“You don’t understand. The warden would start cleaning up his mess the moment I called him! They’d all be dead—Danny, the boy, Randell—all of them. There’d be no witnesses. And then he’d come after me.”
My mind was in a dark fog, and all I could see was Danny, the gentle giant who’d taken a vow of nonviolence, turning the other cheek as the warden beat him to a bloody, dead mess.
But somewhere in that fog I knew that the judge was right. The machine that had growled to life couldn’t be stopped with a phone call. Or by the law, not quickly enough.
Danny had awakened a leviathan, and now he was in its jaws. He was in that monster factory, doing his time. Time that was grinding to a halt.
29
DANNY TOOK A step back at the order. Kill Randell.
Slane’s body lay facedown in a pool of his own blood. The man with the broken ankle was dragging himself away from the body. Randell’s face twisted into a pitted ball of rage.
Danny took another step back.
“Kill him, or I’ll kill you and she’ll be all alone out there, twisting in the wind.”
Renee…
Panic lapped at Danny’s mind. He could not kill Randell. He could, yes he could, but in doing so he would become only another monster, and a monster could not love Renee.
Randell took the matter out of Danny’s hands, no doubt certain that if he didn’t kill Danny, Bostich would shoot him too.
He roared and rushed.
Danny’s first instinct was to take the man down. Doing so would have been a simple matter. But Randell was built like an oak and wouldn’t fall for a simple disabling maneuver again. Danny would have to use force. A lot of it.
His mind scrabbled, grasping for a way out of the warden’s impossible game. All he could think of was a fist to the man’s throat.
But no, he would crush Randell’s windpipe.
His opponent came in like a bull, fists up like hammers, and Danny skipped backward on the balls of his feet.
“Don’t do it, Bruce,” he breathed. “It’s no good!”
“Fight!” the warden shouted. “Kill him!”
“Kill him, Danny!” Kearney shouted. Other prisoners joined in, their mutters and jeers encouraged by the warden’s own order. Randell was the enemy to most of them. They all wanted to see his blood on the ground.
They, too, wanted justice.
“Kill him, Danny!” Pape shouted over the din. “Rip his head off!”
This was their coliseum and Danny was their gladiator.
But he would not kill Randell. There was only one way.
Danny ducked out of Randell’s reach and stopped ten feet from the warden, eyes on the raging bull.
He held out one hand. “Hold on!”
Randell came on, but he slowed.
“Just hold on!” Danny snapped.
The man was panting, blinking the sweat from his eyes. Desperate to survive.
Danny lowered his guard. He started for the larger man, arms at his sides.
“Let’s at least make this fair,” he said.
Now only four paces from Randell.
“I can’t in good conscience simply kill you. You first. Hit me.”
Two paces.
“Hit me with everything you have, you dumb oaf!”
Randell closed the last step, drew his fist back and threw his full weight into a full swing at Danny’s head.
He let the blow come, knowing that he was flirting with death. But he saw no other way.
The man’s fist landed on his temple, snapping Danny’s head to the side and back.
The darkness came quickly, and his contact with the concrete shut off the world. Danny lay on his back, at their mercy.
30
I FACED THE judge and all I could think was that I had to save Danny. Danny had saved me and now I had to save him. The judge was complicit in a plan to destroy him, and I alone knew the full truth.
As I saw it, there was only one way to save him.
I hurried to the door, turned the handle, and jerked it open. Keith spun from where he was pacing in the shadows. I gave the door a shove and let it slam behind me.
“We have to break into Basal.”
He stared at me. “What happened?”
“I’m done with this game. I’m going in there and I’m going to kill Randell.”
“You think that’ll stop Sicko? What happened in there?”
“He’s going to kill Danny, that’s what happened.”
“The judge told you that?”
“The warden’s in on it. They’re in that institution, free to do whatever they want, and right now what they want is to break Danny. I’m going after him.”
“Hold on, slow down.” Keith walked to the office door, cracked it wide enough to glance inside and, satisfied that the judge was as he was supposed to be, notwithstanding bloody feet, he shut it and faced me.
“From the top. Before any more crazy talk about breaking into Basal, I need to know what just happened in there. What did he say?”
“I shot off two of his toes.”
“I saw.”
“He told me that he came to some kind of agreement with the warden to send a boy to Basal so the warden could break Danny. But it’s all gone wrong and now Randell’s going to kill Danny.”
Keith dropped his eyes to the floor. “He knows we didn’t follow his instructions. The boy at the warehouse—we didn’t cut off his finger. He’s following through.”
“Either way, we have to get in,” I said. “And the judge can’t know. All it would take is one call from the judge to warn the warden.” I couldn’t say anything about the judge’s son—Danny’s first victim. “We have to go, Keith. It’s our only play.”
“Slow down…”
“They brought Danny to Basal to break him, but I know Danny. He doesn’t break easily. They’ll kill him instead.”
He hesitated, then nodded. “You’re forgetting about Sicko. Unless you think the judge is Sicko…”
No, that didn’t make sense, did it? “Sicko wants the judge dead,” I said.
“So who’s pulling the strings? The warden?”
“Maybe.”
He paced, running his hands through his hair. “Why would the warden have a grudge against Danny? I can understand trying to break him on the inside, but why go through all this trouble with us?”
“Because he knows how much Danny loves me. And if Danny knows what’s happening to me he’d…” Lose it, I thought, but a knot in my throat cut off my voice.
“I don’t know. The warden wouldn’t risk all this craziness to break a man.” He glanced back at the door. “That leaves the judge. But that doesn’t makes sense either. Why would he want us to kill him? And why would he make us jump through all of these hoops?”
In a perfect world, we’d have the answers we needed before we did anything crazy, like break into Basal. But we didn’t have time to unravel the mess. I had to get to Danny. That was all I cared about now.
“It doesn’t matter. We have to get in there before it’s too late.”
“It always matters.”
“We get inside the prison and stop Randell—that’s what matters. The answers are there. All of them, there, not here.”
He didn’t object as quickly this time.
“Assuming we could get in and stop Randell, the warden would just find another way to break Danny,” he said.
“Then we stop the warden. We blow the whole thing sky-high!”
“How?”