“There’s no need to wake— Agh!”
The involuntary scream came because as Arthur had started to pick himself up, he realised that the nightie-wearing Sister Teresa was standing right behind him.
“Jesus!”
“Yeah,” said Joy. “She does that.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Bunny lay on his bunk and tried as hard as he could not to sleep. He was beyond exhausted. Normally, being able to sleep anywhere was a real skill of his. It had been commented on. Envied even. Staying awake, on the other hand, had never been a great strength. Lights out had been at 10pm, but he needed to stay awake until 2am. He hadn’t trusted himself to nap and then wake up again. It wasn’t like he had an alarm he could set.
So far, he’d run through every All-Ireland winning team, tried to remember the flags of the world, and had even taken a stab at doing the nine times table up to a million. He kept getting lost after he hit four figures. It didn’t help that he was starving. He’d gone to bed hungry more than a few times in his life, but at least he’d been able to sleep through it.
Bunny looked at the battered clock that presumably belonged to his snoring cellmate.
1.58am.
His cellmate.
The potentially psychotic, soul-stealing, genital-cannibal with whom he shared a cell snored loudly and contentedly in the bunk above him. It wasn’t lost on Bunny that the deeper they got into this thing, the less they seemed to know about him.
Bunny had come in here with the idea that Breida was some higher-up in the Ratenda Cartel that nobody knew about. They wanted him back and were willing to swap Sisters Bernadette and Assumpta to make that happen. So far, so straight forward. At least, once you set aside the issue of breaking two men out of a high security prison.
Then, all of this Quiet Man nonsense came up. What was it about this guy that nobody was allowed to talk to him? And why had someone, presumably also the cartel, gone to such great lengths to make sure that nobody could? They’d clearly bought off the warden and Bunny had the assurance of not one, but two gangs that he wouldn’t see out the day if he so much as spoke a word to Breida.
If the guy had confidential information, then he was hardly alone in that. Half the inmates had declined to reduce their sentence by turning state’s evidence. Clearly, if Breida wanted to make a deal, he would have done so already. He was in here on a five-year stretch and he was over halfway through it. If he was a problem, why not just kill him? If the day had proven anything, it was that the Vatos Locos and Azura 13 would fall over themselves to win favour with the cartel by doing just that. Breida was a big guy, but then so were most of the people he’d met today.
None of this fit. And that was making Bunny the most nervous. Given he had the shadow of Shitty Whiteside hanging over him, that was really saying something. The Sisters were keeping an eye on Whiteside’s cell in solitary, and from what they’d said in Bunny’s peculiar meeting with his lawyer earlier, there was no evidence that Whiteside was able to speak to any other prisoners while in there. Bunny had to just pray that really was the case.
Cops were not popular in prisons, undercover ones doubly so. It wasn’t as if anyone was going to give Bunny the chance to explain that he wasn’t technically one any more. All Whiteside had to do was let it be known who Bunny was. Somebody would google him to confirm it, and that’d be that. He’d die thanks to the picture of him they’d put in the Irish Independent to announce his death. Irony of fecking ironies. Bunny had faced death a few times but somehow, facing it under a false name felt worse. As if he wasn’t being allowed to die with his boots on.
Whiteside was coming out of the hole on Sunday, and it seemed very unlikely he was going to be in a forgiving mood when he did. That left them just the rest of the week to engineer an audacious prison break. The whole thing seemed so utterly absurd.
1.59am.
Bunny looked at the little red light under the camera. Still on. He’d been told to look out for it changing. Zoya was going to loop the feed so that he’d have an hour in which he could talk to Breida undisturbed. They had to do it this late to limit the chance the guards or anyone else would overhear. For about the hundredth time, Bunny wished he’d asked exactly how she was going to do it – he’d been trying to lie still for most of the night for fear that any movements caught on the loop would give the game away to an eagle-eyed guard.
His bladder had been complaining for thirty-seven minutes – not that Bunny was counting. The loo was out of bounds for fear that it’d end up getting looped and some guard would find it hard to believe that a man of Bunny’s age would need to piss twice in an hour. It’d be a young guard. The older ones would know better.
He was aware that the chances of that happening were remote, but then the chances of ending up in a prison in Nevada with a guy he’d thrown in prison in Dublin were pretty slim too. Bunny wasn’t in the mood to bet on his shitty luck improving, and if he was going to get rumbled, he really didn’t want it to be because he’d needed to go pee-pee.
For some reason, he held his breath for the last few seconds of the
