“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.”
9
THURSDAY
IT’S AMAZING WHAT even the most bland mind can conceive of when properly stimulated. But press the more imaginative among us and there is no limit to the kinds of wild thoughts that fill our heads.
There I stood, at the end of my bed midday Thursday with all of my tools lined up like footwear on a Buckle shoe rack, carefully rehearsing the use of each item. I had gone through the exercise twice already, the night after returning from Keith Hammond’s condo, and again that morning, after rising from a fitful sleep.
On the far left lay a Bowie knife with a ten-inch stainless-steel blade, good for hacking down a small sapling in the forest if you were stranded following a single-engine airplane crash and needed to make a platform in the trees so the bears wouldn’t get you at night.
Or for cutting off someone’s head.
Next to it rested a smaller, more manageable six-inch Boker tactical knife, sharpened on both sides like a dagger, good for drilling holes in the thin walls of a shack in the forest if you wanted to stay out of sight and spy on whatever deer or porcupine might wander by.
Or for stabbing a rapist’s forehead.
There was also the folding survival knife, good for more than slashing. The wire, good for many things beside strangling. The small but very powerful Steiner binoculars, good for watching more than ugly neighbors. A set of lock picks, good for entering any locked door but my own. A pair of handcuffs for restraining a bad guy. And a four-inch can of pressurized Mace pepper spray readily available from Amazon. Good for turning even the largest man into a squealing little pig.
I’d selected the tools from a chest containing many, many more. It had sat in my closet, unopened, for three years running. These would all fit neatly in my kit, as Danny had taught me to call it—a small black leather bag that some might confuse for a large purse and others a doctor’s medicine bag, although doctors no longer used such things.
Eight tools on the end of my yellow-checkered comforter. And one in my fist: the Browning nine-millimeter gun with a nine-clip round slammed up its handle. Copper hollow points with enough power to stop a much larger person than me in a full rush.
I snatched the gun up to shoulder height and twisted to my right into a firing position. The mirror on the wall said it all. Small package, major punch. Long black hair flowing over my face. Cropped black tank top and yellow-checkered flannel night shorts. Other than being too skinny, I looked like Lara Croft ready to face the world. Well, at least from the waist up. My flannel shorts and white thighs were anything but threatening.
I straightened and examined the gun. Released the clip, checked it quickly, slapped it home, chambered a round—clank, clank—and pointed the gun at my fluffy white tiger.