The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(42)

“Gonna bleed you like a pig, cabron,” he snarled. He was too focused on me to see Jake coming in hot. The biker’s fist cracked across the back of Raymundo’s skull just as Westie tackled my grappler, all three of us crashing into a struggling pile in the dirt.

The tower alarms shrieked across the yard, reverberating with the blood roaring in my ears. I didn’t know how long they’d been blaring, nothing but background noise for the brawl. Then a rifle shot boomed like a peal of graveyard thunder, and the brawl was over.

All across the yard, prisoners dropped to their knees and laced their fingers behind their heads. I pulled myself out of the tangle, rolled onto my belly in the dirt, and knelt up, struggling to catch my breath.

The hive doors burst open and uniforms filled the yard. All was silent but the groans of the injured, loaded up on stretchers and carted out one by one.

“This ain’t over,” Raymundo hissed, kneeling a few feet away.

“When Jennifer gets back,” I said, “you are gonna owe me one hell of an apology.”

“She ain’t comin’ back,” he sneered.

I locked eyes with him. He gave me a bloody-toothed grin.

“What exactly do you mean by that?”

“Just sayin’. Word from the outside is JJ ain’t in a position to call any shots, not anymore. Change in management. Pretty soon she ain’t gonna be in a position to do anything.”

I took a deep breath and struggled to keep my fingers laced behind my head. They wanted to be wrapped around his throat. They wanted it more than anything.

“Raymundo, I’m going to ask you a question. And I want you to consider it the most important question you’ve been asked in your entire life. Where is Jennifer?”

Two guards seized him from behind, hauling him to his feet and shackling him, while another scooped up his razor-blade toothbrush from the dirt.

“Take this one to solitary,” the guard with the blade said. “Gang unit’s gonna want a word with him.”

“Raymundo,” I shouted, “where is she?”

He just laughed as they dragged him away.

“Easy,” Jake told me, “calm down, man. Don’t give ’em an excuse to get trigger happy.”

Westie hadn’t said a word. His head was turned, gazing across the yard. His shoulders sagged.

“Aw, no,” he whispered. “Damn it all. Damn it all to hell.”

I followed his gaze.

We’d heard the rifle go off, the thunder that ended the fight. The last word of the argument. I just hadn’t seen where the bullet landed.

Paul lay sprawled in the scrub, his beige uniform soaked with blood where his heart used to be. His eyes wide and glassy, staring up at the cloudless sky. A perfect kill shot.

Up on the tower catwalk, I saw Jablonski. Clutching his rifle and grinning like a big-game hunter who’d just bagged a rhino. Another guard strolled by and gave him a pat on the back.





22.




They locked us down in the hive while the prison investigators worked to sort out the whole sorry mess. I paced my five feet of freedom, trying to take a maelstrom of worries and turn them into some kind of coherent plan.

Paul’s tattered paperback, Sartre’s No Exit, sat abandoned on his bunk.

All I could think about was Jennifer. If Raymundo was telling the truth, her alliance with the Calles had gone off the rails in the worst way. I wouldn’t have believed it—the last time I’d visited their little urban fortress, it looked like a perfect match—but things were different now. Nicky Agnelli had kept the reins of the Vegas underworld in an iron grip for years; now with Nicky on the run, nobody was running the show. No force in nature was deadlier than a power vacuum.

Anything could be happening out on the streets. All I knew was my friend was in trouble, and I wasn’t there to help her.

“Kite coming left!” shouted a voice from the cell next door.

An elaborately folded piece of paper flew through the bars of my cell, with a length of dirty twine strung through a hole in the corner of the packet. Kites were a prison version of a telegram: you could get a message to any cell in the hive with one—eventually. Since the lockdown kites had been flying fast and furious, one passing my cell every five minutes or so. I crouched and picked up the paper, reeling in the line.

The number 248 was scrawled in blue ballpoint on the outside of the fold. I gathered up all the twine—a good ten feet of it—and slid the paper back out through the bars before calling out “Kite coming left!”

Kneeling by the door with the twine in both hands, I gave it a good swing. The paper rustled as it flew, arcing almost out of sight but falling short of its next stop. I swung it back and forth, gathering momentum, and gave it more line this time. Now I felt a quick double tug, letting me know the prisoner on my left had caught the paper. I let go as the length of twine slithered away.

All right, I told myself, focus. You can’t do a damn thing if you’re distracted in five different directions. Nothing’s changed. The plan is the plan, which means I still need to figure out how I’m going to open that gate and get my hands on a pair of night-vision goggles.

I was staring at Paul’s empty bunk when the answer came to me.

Another kite swung through the cell door. I passed it along, then reached under my mattress and slid out the cell phone. The charge was in the deep amber now, twelve percent and dropping. I dialed fast.