“Yeah. He’s just oozing honor there, isn’t he?”
At which point the lanky man—Prisoner Four—lifted his head. He could sense the other two guards approaching. Yankee barked his orders at the prisoner, his voice sounding tinny through the small speaker in the control room.
“Number Four, back against the bars.”
“No names for these guys, either?”
“Nope. Just numbers. But we do have nicknames, which relieves the tedium of the numbers. We sometimes call this one Bollock. As in ‘bollocks’?”
“Yeah, I get it.”
“Sometimes Americans don’t.”
Once the prisoner’s back was against the bars, Whiskey reached out and yanked Bollock’s head backward, pinning it to the bars and keeping it still. Yankee took a key from his ring and inserted it into a small lock that joined the straps on the back of the prisoner’s mask.
“What’s the deal with the masks?”
“They’re only allowed to remove the masks when they eat and when there’s roll call, which we do with digital photographs.”
Yankee said, “Now turn around. Back against the wall.”
Prisoner Four, aka Bollock, complied. With the mask off, he turned out to be a long-faced, grim man, with unruly, wispy blond hair. Yankee lifted his digital camera and snapped a photo just as Bollock hoisted a long, bony middle finger at them.
“See what I mean?” Victor said inside the control room.
Whiskey’s response was quick and brutal. The bird was flying for only two seconds before a baton jabbed Bollock in the stomach. As the prisoner doubled over, Whiskey removed the baton then jammed it into the hollow of his throat, choking him. Yankee snapped a new photo.
“Say ‘cheese,’ scumbag,” Victor muttered.
“Over on the left is Prisoner One. Also known as Horsehead.”
The heavily muscled man inside the cell lazily rubbed the back of his head. Unlike Bollock, this prisoner wore a plain smock. But it didn’t cover the scars and puncture wounds that snaked up and down his arms and legs, and presumably his torso, upper thighs, and many of his major internal organs, too. He was a large, thick slab of scarred muscle.
“Horsehead?” Hardie asked.
As if on cue, Horsehead’s masked head whipped up to attention. Moved a fraction of an inch to the right, then the left, then the right again, as if his brain were a satellite trying to tune in to a signal. Then he began to jibber excitedly in Italian, the words almost sounding operatic as his voice rose and fell in pitch with every sentence.
Victor rolled his eyes. “Talkative bastard. It’s so ironic.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, you know how the mob’s always sending enforcers to scare potential witnesses?” Victor leaned in. “Rumor has it old Horsehead here was the worst mob enforcer of all. When they wanted to frighten somebody into stone-cold silence, they’d send him. Forget severed animal heads in your bed. This guy would do the sickest, most twisted shit you can even imagine. Vile acts that you can never scrub out of your brain, not matter how hard you try. He wouldn’t say a word. He would just show you, and instantly, you’d get it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Now listen to him. Singing like a canary, ever since they put him down here. Or so I’ve been told.”
Yankee and Whiskey stepped into the frame to repeat the routine. “Prisoner One, back against the bars,” Yankee said. Horsehead stopped jabbering and meekly complied with their demands. This time, Whiskey inserted the key.
And nothing happened.
Yankee shook his head sadly. “Shit. Let me try,” he said. He took the keys from Whiskey, jammed one into the slot in the back of the mask. Nothing. Jammed it in repeatedly, like he was trying to churn the world’s smallest batch of butter. Still nothing.
In the control room, Victor shrugged. “Another wonderful bonus of this facility. Stuff breaks down all the time. And it’s not as if we can get a repair crew down here to fix anything—security being what it is. So usually, we have to make do with what we’ve got.”
Hardie watched the guards struggle to open the mask for another few moments. How was this son of a bitch supposed to eat?
“Come on. We’ve got to walk around to the other control room. Your leg doing okay? You want to go back?”
“I’m fine,” Hardie lied. His leg was killing him. But the sooner he saw the rest of the place, the sooner he could figure out how to escape.
The next door Victor opened revealed another guard’s living quarters—Yankee’s. Same spare furniture as Hardie’s and Victor’s rooms, only this space smelled like body odor and mold. Hardie couldn’t help but think that the guards’ rooms were not much better than the prisoners’ cells. Granted, you didn’t have to sit in your room with your balls touching a cold metal floor, but this wasn’t exactly easy living, either. For the past three years—right up until his run-in with Mann and her crew—Hardie had guarded fairly posh residences, stuffed with wall-to-wall audio and video entertainment. It distracted him from the shambles of his own life. If Hardie had to sit in an empty room and just contemplate shit, he might lose his mind.
Yankee’s cell led into a much bigger corner room lined with small metal doors, each of them a bit smaller than a cafeteria tray.
“This is where we receive food and fresh clothes,” Victor explained. “And any trash goes down here.”
“Who sends the stuff down?”
“The Prisonmaster, like I said. Our only link to the outside world. Only he knows where we are.”
“How do we talk to this Prisonmaster?”
Victor tapped his ear. “You don’t call him. He calls you.”
Hardie checked out the doors, which reminded him of both old-fashioned Automats and mausoleum crypts. Neither a very pleasant association.
“Aren’t you worried about, uh, prisoners escaping and crawling up the supply path?”
Translation: Maybe I could find a way to escape by crawling up the supply path?
Victor shook his head. “Impossible. The pathways are lined with razor-sharp metal—kind of like those traffic spikes you see in parking lots. The packages are fine coming down. But try to go up one of those things and you’ll be cut to pieces.”
Awesome.
The next door led to the saddest break room Hardie had ever seen. And Hardie had spent countless hours in the sad, soul-draining break rooms of many Philadelphia police departments. The centerpiece was a long wooden table with metal legs that looked like it wobbled all the time. Hardie made his way over and pressed two fingertips down on its tacky surface. Yep. It wobbled.
“We spend our leisure time in here,” Victor explained.
“Leisure, huh?”
“It’s actually nice to get out of your room every so often.”
“I’m sure.”
The door at the other end of the room led to the corner room that Hardie was already familiar with: the elevator vestibule, where he’d been shocked into unconsciousness. Good times, good times. Hardie looked at the elevator mechanism and once again wished he’d stayed in that stupid room upstairs. At least he could wither away in peace.
Now Hardie and Victor were on the other side of the room, and once they made their way through Whiskey’s accommodations—just as spartan as the others—they stood inside a second control room, facing a row of three cells.
Through the hard plastic window, Hardie could see a woman in the cage on the right.
Victor said, “That’s Prisoner Two.”
She wore a mask and a drab cotton smock, just as Prisoner One did, but she didn’t look particularly uncomfortable. She sat with her legs arranged in the lotus position, backs of her wrists resting on her knees, head perfectly straight, raven-dark hair touching her shoulders. She didn’t move. At all. From all outward appearances, she could have been a fiberglass mannequin, modeling the latest in prison attire.