by Ted Dekker
“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?”
“I don’t know how,” I snapped. I took a deep breath and tried to gather myself. “You tell me how. Prisons are built to keep people in, not keep them out. Don’t tell me there’s no way. We either get in there and stop this or, like you told the judge, we’re all finished. All of us.”
He lifted a hand to quiet me. “Okay, calm down.” He absently scratched at his neck. “But Sicko’s still pulling strings. He can’t find out we’ve abandoned the judge. Which means…” His voice trailed off.
“What?”
He flipped me a glance. “His instructions gave us forty-eight hours to get the money. We’d have to do it within the next two days.”
I’d won him over, which could be either good or bad, but in that moment all I could think about was Danny, and Danny was in trouble now, not in two days.
“We can’t wait that long.”
“You can’t just drive up there and walk in. We’d have to get the right identification, make the arrangements, and plan it down to the minute. And then there’s the getting-out part.”
“So you know how we can get in?”
He averted his eyes. “Maybe. I’ve been thinking…I made a few calls.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“You would have insisted. We didn’t know enough to go off half-cocked. We still don’t.”
“I do.” I walked over to my kit open on the floor and shoved the gun into the bag. “Everything leads back to Basal. Everything.” I snapped the kit shut and snatched it off the floor. “We’re wasting our time here.”
“What about the judge?”
“We tell him he has two days to gather one million dollars. We’ll be back in forty-eight hours.”
“And what if he goes to the police? Or warns the warden?”
“He won’t,” I said. “I know too much about him now. If he can’t keep quiet, what I know about him goes to the press.”
31
HE DIDN’T KNOW how long he’d been out, only that he wasn’t dead. And that he’d been brought back to consciousness by water thrown on his face.
“Wake up, you idiot. Payback time.” The captain’s voice.
Danny opened his eyes. The concrete ceiling of the terrible room where he’d spent two days slowly came into focus. He was in deep meditation. The place of torment.
But he was alive, which could only mean that the warden had stopped Randell from killing him as he lay unconscious in the hard yard. This was what Danny had hoped for. Death wasn’t Pape’s objective. His world revolved around compliance and punishment.
But what of Randell?
Danny turned his throbbing head and saw that he wasn’t on the ground. Or on the wall. He lay on his back, arms and legs strapped to the wooden table, dressed only in loose shorts.
Bostich stood over him wearing a slash for a grin. Sweat beaded his forehead and darkened the armpits of his uniform.
“Wakie, wakie.”
A doctor from the infirmary stood in the corner, dressed in a white smock. There was a black medical bag at his feet. The man was tall and gaunt, with high cheekbones and a balding blond head. He watched Danny, emotionless, hands clasped in front of his waist.
The door opened, and the warden stepped into the room like a sloth, slow and deliberate. He closed the door behind him and straightened his black suit jacket.
Danny saw then that they’d strapped down his shins and thighs as well as his ankles. The low-wattage incandescent bulb on the ceiling flickered once, then remained lit, casting its glow about the room.
Marshall Pape slid one hand into his pocket as he always did, and stepped into the middle of the room. There wasn’t a hint of kindness on his face.
“You disappoint me, Danny. You saw what they did to that poor boy. Slane was the kind of person other prisons keep paroling back into society to prey on the weak. The kind who took my family. I’m trying to fix that, and I’d hoped to get a little help from a priest. I was wrong.”
But Danny’s mind was more on the straps holding his legs. Why? A tinge of fear leaked through his bones.
The warden nodded at the doctor, who bent for his black bag.
“Did your father ever send you into quiet time when you were a child, Danny?”
He cleared his throat. “Yes.”
“Think of the hole as a kind of quiet time. But if you keep breaking the rules, things get worse. The next time, your father might take away privileges. Then swat your hand. Then maybe give you a good whipping.”
No, but Danny said nothing.
“You may think of this as your good whipping. I hope it’s your last.”
He stepped aside as the doctor placed his black bag on the table. From it he withdrew a white cloth, which he placed next to Danny, then latex gloves, and something that looked like a silver electric toothbrush without the brush. A small jar of disinfectant and several cotton swabs were next.
The warden continued in a calm voice. “Don’t worry, he’s very clean. It’s important that you don’t develop an infection.”
The doctor removed a small white case, which he opened. From it, he selected a very thin six-inch needle that went into the end of the device. Or was it a small drill bit, like those used by dentists?
Sweat began to seep out of Danny’s pores.
The doctor connected a small air tube to the silver wand and set it down on the white cloth. Taking the disinfectant, he wiped a four-inch section of Danny’s shin.
No one spoke now. Bostich stood with his arms crossed, wearing a smirk. The warden watched, hand in pocket, frowning. The doctor calmly went about his business.
“The advantage of this particular form of punishment is that it will leave only a very small mark,” Pape said. “The needle will reach into your bone and grind at certain nerves. There will be no permanent damage, but you can expect the pain to be quite intense. It doesn’t compare to eternal fire, but you’ll get the general idea.”
The doctor felt along Danny’s shin bone with his thumb until he found what he was looking for. Keeping the thumb in place, he reached into the black bag and turned on a power source. A small air pump.
He lifted the drill and Danny closed his eyes. The device whined once, then twic
e as the doctor tested it.
“We’ve only taken one other member this far,” Pape continued. “Slane was terribly stubborn when he came to us, and now he’s dead. Such a shame, but some people just can’t be rehabilitated in their time. As for Peter’s suffering, it was short. Yours will last two days. We’ll talk then.”
He stepped away. The door squealed open, then closed behind him.
Bostich pressed a thick strip of rubber against Danny’s mouth. “Bite on this. You don’t want to chew off your tongue.”
He accepted the piece, bit into it, and marshaled all of his focus to one end: shutting down his mind. The brain controlled pain. The nerve endings might be stimulated, but unless their message was properly interpreted by the mind, the pain would be lost. There was no way to avoid the warden’s punishment, but he could endure it by minimizing that pain.
This Danny knew, but he had never felt a thin, whining drill grind into his bones before. The device screeched to life.
“Try not to move,” the doctor said. “We have a long way to go and I don’t want to tear up your bone marrow.”
It was with that word marrow that Danny’s resolve began to fade.
The tip of the drill touched his skin and a sharp sting shot up his leg. But not so much that he flinched. Then it struck his chin and the sensation swelled, a biting, excruciating pain that brought with it spreading heat as his flesh rebelled.
This too, Danny could manage for some time. He bit down on the rubber with more force and pushed his thoughts into submission, searching for the solace that he’d learned to find beyond them.
But then the drill broke past the surface of the bone and struck a tangle of nerves that shattered any notion he could endure such torment. The pain was not localized; it slammed into his whole body at once, like a thundering wave crashing onto the shore.
Nothing could have prepared him for such intense agony. His body began to tremble from head to foot. His head snapped back, and he clamped down on the rubber, desperate for relief.
“Hold still,” the doctor said. “It gets worse with time. Just try to relax.”
Danny’s jaw snapped wide and he began to scream.
32
WEDNESDAY
I WAS A bundle of raw nerves. Keith drove the rented black Ford sedan down Highway 138 toward Lone Pine Canyon Road toward Basal. He had pulled the entire plan together in fewer than forty hours and, despite the fact that it fell into place so seamlessly, I was certain we’d forgotten something.
We had identification. Getting in would all come down to our Office of the Inspector General ID badges.
Never mind that. Even if we hadn’t forgotten anything and getting into the prison proved to be as simple as we thought it could be, we were entering the lions’ den. The warden was in there. Randell was in there.
We were dressed like congressmen visiting our constituents, Keith in a dark blue suit and me in blue slacks and a white blouse.
I’d watched a documentary once about the cult leader Jim Jones, who set up a compound for his followers in Guyana called Jonestown. A congressman who had gone in to investigate rumors of abuse lost his life along with more than nine hundred temple followers.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that Basal was our Jonestown and I was that congressman.
We’d left Judge Thompson in his estate, assured of his silence and compliance. Knowing that he was complicit at some level, we told him what we wanted him to hear: someone wanted him dead, and unless he got our hands on one million dollars within forty-eight hours, we would have to at least fake his death. We would be back. There would be no contact until then, because we believed that someone was watching.
As to why Sicko wanted the judge dead, the reasoning had become obvious to us: Thompson was a loose end who knew too much to be left alive. If we killed him, we would be implicated in his murder and go to prison, which was one of Sicko’s stated objectives from the beginning. It was the perfect setup.
As to why Sicko had led me to the dancing bear, then to the warehouse with the maimed boy before leading us to the judge, the answer seemed obvious in retrospect: he was manipulating me, pushing me further and further, hoping I would snap and kill a man with my own hands.
But now we’d turned the tables on him. He didn’t know it yet, but he was now playing our game, and in that game I needed the judge alive. In fact, he was invaluable. Assuming both Danny and I survived the next twenty-four hours.
“You’re sure these IDs will work?” I asked.
Keith didn’t bother answering. He drove the sedan in silence, as he had for most of the drive north. Neither of us had slept more than a few hours since Sunday night.
He’d dyed his hair black and wore a mustache and goatee. He looked nothing like the Keith I knew. I’d found a short blonde wig and wore rectangular, wireframe glasses. True, I was still my skinny self, but Keith seemed certain that the warden wouldn’t detect us. Although he had probably seen pictures of us, he hadn’t met either of us in person, a key factor in recognition. Our alterations were simple but they would be effective, and I had to trust him on that.
“How long?” I asked.
“Five minutes.”
Honestly, most of my nervousness revolved around the thought of seeing Danny again. Would I? What condition was he in? Was he even alive? I stared at the road ahead and tried to imagine seeing him again. Would he recognize me with a wig on? What would I say?
I’d written a letter that laid it all out—everything that had happened, everything we planned. Although the judge didn’t know it yet, with his help I was going to get Danny transferred out of Basal. But first we had to keep him alive. We had to stop Randell. We had to deal with the warden. That couldn’t be done from the outside because there was too much risk of the warden being tipped off, which would send him sky-high. He’d blow up the whole prison with Danny in it. He’d become the new Jim Jones, and Basal would become his Jonestown.
The letter was folded neatly in my underwear—nothing was as important as getting it to Danny.
Keith gave me a quick glance, then returned his gaze to the road.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
He waited a while before answering. “I was thinking that I’ve been over this a hundred times, and I’m still having a hard time believing the system would leave such a gap in their security. They must have retina scans, fingerprints—something to identify OIG deputies besides a simple ID.”
I gave him our pat answer. “Who wants to break into prison, right?”
“Yeah, but you’d think they’d have more protocols in place. What if someone wanted to break in to kill a high-value target? I know we’re not talking witnesses here, we’re talking convicted inmates. One gets knocked off and no one really cares much. Still…”
“But you trust your source,” I said, knowing the answer.
He nodded absently. “Sources. Three of them.”
Our break-in would be made possible because of the separation of power between the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the governor’s Office of the Inspector General, the investigative watchdog that had reporting authority over the way the CDCR ran the prisons. In essence, the OIG could investigate any complaints of abuse in the department of corrections. Misappropriation of funds, theft—any form of misconduct in the prison system was the OIG’s to flush out.
OIG deputies routinely showed up unannounced to audit, inspect, or investigate complaints. According to California law, any prison official’s refusal to cooperate constituted a misdemeanor. The OIG was seen by some as the governor’s Gestapo arm, the adversary, the ones who made the difficult task of controlling prison populations even harder.
But that adversarial relationship gave OIG deputies healthy respect, and we intended on tapping it. We needed only an hour inside, plenty of time to do what we needed to do and get out before any collateral damage was discovered.
There were problems, challenges that would have been impossi
bilities without Keith’s connections, like getting fake ID badges made quickly. And any investigation into a prison like Basal would immediately put the warden on high alert. He would watch us like a hawk.
After numerous phone calls and hours of digging, the plan that Keith landed on seemed flawless.
We would show up unannounced as two deputies dispatched from the main office in Sacramento. The warden would be familiar with regional deputies. Our papers identified us as deputies Myles Somerset and Julia Wishart. We were investigating a current well-known problem in the system: spiked milk supplied by the Prison Industry Authority. We would take random blood and urine samples from inmates, and milk samples from the kitchen. It would take only an hour and we’d be out of their hair.
The warden wouldn’t call the Sacramento office to verify our task, because doing so would cast suspicion on his motives for inserting himself into the investigation. You don’t call headquarters and demand to know why the Gestapo are checking out your prison unless you’re covering something up. He might be able to make inquiries through back channels, but it would take time. Hopefully enough for us to get in and out.
Once we were processed and inside, we had the authority to ask the staff to help us or stay clear. We would find Randell and Danny, do what we needed to do, and leave.
Simple.
But we both knew nothing was ever that simple.
Keith took the turn onto the winding canyon road, and the silence seemed to deepen, despite the fact that neither of us was talking. The radio was off, the windows were up, the air was turned down. My gut felt inside out.
“Remember,” he said softly. “It’s all in the way we play it. It’s in the eyes and the voice. Who are you?”
“Julia Wishart. OIG. You don’t need to worry, I can handle myself.”
“I know you can. So does the judge now.”
“Maybe I should shoot off Randell’s toes.”
