The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(62)

When I decided, I decided in a heartbeat. It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t a debate at all.

I wanted to live more than I wanted to feel like a good person.

I raised the bat with both hands and brought it down on Simms’s head, gritting my teeth as the wood cracked and the handle snapped, sending a jolt up my arms. He didn’t die. He spasmed, arms and legs flopping like a fish drowning on dry land. I left the broken bat embedded in the back of his skull, splintered wood and barbed wire matted in crushed flesh and bloody bone.

“Seven seconds,” Lancaster said.

I snatched up the fallen machete. The first chop went halfway into Simms’s neck, snapping his spine. He still wouldn’t die. He let out a rattling, wheezing gasp as he convulsed. I wrenched the blade free and raised it one more time.

The second chop, the one that drained the last of my strength from my aching muscles, the one that left me standing slump-shouldered in front of the roaring crowd—that one killed him. One more step past the line of damnation.

“Now you might call that beginner’s luck,” Lancaster told the audience, “but every once in a while, a long shot wins.”

I stood, limp, while the waist-belt and wrist shackles went back on. The guards led me away, already forgotten by the blood-hungry audience, as the warden announced the next bout.

*

“You know,” I said to Valentino. I sat on his vinyl exam bench, my cheek ice numb from a local anesthetic while he sewed the gash in my cheek shut.

“Only two stitches,” the prison doctor murmured, leaning close and studying my face under a penlight. “That should heal up nicely.”

“You know what’s going on in Hive B,” I said. “You have to know.”

“You’ve also got a mild concussion,” he said, shining the penlight in my eyes. “Probably from your escape attempt—I heard about the bus crash—though tonight certainly didn’t help matters. I’ll give you some acetaminophen.”

“Yeah, let’s talk about tonight,” I said.

He shot a furtive glance toward the infirmary door.

“I can’t,” he said softly.

“The hell you can’t. You’re an accessory to this, doctor. You still have to take the Hippocratic Oath when you get your degree, right? Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you, but—”

“They’ll kill my family.”

He bit his bottom lip, turned, and put his surgical thread in a drawer. When he looked back at me, his eyes were moist.

“I have a wife and a daughter,” he said. “They told me…if I even think about blowing the whistle, if I don’t help…they’ll be on stage at the next event.”

“So take them and run. Go to the feds. They’ll put you in protective custody.”

“You don’t understand.” Valentino shook his head. “You think some prison warden and a gang of corrupt guards could pull this off all by themselves? Lancaster is protected. He has relatives in high places, old money, very old money. There’s nowhere they couldn’t get at us.”

“It’s all right,” I said, holding up one hand. “We’ll find a way. Nobody’s going to hurt your family.”

In the quiet of the infirmary, away from the chaos and the fear of the fight, I took a deep breath and sorted my mind out. Time to take inventory and figure out what I had to work with.

The footage from the fight? Damning evidence, and Valentino could smuggle it out, get it to the cops or the media—but there was no telling how Lancaster and his goons would react. They might run for the hills, or they might try to cover their tracks by going from cell to cell and putting a bullet in every last one of us. No. Too unpredictable, too risky. For now, the camera stayed with me.

Emerson wasn’t coming to the rescue, but the plan he’d put in place before he died—the unlocked hatch and the cell phone stashed in the maintenance tunnels—was still waiting for me. I could use that.

And I could use Valentino.

“When’s the next big event?” I asked him.

“Wednesday night.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I guarantee you’ll be fighting again. When a long shot wins like you did tonight, everybody wants to see an encore. More bets means more money for the warden.”

“What if I told you I had a way to bring this whole place crashing down?”

He let out a nervous chuckle. “I’d say you should have already done it.”

“I need your help.”

“Are you not listening?” he said. “They will kill my family. I’m sorry, I’m genuinely sorry, but I’m not going to—”

“Hold up. It’s something they can never connect back to you. No risk on your part whatsoever. If I succeed, you and your family are free. If I fail, nobody will ever know you had anything to do with it.”

He wavered on his feet, chewing his lip, and glanced to the door again. When he looked back at me, his voice was soft.

“What do I have to do?”

“It’s easy,” I told him. “You need to tell the guards, tomorrow morning, that you have to see me for a follow-up exam.”

“Impossible. We don’t do follow-up care. My instructions, when it comes to the Hive B prisoners, are to patch you up and send you back in the best shape I can manage. Most of the time, the second visit is the one that ends, well”—he nodded toward the door to the morgue—“in there.”