Lock moved from the door back to the bunk and climbed up. He ached all over. Even his bruises had bruises.
He himself had been shot before. Once. A single shotgun round in the chest, courtesy of a two-man assassination team he’d been chasing down who’d rigged a door. It had hurt like hell, even though he’d been wearing an anti-ballistic vest.
Reaper lowered his voice to barely a whisper. ‘Hey, I never asked for your help. But seeing as we’re both here, let’s not forget what’s at stake. If I don’t make that trial, no one’s going to be held to account for snuffing your buddy Prager, and this whole exercise will have been one big waste of everyone’s time.’
22
Water slicked the floor of the blackened shell of what had formerly been a restroom in San Francisco’s main courthouse. Jalicia stepped through what remained of the door, followed by Coburn. Shards of ceramic toilet and basin lay scattered in every direction. There was a handbag in the far corner of the room.
Jalicia picked her way through the debris towards the stall where the device had detonated. There was still a smear of blood against the wall. Both stall panels had been blown away, and the toilet itself had been reduced to a porcelain stump. Water gurgled from the bottom of it.
‘How the hell did someone get past security with a bomb?’ Jalicia asked.
‘The guards here usually look for weapons,’ Coburn replied, ‘not high-grade plastic explosives. Plus, whoever placed the device planted it on a floor the public have access to rather than next to one of the courtrooms or a secure area.’
‘How did they detonate it?’
‘We’ll only know that when forensics can tell us if it was on a timer or if it was set off by remote.’
Jalicia squared her shoulders. ‘If they think they can intimidate us into dropping the case, they can forget it.’
She watched as Coburn kicked out at a piece of ceramic tile, peeled from the wall by the wave of the blast. The smell of raw sewage seeping up from exposed outlet pipes was starting to get to her. She took a step towards the mirror. It used to run the length of the wash basins; now only a few fractured pieces remained on the wall, throwing back a circus-freak reflection of her sharp features.
‘We push them, the Aryan Brotherhood push back. That how we play this?’ Coburn asked.
She turned to face him. ‘No. The AB push us, we knock them the hell down. That’s how we play it.’
‘They might come after you as well.’
‘I ever tell you about my great-grandmother, Coburn?’
‘I’m guessing you’re about to. Mind if I make myself comfortable?’
‘She grew up in the Deep South during the civil rights struggle. When the high school in her home town was forced to integrate by the federal government, she was one of the first black students to attend. She told me about walking in that first morning. The local police just stood by while a bunch of locals abused her and the other black students. Spat on them until they were drenched in it. Kicked at them. Called them every name under the sun. It was so bad they had to turn back and go home. But she told me that the worst part was the next day when she had to force herself to go through it all over again. But she did it anyway.’
‘This is a little bit more than a bunch of rednecks,’ Coburn said.
‘These guys are better armed, that’s all,’ said Jalicia, walking back out of the bombed-out restroom, the click of her heels echoing down the halls of justice.
Bobby Gross was out on the sidewalk, covered from head to foot in a thin layer of grey dust. Jalicia approached him as he fumbled a cigarette into his mouth with a trembling hand.
‘I have a message for your clients,’ she said.
He cupped a hand round the tip of his cigarette while he lit it. ‘That so?’
Jalicia reached up and plucked the cigarette from his mouth, tossing it on to the ground and grinding it to dust under her heel. ‘Tell them they’re not going to stop this trial.’
She walked back to where Coburn was nose to nose with a US Marshal. Behind her, Gross had recovered his composure sufficiently to start haranguing her from a safe distance. ‘My clients could have died in there, Jones,’ he bellowed.
Jalicia tuned Gross out, instead focusing on Coburn and the US Marshals clustered round him. ‘I want this trial up and running again as soon as possible,’ she announced. She glanced back at the building, where smoke was billowing through the windows of the upper floors. ‘We’re going to need a change of venue so let’s get a list of possible federal courts that might be able to accommodate us as soon as possible. We can meet later this afternoon to go over them.’
23
Lock rubbed at his wrists, and settled down in a chair next to Ty’s bedside. Ty’s face was covered by an oxygen mask and he had a line running into his wrist that was connected to two separate IV drips, while a monitor sketched his pulse and blood pressure in luminous green against a black grid. The prison warden, Louis Marquez, stood with Lock and watched the rise and fall of Ty’s chest.
Minutes passed. Lock watched the ventilator as it moved up and down, the monitor’s steady rhythm. Ty’s usual scowl was gone, replaced by an expression devoid of tension. He looked like kids did when they slept. Untroubled.
‘If I’d had my way, Reaper would never have left solitary confinement,’ Marquez said. ‘But the US Attorney’s Office wanted his testimony.’
Lock’s jaw tightened. ‘And they’re still going to get it. I’m going to see to that personally.’
One of Pelican Bay’s numerous medical staff, a petite Asian-American woman whose name badge read Dr Lau, walked into the bay. She checked Ty’s chart without acknowledging either Lock or the warden.
‘How bad is it?’ Lock asked her.
‘There’s some tissue and nerve damage, and we’ve had to pull the slug out of his shoulder, but he’s stable.’
Lock looked over at Marquez. ‘Shouldn’t you be getting him to a civilian facility?’
‘We’re pretty experienced in dealing with violent trauma injuries here,’ Dr Lau said. ‘Get plenty of practice.’
Lock turned to her. ‘He’ll be OK though, right?’
‘There are no guarantees, but, for someone who’s been shot, I’d say his prognosis is good. As long as he doesn’t pick up a secondary infection he should be fine.’
‘What you plan on doing with Reaper?’ Lock asked Marquez.
‘Well, I’ll tell you something, son. I never thought the day would come when I’d say this about an inmate, but I want him out of my goddamn prison. So I plan on shipping him down to San Francisco as soon as I can. Let the goddamn US Attorney’s Office deal with him. If they can.’
‘Maybe now they’ll take our original advice,’ Lock said, ‘and stash him in a safe house.’
‘You know he’ll try to escape, don’t you?’ Marquez cautioned.
‘You seem pretty sure about that.’
‘Soon as I heard that he wanted back on the mainline, that’s what I thought. Of course, having you here kind of cramped his style. That’s probably why he asked the Nazi Low Riders to screw around with you and your buddy.’
Lock thought about this. It made sense that Reaper was behind the Nazi Low Riders’ order to attack Ty. It was a way of getting Lock and Ty out of the way, without appearing openly hostile to Jalicia.
‘Let me know when you’re going to make the transfer and I’ll ride along to make sure I deliver Reaper to the prosecutor personally,’ Lock said.
