The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(2)
“Thank you for coming, Ms. Fleiss,” he said with a smile. “Have a safe flight home.”
1.
I woke to the grind of a school bus engine and the stench of diesel exhaust. No, I thought, looking out at the Mojave Desert through a mesh of reinforced steel, not a school bus.
My head pounded like a five-tequila hangover and my mouth was dry as a cotton ball. I tried to rub my forehead. Chains rattled. My hand jerked short.
Shackles. A heavy leather belt was locked around my waist. A belt over a dingy orange jumpsuit. Chains ran to the cuffs on my wrists and ankles.
“…the f*ck am I?” I muttered. The guy sitting next to me had Emilie tattooed down his neck in flowing calligraphy. He gave me the side-eye.
“Transfer bus, man. Goin’ to the Iceberg. Eisenberg Correctional.”
Now I was wide awake. We rode near the back of a packed bus, two men in jumpsuits and chains to each dirt-brown vinyl bench. Up front, a Department of Correctional Officer held a shotgun like he thought he was in a cowboy movie.
“What? That’s a prison.”
He looked at me like I’d sprouted a second head. “Uh-huh. You were expecting Disney World?”
“I was expecting county. I just got busted an hour ago. I should be in jail waiting for—”
No. Not an hour ago. It all flooded back to me at once: the setup, getting caught red-handed with a dead drug dealer and a gun one bullet short. Hauled in by Las Vegas Metro. Trying to convince Harmony Black that the Chicago Outfit’s pet shape-shifter had framed me for murder.
It had just happened. I knew it just happened. So why was the high-noon sun burning down at least twelve hours later, and why couldn’t I remember anything that had happened in between then and now?
“There’s been a mistake,” I told the guy. “I can’t be going to prison. I haven’t even had a bail hearing yet, let alone a trial.”
He shook his head, giving me a gap-toothed smile.
“Man, most dudes just insist they’re innocent and leave it at that. You’re really going the extra mile.”
I stared out the window, though the mesh, looking out over the desolation. Nothing here but rocks, cactus and sand, stretching out to the horizon line. Then the bus turned, the two-lane highway bending hard left, and I got a glimpse of our final destination.
Beehives. Those were what I thought of when the towers loomed up ahead, boiling like a mirage in the dry desert air. Three giant beehives, fat cones of drab beige concrete dotted with tiny windows that caught the sunlight and flashed like diamonds.
“Bigger than it looks,” my neighbor told me. “Had a buddy who did a nickel in there. He says most of it’s underground.”
I wouldn’t know. The hardest time I’d ever done was a three-day stint in a county jail, if you didn’t count my stretch in a halfway house for wayward youth. I’d always held that the most important skill in any career criminal’s resume was “not getting caught.”
At the moment, that wasn’t working out so well for me.
Two rings of fencing stood between us and the prison, fifteen feet high and topped with razor-sharp concertina wire. A bright orange sign on the outer ring screamed “This Fence Is Electrified at All Times,” next to a cartoon silhouette of a skeleton hit by a lightning bolt. The bus slowed to a stop and waited. A horn blared, twice, and the outer gate slowly rolled open.
As we stopped again, between the two gates, guards circled the bus. One held a huge black mastiff on a lead, while the other inspected the bus’s undercarriage with a mirror on a telescoping rod. They were some kind of private security outfit, not state Correctional Officers, wearing crisp navy blue uniforms and belts loaded for bear: sleek black automatics on one hip, canisters of pepper spray on the other.
Satisfied, the guard with the mirror rapped on the bus door and waved us on. The second gate rolled open, grinding on its wheels, and my stomach roiled like I’d just gulped down an entire bottle of hot sauce. This was wrong, this was all wrong, and I wanted to run until my legs gave out.
I looked out the window, up to the towers that dotted the fence line. Polished windows gave each crow’s nest a three hundred and sixty degree view of the action, and every guard on point wore a military-grade sniper rifle slung over one shoulder.
I hadn’t even gotten off the bus yet, and I was already counting all the ways to die.
“On your feet!” shouted the officer up front as the bus came to its final stop. “You will exit the bus single file. You will follow the white line into the processing building. You will not speak.”
I was bad at following orders. I got up and joined the slow line off the bus, shuffle-stopping every few feet until I got close enough to catch the officer’s eye.
“Excuse me,” I said, “I need to talk to somebody in charge. There’s been a mistake—”
“You will exit the bus.” His fingers tightened around the shotgun barrel. “You will not speak.”
No point arguing with a brick wall. Especially not a brick wall with a gun. I stepped off the bus, my sneakers—no, not my sneakers, I thought, looking down at the ratty white track shoes—touching down on dusty gravel. Autumn had washed over the desert, casting the sky in a gloomy haze but not doing a thing to temper the gritty heat.
Two more guards stood at the edge of a long white line painted on the gravel, next to a gray plastic barrel. They unlocked my shackles and belt, tossing them into the barrel. I rubbed my wrists as I walked the line and smeared a bead of sweat on my forehead. I didn’t feel any freer.