The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(58)

The entire hive, all seven stories of it, had been converted into cells for solitary detention.

They walked me up to the fourth tier. We passed cell after cell where a narrow slot stood open, the occupants’ only window to the outside world. In some cells, cowering figures huddled in corners, hiding their faces from the light. In others, eyes stared back out at me. Hard eyes. Distant eyes. Mad eyes. I stopped looking.

My new cell was identical to the one they’d just pulled me out of, with one exception: on the back wall, a frosted panel under a wire-frame cage glowed with soft light. There wasn’t anything to look at, but at least I wouldn’t go blind in the meantime.

They took off my shackles and waved me inside. As soon as the door swung shut, clanging behind me and sealing me in, I fought a surge of claustrophobic terror. Was this the great mystery of Hive B? That they were keeping everyone in permanent solitary?

It made a sick kind of sense. Eisenberg Correctional only cared about minimizing expenses and maximizing profits; rehabilitation wasn’t on the menu. Providing recreation cost money, and so did hiring enough guards to watch all the prisoners. Medical care and patching up cons after the occasional brawl cost money too. So much easier to toss every prisoner into his own personal tomb and let him rot.

All the convicts I’d been told about, the ones who had been snatched in the night and transferred to Hive B, had violent records—or in Simms’s case, attacked other inmates. Exactly the kind of prisoners who gave the administration a headache. And then there were the ones who wouldn’t ever be getting out and squawking about this to the press: the ones on life sentences, with no parole.

Like me.

I paced the seven-by-seven prison cell. Possibly my new home, for the rest of my life.

No, I thought. There’s no such thing as an unsolvable problem, and there’s no such thing as an impossible escape.

I did push-ups against the wall, ignoring the twinge from my tortured muscles. Working my body helped to work my brain and get the ideas flowing.

What I didn’t know then—what I wouldn’t find out until later that night—was that I was working the wrong problem. I thought I’d solved the puzzle of Hive B. I hadn’t.

The truth was so much worse.





31.




First, I heard the sounds. Murmuring voices, echoing footfalls, rising up from the gallery floor far below my cell. Like they’d opened all the doors and let the inmates out for some recreation time. I felt a spark of hope; maybe the situation wasn’t as bad as I’d imagined.

Then the guards came for me.

One had a checklist on a clipboard, lined with names and cell numbers. The other two had a fresh pair of shackles for me. They marched me out onto the tier under dimmed-down lights. As we rounded the stairs, headed down, I got a look at what waited below.

Mahogany tables and candlelight. White-tuxedoed waiters with towels draped over their sleeves, ferrying drinks from a rolling wet bar. The gallery floor, surrounded by iron doors and standing in the shadow of the guard tower, had been turned into a bizarre imitation of an upscale nightclub.

“What the hell is this?” I said, hesitating. A guard’s fist jabbed into my kidney, sending me stumbling.

“You’ll find out. Shut up and do what you’re told.”

I wasn’t the first prisoner down on the floor. Four others stood in a silent, grim line off to one side of the “nightclub.” I recognized one of them. Simms looked different from when we’d tussled back in my cell. A long scar ran along one puffy eye, sealed with a row of black stitches.

I kept my mouth shut and my eyes open, trying to get a read on the situation. The waiters set out more tables and chairs, lighting elegant candles. Two men in black tuxes rolled in a baby grand piano and opened a sleek black case, taking out a polished bass. Soon the jaunty strains of a jazz duo filled the air.

The guests arrived in pairs and foursomes, dressed for a night on the red carpet. Perfect hair and designer suits, haute couture and diamond necklaces. They mingled and laughed and ordered cocktails from the bar, as if finding a swank lounge in the heart of a prison was perfectly ordinary.

I risked a whisper, glancing sidelong at the convict next to me. “Hey. What’s going on here?”

He gave a timid shake of his head and muttered, “Don’t talk. Just don’t react to anything. Safer that way.”

Given the look of the guards patrolling the floor—and the Tasers they openly carried—I took his word for it.

Still, I knew an opportunity when I saw one. My shackles had just enough give to let me reach my pocket. My fingers dipped in, scooping out the tiny plastic square of the video camera, and I palmed it like a playing card. My pinky slid across a textured switch, clicking it on. As I surveyed the room, I swiveled my wrist from side to side, furtively filming as much as I could.

I caught some familiar faces in the growing crowd. Not anyone I knew personally, faces from television. A famous golf pro, with a woman who definitely wasn’t his wife, shared drinks with an actress I’d seen in some summer action-movie blockbuster. A political pundit wore a huge lantern-jawed grin as he crossed the floor, rendezvousing with Warden Lancaster.

“Uh-oh,” Lancaster chortled, “the media’s here! Not gonna blow the whistle on us, are ya?”

The pundit laughed and raised his glass. “What, don’t you watch my show? I always say we should be tougher on crime.”