The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(64)

My arms shook and my teary eyes burned, but I didn’t have a second to rest. I fished on his belt for the keys, unshackled myself, and scrambled back up the ladder. The smoke had cleared, and the hallway still stood empty. Nobody had seen a thing. I closed the hatch on my way back down and latched it behind me.

The tunnels hummed, lined with fat iron pipes and rattling old access panels. Faint yellow light glowed from bulbs in wire cages, spaced out every twenty feet or so along the cramped walkway. Judging from the cobwebs and the dust, so thick I could taste it in the back of my throat, maintenance crews didn’t come down here often.

I scouted ahead, squinting. I found what I needed in a blot of shadow, halfway between the lights: a tiny nook along the left-hand wall, next to a throbbing metal cabinet dripping with condensation dewdrops. I grabbed the dead guard by the wrists, gritting my teeth as I dragged him down the tunnel. Then came the laborious work of squeezing his body into the nook, folding his arms and legs and shoving with my feet.

It wasn’t the best way of hiding a body, but assuming nobody checked down here, or if they just didn’t look too hard, there was a good chance he’d stay hidden for a few days. Eventually he’d stink up the place and somebody would have to notice, but hopefully by then it’d be a moot point.

I found my prize, Emerson’s last gift, sitting on a ledge about fifty feet further down. A cell phone, sealed up safe in a ziplock baggie. I dialed by memory as I prowled the tunnels, looking for exits and trying to get the lay of the land.

“It’s me,” I said fast. “I’m alive. Banged up and then some, but I’m alive.”

“What happened out there?” Bentley asked. “The escape’s been all over the news, and we thought you’d made it out, but you never came home. Then this prison guard contacted me and—”

His voice washed out in a blur of static, then silence. I took the next right and jogged along the tunnel, watching the phone’s screen and waiting until a single reception bar lit up.

“Sorry,” I said once I redialed, “hit a dead zone. I’m down in the prison maintenance tunnels.”

“Can you get out from there?”

I paused, looking up at a short ladder to another hatch just above my head.

“No,” I said. “Not on my own, but I’ve got a plan.”

“Name it,” Bentley said.

“Wednesday night. I need a car. A service van would be better, something with no windows in the back so I can stay out of sight. Thing is, you’ll probably be taking it out through a roadblock; the papers and plates have to be legit.”

“The vehicle shouldn’t be a problem, but that’s well after visiting hours. How do we get inside the prison?”

“You don’t,” I said. “Just get as close as you can and wait for my signal. Trust me, you’ll know when it happens.”

Then I told him the rest of the plan. He was silent for a moment when I finished, contemplating all the angles.

“It could work,” he mused. “Dangerous, though.”

“If you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears.”

He sighed. “Alas, I do not. All right. I’ll make the phone calls.”

As I came to a tunnel junction, craning my neck to look in each direction, a fresh wave of nausea hit me. I squeezed my eyes shut until it passed.

“Do me a favor,” I said, “and have Doc Savoy on standby. I’ve gotten the shit kicked out of me this week, and I have a feeling things are gonna get worse before they get better.”

“Be safe, Daniel. We’ll see you Wednesday night.”

After I hung up, I flipped the phone over, fished out the SIM card, and snapped it in half. If my whole plan went sideways, I didn’t want Lancaster and his thugs tracing anything back to Bentley and Corman’s doorstep. Then I tossed the phone into a dark, dusty shadow under a rattling iron pipe.

Time was running out. With every passing minute, the odds of someone noticing that a guard and one of the Hive B prisoners had gone missing became more and more inevitable. I started carefully poking my head up through access hatches as I passed them, using half-inch glimpses of the world above and my mental map of the prison to navigate.

That was how I ended up back in Hive C, standing in front of Brisco’s card table on the gallery floor. He and his buddies stared at me like they’d seen a ghost.

“Need to talk,” I told him, “the bathrooms on tier three. Right now.”

He spit out the toothpick he’d been chewing.

“The grapevine said you got killed trying to bust outta here,” he said. “Then I heard you were in Ad Seg. Then you were just gone.”

“I’m alive and well, and right now I’m just another uniform in the crowd, but if any of these guards look too close and realize who I am, we’re both dead men. So please, pretty please, get up and come with me.”

His entourage looked between us, uncertain. Brisco sighed and tossed his cards on the table.

“Play without me,” he told them.

Alone in the bathroom, under the eye of a dead surveillance camera, I took Emerson’s video camera from my pocket.

“Convicts work the prison cafeteria, right? You got juice with any of ’em?”

“With the whites, sure,” he said. “I could get double servings at dinner if I wanted. I just don’t. What’s going on, Faust?”