‘You gonna try and talk to them?’ Ty asked.
‘Be wasting my time, but Carrie’s going to keep digging.’
‘So what are you gonna do? And don’t tell me nothing, Lock, because I know you must have a hard-on for Reaper a foot long by now.’
‘I wish,’ muttered Carrie, lying back, her eyes closed, head propped up on the pillows.
On the other end of the phone, Ty laughed.
Lock shot her a fake injured look, then lowered his voice. ‘I’m heading back to the Bay. One of the AB leaders survived the attack. If he doesn’t have a clue what Reaper’s up to then nobody does. Listen, once I’ve spoken to him, I’m coming down to San Francisco to see you.’
‘Look forward to it,’ said Ty, before hanging up.
‘You sure you really want to go back in there, Ryan?’ Carrie asked, sitting up.
‘I’ll be fine. I know the territory.’
Carrie gave him an even look. ‘You mean like Ty did?’
44
Lock headed out of Medford on Interstate 5. He’d have to drive north first, towards a place called Grants Pass, before the highway would drop him back south and west to Pelican Bay. To his right, trees had been planted at regular intervals along the highway. The storm clouds were being sucked back out towards the Pacific, revealing a powder-blue sky.
The smell of rental-car air freshener combined with his lack of sleep was soon making him woozy. He lowered all four windows a notch.
As he drove, the traffic fell away to a trickle of pick-up trucks and lumbering semis and the giant redwood trees closed in around his tiny car. Looking at a map he’d picked up at a gas station before he left, he’d wondered at some of the names. Rattlesnake Rapids. Wolf Creek. Starvation Heights. It was a landscape that could eat a man up whole, that was for sure.
Lock wondered if Reaper was near one of those places now. Maybe shooting the rapids with his band of fellow psychopaths, the water swallowing their trail. Or camped out on top of Starvation Heights, surveying the land below, planning a desperate last stand against the minions of what Reaper saw as an occupying government. What was the phrase he’d used? Oh yeah, the Zionist Occupation Government.
Blaming the government, Lock reflected, was an easy out for the white inmates inside America’s prisons. They had been incarcerated not because they’d peddled amphetamine to school kids, or shot some unfortunate first-generation immigrant minding the till of a convenience store, or because they’d drowned someone in their own hot tub after staging a home invasion robbery. No, it was always other people’s fault, part of a wider plan to do them down, all engineered by dark forces skulking in the shadows and plotting a new world order.
With Reaper’s messianic tendencies, Lock had a strong hunch that his former cellie wasn’t about to go quietly. He wasn’t about to do a disappearing act. No, Reaper had something else in mind. Lock was sure of it.
Aware that his eyelids were getting heavier by the minute, Lock reached down and jammed on the radio. There wasn’t much choice: a couple of country music stations and something that billed itself as Rogue Valley’s top-rated twenty-four-hour evangelical station. Lock would have welcomed some divine inspiration, but doubted it was going to come via this particular source. He clicked the radio back off.
Ten miles further on, Lock hit a line of traffic. It came up on him fast, and he had to slam on the brakes to avoid rear-ending a black pick-up sporting a National Rifle Association decal and a Palin for President 2012 sticker. The jolt as the car lurched to a halt convinced him that he’d have to take a nap before he got to Pelican Bay.
The local cops had set up a roadblock and were checking vehicles, and he was aware that his rental car and dragged-through-a-bush-backwards appearance would single him out for special attention.
He stayed in his car as he was approached, immediately declaring his firearm. Thankfully, one of the cops recognized him.
‘Any sign of them?’ Lock asked him, with a show of forced politeness.
‘Not a one,’ said the cop, disconsolate.
No shit, Sherlock, they left in a helicopter, Lock thought. ‘Well, good luck.’
The cop waved him through, and Lock continued on his way.
Fifty miles down the road, he pulled in at a rest stop. Seconds after he’d switched off the engine, pulled on his parking brake and set the alarm on his cell phone, he was dead asleep, the doors locked and his SIG close by.
Lock rarely dreamt, and when he did he shrugged his dreams off pretty much as soon as he’d taken a leak and had his first sip of coffee. But the nightmare images that came to him now would be less easily shed, based as they were on the realities of the previous days.
At first he was tumbling down a black slide that deposited him in a heap in the middle of the yard at Pelican Bay. As he looked up and got his bearings, he saw Ty, surrounded by bare-chested white inmates, their bodies a continuous mosaic of swastikas and lightning bolts. As they closed in on Ty, knives glistening in the early-morning sun, Lock glanced up towards the gun tower. The guard’s face melted into Reaper’s as one of the inmates slashed at Ty and he went down.
There was a screech of tires behind Lock as a black van careered across the yard, throwing up clouds of dust. Lock felt a burst of relief which faded almost immediately when he spotted the driver, her hands taped to the wheel. It was Carrie, a swastika carved, Manson-like, into her forehead. The living corpse of Ken Prager rode shotgun alongside her, helping to guide the wheel.
Lock sank to his knees, letting rip with a primal scream. Then a black tunnel was all around him, sucking him back into the sky and away from being able to help either Carrie or Ty.
Lock woke to the sound of his cell phone’s alarm, the gun still by his side, the steering wheel in front of him. Disoriented by the images from his nightmare, he peered out of the windshield and both side windows, a thin sheen of sweat coating his face. He wiped the worst of it away with his sleeve, opened the door of the car and stepped out into the fresh air, shaking out the cramp from his legs. He took a walk round the rest stop area, then got back in the car, took a sip of water, wishing it were coffee, started the engine and continued his journey.
It was dusk by the time Lock drove past the unmanned security booth and into the parking lot that fronted the administration building of the prison. Coming in this way, a visitor would have little idea of the security that lay beyond. He pushed open the main door, stepped on to the sparkling linoleum that covered the lobby floor, then took a left towards the warden’s office. The two middle-aged women who served as administrators were packing up, ready to go home.
Lieutenant Williams stepped from his office next to the warden’s. He didn’t look particularly pleased to see Lock.
‘Warden Marquez still here?’ Lock asked him. ‘It won’t take long.’
Williams hitched up his equipment belt. ‘Thought you might have had enough of this place for a lifetime,’ he observed, turning into the warden’s office.
Marquez emerged a few moments later. ‘It’s not a good time, Lock,’ he said.
‘The timing isn’t of my choosing. I guess you heard about events in Medford?’
Marquez rubbed his prosthetic eye. ‘We got the SHU and the mainline on lockdown because of it.’
‘Problem?’
‘Soon as word came that the AB leadership had been wiped out, the Nazi Low Riders made their move.’
‘What kind of move?’
‘Told all the white inmates that anyone that was AB could either switch to the NLR or die.’
‘What about the AB leader who survived? I heard he was shipped back here. You still have him?’
‘He was smart, he PCed up,’ said Marquez.
PC, Lock knew, stood for protective custody. There was a separate part of solitary reserved for these prisoners.
‘I’d like to speak to him if I may.’
Lock waited for a speech about how his request breached protocol. Instead, Marquez glanced at Williams
