He held his silence and I knew that this was the information that had him resisting all along. He could have told me about the boy earlier, but it was something about Danny that he wanted to keep from me.
“What was the name of your son?”
The muscles along his jawline bulged.
I pressed the gun in tighter. “Tell me!”
“Roman,” he said.
“He was a pedophile?”
“Yes. Now move the gun.”
So I really had been right. I stood back and lowered the gun to my side, still trying to connect the dots. Franklin Thompson had made the one confession he never imagined making, but I needed more. Danny had killed the judge’s son, and for that maybe I was sorry. But that was the past.
“What does the boy’s rape have to do with Danny?”
“The warden said there could be some trouble, and he wanted legal advice. If any of this comes out, you know I’ll deny it.”
“Tell me what I need to know and it won’t. Trouble with who? With Danny?”
The man’s eyes shifted. “He told me that the inmate behind the rape wants to kill Danny. And that he’s inclined to allow it. That’s all I know.”
“What do you mean kill Danny?” Waves of heat washed over my face. “Who’s going to kill Danny?”
“That’s all I know! I sent the boy there because the warden said he needed him to break Danny. I didn’t know he would be killed. Danny murdered my son!”
“If you could prove that you’d have gone through legal channels.” But my mind was on Basal. Randell was going to kill Danny, and the warden was in on it. “You have to help me stop it,” I said.
“I can’t.”
“What do you mean, you can’t? You set this up—you have to!”
“I didn’t set it up. I only got him the boy.”
“Call the warden and tell him I know everything.”
“I can’t. And you don’t.”
“Why can’t you?”
“The warden knows too much. He would turn on me. My life would be over.”
“I don’t care if your life would be over! You set Danny up, you get him out!”
Keith banged on the door. “Renee?”
“Hold on!”
Blind with rage, I walked back up to the judge and put the gun against his teeth. “Now you listen to me, Judge. I really have lost it. You hear me? I’m a neurotic, manic mess. I don’t care anymore if I live or die. You’re going to call that warden and you’re going to get Danny out of there, or I swear I’m going to blow off another body part!”
“You don’t understand. The warden would start cleaning up his mess the moment I called him! They’d all be dead—Danny, the boy, Randell—all of them. There’d be no witnesses. And then he’d come after me.”
My mind was in a dark fog, and all I could see was Danny, the gentle giant who’d taken a vow of nonviolence, turning the other cheek as the warden beat him to a bloody, dead mess.
But somewhere in that fog I knew that the judge was right. The machine that had growled to life couldn’t be stopped with a phone call. Or by the law, not quickly enough.
Danny had awakened a leviathan, and now he was in its jaws. He was in that monster factory, doing his time. Time that was grinding to a halt.
29
DANNY TOOK A step back at the order.
Slane’s body lay facedown in a pool of his own blood. The man with the broken ankle was dragging himself away from the body. Randell’s face twisted into a pitted ball of rage.
Danny took another step back.
“Kill him, or I’ll kill you and she’ll be all alone out there, twisting in the wind.”
Panic lapped at Danny’s mind. He could not kill Randell. He could, yes he could, but in doing so he would become only another monster, and a monster could not love Renee.
Randell took the matter out of Danny’s hands, no doubt certain that if he didn’t kill Danny, Bostich would shoot him too.
He roared and rushed.
Danny’s first instinct was to take the man down. Doing so would have been a simple matter. But Randell was built like an oak and wouldn’t fall for a simple disabling maneuver again. Danny would have to use force. A lot of it.
His mind scrabbled, grasping for a way out of the warden’s impossible game. All he could think of was a fist to the man’s throat.
But no, he would crush Randell’s windpipe.
His opponent came in like a bull, fists up like hammers, and Danny skipped backward on the balls of his feet.
“Don’t do it, Bruce,” he breathed. “It’s no good!”
“Fight!” the warden shouted. “Kill him!”
“Kill him, Danny!” Kearney shouted. Other prisoners joined in, their mutters and jeers encouraged by the warden’s own order. Randell was the enemy to most of them. They all wanted to see his blood on the ground.
They, too, wanted justice.
“Kill him, Danny!” Pape shouted over the din. “Rip his head off!”
This was their coliseum and Danny was their gladiator.
But he would not kill Randell. There was only one way.
Danny ducked out of Randell’s reach and stopped ten feet from the warden, eyes on the raging bull.
He held out one hand. “Hold on!”
Randell came on, but he slowed.
“Just hold on!” Danny snapped.
The man was panting, blinking the sweat from his eyes. Desperate to survive.
Danny lowered his guard. He started for the larger man, arms at his sides.
“Let’s at least make this fair,” he said.
Now only four paces from Randell.
“I can’t in good conscience simply kill you. You first. Hit me.”
Two paces.
“Hit me with everything you have, you dumb oaf!”
Randell closed the last step, drew his fist back and threw his full weight into a full swing at Danny’s head.
He let the blow come, knowing that he was flirting with death. But he saw no other way.
The man’s fist landed on his temple, snapping Danny’s head to the side and back.
The darkness came quickly, and his contact with the concrete shut off the world. Danny lay on his back, at their mercy.
30
I FACED THE judge and all I could think was that I had to save Danny. Danny had saved me and now I had to save him. The judge was complicit in a plan to destroy him, and I alone knew the full
