He’d thought he couldn’t stomach that.
But now, with the cold winter air cutting through his jacket and the guard propelling him forwards towards his destiny, he started wondering if he could.
His reputation might already be ruined beyond repair. No one was beating the drums to have him let out of prison, after all. No matter how well he behaved within bars, he could easily be there the rest of his life.
And escaping might save his griffin’s life—if that life was still there to save.
The Marshal transporting him would surely have to leave him comparatively unguarded at some point, especially since this would be an overnight trip. He could find a way out, and if one person happened to glimpse something seemingly impossible happening, that wasn’t the same thing as concrete security footage.
You could hurt someone’s career. Losing a prisoner—
But he didn’t know that he could bring himself to keep caring about that. He didn’t think it was out of line to say that his freedom might be worth it.
And it isn’t like they’d get fired, he thought. Anybody could guess that I’d have resources and knowledge your average criminal wouldn’t. I’ve seen the transport process from both sides. It might be embarrassing to whatever Marshal has me if I slip the net, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
There was something else, too.
Someone had tried to kill him. No one in the yard had had a problem with him themselves; he hadn’t made any of them angry. But the ferret had been armed and ready.
The deal was too good to pass up, the guy had said.
Someone had been pulling the strings there. If he hadn’t been woozy from painkillers ever since the infirmary, he would have realized it even sooner.
Whoever had killed Phil had tried to kill him, too. It wasn’t enough to have framed him; someone wanted him out of the way completely.
His choice wasn’t between prison with a chance of proving his innocence or freedom on the run.
His choice was between life with answers or death without. Justice for Phil, and for him, or a murderer walking free.
And that, to Cooper, was no choice at all.
As soon as he could get a chance, he would make a break for it.
*
“Anything I should know?” Gretchen said.
Stridmont Penitentiary’s outgoing prisoner transports were overseen by a man who looked like the last time he’d smiled had been twenty years ago, and it had been terrible, and he had no intention of doing it ever again.
“Is a little girl like you going to be able to handle this guy?” he said wearily.
If he’d wanted to specifically design a question to irritate her, he couldn’t have done any better than that.
“Your prison is the one where a bunch of inmates got out of control and nearly killed him,” she said. “Nothing like that has ever happened on my watch. Maybe you should worry a little less about me and a little more about what’s happening in your own house.”
“Things happen.”
“Sure, especially if you let them.” She repeated, “Is there anything I need to know about Dawes?”
The man heaved out a sigh that was so deep it seemed to come up all the way from the soles of his feet. “He’s got a pretty clean history here. He doesn’t make trouble, not that there’s usually much trouble you can make in protective custody.”
Outside of ganging up on a man and repeatedly stabbing him, apparently.
As long as Dawes was in her keeping, she was going to handle him better than that.
Not that she could really handle him worse.
“The prisoner who stabbed Dawes.” She searched her memory and found the name. “Clarence Reilly. Has he confessed yet?”
“What’s to confess? His fingerprints are on the shiv that has Dawes’s blood all over it.”
“But did he say why he did it?”
“Who cares?”
“I do,” Gretchen said patiently. “I’m going to be moving him cross-country. If someone’s put a target on his back, that’d be good to know.”
The guard shrugged. “Reilly was high as a kite. It could have been anything. There’s no conspiracy here, sweetie. Just your basic prison yard brawl.”
Nothing about this sounded basic to her, but she let it go. She didn’t think she was going to get a lot of good intel out of this particular guard.
Then he frowned, an actual flicker of engagement crossing his beleaguered expression. He even failed to call her sweetie, so it must have been serious.
He said, “There is something a little funny about him, now that you mention it.”
It felt like the first actual opinion the guy had had, so Gretchen handled it with care. She made sure she sounded friendly. “Funny how?”
“Just funny.”
She was starting to understand how you sighed all the way from the soles of your feet.
“I don’t care if it makes sense or not,” she said. “I just want to know what you think.”
She didn’t know what she’d expected, but it wasn’t what she got.
“He’s... composed,” the guy said finally. “You know, calm. Self-possessed. He looks like—”
Gretchen remembered. It hadn’t shown up often when he’d been on the stand, unfortunately for him, but there had been times when Cooper Dawes had been sitting quietly by his lawyer, and he had somehow looked—unbreakable. Like there was something buried deep down inside him that none of this could touch.
He had looked a little like a prince in disguise.
“You know,” the guy said. “Like somebody on Undercover Boss.”
Sort of the same thing, Gretchen thought wryly.
She signed the rest of the transfer documents and then stood there waiting silently while the guard went to fetch Dawes. She was good at that kind of coiled, unmoving attention. If you grew up in a family of lynx shifters, you picked up on the body language, even if you couldn’t shift yourself.
She was standing just outside of the prison itself, outdoors but still inside the main walls. It was freezing. Funny how there could be so much sun without it making her even a little bit warmer.
At least Keith
