Sanctuary (23 page)

“SEVEN BULLETS LEFT,’’
I said, staring at the bloodied tapestry under the judge’s chair. He was being stubborn and I’d felt compelled to put a second bullet through his other foot, into the subfloor beneath the thick green carpet. They were hard jackets and passed through cleanly without making too much of a mess.

But none of that lessened the judge’s pain.

Keith gave up trying to break the door down after the second shot, when I’d taken a moment to explain what I was doing.

I sat in the chair, unable to steady my trembling hands. “The nice thing about losing toes is that you can cover them up with good shoes. With good therapy no one but you will even know someone shot them off. But I hear it’s hard to walk if you lose too many, especially the big toes.”

He was sweating and his face was flushed. Tears of pain leaked down his cheeks.

“You’re done,” he growled through clenched teeth.

“Not really. Because if I still can’t get you to talk, I’m going for the biggest toe.” I gave his crotch a significant glance. “I really don’t want to do that, but I hope you understand now that I can’t control myself. This is something I have to do.”

“You can’t get away with this.”

“But you did, didn’t you? You put your son back on the street, and he went back and killed that poor boy. You don’t have to confess that. I just want to know how you’re connected to Basal. That’s all. Think about it. I’m not going to incriminate you. I’d go to prison if what I’ve done here ever came out. I’d have to spill all the beans and there’d be a full investigation into both of us. We’re in the same boat, so we have to keep this all private—me and my crazy DNA and you with your secret. Just tell me and we’ll leave. I’m not going to kill you, even though that’s what we were sent to do. I’m not a violent person.”

He was looking at me as if I was a complete nut, and that was fine by me. The crazier he thought I was, the better.

I kept telling myself it was okay. That I had to do this, that I’d already gone too far to turn back, that this man
did
hold the key to Danny’s life, that in some ways Danny was in prison
because
this man had pushed Danny beyond the brink when he’d cut his son loose. But I didn’t really know if any of that was true, and I was feeling nauseated.

The judge sat in his chair, chest rising and falling as he tried to control his agony.

“So I have to use another bullet?” I asked.

“This is absurd.” The last word was a snarl.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

He only glared at me. So I stood up, leaned over, and pressed the gun to the tip of his right shoe. I was just starting to squeeze the trigger when he spit in my hair. Dirty germy spit.

My crazed DNA reasserted itself. I jerked the gun up and shoved it into his crotch.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” I said. “I know what your son did. You think Danny killed him and now you’re after Danny. Tell me what you know about Basal or I’m going to pull this trigger.”

He swore.

“You don’t think I’ll do it? Like son, like father.”

His jowls were trembling, and for a moment I felt sorry for the man. What if I was wrong about him?

“You have three seconds. Two. One…”

“Okay,” he blurted. “I’ll tell you!”

“Tell me!”

“KILL HIM!’’ THE
warden’s order echoed through the hard yard.

The first to come wasn’t Randell. The big man had heard something that made him hesitate. The first was one of the heavily tattooed men behind Danny, and he came like a bull, rushing at full speed as if this were a street fight and he could simply overwhelm Danny by force.

Without turning, Danny waited, using the sound of the man’s feet slapping on the concrete to judge his distance. The other tattooed member joined the rush, to the right and slightly behind the first man.

By not turning, Danny offered his attacker the false perception that victory was imminent, that if he only moved faster and reached Danny before he could turn, he would be able to break his back from behind. This belief drew the man into a final headlong rush.

Slane was now on the move as well. That made three coming in, no contact.

Danny spun to his right when the tattooed man was only one step away. Hooked his arm behind the man’s back, and shoved hard. The off-balance attacker flew forward and collided head-on with Slane.

A bone snapped. They both crashed to the ground with Slane beneath, screaming in pain.

But now the other tattooed man arrived, swinging his fist at Danny’s head like a club. Danny shifted and blocked the blow down and away with his forearm. In any other circumstance he would have caught the arm and wrenched it back for either a break or a dislocation.

As it was, he helped the man find the ground with a kick at his ankles and quick shove at his back. Arm deflected and twisting, the man landed on his shoulder with a grunt.

Slane was moaning. He’d been struck with a head to his arm, now broken. The first attacker was back on his feet, facing him like an ape. But Danny had disrupted their circle and he now backed away from the three standing men, hands lifted in partial surrender.

“I don’t want to fight, but I’ll defend myself. Please, this isn’t necessary.”

“Fight!” the warden roared.

All but Slane found their feet and came together, screaming bloody murder. Four grown men unfamiliar with tactics any more strategic than brawling with fists or backstabbing with shanks. Without a dark corner from which to spring, without an element of surprise, with only their fists and muscles, they were at a hopeless disadvantage.

They came fast, sure that four abreast could overwhelm one man. But all four had two legs, and all eight of those legs were propelling them forward.

Danny feinted back one step into a half crouch, but instead of retreating he surged toward them and threw himself down, perpendicular to their path.

He hit the ground at their feet and crashed through them.

The two on the ends had time to jump, but still he caught one of them by the foot. The two in the center—Randell and one of the tattooed men—took the full weight of Danny’s body on their ankles. Their forward momentum carried their bodies where their feet could not go.

Another bone snapped. Three of the men sprawled headlong onto the concrete. Two rolled and came up, panting. The tattooed man lay on the floor near Slane, twisting with the pain of a broken ankle.

Danny had missed the skinny one entirely, and now the man twisted back to take a vicious kick at Danny’s head.

There was no way to avoid the contact. Danny arched his back and took a glancing blow on his temple.

The man left his legs exposed, and Danny could have struck the side of his knee, perhaps disabling him with one kick. But doing so stood a good chance of putting the man out of commission for more than a single fight.

Instead, he rolled away and came up in time to deflect a second blow aimed at his head. This time he took the man’s feet out from under him.

The skinny, bald man landed on an unpadded seat. Hard.

Danny backpedaled on light feet, hands up. “You don’t need to do this. You must understand, I won’t fight, but I must defend myself. Please…”

“You call that not fighting?” Slane blurted from the ground.

“You’re alive, aren’t you?”

The warden wore a mild grin, whether truly impressed or shocked and attempting to cover it, Danny didn’t know.

“You’ve made your point,” Danny said.

“Have I?” The warden held up his hand toward Randell, who was circling in, eyes crazed. “No, I don’t think I have. The point is, we accept only deviants in this place. Bring your broken and wounded and I will make them whole, isn’t that the way it works? I will rehabilitate you. But you, Danny, don’t want to accept that you’re broken. You’re as evil as the rest of them, but you really do think you’re better. How can I help you if you don’t first show me just how broken you are?”

“I
am
broken!” Danny shouted.

“Then kill him!” The warden jabbed his finger at Slane. “Kill the man who broke my rules and killed young Peter. An eye for an eye. Take his life!”

“I can’t!”

Pape stopped. Stared at Danny for a moment.

“Captain?”

Bostich took one step away from the wall. “Yes, sir!”

“Kill Slane.”

A beat of silence.

“Shoot him, sir?”

“He broke a fundamental rule and killed a man, did he not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then do the same to him.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bostich lifted his rifle, aimed at Slane, who was just beginning to grasp what was happening, and shot him through the head before the first cry of protest could be heard. The loud crash of gunfire echoed through the room.

Slane dropped flat, hole in head.

“Now,” the warden said, addressing Danny. “Kill Randell.”

“TELL ME, OR
I swear I’m pulling this trigger,” I snapped.

The judge was trembling from head to bloody feet, furious that I’d maneuvered him into baring his deepest secret. But he still wasn’t telling me.

“I swear…”

“I received a call from Basal this morning,” he breathed.

“That’s not enough. We’ll start over. Three, two,…”

“The warden called me an hour ago.” He was breathing hard. “He said there’d been an accidental death. A rape that went too far.”

A rape?

“You know the warden? Why would he call you? Who was raped?”

“I was instrumental in transferring a young man convicted of statutory rape to his prison. The boy was evidently raped.”

“What about Danny?”

He held his silence and I knew that this was the information that had him resisting all along. He could have told me about the boy earlier, but it was something about Danny that he wanted to keep from me.

“What was the name of your son?”

The muscles along his jawline bulged.

I pressed the gun in tighter. “Tell me!”

“Roman,” he said.

“He was a pedophile?”

“Yes. Now move the gun.”

So I really had been right. I stood back and lowered the gun to my side, still trying to connect the dots. Franklin Thompson had made the one confession he never imagined making, but I needed more. Danny had killed the judge’s son, and for that maybe I was sorry. But that was the past.

“What does the boy’s rape have to do with Danny?”

“The warden said there could be some trouble, and he wanted legal advice. If any of this comes out, you know I’ll deny it.”

“Tell me what I need to know and it won’t. Trouble with who? With Danny?”

The man’s eyes shifted. “He told me that the inmate behind the rape wants to kill Danny. And that he’s inclined to allow it. That’s all I know.”

“What do you mean kill Danny?” Waves of heat washed over my face. “Who’s going to kill Danny?”

“That’s all I know! I sent the boy there because the warden said he needed him to break Danny. I didn’t know he would be killed. Danny murdered my son!”

“If you could prove that you’d have gone through legal channels.” But my mind was on Basal. Randell was going to kill Danny, and the warden was in on it. “You have to help me stop it,” I said.

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you can’t? You set this up—you have to!”

“I didn’t set it up. I only got him the boy.”

“Call the warden and tell him I know everything.”

“I can’t. And you don’t.”

“Why can’t you?”

“The warden knows too much. He would turn on me. My life would be over.”

“I don’t care if your life would be over! You set Danny up, you get him out!”

Keith banged on the door. “Renee?”

“Hold on!”

Blind with rage, I walked back up to the judge and put the gun against his teeth. “Now you listen to me, Judge. I really have lost it. You hear me? I’m a neurotic, manic mess. I don’t care anymore if I live or die. You’re going to call that warden and you’re going to get Danny out of there, or I swear I’m going to blow off another body part!”

“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.

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.