The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(78)

I took Emerson’s tiny camera from my hip pocket and weighed it in my hand. Then I opened it up, slid out the storage card, and slotted it into Lancaster’s computer. The footage was all there, blurry and jumpy but unmistakable: Emerson’s murder at Lancaster’s hands, the fights to the death, even a few clear glimpses of the audience.

Those glimpses were the key. I counted five minor celebrities—actors, athletes, cable pundits—whose faces and voices were unmistakable. If the video went public, they’d go down as accessories to murder.

I nestled the camera in my palm and drummed my fingers against it, thinking.

At least five celebrities, and any or all of them would pay to keep this quiet. And keep paying as if their lives depended on it. Because they did. Blackmail wasn’t my usual game, but I could turn this video into solid gold.

If I did that, nobody would ever know the truth. The dead prisoners, Emerson’s murder, all of it would be swept under the rug and forgotten. And that would be on my shoulders. The only person who could bring a little justice to this whole sorry mess was me. That was my choice: justice, or a lifetime supply of cold, hard cash.

I leaned over the keyboard, sighing as I typed. “Sometimes,” I muttered to the empty room, “doing the right thing sucks.”

Most of my business was secrets and lies. Every once in a while, though, I could inflict more damage with the truth. I opened Lancaster’s email client and attached the video file. With a single click, it went to the newsrooms at CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and CBS. What Emerson had given me wasn’t a camera after all; it was a hand grenade, and I’d just pulled the pin and lobbed it at the world.

I think he would have appreciated that.

The golden ticket sat on Lancaster’s desk, but now the gold was flecked with scarlet stains, one corner soaked in drying blood. I picked it up and eyed it thoughtfully. Even if anything the warden had told me was true, his “friends” at Weishaupt and Associates wouldn’t be coming after me; they wouldn’t even know there was a murder to avenge. Good. I didn’t need any more enemies.

Still, I had to wonder how much juice they really had. Could they kill a scandal before it hit the nightly news? I laughed when the solution came to me.

Then I opened a YouTube account in Lancaster’s name and threw the raw footage up on the Internet under the title “Celebrities and Murder in Prison Scandal—Explicit Violence!”

By the time I wiped down the keyboard, the door handles, and everything else I might have touched, erasing my tracks, it already had over three thousand views.

I pocketed the golden ticket, out of curiosity more than anything else, and traded my prison uniform for one of Lancaster’s suits. He was bigger and broader shouldered than me, so it fit like a tent, but it was better than nothing. The uniform didn’t have a name or number stitched to it, nothing to identify me as the one who’d worn it, so I shoved that in a plastic bag and buried it deep in the garbage cans behind the house.

I found around three hundred bucks in his top dresser drawer, a little rainy-day stash. Not much, but it would get me where I was going.

Home.





42.




I’d come to Eisenberg Correctional in a bus, and I left the same way. A Greyhound this time, barreling down a long, dry desert highway. No dust, no diesel fumes, just clear blue sky and sunlight. I got off in Salt Lake City and grabbed lunch at a McDonald’s while I waited for my next bus. A two-dollar cheeseburger tasted like filet mignon. I sat there, savoring every bite, looking at the people around me and marveling. Because I could.

I didn’t know what freedom was worth until I lost it. I would never, I quietly vowed to myself, lose it again. Never.

The waiting lounge at the bus terminal had a television set mounted on brackets high in one corner of the room. I paused for a moment. The video was already headline news, the story of the day, and two pundits behind a curved desk were spinning up a storm.

“—our beloved colleague found dead in his home, allegedly of a self-inflicted gunshot wound just like—as we learned twenty minutes ago—Warden Lancaster himself. Now even if that wasn’t his face and voice on the recording, and frankly our in-studio experts have serious questions about that, clearly he believed he’d already been tried in the court of public opinion—”

“And that’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. We’re hearing reports of dozens of indictments being handed down this afternoon. Was he even named? Isn’t it far more likely that instead of being a patron of this ‘fight club,’ he was reporting undercover and planning to expose it? And why isn’t anyone asking the real question: why isn’t this graphic, violent footage, which could be seen by children, being erased from the Internet immediately? Doesn’t the attorney general care about children? That’s where we should be focusing all our attention right now.”

I smiled, shook my head, and moved on. Some things never changed.

The next bus ride was a straight shot down I-15, all the way to Las Vegas. Six and a half hours on the road, and I moved closer to the edge of my seat with every passing mile. My seatmate made small talk now and then, in between naps; he was an airplane-parts salesman. I didn’t know anything about that, so I asked him some questions I didn’t care about the answers to and let him ramble, responding with nods and “hmms” here and there. It was good background noise.