The Last Mile (Amos Decker, #2)(19)

His breathing slowed, his nerves calmed, his muscles relaxed. He felt good, actually.

Twenty years of my life. Twenty damn years.

The anger in him was suddenly immense. The frustration just as potent.

Somebody had to pay. And somebody was about to.

Jumbo was about to come down for an extremely hard landing.

He shuffled forward with what seemed to be the intention of joining a couple of inmates.

Mars knew the lay of the land, and the pair did what he expected them to do. They turned and walked off. Nobody mixed with the leper. The infection might rub off on you.

He looked back up at the catwalk. At Big Dick and Reedy.

He knew what they expected to see on his features: fear.

But instead, he smiled.

And on their faces he saw what he wanted to see: surprise.

He turned back to face Dee and Dum, who had separated from the pack and were now circling him, wild dogs on the prowl. There were lots of wild dogs in Texas and they always hunted in packs. They went after wounded animals, running them out of air and then ganging up on them for the kill.

Well, Mars was not wounded and he had plenty of air.

He wondered what their reward would be. Drugs, smokes, maybe a local skirt snuck in for an hour?

Well, he would make them earn it.

Dee and Dum were both in their thirties, years younger than he was. They were tough, scarred, hardened.

To a degree.

It was always about degrees.

He was about to find out where this pair stood on the prison hardiness spectrum.

Mars shuffled toward Dee while keeping Dum in his periphery. Dee was the linebacker looking to take him head-on because he was big and strong and that was his job. Yet he looked a little surprised that Mars was coming right for him. Then his expression told Mars that he thought this a positive. That Mars was actually making his job easier.

Maybe instead of Dee, he was actually Dum.

Now the other dude was the safety, the fail-safe. If Dee went down, Dum was the one set to take Mars out of this world.

From the corner of his eye Mars watched Dum. The dude was jacking himself up, getting ready. Part of him wanted his mate to fail, just so he could have his shot, build his cred inside here to unassailable proportions.

He could hear it now. I took out Melvin Mars. Dude was a murderer. NFL lock. Biggest, meanest cocksucker you ever saw. And I wiped the floor with his ass.

He’d be telling that story in here for the next forty years. Well, except for one thing. It was never going to happen like that. And Mars didn’t think Dee and Dum had forty seconds, much less forty years, left to live.

Get ready, fresh meat, ’cause here comes Jumbo.

“What’s up, brotha?” said Mars to Dee.

“I ain’t your brotha,” snarled Dee.

“Know that, man, just makin’ conversation. Ain’t no big deal, right?”

Words did not come out of Dee’s mouth. Instead a shiv was revealed in his hand as he came at Mars with a burst of speed. The strike would be to his belly and up to his chest cavity. That was quick and clean and the bleed-out would be fast and fatal. And immensely painful.

The prisoners and guards had backed away, to give Dee room to work.

And Mars to fall.

Well, they actually had it backward.

Mars had already lowered his shoulder, squatted down, tensed his enormous thighs, and, despite the shackles, sprang forward like a launched cannonball. As his hand clamped around Dee’s wrist, holding the shiv right where it was, his right delt slammed into Dee’s throat, pushing his chin up at an angle that would cause nothing but a bolt of pain right before blackness.

There came an audible crack as the spine was pushed past all point of return. And it was over, just like that.

Bleeding from the mouth, an unconscious Dee crumbled where he stood, the shiv dropping from his hand.

Linebacker down.

Mars pointed to the blade as it hit the floor. “Hey, man got a blade,” he said to the closest guard. “Y’all be careful now. Somebody might get hurt.”

He saw in his periphery what he expected to see.

Dum was hesitating now after the quick slaughter of his larger twin, but then how could he not follow through with all the dudes and especially Big Dick watching?

Man had to go. No choice. Else he’d get a shiv in his gut later. Just how it was.

America didn’t have prisons. It had chaos pens where men were transported back seventeen centuries. Where the strong survived until it met something even stronger, and where the weak died every time.

Dum screamed and ran at Mars at the top of his speed.

It was almost too easy, really. Dum was all muscled up and yet slow as gravy. Big in the arms, light in the quads. And the man was about to pay a steep penalty for that imbalance.

Mars again bent low, pivoted, blocked Dum’s arm where his shiv was held, got his shoulder under Dum’s belly, and exploded upward. It was the same move that had launched three-hundred-pound defensive linemen off their feet.

The two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Dum went airborne, soaring over Mars. The crowd parted and Dum landed hard on the concrete and slid across its smooth surface headfirst into a cinderblock wall with shattering velocity.

There was a crunch of bone as his spine compressed and he lost about an inch of height. He didn’t move again. He’d just been in a car accident without benefit of a vehicle. Blood seeped from his mouth. His shiv had fallen from his hand and clattered to the floor.