More gunfire emanated from inside the prison walls like the music from a rock concert overflowing stadium walls. But this was no concert with staged pyrotechnics. This was real. Flames burst through the roof with an explosion of gas and cement. All the police officers who had manned the perimeter rushed toward the prison now, right past Macy and the female DEA agent.
She could have called out, but they might not have even heard her over the noise from the prison. And if someone had heard her, she had no doubt that just as she’d threatened to shoot the sheriff, Alice would have shot anyone looking to save her, too.
Special Agent O’Neil opened the truck door and pushed Macy inside. “Keep going,” she ordered, “over the console.”
Macy went willingly to where she had dropped her purse. As she settled onto her seat, she reached inside the bag. “Where are you taking me?”
“Straight to hell,” the woman murmured. She didn’t reach for the keys that dangled from the ignition, though. Instead she stared through the windshield at the prison as flames rose from the roof.
Alice didn’t even notice Macy digging inside her purse. When she finally fumbled the weapon free from her wallet, the sharp blade nicked her finger, and she sucked in a breath of pain and fear.
Rowe had wiped off Elliot’s blood, but he hadn’t sterilized it. But then, with this woman pointing a gun at her, catching a disease should have been the least of Macy’s worries.
“I just killed a man I thought was a friend,” she shared with the distracted agent. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m not capable of killing you, too.”
“I’m not some stupid drug-dealing kid,” Alice replied.
“You know about Elliot?”
“I know about everything. You think the warden was smart enough to handle this entire operation on his own?” She snorted her derision of his intelligence, just as James had earlier mocked Macy.
She suspected that their arrogance would prove the downfall for both of these criminals.
“Was?” Macy repeated. “Is he gone?”
“He’s in there, too. Or whatever his prisoners left of him is in there…along with the body of your brother. And, in just a few minutes, your boyfriend will be torn apart.” A smile of satisfaction crossed the woman’s beautiful face.
“You’re not a kid,” Macy agreed, “but you’re stupid to think that Rowe is going to die in there. He’s more resourceful than you know.”
And so was she.
HE COULD BARELY SEE THROUGH the smoke that hung heavy in the air. Alarms blared, reverberating inside his head along with gunshots and shouts and screams of pain. He’d thought Blackwoods was hell before; he’d had no idea what hell was…until now.
He had spent three weeks inside, but he recognized nothing of the open cells with cots burning inside. Bleeding bodies were lying on the ground. He ducked down and rolled over people to check faces.
He had no equipment to address their injuries. Yet. The Guard and paramedics would treat them. Rowe had another mission entirely.
He was looking for one man.
But while he searched for Jed, someone searched for him. Heavily armed guards tried to take back the prison. But inmates had taken weapons from some of the fallen guards. Gunshots echoed off the walls, as bullets were exchanged.
He clutched his gun, but how effective was a nearly empty weapon against automatic rifles?
“There he is!” someone shouted.
He whirled just as a shot fired, striking the wall above his head. It wasn’t a prisoner with a gun; it was a guard shooting at him. Rowe fired back, hitting the burly guard with the brush cut in the shoulder. The automatic rifle dropped, firing as it struck the ground. Bullets flew around the area.
Rowe hit the floor, rolling out of the way. He crept along the corridor, nearly on his belly, as another guard fired, covering his partner.
A prisoner, armed with one of the guard’s guns, ducked through the open door of a cell and fired back. With a cry of agony the guard dropped to the ground.
But Rowe wasn’t clear, for the prisoner caught sight of him and opened fire. Rowe lifted his gun and squeezed off his last shot. A bullet struck the prisoner’s shoulder, driving him back inside the cell. Rowe lurched to his feet, ready to run. But before he could move, the inmate caught his breath and rushed forward, knocking Rowe to the ground.
He shoved the barrel of the rifle against Rowe’s head, grinding the metal into his temple. “Now you’re going to pay for that. You’re going to pay for being a stinking narc—”
“Don’t,” a deep voice ordered as a shadow fell across Rowe.
“You wanna kill the Fed yourself?” the inmate with the gun asked, easing the barrel slightly away from Rowe’s throbbing head.
“No,” the big guy replied. “And you don’t want to kill him either.”
“But he’s a Fed…”
“He’s also the only person who can testify against the warden,” the rational inmate said, pointing out Rowe’s usefulness.
“We shoulda just killed James.”
The big guy chuckled, a rusty rumble of sound that echoed like the gunfire or sounded like a hammer pounding nails into concrete. “Killing is too good for the warden. Too easy,” he said with satisfaction. “He deserves to spend the rest of his life in hell. In here.”
“Yeah!” the guy with the gun shouted his wholehearted agreement.
The big guy sighed almost regretfully and said, “But that won’t happen if you kill this Fed.”
With a grunt of disgust and begrudging agreement, the armed inmate pulled the barrel away from Rowe’s head. “All right, damn it. He can live to testify.”
“Good.”
“I hear a chopper!” The inmate ran off, the rifle slung over his shoulder, as if he were eager to fire at the aircraft. If that chopper belonged to who Rowe suspected it did, the guy wouldn’t get off a shot before guardsmen gunned him down as he very nearly had Rowe.
As he surely would have if this man, whose shadow Rowe lay beneath, had not intervened on his behalf.
A big hand reached down, lifting Rowe to his feet as if he weighed nothing. “How many times I gotta save your ass, Cusack?”
“You’re alive!” Rowe gaped in shock that not only was Jedidiah Kleyn alive, but he looked relatively unharmed except for the bruises that Rowe himself had inflicted on him so that their struggle had looked real. But their efforts to make it look real had failed, as had their entire plan. “Macy’s gonna be so relieved that you’re okay!”
“I’m not relieved,” Jed remarked. “What the hell are you doing back in here?”
“Looking for you.”
“I told you I could take care of myself,” Jed stubbornly reminded Rowe. “You needed to focus on Macy, on keeping her safe.”
“Your sister’s pretty good at taking care of herself, too.” Must have been some family thing…self-reliance, pride and independence.
“Where is she?” Jed asked.
“Right outside,” Rowe assured him, “with the sheriff.”
Kleyn shook his head but then reached up to readjust the earpiece for the radio at his waist that he must have lifted from a guard. “That young sheriff’s inside. He’s looking for the warden.”
“Is he dirty?” Had Rowe chosen the wrong time to trust his instincts? Had he chosen the wrong man to protect the woman he loved?
“I think he’s looking for the warden because he wants to arrest him,” Jed said, “not let him go.”
“Where is the warden?” Rowe asked.
“The sheriff will find him.”
“I should be the one to arrest him.” To arrest the man who’d ordered his death and Macy’s.
Jed shook his head. “You shouldn’t be in here.”
Rowe suspected the man didn’t feel that way because he was concerned about his safety.
“You should be out there protecting my sister,” he said, confirming Rowe’s own feelings.
Rowe was about to deny that she need
ed protecting when that niggling sensation clenched the muscles in his stomach and that god-awful sense of foreboding washed over him.
“Come out with me,” Rowe said. How happy would Macy be to see her brother alive and on the outside, even if he wouldn’t be able to stay there until Rowe cleared him? “I’ll protect you from the police and the National Guard.” Bringing him out was a hell of a lot safer than leaving him in this hell….
Jed chuckled, as if amused by his concern. “I got this, Cusack. Get the hell out of here. That’s what I intend to do.”
“You’re breaking out of prison?”
The big man didn’t reply, just turned away from him as if he was already heading out of the maximum-security facility that had been his prison for the past three years.
“I can’t let you do that,” Rowe said. As a lawman, he couldn’t stand idly by and watch a convicted killer—a cop killer—walk right out of the prison where he’d been sentenced for his crime.
He would stop Jed if he had to.
If he could…
How ironic would it be if the man he came back to hell to help was the man who finally carried out his order and killed him?
“THIS IS HIS GUN, you know,” Alice remarked, staring down the barrel she had trained on Macy.
That had been one of Rowe’s fears, that his mentor had been shot with his gun. “Did you kill Special Agent Jackson with it?”
Alice sighed. “That old fool didn’t want the money. He wanted to pull Cusack out.” She shook her head in disgust. “He didn’t want the kid getting hurt.”
“He was part of it?”
“No. He was like Cusack. Delusional. Even though he’d been on the job long enough to know better, he still thought he could make a difference in the world.”
No wonder Rowe had respected and revered the man as much as he had.
“What little money he made on the job he donated half of to after-school programs.” Alice snorted her disgust again.
“You don’t think that you can make a difference in the fight against drugs?” Rowe did; it was why his job meant so much to him.
“I never thought that,” Alice said.
Macy furrowed her brow in confusion. “Then why would you choose to work for the DEA?”
The redhead laughed. “It’s where the money is, honey. The warden knew how to make money.” And that was the kind of man Alice respected and revered— a killer. “Lots of it. Enough that as soon as I get rid of you, I can get out of here for good.”
“You’re going to shoot me, right here?” Macy challenged her.
Alice tapped the end of the barrel. “Silencer. Nobody will hear a thing, especially not over that racket.”
The National Guard had arrived with helicopters and Humvees. The riot was over or would be soon. Alice wasn’t going to wait any longer before she pulled the trigger.
So Macy lunged with the scalpel.
But the gun struck her. Not a bullet. Just the barrel against her arm, sending the scalpel flying across the dash…to the driver’s side of the truck.
With the hand not holding the gun, Alice picked up the knife. “Maybe you should go out the same way your boyfriend just did.”
“Elliot was not my boyfriend.”
“I’m talking about Rowe. He committed suicide when he ran inside that prison to save a man who’s already dead.”
Macy ignored the flash of pain at the woman’s matter-of-fact remark. She couldn’t believe anything Agent O’Neil told her.
The redhead stared at Macy, her eyes narrowed in consideration of the lies she was about to concoct to cover her murder. “Maybe, overcome with grief over the loss of your boyfriend and your brother, you decide to kill yourself, too, rather than continue alone in the world.”
“I would never kill myself.”
“Trouble is that the only people who might know that about you are already dead. So…” Alice fingered the blade. “You know, if I were faking a suicide for anyone else, I would slit your wrists. But with your medical background, you would know that a person can survive slashing her wrists.”
Damn. Macy had thought she was smart, but this woman was smarter. And she had done her research. She knew everything about her as well as everything about Jed.
Was she right about her fellow agent getting killed inside? Was she right that Jed was already dead?
Macy didn’t know what beliefs to cling to anymore. This woman had confused and rattled her with her words more than the gun or scalpel she held. Or even with the murderous intensity of her stare.
“With your medical background, you’d know that the fastest and surest way to die is to cut your jugular.” Alice had no more than made the declaration before she slashed the blade toward Macy’s throat.
Chapter Fifteen
Warden James grimaced as he was handed into the back of the sheriff’s cruiser. His arms stung, the handcuffs chafing his wrists. Some of the prisoners stood around, smiling even as National Guardsmen snapped handcuffs on them.
These men thought Jefferson James was no better than they were. Animals.
But he wasn’t the only non-inmate in cuffs now. The guards who had survived the riot were being cuffed and placed into the backseats of state police cruisers.
Another man had been arrested as well, a man he had never seen before. The guy wore a suit and an attitude that suggested he’d been in charge of something.
But he wasn’t the man who drew the warden’s interest. He stared instead at the undercover DEA agent who stood next to the sheriff. If only Cusack had died…
“What the hell!” Rowe Cusack exclaimed as the sheriff patted down the pockets of the man that he had pushed up against the car. “I thought you were arresting the warden, not the special agent in charge of the DEA.”
Sheriff York jerked his thumb toward the backseat. “The warden’s already been cuffed and read his rights. He’s in there.”
“Cusack, explain to this idiot that I am not in league with this corrupt official,” the older man with the attitude ordered.
Warden James grinned over the incompetent sheriff arresting the wrong agent. His partner was still out there, still free. Despite the cuffs on his wrists, he wasn’t without hope.
“You’re the one who held off the raid on the prison until the National Guard got here,” the sheriff explained to the agent he was cuffing, “giving your cohort time to destroy evidence.”
James snorted. As if they thought he’d be stupid enough to leave evidence, or anything else incriminating, in the prison…
“It wasn’t my idea,” the snooty agent protested. “Special Agent Alice O’Neil urged me to wait.”
The sheriff gasped. “Is she the redhead?”
“Yes,” both Cusack and the other agent replied.
“I left your friend with her,” York said. “I thought she’d be safe.”
The warden leaned forward, just enough to catch the look of terror passing through the pale blue eyes of the DEA agent who should have been dead. “She would have been safer with me.” James couldn’t resist taunting them. “Because with Alice, there’s no chance she’s alive or that she didn’t suffer greatly before that cold-blooded bitch killed her.”
For a brief second, Cusack met his gaze. Behind the rage and hatred on the man’s handsome face was fear and helplessness. Even though he wore no metal bracelets, he was cuffed almost as tightly as James was because he had just lost what mattered most to him—even more than his own life.
He had lost the woman he loved. James intimately knew the white-hot intensity of that unrelenting pain.
Now it was over.
EVEN ABOVE THE RACKET of the riot, Rowe heard her scream as he ran through the prison guards toward where he’d left Macy. He actually felt her scream, throbbing inside him, rushing through his veins with the adrenaline coursing through him.
While the warden had gloated, the sheriff had regretfully admitted to leaving Macy with Alice quite a while ago. They should have been gone. If Alice wa
s as smart as he’d always believed she was, she would have forced Macy into his truck. She would have driven off with her, away from Blackwoods, away from Rowe.
But then, given the beating Jackson had taken before his death, Alice had toyed with him, too, just as she must have toyed with Macy. Why else would they still be close enough to the prison that Rowe could hear Macy’s scream?
Killing wasn’t just Alice’s way of hiding her corruption; the woman must have actually enjoyed it. Why else would she have tortured a coworker? First Jackson, beating him before she killed him, and now Macy.
So Rowe felt no compunction over pulling the trigger and sending a bullet straight into Alice O’Neil’s twisted brain.
But had he fired it in time? Had she hit Macy with that damn scalpel that she’d kept swinging at her as she taunted her with it?
He jerked open the truck door and pulled Macy from the passenger side. The dome light illuminated her pale face and wide eyes and the blood that already stained her clothes.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his voice shaking as badly as his hands as he lifted her in his arms. “Did she hurt you?”
“No…” But the denial slipped through her lips with a moan.
“You’re not all right.” She had been through hell because of him.
But instead of resenting him for it, she lifted trembling fingers to his face. “Are you all right?”
Rowe nodded in assurance. “I’m fine. Thanks again to your brother.”
Hope brightened her eyes, chasing away some of the fear that haunted her. “He’s alive?”
He couldn’t tell her what had happened to Jed—not here, not with her being as fragile as she was.
“TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED to my brother!” Macy demanded. She had waited long enough, enduring the sheriff’s questions and Rowe’s pompous supervisor’s questions. And any time she’d tried to ask about Jed, Rowe had silenced her with a look, as if she were supposed to deny the man who mattered most to her.
Or had mattered most…until she’d unzipped that body bag and found Rowe Cusack. She hadn’t realized then what he would come to mean to her. She hadn’t really realized it until he’d run into the middle of a prison riot.
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