Black And Blue (Quentin Black Mystery #5) (24 page)

“RISE AND SHINE, asshole.” The unfamiliar voice held a curl of derision even as blinding light erupted over the bed. “You got a visitor. A non-negotiable one.”

Black barely had his eyes open when rough hands yanked him off the bunk, two sets of them.

He wasn’t in the cell he’d woken up in the other day. This one was stripped bare, with only one thick door at the other end. The door had no windows, only a “bean slot”––meaning the slot in the door where guards handed through food and where prisoners handed through their wrists to be handcuffed and un-handcuffed by those same guards.

They hadn’t done that with him, though.
 

They’d come in after him.

Black was in De-Seg, solitary confinement.

He had no memory of how he got there.

They’d barely dragged him to his feet when they forced him back to his knees on the cold floor. His mind fought back to straight lines as they forced his hands over his head while they patted him down, then behind his back, handcuffing his wrists while he panted, fighting to remain silent from the pain.

Physical pain ripped through his body the second he was awake enough to feel it.
 

Every time they moved him, or jerked at his body, it only got worse.

“Fuck,” he groaned, unable to help it when they wrenched his arms to lift him.

The guard on his right smiled as he yanked him back to his feet. “Looks like the boys worked you over pretty good, fish.” Black stumbled, nearly falling into him, but the guard on the other side gripped his other arm, steadying him. “Guess we all have to learn sometime. You really pissed in the wrong fucker’s corn flakes... didn’t you?”

Black fought to clear his vision, to remember. His right eye remained dark and blurry no matter how often he blinked it, and he realized after a few seconds it was swollen most of the way shut. He didn’t remember anything that happened in the yard after the collar turned into a live wire around his neck.

The fire alarm. The chiefs running towards him, only to be stopped by guards with riot shields. Roscoe... that other guy, the skinhead with the eagle tattoo. Inmates running towards the prison complex, trying to see which part of it burned.

Black knew he got a few of them down. Then the collar ignited...

Then nothing. His memories just stopped.

Of course, he could deduce a few things.

The state of his body told him more than he really wanted to know.

They shoved him towards the cell door and he groaned again, unable to stop himself when they forced him up against it. He was barefoot, wearing nothing but boxers and a tank top. The guards didn’t seem to care. They frisked him again once he was pressed up against the door, and Black groaned a few times at their rough hands on him.

“Yeah, those boys got you good,” the first guard said, that faint glee still audible in his voice. “I’m guessing you won’t walk right for a week, what you say, Sonny?”

“Least a week,” the other guard affirmed.

“But maybe he’s okay with that... what do you think?”

“There are those who like it,” Sonny allowed. “Don’t understand it myself.”

“Yeah,” the first guard said, grinning as he turned Black around, so that his cuffed wrists knocked into the door, making him wince again at a shoulder that felt dislocated now. “A few of them swear this here fish liked it. That he was begging for more at the end. They only stopped ‘cause they got tired, I guess.”

The one called Sonny chuckled, shaking his head on a thick neck.

They pulled Black off the wall and for the first time he looked down. The shirt he wore was splattered with blood. He didn’t let his eyes roam down much further than that. Grimacing, he looked away. “Can I put on some fucking pants at least?” he growled.

“Oh,
now
he wants pants,” the first guard said.

Sonny shook his head, chuckling again.

They helped him put on the baggy prison pants though, which was its own kind of torture. They got them on him and hitched them up, and Black just stood there while they tied them in front, clenching his jaw against the pain.

“Come on now,” Sonny said, yanking open the door. “I think you’re as pretty as you’re going to get.”

Black didn’t speak, he just followed them out into the hall.

The other prisoners in solitary catcalled him as he passed the cells.

Roscoe was in one of those, sharing it with the guy with the eagle tattoo on his neck. Both of them made kissing faces at him as he passed, laughing when Black looked away. He didn’t see any of the chiefs in there, but he saw a few others he recognized from the yard, not all of them Aryan Brotherhood types. All of them grinned at him as he passed, and a few others blew him kisses, too.

Black fought with the rage that started to build in his chest.

A harder, more animal feeling rose inside that rage.

Memories he hadn’t let near his mind in longer than he cared to think about. Not just memories––ways of thinking, ways of strategizing about his own survival. It crossed his mind to ponder the strangeness of how memory could work... how blurry some things could be one day, only to come rushing back, crystal fucking clear and three-dimensional.

Then something a lot more immediate struck him.

A visitor.

These assholes just said he had a visitor.

Hope bloomed in his chest at the thought. He knew it was irrational. He knew the likelihood that it was Miri was next to none, given what they’d said to him in his cell. He knew they likely wouldn’t let him have real visitors at all, given how he’d gotten here, since clearly no one was supposed to know where he was.

But that hope burned hotter and hotter as they got him to the first gate leading him out of De-Seg and back into the main complex.

Pain wound through him as he thought of seeing her there, even though he knew she’d be fucking horrified by how he probably looked. He didn’t care. Some part of him was reaching for her with every part of his being, almost compulsively now.

He reached too much. The collar activated, reminding him it was there.

It shocked him hard enough to snap him out of where he’d gone at the thought of seeing his wife on the other side of that bulletproof glass.

They stopped him outside the door to the visitor cubicle and un-cuffed one of his wrists, re-cuffing it with the other one in front of his body the instant they got it free. Again every movement hurt, but Black had gone into a kind of lockdown mode with the pain that was also familiar, and related in some way to the borderline-animal feeling that rose in him as the guards paraded him though the De-Seg block.

When they opened the door to the visitor cubicle and shoved him inside, Black nearly fell again, but managed to keep his feet by catching hold of the wall.

He didn’t change expression. He also didn’t move right away.

He just stood there for a few seconds, breathing hard.

The person waiting for him wasn’t Miri, of course.

The man sitting on the other side of that glass was a total stranger to him.

He’d expected that, but even so, the sheer fact of not seeing her there brought him up short, briefly paralyzing his mind. Separation pain tried to rise, to force him to feel it, to deal with her absence. He shoved it back violently, but even that flickering taste cost him the ability to block the physical pain in the rest of his body, for a few seconds at least.

The combination kept him by the door, panting, fighting to regain control.

He stared at the man who sat there, watching that same man look at him.

He took in the spotless black suit, which had to be seriously off-rack from the cut and the diamond accents around the edges of the mandarin-style collar. He noted the crisp black shirt underneath, also likely tailored, and the leather shoes. The man was fit, but in an understated way, with a strong jaw off-set by large eyes and a full mouth. Well-cut dark brown hair matched a face that appeared utterly without blemish.

His eyes themselves were eerily pale, almost clear when they reflected the overhead lights, but with a dramatic, scarlet tinge dead in the center, around the pupil.

Like at the Los Angeles Port, Black didn’t feel like he was looking at a fellow seer.

This man had a few feature traits in common with seers, but the similarity was superficial only, and didn’t live anywhere in how the man moved, how he held himself, even in his facial expressions.

He wasn’t seer. Black would have bet money on it.

“Who the fuck are you? Johnny Cash?” His voice came out harsher than he expected, and thicker, more like a snarl.

The man didn’t flinch, or even look particularly surprised.

“What the hell am I doing here?” Black said. “If you’re the reason I’m in here, you’re fucking dead. You... and whoever the fuck hired you.”

The man looked him over, a faint smile touching his bloodless lips.

He seemed to assess Black with even more care than Black had taken in looking over him. Black saw a strange kind of appreciation in the lingering looks, along with humor, which struck him as condescending, in spite of the clear admiration in his eyes. In the end, Black felt like he was being admired the way one might admire a particularly fine specimen of horse... or even a full-bred dog one planned to show competitively.

“Interesting, that you would take that approach,” the man said, after he’d finished his appraisal. He smiled up at Black, in a friendly but somehow overdone way.

He had a thick American accent. Southern.

New Orleans, to be precise.

Black intended to learn everything he could about this fucker.

“...Most coming out of the ordeal with which we’ve saddled you over the past seventy-two hours,” the man continued, still smiling. “...likely would not wish to lead their first discourse with obviously dangerous captors by making death threats. Interesting choice, as I said. Gutsy.”

He might have been complimenting Black on his choice of shoes.

“Who the fuck are you?” Black repeated. “What am I doing here?”

The man smiled, brushing imaginary dust off the lapels of his suit jacket. “We have a business proposal for you, Mr. Black. I am here to convey it.”

“No,” Black cut in. “You don’t have a business proposal for me. A business proposal implies free agents coming together to negotiate terms that are mutually acceptable to both, even if one of them is massively disadvantaged by those terms. The only terms that would be acceptable to me is if you let me out of here...
now
... and compensated me for the damage you’ve already done. I’m thinking about ten million might cover it. Each. For myself and my wife.”

The man didn’t blink.

He just sat there, continuing to smile.

He looked Black over in the pause as if he found him a mildly entertaining diversion but was growing tired of him now and merely being polite.

“So call this what this is,” Black said. “I’ve been kidnapped. Tortured. And now you want to use my fear of both things continuing to extort some kind of service or payment out of me. One I certainly wouldn’t have agreed to of my own free will.”

“Are you quite finished, Mr. Black?” The man checked his watch. “As fascinating as I find it to watch your emotional reactions, I am afraid we are on a tight schedule, you and I.” He flashed him another of those over-wide smiles that didn’t touch the flat affect of his eyes. “...And as you rightly pointed out, there will be no negotiations here. You will do what we say, when we say it. You will do it precisely as we require, or what happened to you in the yard the other day will happen next to your wife.”

He paused a beat, letting his words sink in.

His face slid into another of those wolf-like smiles.

“To be totally frank with you, there were some who thought we should lead with her. They thought, given your race’s inherent irrationality when it comes to their sexual partners, that it would impress the seriousness of our intent upon you more forcibly.” He winked at Black, his eyes still flat. “I think that was just an excuse though, personally. She’s quite an attractive woman, your wife. Even for one of your species...”

Black’s voice came out in a dense-throated growl.