The captain wagged his head through the open doorway. “Let’s go.”
It was my Jonestown, but it was also the place where I might see Danny, and so it was with a conflicted mind that I stepped inside their hard yard.
The room was concrete on all sides except the ceiling, which was made of a mesh wire supported by several metal beams. The towering concrete walls sent a chill down my back.
It was as if I had just stepped into my own graveyard. This was my tomb. My crypt, my slaughterhouse, the place where I would finally rest at the end of my life’s search for peace.
My eyes flitted over the rest of the room. A sea of faces stared at me, but none of them belonged to Danny. My heart crumbled.
Marshall Pape stood to my left, hands tucked into his blazer pockets, watching me without expression. Ten inmates were seated along the wall, legs cocked up or extended on the floor in front of them. Some were dressed in the common blue-and-tan uniforms of the general population. Some wore street clothes.
Besides the captain and the guard who’d brought us, there were four other COs in the room, one in each corner, all armed with illicit rifles.
Bruce Randell stared at me from the center of the line. I was going to die.
That was how I was thinking of it, but in the most trying times I had a way of letting all of my neurotic tendencies sink into the floor and becoming stronger. I was going to die here—Keith knew that, I knew that, Danny would soon know that—but maybe I was going to take Pape with me.
A low wolf whistle from one of the inmates broke the silence.
“Quiet,” the warden said. “This isn’t a whorehouse.” He returned his stare to me, face still flat.
The captain removed my handcuffs and shoved me from behind. I stumbled forward to the center of the room and was joined by Keith.
For long seconds no one spoke. I scanned the faces of the inmates, trying to guess their intentions or, worse, the warden’s intentions for them.
Some were in their twenties, but most were in their thirties or forties, covered in prison tattoos. Just men, like Danny, who’d been sucked into Marshall Pape’s monster factory.
But they didn’t look like monsters. One had whistled, yes, and two or three eyed me with interest, but their eyes weren’t dripping with lust. In fact, most of them looked at me with uncertainty, even sympathy.
An older man sat at the far end, legs crossed underneath him, and on his face I saw a sad regret I might have expected from my own father, if he were still alive and there.
I was desperate, I know, but I really did feel a surprising sense of kinship with my fellow prisoners at that moment. We were all under the same heel.
I knew they were going to hurt me, but as I stared into the prisoners’ eyes I saw Danny. These were the kind of men he’d lived with for the past three years. These were the members of his world now. These were the ones he’d chosen to love. Even Randell, who on closer inspection looked uncertain, not vengeful.
“What we have here, my friends,” the warden said, withdrawing his hands from the pockets, “is a perfect lesson in what’s so wrong with the world. You see a man and a woman in front of you. They came to our institution under false pretenses, pretending to be two people they were not. But isn’t that the way it is with everyone who comes to this place? Isn’t that the way it is with the whole world? No one wants to confess their true nature or the evil thoughts in their minds. Everyone’s guilty. Pretenders, all of them.”
He allowed himself a subtle if insincere smile. “It’s my job to peel back the layers, strip you all down to your naked selves, and reveal the pathetic truth of your nature so that it can be rehabilitated. All things must become new, and sometimes that’s an ugly process.”
The warden wagged his head toward the inmates seated against the wall. “The men you see aren’t here by accident. They cannot and will not run to your law, because they’re under mine now. They know the cost of breaking my law is far too high to endure for very long, much less forever.”
Basal was his religion. The inmates were his flock. It made me sick.
“The question I put to you two today is, who are you underneath it all?” He looked between Keith and me. “Please show them who you really are. Both of you.”
I’d forgotten about my blonde wig, and it took me a moment to understand what he was asking. But then Keith reached up and started peeling off the goatee and mustache he’d glued to his face. I pulled off my wig. I’d left the glasses in the holding room. They were pointless anyway.
“You see? They aren’t Julia and Myles, after all. They broke into my prison with the intention of killing Randell, because they believed Randell intended to kill the priest.”
He walked up to me, and I suppressed a sudden urge to spit in his face, because for a moment he ceased being human in my eyes.
The warden began to pull the pins out of my hair, letting it fall around my shoulders.
“So pretty on the outside,” he said. “But inside no different from Slane.” He continued pulling down my hair. “You’ve abused me,” he said matter-of-factly. “You’ve breached my walls and violated my sanctuary. And that is no less of an offense than the torturing or taking of another human being. So now I have no choice but to return the favor. An eye for an eye, as we all know.”
“You can’t do this,” Keith bit off under his breath.
“Oh, but you’re wrong. I can. This is Basal, and in Basal, I preside.”
It hit me that this might have nothing to do with Danny. The warden was going to let them hurt me and Danny would be nowhere near to stop them. Maybe he was already dead. My breathing thickened.
“Now that the preliminaries are out of the way, let’s get on with the messy business, shall we?”
“How can you stand here and—” It was as far as Keith got before the warden slapped him.
Keith glared, face flushed. I had never seen such a look of hatred from Keith, and seeing him stand up to the devil both scared me and gave me a surge of confidence.
The warden turned to me. “Take off your pants.”
“No—” Keith’s objection earned another slap, this time backhanded, hard enough to startle me.
“Bare yourself!” the warden thundered. “Show us who you really are!”
Danny had worked his way through the underground passages and found his way to the administrative segregation wing. No guards. No attempt to stop him. They knew; they had to know. Why else would they have left the cell open and let him pass?
It was all planned. Danny wasn’t about to execute some clever, eleventh-hour rescue that would sweep Renee from danger without significant collateral damage.
But he could not stop, because he also knew that he had to go to her.
There were other possibilities. He could make an attempt to gain a hostage. He could hole himself up in the warden’s office and threaten to expose the prison. He could find a more suitable weapon, a knife or a gun. He could try to get to a phone and an outside line and call the authorities.
But the warden was no fool. All his bases would be covered. There was only one way to save Renee. There was only one thing that the warden wanted more than Renee, and that was him.
Danny was the key to her survival. Only Danny.
He paused at the bottom of the concrete stairs that led up from ad seg, breathing hard. A single bulb lit the stairwell and exposed the sealed steel door that led into the administration wing. From there he would head down the hall to the guarded door into the main prison.
They wouldn’t stop him, he already knew that. They had all been instructed to let him pass, let him find Renee, let him try to save her. Let him see her die.
His greatest advantage was their underestimation of his skill. They’d seen him take blows and suffer punishment, but they hadn’t seen him fight.
His right leg felt like it was filled with hot lead, and his head pounded with swelling pain, but none of it compared to the rage tearing at his heart. Again, a quiet voice deep within objected to the sudden change in him.
An image of Renee silenced that voice.
There were more ways to kill a person than to save one. A thousand times in the yards and halls of Ironwood, he’d been close enough to kill another inmate, but he’d never given the matter a passing thought. He’d
