He could be anywhere: under a waterfall on some South Pacific isle, waiting for one of his stable of fine women to join him under its spray, or maybe at home when he was younger and his mom calling out if he was going to be long because dinner was ready.
It washed away the sweat and grime, the invisible aura of stale and trapped humanity, of oppression and death, that seemed to cling to the skin like a sticky blanket within hours.
Wash it away. Wash it away.
Rodriguez scrubbed hard. Then, when he felt he’d washed the prison away, he tilted his head back and closed his eyes, letting himself drift with the spray hitting his face and running down his body. Pacific waterfalls, fine women soaping his body, at home and about to put on his best threads for a Saturday night out.
And he’d been more successful in his reverie this time, Rodriguez thought, because he’d even managed to tune out the clamour and echo of the other voices in the showers.
The hand clamping suddenly over his mouth snapped his eyes sharply open.
Two striplights his end of the showers had been switched off and the five guys showering in his section and the guard by the showers’ open entrance had suddenly gone.
Probably the other people showering and the guards further along out of sight were still there, but as Rodriguez writhed and tried to call out to get their attention, he made no more than a muted whimper. The hand across his mouth was clamped too firmly.
Rodriguez couldn’t see who was holding him — the arm too across his chest was clamped tight — only feel his breath against the back of his neck. The only person he could see, in that instant sliding into the side of his vision a few paces away, was Tally Shavelclass="underline" a towel around his waist, upper body glistening, muscles tensed like steel chords, the veins in his neck taut as he grimaced malevolently.
‘Sorry. Didn’t bring no reading matter wi’ me this time.’
The open razor at towel level in Shavell’s right hand was flicked out silently, imperceptibly, as he stepped closer.
And Rodriguez knew in that moment that death had come for him sooner than he had thought.
‘Should be no problem handling two addresses. I got a friend, Mo, who does much the same as me. I’ve only got one Bell uniform, but I can head over to his place after I’ve finished and hand it to him.’
‘Are you sure it will fit?’ Nel-M quipped.
‘Very funny,’ Barry responded dryly. ‘But if it looks like there’s a problem, I can always stitch up the back for him.’
Barry Lassitter had become Barry-L, then simply ‘Barrel’, since he’d been three hundred pounds for more years than he cared to remember. But he was one of the best ex-Bell men that Nel-M knew and, from the name he’d given his company, ‘Warpspeed Communications’, he obviously didn’t mind the world knowing that he was an ardent ‘Trekkie’. Nel-M would have put in the bug himself if it wasn’t for the fact that Truelle would recognize him; also, he needed someone who could do it in one minute flat rather than five or six.
‘Nothing like a good stitch up,’ Nel-M commented. ‘Also, make sure there’s no tell-tale egg or ketchup stains down the front that might give the game away that it’s the same uniform.’
Barrel huffed and muttered a response that Nel-M didn’t hear.
‘And let me know as soon as they’re both in place and we’re live.’
Larry had just gone through the gate at the end of his cell block to head down to the showers when he was approached by one of the guards, Dan Warrell.
‘You’re wanted up in the library.’
‘Am I back on duty there, then?’
Warrell shrugged. ‘Don’t know about that. All I know is the guy up there, Perinni-’
‘Peretti.’
‘Yeah. Well, he’s apparently stuck with something. Needs a hand.’
‘Okay,’ Larry nodded. He wasn’t suspicious. Warrell didn’t have any allegiances with Bateson, was very much his own man. If you had a grievance and wanted it dealt with fairly and evenly, Warrell or Torvald Engelson were the best to go to.
‘I’ll see your way up there.’ Warrell led the way up the two flights of steel steps, then along forty yards of corridor, half of it flanked by cells.
Warrell took out his security card as they approached the gate. Beyond lay store rooms, a guards’ watch room and canteen, and the library.
Peretti was at the far end of the library and looked surprised to see Larry, though pleasantly so.
‘Back to give me a hand then?’ He smiled crookedly. ‘Couldn’t trust me to be on my own too long in case I screwed everything up?’
‘But you said you wanted a help out with something?’ Larry pressed, one eyebrow arching.
‘Not me. Naah.’ Peretti shook his head.
Larry turned to Warrell, his eyes narrowing. ‘I thought you said I was wanted here?’
‘Yeah. That was what I was told.’
‘Who told you?’
With the intensity of Larry’s glare and his cutting tone, Warrell flinched slightly. ‘Uh… Bateson. Glenn Bateson.’
Jesus.
Larry ran ahead of Warrell, realizing he needed him as he came up to the gate.
‘Get me back through this. And quick.’
Under Larry’s icy glare, Warrell’s hand shook uncertainly as he slid in his card. He wasn’t about to argue or question.
Back along the corridor, down the two flights of stairs, leaping them three and four steps at a time, Larry was already breathless as he hit the passage by his cell block at full pelt. One more flight down to the shower stalls, and another thirty yards of passage before the security gate by the shower stalls.
Breath ragged, heart pounding, Larry saw that there were five or six men by the gate to the showers, being handed towels and waiting for that same number to come out so that they could go through; the normal routine.
But what was not normal, Larry quickly picked out, were the lights out at the far end and no guard looking into that section.
‘Man in distress at the far end!’ Larry shouted, pushing through the men waiting.
The guard by the gate, Fisk, in thick with Bateson, blocked his way defiantly. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I said man in distress at the far end!’ Larry raised his voice to screaming pitch. His only hope was rousing the attention of the three guards by the early sections, and hoping to God they weren’t all in on it with Bateson. ‘Man in distress!’
One of the guards looked uncertainly towards the rear cubicles then back at the gate, confused.
Larry saw the alarm button a yard to one side, and, remembering Rodriguez in the boiler-room, leapt across and hit it.
The jangling bell finally galvanized the guard into action, Larry keeping up his mantra, ‘Man in distress… man in distress,’ as the guard darted towards the rear cubicles. Though Larry feared that it was already too late.
15
‘Bye-bye’ had got his nickname because fellow Malastra capos and soldiers had noticed that it was usually the last thing he said before he wasted someone with his favoured Cougar 9mm; and, as Malastra’s main trigger-man, it was something he said often.
Though with the name apparently came some unintentional humour: often when he called out ‘Bye-bye’ in parting, others would flinch or lift one arm up, worried that any second his Cougar would be pointing and firing.
But it was difficult for George Jouliern to laugh about it now, because pretty soon those words would probably be the last thing he’d hear.
They were in an old warehouse, musty and humid, and Jouliern looked morosely at the blue plastic sheet, usually used as a damp membrane in construction, spread beneath him. Eight yards away a furnace, probably lit over two hours ago, glowed red from its aperture.