That would make two of us, Danny thought, but he said nothing.
Bostich glared at him. “Now that you know how things work, the warden thinks you should be given a little more freedom. He wants you to keep an eye out. Half the members in this place are snitching on their cellie but no one’s a snitch, if you catch my drift.”
Meaning no one was labeled as a snitch, because it would break the convict code and subject them to hatred, and yet half the members were giving up details when called upon to do so anyway.
“An efficient way to—”
“Shut up. If you see anything that strikes you as out of place, you have permission to inform the warden, but only directly or through me, you got that?”
“Yes.”
The captain stared at him for a full ten seconds without blinking once.
“Fine. You’re going back to your cell. You open your mouth even once before lockdown and you’re going back down. Stand up.”
The hub was deserted except for four privileged members who sat around a table, playing a game of checkers. Most of the inmates would already be in the housing units. Two members were in a discussion with the facilitator on duty in the commons wing when Danny stepped in. Another small group loitered near the top of the staircase. Several dozen stood at their cell doors or on the tier above, leaning on the railing, wasting away their last few minutes before lockdown.
The hall quieted the moment he entered. Heads turned and watched, silenced by his appearance. Danny’s last hose-down had been earlier that day. He still smelled of chlorine. His hair was a mess and his hands were scraped from the concrete, but his clothing covered the bruises that had developed on his hips and shoulders from hours of shifting on the hard bed in an attempt to ease his pain. He’d lost a few pounds since arriving; otherwise there would be no other sign that he was worse off for the wear.
“Up.”
Danny mounted the steel staircase, aware of the surreal silence interrupted by the sound of his feet thudding up the steps. Even if this was a common occurrence, his unearned reputation as the new deviant priest probably had more to do with this audience than his return from the hole. He was still a curiosity, singled out to be crushed with the help of Randell and his thugs.
As such he was a potential enemy to all. The warden expressly reserved the right to impose restrictions on the entire wing due to one person’s deviance. Most of the members were likely far more interested in Danny’s compliance than in his help.
A quick glance at the top of the staircase showed no sign of Randell or Slane. A member with a barbed-wire tattoo on his neck and a crooked grin on his face watched him from his cell door at the top of the staircase.
“Yo, ya priest,” he said with a slight southern accent. “Name’s Kearney.”
“Whoa!” Bostich stopped Danny and looked at the member who’d spoken. “You begging for trouble, boy?”
“No, siree.”
“Then keep your trap shut.” He lifted his chin down the tier. “In your cells, all of you.”
They pulled off the railing and stepped into their cells, some more quickly than others.
Danny headed down the tier, keeping his eyes ahead, but he could see the members in his peripheral vision, making idle use of their last minutes before the ward shut down. At Ironwood a similar hall might be cut with the sounds of a banging locker and loud laughter, punctuated by vehement demands or loud objections.
Danny’s thoughts were cut short as they approached his cell. A man stood inside the cell next to his own, fingers wrapped around the bars, peering out at him, wearing a thin grin. It was Slane. Hair greased back like a wedge on his narrow head.
Danny drew abreast of the cell and stopped. Beyond the grinning Slane sat Peter, rocking back and forth on the lower bunk, staring into oblivion. Bostich didn’t order Danny forward, didn’t shove him toward his own cell, made no effort at all to keep him from seeing what he was meant to see. They had transferred the predator into Peter’s cell with clear intentions.
Danny met Slane’s daring eyes and for a moment rage flooded his veins. He couldn’t seem to pry Peter’s plight from his mind. What kind of savage would place such a boy in the arms of a beast like Slane?
He told himself to move on, there was nothing he could do. He willed his feet to move, but his feet weren’t responding. There was the predator and there was his victim, and here stood Danny, helpless to stop the one or help the other. And even if there was a way to help, could he?
Would he?
A stick in his back finally pushed him forward and Danny moved on, pulling his mind back from that place of fury that had once swallowed him.
Godfrey lay on the bottom bunk, reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which he immediately set down. The door crashed shut behind Danny.
“Lights out in two.”
Bostich nodded at Danny. “Sleep tight, Priest.” He retreated down the pier, evidently satisfied that he’d escalated Danny’s misery by setting up Peter in the cell next to his.
Godfrey closed his book and laid it on the mattress beside his head. “So you survived your first opportunity to meditate. That’s good, everyone does.”
“When did they move Slane into Peter’s cell?” Danny kept his voice low.
The older man’s head swiveled toward the bars. “What do you mean?”
“The man’s in the cell next to ours.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
“Peter’s with him?”
Danny shrugged out of his shirt and walked to the sink. “Yes.” He turned on the faucet and splashed his face, ran his wet fingers through his grimy hair. There was no mirror.
“Lockup!” the CO shouted. The electronic locks on the cell doors engaged with a loud clank.
“You see what I mean?” Godfrey muttered. “There’s no end to their games. And there’s nothing you can do, don’t kid yourself. Guaranteed, this is as much about you as Peter. They are begging you to say something. Take my advice, don’t.”
“Lights out!”
Danny grabbed his towel from his locker and wiped his face. The bulb blinked off, leaving only pale light from the tier to reveal the outlines of the room. A faint whimper sounded from the cell on Danny’s right.
He stood still for a moment, unable to move, unwilling to give any more space in his mind to the rage boiling in his gut. For three years he’d methodically steeled himself against the fury directed at the monsters of society, fully aware that he was essentially one himself. His only reasonable course of action now would be to console the boy and provide him with a ray of hope in the morning.
Danny stripped, rolled into his bunk, and prayed for the boy’s safety. But he could not pray to be Peter’s guardian angel. That task would have to be left to higher powers.
The facilitator on duty walked down the tier, checking each cell door.
“Keep to yourself, Priest,” Godfrey muttered.
Why the man thought Danny needed this encouragement was a mystery. Was his indignation so obvious?
For half an hour Danny’s senses remained tuned to the hall’s noises, listening for the slightest sound from the cell next to his. Surely Slane wouldn’t go so far so quickly. Surely there was a limit to what he could do with impunity in Pape’s sanctuary. An eye for an eye, Pape had said, but surely he wouldn’t demand an eye from someone as innocent as Peter. And yet, in Pape’s world, everyone was guilty, whether or not caught and—
A short cry sliced through the dark night. At first Danny couldn’t be sure of what he was hearing. But then the cry came again, this time a whimper that stopped his heart.
“Please! Please…”
Danny sat up.
“Think, man. Get a grip,” Godfrey whispered.
Although the boy’s cries were muffled now, they did not stop. The wing was gripped in perfect silence except for those stifled cries, now accompanied by other sounds of struggle.
Danny sat rigid, overwhelmed by a craving for justice that refused to bow to any calculated reasoning.
No one could help the boy in this moment, Danny. Your only course is to hope that Slane’s sending a message, not carrying it out.
A bead of sweat ran past his temple; his body was already covered in a sheen of it. It was the warden’s willingness to throw the boy away simply to break Danny that stirred up the worst of his anger.
In this world only the warden had true power. He was using terror to ensure compliance as much as some might think God would use a tornado to wake up a sleepy town.
The boy’s stifled cries became louder, and Danny felt his hands begin to tremble. His mind bent to the point of snapping. Peter was that unwitting participant in a grand scheme, lost to the complexities of rules and protocol yet somehow subject to all of it. Peter was in his own hell, suffering punishment while the warden’s message hung over them alclass="underline" everyone is guilty and everyone suffers and only I can save you.
Beneath Danny, Godfrey’s breathing was heavy. Surely he’d been confronted by similar injustice many times during his incarceration. He knew to keep his offense to himself, no matter how deep it ran.
Danny, on the other hand, wasn’t as practiced, not here, not in Basal. But he could learn. He could suppress his hopeless urge to defend the defenseless. He could refuse to act. Didn’t the whole world do the same? Didn’t everyone turn a blind eye to the plight of others less fortunate?
A muffled scream reached past the cell wall, and for an endless moment that cry belonged to someone else. It was his mother’s.
No, Danny, this isn’t your mother…
But Danny’s mind wasn’t cooperating. He was a boy, hiding in his room in Bosnia. In the next room the Serbs were raping his mother. He was only a boy; he could not stop them. His two sisters were already dead. Now they were going to kill his mother, but he could not stop them, he couldn’t scream, he couldn’t even breathe.
The sounds of his mother screaming stopped. Their house was suddenly quiet. And Danny hid in the corner, shaking violently. This time he could not allow them to kill her. His foundation began to crumble. He was only vaguely aware that he was sliding off the bunk, desperate to stop them this time.
“Stop it!”
Danny’s mind snapped back to his cell. He was on his knees, fists balled like twin hammers.
Silence smothered the echo of his cry.
In the next cell, Slane cackled. His hand must have slipped off the boy’s mouth because a shriek cut through air.
“Help me! Help—” But the cry was stifled once again.
The bulbs suddenly popped bright, flooding the commons hall with light.
“Priest!” Bostich’s voice rang out from the hall below the tier. The electronic lock on their cell door snapped open. “Step out of your cell!”
It took a moment for Danny to reclaim his poise. The heat on his face began to subside. What had he done? But he knew only too well.
“I won’t say it again—step out of your cell!”
“Lord have mercy,” Godfrey breathed.
Danny swung his feet off the bed, dropped to the ground, and exited his cell. His had been the only door opened. He stepped up to the railing and saw that Bostich stood by the guard station on the first floor, hands on hips, staring up at him.
“Do we have a problem?”
Danny had been under the warden’s thumb for less than a week and the man had already fractured his resolve? He took a deep breath and considered the captain’s question, then chose his words carefully.
“I would like to request an audience with the warden, sir.”
The captain hesitated. “There’s protocol for that, and it doesn’t include screaming out in the middle of the night.” But Bostich’s curiosity pushed him further. “Regarding what?”
“Only clarification.”
“You’re confused, is that it? No one else seems to be confused. Are all priests as thickheaded as you?”
“I only need clarification about your latest request.”
There was another pause as Bostich seemed to consider his reference to snitching, surely knowing that Danny had nothing on which to snitch other than what was obvious. But it was enough to pique the man’s interest.
“You’re going back into meditation, you do realize that, don’t you?”
“All I’m asking for is a word with the warden as part of due process before you take me down. Nothing more.”
“Get back in your cell, keep your mouth shut. I hear of one more word in this ward tonight you’re all going on lockdown for three days. That includes you, Slane.” He faced the CO to his right. “Shut it down, Tony.”