“Yes.” That single word was all he needed to let me know what I already knew. I had to do it. Regardless of his name on my list, there was more at stake than simple revenge. “I’ll go one further, kid. You kill Frank and I will forgive you for killing Kon.”
My arse puckered instantly, the invisible hand that suddenly gripped my stomach squeezed harder than ever before. I’d completely forgotten about the hit on Kon, Danny and I ending that man almost as violently as Danny did Katarina.
“I-“ was all that would come out, the rest of the words tripping over themselves in my throat. Nick held his hand up, waving my words away.
“I get that. As much as I love him, I get what that was about. Kon, like Tommy, was a soldier who died for the cause. Our fucked-up lives chose this shit and he fell at the hands of the enemy. Just like the ones yesterday. But my little girl wasn’t part of the war, Dylan. They crossed a line when they took her from me.”
I simply nodded, understanding fully what he was saying. There was so much remorse and guilt in my system that I knew what needed to happen. I didn’t need this grief-stricken father pointing it out to me.
“You’ll be betraying the very people you call family, kid. And working for the enemy. But you need to be the one to do this. You are the only one that can do this. And do you know what, kid? I think you want him dead as much as I do.” I looked him in the eyes and acknowledged his request with a single nod. It didn’t need anything else.
I took my mop and finished cleaning out his toilet. 10 minutes later I was finished, Nick still sitting up the way he was before. When I emerged from the bathroom, he looked at me and smiled.
“You know something? You do this for me and I’ll make sure you can scratch a couple of names from your list.” I looked at him surprised, wondering if he somehow had a spy in my cell.
“What? You don’t think I know you have a list? With the amount of shit that’s happened to you?” He lowered himself, cursed at the pain and raised the sheet up over his head. I watched him for a few more seconds then left him alone. The betrayal he spoke of was now in motion. Despite not yet having a plan, it wouldn’t take long for me to devise one.
8.
It took me 3 days to figure out the best way to kill Frank and it finally came to me after watching an episode of MacGyver of all things. It wasn’t the actual crazy contraptions he built that gave me the idea; more so the premise to think outside the box.
There were 2 things playing on my mind and both needed consideration. They were whether to kill Frank publicly or privately. Frank had always made sure to make every killing he was involved in as public as possible. The question I kept asking myself was whether he should go the same way?
There were a number of ways to give him a public execution, but there were none I could think of where I could do it without incriminating myself. Attacking him with a blade, or simply beating the fuck out of him with a heavy weapon sounded great, but that would be it for me, removed from the unit or prison for God-knows how long.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that having Frank die alone in his cell would be one of the greatest injustices I could inflict on him. No audience to watch him end, just a sorry bitch dying in the confines of his prison cell, alone, like a wounded rat hiding.
9.
It didn’t take me long to make the necessary preparations. It felt good, knowing that I was finally working on the damn list that had haunted me for the past years, seeming to increase as the time passed. But now that I was actually committing to a plan, I felt like celebrating.
I resisted the urge to bounce around my cell in jubilation and promised myself that I would once the prick was dead. For now, I needed to keep my eyes on the prize and stay focused, ensuring that my plan would go the way I needed it to. If everything fell into place, Frank Crudinski would be dead by the following week and his death would hopefully be ruled as natural.
10.
I always found something intriguing about old buildings as a kid. They held a certain energy about them, as if past events somehow remained within their walls. There would always be some kind of treasure hidden inside them, whether it was old artefacts or even just a simple newspaper from another time.
Prisons were the same. Many old ones often opened their doors long after closing down, to give the interested public a chance to view the other side of the walls. The Palace was fairly old, its doors first opening in the Summer of 1935. It steadily grew to be one of the worst prisons in the country, housing many of the vilest criminals that society could spit out.
But this isn’t a history lesson. The point of all this is that some areas of the prison are older than others and the medical wing is one of the oldest, it’s building one of the original to be built. The purpose of the unit has changed several times, starting with the initial use of the building as a mainstream unit. It was an isolation wing at one stage, and part of the building was used for staff accommodation.
It didn’t turn into a prison hospital until 1982, a complete refurbishment undertaken that year. But not everything was cleaned out during the previous changeover and one of the rooms that was left practically untouched was my laundry room.
