The sooner he got back to his cell, the better. At least in the cramped cement room, he only had to worry about an assailant approaching him from a single direction.
Out here, an attack could come from anywhere.
As Carlo hobbled past a pair of black-clad corrections officers, he kept his head straight, but his eyes were on the move, shifting left and right as he monitored the men from his periphery. Even though he was the criminal, Carlo trusted the guards about as far as he could throw them.
To his relief, the men paid him no attention. Their conversation about hockey continued without interruption.
The closer he got to the wide doorway at the corner of the room, the more he had to remind himself to act cool and not make any jerky movements.
He hated this damn hallway.
It didn’t matter that all directions were monitored in real time by security personnel local to the prison. The relative isolation of the drab gray corridor was cause enough for paranoia.
Swallowing against the dryness in his mouth, Carlo took one last look over his shoulder before he crossed into the hall. He pushed his bad leg as hard as he could to hurry. The rubber soles of his shoes made little more than a whisper of sound against the white and gray tile.
A short stretch of the hall turned left in an inverted L shape. Carlo hesitated before rounding the corner. He stopped at the edge and carefully peeked around. As he took in the spotless floor and the unadorned cement walls, Carlo released a relieved breath. He was alone.
Which was good and bad.
The hair on the back of his neck stood up.
Just go, stupid.
Once he made it to the intersection at the end of the corridor, he’d be home free.
He’d only gone about four feet when a metallic click echoed against the bare cement walls. The sound, amplified by the cavernous space, scared him half to death, and anxiety had his heart thundering against his chest as if trying to escape. He gulped against the dryness choking his airway and slowly turned toward the sound.
The room behind the heavy door was only accessible to corrections officers, and in his two weeks at the facility, Carlo had never seen it open.
Hinges creaked as the door swung wide. One orange pant leg emerged, followed by the sleeve of a matching shirt, and Carlo froze in his tracks.
Why was an inmate behind a locked door that led to the guards’ breakroom?
Carlo’s first thought was that he’d just caught a prisoner and a CO at the end of a sexual encounter. He’d overheard rumors that some guards weren’t above playing favorites to those who occasionally got on their knees, and he’d be a liar if he said he hadn’t considered using the tactic to keep himself from being stabbed while he slept.
Desperate times called for desperate measures, and unlike Matteo and Alton, Carlo was determined to stay alive, incarcerated or not.
A short, wiry man clad in the telltale orange of a prisoner stepped into the hallway. His gray eyes darted up and down the hall like he was scared to death of being discovered.
Holding up both hands submissively, Carlo opened his mouth to assure the twitchy fellow that he had witnessed nothing.
That was when he saw the knife.
Not a shiv or a shank. Not a contraption made from duct tape and a sharpened toothbrush. A damned knife.
The blade couldn’t have been more than three inches long, but the weapon was far deadlier than most of the homemade devices concocted by prisoners in the secrecy of their cells.
With a swift lunge, the inmate closed the meager distance between them. Carlo barely had time to take a half-step back toward the turn that would take him to the cafeteria when the inmate clamped a hand around his injured wrist. Bony fingers dug into Carlo’s arm like a vice. With strength that did not belong to a person of his stature, the inmate forced Carlo back up against the wall.
Carlo’s back kissed the concrete with so much force it stole all the air from his lungs. He gasped and choked, but his lungs refused to take in any air. Carlo’s mouth hung open stupidly as his attempt to cry for help died in his throat. Eyes wide, all he could do was stare at the inmate’s greasy hair and gaunt face.
Even as the sting of the inmate’s blade pierced his belly, Carlo couldn’t find the air to give his cry sound. The inmate pushed the knife in as far as he could before tweaking it on the way out. Searing flames followed the blade’s exit, radiating out from the site of the injury, but as the sensations reached Carlo’s brain, another followed, then another, and again. By the sixth, he’d lost track of the individual wounds as they coalesced into one inferno in his belly.
He opened his mouth to take in air. Every part of his body demanded it, but with a wet sucking sound, his lungs refused to fill. Sheer panic gripped him as he desperately struggled for even a small gasp of oxygen.
Red flashed in front of his eyes as Carlo slid down the cold cement wall, staring at the knife in his murderer’s hand, now covered in his blood. Carlo tried to lift an arm to clutch at his ruined stomach, but even that slight movement was a Herculean task.
Darkness nibbled at the edges of his vision, and the tiled floor was like a block of ice. He didn’t remember the floor being this damn cold.
When he forced himself to flop his head to the side, he caught a fleeting glimpse of orange as the inmate disappeared back behind the door
