might call creamed chicken and rice, if you were in the mood to be charitable and squinted a little.
I thought about eating beef Wellington at Gordon Ramsay’s and sharing the sticky-toffee pudding dessert with Caitlin. Imperial Peking duck at Saffron East. Fat slices of pepperoni pie at Secret Pizza. Hell, at that moment I would have killed for the greasy shrimp toast and a mai tai from Tiki Pete’s.
That was when the reality of the situation hit me, a full-bore shotgun blast straight to my reptile brain. I was a prisoner here. I was a convict. And all the things I loved, all the things I dreamed about, were just that: dreams. Everything I couldn’t have. For the rest of my life.
I swallowed down my sudden animal panic, pursing my lips into a taut line, and looked for a place to sit.
The cafeteria tables were more Neapolitan ice cream. Vanilla on the left. Paul caught my eye and waved me over, scooting to make a spot beside him.
“Welcome to Chez Eisenberg,” he said, nodding across the table as I swung a leg over the bench and sat down. “You know Jake and Westie?”
“Yeah, we met in the yard. Hey, guys. Speaking of, remember our talk out there, Paul? You had started to say something about breakouts.”
He dipped his plastic spoon in the chicken and rice, giving it a dubious sniff. “Huh? Oh, right. Okay, so it’s not totally true. People have broken out of the Iceberg—”
“Lucky bastards,” Westie grumbled.
“Wait for it. They have, maybe three or four times, but they either get caught or gunned down right after.”
Paul pressed his spoon against his mashed potatoes, separating them into a pair of lumps and drawing a thin potato road between them. I sampled a mouthful of the chicken and rice and struggled to hold it down. The meat was half gelatin and half gristle, in a sauce that tasted like warm mayonnaise.
“This food is…not food,” I said, chasing it with a swig of lukewarm water. “They seriously feed you this slop?”
“All meals meet a minimum caloric and nutritional standard,” Paul said, engrossed in his potato sculpture building, “emphasis on minimum. Food budget’s something like four bucks a day per prisoner.”
“Now you know why people shank each other over commissary goods,” Jake cast a cautious glance across the room. “And why aren’t we on lockdown after that shit that popped off in the yard today? The blacks and browns are givin’ each other snake eyes, and I’ve seen two guards so far with their fingers on their triggers.”
“Probably hoping it gets worse,” Westie said, following his gaze. “Hell, a full-on cafeteria riot? They could put the whole hive in lockdown for a month. Gotta get all that overtime in before Christmas shopping, right?”
I took a deep breath, steadying myself as much as I could manage, and stretched out my senses. Psychic tendrils, glistening in my second sight like purple sea anemones, drifted across the room. Touching brains, scooping up surface thoughts, sifting through emotions like panning for gold in a vat of sludge. Fear. So much fear. The kind of anxiety that turned a man feral. Anger, but that was mostly surface bluster. A crude dam to keep the terror from breaking loose.