The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(53)

He shook his head. “You sure? Work detail’s almost over.”

A tiny trickle of sweat beaded on Vasquez’s forehead.

“Positive. C’mon, I’m late for my dinner break.”

“Sure, sure,” the gate guard said. He turned a key in the console and pushed a button. The gate rattled open on electric tracks. As we walked through, he glanced at the empty holster on Vasquez’s belt.

“Hey,” he said, “where’s your gun?”

“Here,” I replied and pressed the barrel to his forehead. Westie stepped in fast and got the knife back against Vasquez’s throat. Everybody turned into statues.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Mc—McGuiness,” he stammered.

“You get the same deal he gets,” I said, nodding toward Vasquez. “You stay cool, you get to go home to your family tonight. Can you stay cool, McGuiness?”

He nodded like a bobblehead doll.

“Good man,” I said and took the gun off his belt. I passed it over to Westie and got McGuiness on his feet. “What time is it?”

McGuiness raised his trembling hand just enough to glance down at his cheap Timex. “Four minutes after six.”

Right on schedule. We pushed the guards through the double doors ahead of us just as Jake’s distraction fired off. I had the space of a heartbeat to take it all in: the cavernous garage, bay doors open to a violet Nevada sunset, and harsh white light pouring down from stark steel fixtures high above. The transfer bus parked on one end of the repair bay, buggies on the other, and a handful of sweaty, shirtless cons doing a wash-and-wax job on a couple of guards’ personal cars. Booth in the back at the top of a short flight of corrugated metal stairs, two guards sitting snug behind bulletproof glass. A third guard pacing the floor, his back turning as a flash of hot orange flared under one of the parked cars.

“Fire,” Jake shouted, scrambling around the car. That got the booth guards moving; they came thundering down the steps, one with a fire extinguisher. Westie and I shoved our hostages to the floor. The guard by the cars spun, saw us, and froze; between the fire and the guns, it was one crisis too many for his brain to handle. He got his priorities right and reached for his pistol just in time to catch Jake’s granite fist across his jaw. He dropped, out cold, and Jake grabbed his piece.

We kept our guns on the booth guards. The fire extinguisher fell, clanging as it bounced down the metal steps. One of the guards gave a shifty look toward the door and wavered on his feet, like he was thinking about running back to the booth and locking himself inside.

“This bullet can fly twenty-five hundred feet in one second,” I told him. “Can you run faster than that?”

He stayed put.

“Jake,” I barked, “get that fire out before it sets off the smoke detectors. Westie, disarm the booth guards. I’ll keep you covered. Buddy, lock the doors behind us.”

The motor pool was ours. No alarms, no blood, nice and clean. All I could think about, though, were the prison gates that stood between us and freedom.

The hard part wasn’t over. It hadn’t even started yet.





28.




We patted the guards down, took their belts and their radios, and had them kneel in the corner of the garage. “Yo,” one of the cons on the work shift called out, “we gettin’ out of here?”

“We are,” Westie said. “You can do whatever the hell you want. Just stay out of our way.”

The two Wildcats stood sleek, polished and ready, scooped-back steel skeletons painted desert tan. There wasn’t much to them but fat wheels, two rumble seats, and an engine built for speed. Jake trundled over with two scarlet plastic gas cans, and I held them steady while he strapped them onto the first buggy with bungee cords.

“This much gas should get us to civilization at least.” He nodded toward the open bay doors. Wispy clouds streaked a pearly violet sky as the last rays of sunlight escaped from the oncoming night. “Right across that tarmac, we take a hard left, and it’s a straight shot to the prison gates.”

The gates I couldn’t open.

I jogged up the stairs to the booth. A hard plastic box hung on the back wall, lined with tarnished keys tied to little paper tags. As I looked down through the bulletproof glass, the answer came to me. I just didn’t like it.

The transfer bus. Heavy-duty and reinforced with cold steel to keep prisoners in and would-be rescuers out. A machine like that, at full speed…sure, it could crash those gates and carve a hole for the Wildcats to blaze through. It’d also set off alarms from here to the Aberdeen Police Department thirty miles away. They’d have choppers in the sky, roadblocks waiting up ahead, and hard-eyed cops with itchy trigger fingers and orders to shoot to kill.

One person could crash the gates. And that person wasn’t going home. Not tonight.

Westie or Jake? Not a chance they’d throw away their shot at escape to save the rest of us. They weren’t the altruistic type. The other cons on the work detail? They weren’t that dumb; a fast car might have a shot on the open road, pinned between the prison guards and Aberdeen’s finest, but the bus was a lumbering target just waiting to get taken down.

Buddy? Buddy would do it. Set him in the driver’s seat, tell him what pedal to push, and point him toward the gate. He was so lost in his world of voices, he probably wouldn’t even ask me why.