Betrayal

by Simon King

  I continued mopping, making my way around the room until I was on the window side. The meal trolley that each bed had was in my way and I carefully moved it aside, continuing to push my mop around the floor. I was about to bend down and move a paper bag aside, one I knew held a prisoner’s uniform until they changed back out of the hospital pyjamas, they were all given. It was leaning against the bedside table.

  “Did you know?” a voice suddenly said, speaking from almost directly beside my ear. I jumped a little and stepped back. I kicked the bucket in the process, water spilling over the rim.

  I stared at the mop of black hair that was lying on that pillow, making out a single bloodshot eye staring out at me. There was a small patch of forehead, but the colour looked off. The figure suddenly pulled the sheet back a little, Nick Traiforous staring back at me with one good eye, the other completely shut under a dark and swollen bruise.

  “Huh?” I said, taken by complete surprise. I wasn’t sure whether he was going to attack me, the last time I’d seen him, Katarina’s lifeless body in his arms. “Nick?” I asked, leaning forward a little.

  “Did you know? A simple question.” He sounded terrible, but there was nothing that could eclipse the hurt in the man’s voice. While his body lay bruised and battered on the bed, it was his soul that remained racked with grief. It was that voice I heard, the one speaking from the inside.

  I knew the question, having been asked it by the late Francisco De Bane. I gripped the mop tight and stepped forward slightly. The grief the man felt tore into my soul, remembering his screams as she lay dying in his arms. It was the same grief that had torn through me when Aiden died.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. His one good eye locked onto mine and I knew he was looking for a lie. But there was no deceit in me for the man lying before me. I had a part to play in his daughter’s death and the only thing I could do now was to be honest with him, regardless of how ‘the family’ felt about it.

  “Did Frank?” It was funny how his questions mirrored San’s. But with Nick, there was another reason why he was asking. He was looking for revenge as much as I was.

  “Yes. He knew. It was him and Danny that worked it out. They didn’t tell me. I was told it was-“ I paused. He simply nodded, understanding what I was about to say.

  “Me. Yes. They told you that they were going to kill me. You were the guy tasked with creating a scene that day. To distract everyone.” He rubbed at his temple and strained to sit up. I saw him grimace as he strained to lean on one arm, trying to push himself up. I stepped forward and grabbed his arm, pulling him up as best I could. “They broke 2 of my ribs. Can’t say it’s pleasant.” He rubbed the side of his chest, breathed in and grimaced again.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “You mean you don’t know?” he asked, looking genuinely surprised.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Your Boss, of course. He’s still trying to get me. Sent half a dozen goons after me yesterday. Although my boys got a bit cut up, we managed to drop 2 of yours permanently.” I was shocked, realizing for the first time just how much I really was out of the loop.

  “Frank ordered a hit on you?” I asked, taken back by the revelation.

  “He didn’t tell you? Seems to me there isn’t a lot of things you know, kid.” He winced again as he tried to adjust his sitting position. I suddenly heard the familiar clip-clopping of shoe heels marching down the hallway and resumed mopping.

  “All good in here?” Aiden said as he stuck his head in through the open doorway. I simply waved, Nick not bothering to acknowledge the question. Aiden nodded once, looked around, then returned to the station. When I was sure he was gone, I returned to the side of Nick’s bed.

  “I know it’s a little late coming, and I totally get if you don’t care for it, but I want to apologize for my part.” I held out my hand, positive that Frank was going to stick his head in the door and catch me out. Nick looked at my hand, considered, then shook it, his grip firm, despite his obvious injuries.

  “He has to die, Dylan. That man needs to die, sooner rather than later. And there’s one person that needs to do it.” Me standing there talking to Nick was already crossing a line. If anybody saw me talking with him, it would be enough to get me a fair whooping from the boys. But now that he was mentioning killing Frank, it was a betrayal of biblical proportions. This was a betrayal there was no coming back from.

  “Who’s going to be dumb enough to try and kill him?” I asked, already knowing what he was going to say.

  “Someone who can get close enough to him without raising suspicion. Someone that has a reason to want him dead. And someone with the stomach.” He looked at me, his eyes studying mine for comprehension. I understood perfectly well, the familiar tightness in my stomach acknowledging the fact.

  “You think I’m going to kill him for you?” I said. Nick never hesitated with his response.

  “Yes.” That single word was all he needed to let me know what I already knew. I had to do it. Regardless of his name on my list, there was more at stake than simple revenge. “I’ll go one further, kid. You kill Frank and I will forgive you for killing Kon.”

  My arse puckered instantly, the invisible hand that suddenly gripped my stomach squeezed harder than ever before. I’d completely forgotten about the hit on Kon, Danny and I ending that man almost as violently as Danny did Katarina.

  “I-“ was all that would come out, the rest of the words tripping over themselves in my throat. Nick held his hand up, waving my words away.

  “I get that. As much as I love him, I get what that was about. Kon, like Tommy, was a soldier who died for the cause. Our fucked-up lives chose this shit and he fell at the hands of the enemy. Just like the ones yesterday. But my little girl wasn’t part of the war, Dylan. They crossed a line when they took her from me.”

  I simply nodded, understanding fully what he was saying. There was so much remorse and guilt in my system that I knew what needed to happen. I didn’t need this grief-stricken father pointing it out to me.

  “You’ll be betraying the very people you call family, kid. And working for the enemy. But you need to be the one to do this. You are the only one that can do this. And do you know what, kid? I think you want him dead as much as I do.” I looked him in the eyes and acknowledged his request with a single nod. It didn’t need anything else.

  I took my mop and finished cleaning out his toilet. 10 minutes later I was finished, Nick still sitting up the way he was before. When I emerged from the bathroom, he looked at me and smiled.

  “You know something? You do this for me and I’ll make sure you can scratch a couple of names from your list.” I looked at him surprised, wondering if he somehow had a spy in my cell.

  “What? You don’t think I know you have a list? With the amount of shit that’s happened to you?” He lowered himself, cursed at the pain and raised the sheet up over his head. I watched him for a few more seconds then left him alone. The betrayal he spoke of was now in motion. Despite not yet having a plan, it wouldn’t take long for me to devise one.

  8.

  It took me 3 days to figure out the best way to kill Frank and it finally came to me after watching an episode of MacGyver of all things. It wasn’t the actual crazy contraptions he built that gave me the idea; more so the premise to think outside the box.

  There were 2 things playing on my mind and both needed consideration. They were whether to kill Frank publicly or privately. Frank had always made sure to make every killing he was involved in as public as possible. The question I kept asking myself was whether he should go the same way?

  There were a number of ways to give him a public execution, but there were none I could think of where I could do it without incriminating myself. Attacking him with a blade, or simply beating the fuck out of him with a heavy weapon sounded great, but that would be it for me, removed from the unit or prison for God-knows how long.

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that havi
ng Frank die alone in his cell would be one of the greatest injustices I could inflict on him. No audience to watch him end, just a sorry bitch dying in the confines of his prison cell, alone, like a wounded rat hiding.

  9.

  It didn’t take me long to make the necessary preparations. It felt good, knowing that I was finally working on the damn list that had haunted me for the past years, seeming to increase as the time passed. But now that I was actually committing to a plan, I felt like celebrating.

  I resisted the urge to bounce around my cell in jubilation and promised myself that I would once the prick was dead. For now, I needed to keep my eyes on the prize and stay focused, ensuring that my plan would go the way I needed it to. If everything fell into place, Frank Crudinski would be dead by the following week and his death would hopefully be ruled as natural.

  10.

  I always found something intriguing about old buildings as a kid. They held a certain energy about them, as if past events somehow remained within their walls. There would always be some kind of treasure hidden inside them, whether it was old artefacts or even just a simple newspaper from another time.

  Prisons were the same. Many old ones often opened their doors long after closing down, to give the interested public a chance to view the other side of the walls. The Palace was fairly old, its doors first opening in the Summer of 1935. It steadily grew to be one of the worst prisons in the country, housing many of the vilest criminals that society could spit out.

  But this isn’t a history lesson. The point of all this is that some areas of the prison are older than others and the medical wing is one of the oldest, it’s building one of the original to be built. The purpose of the unit has changed several times, starting with the initial use of the building as a mainstream unit. It was an isolation wing at one stage, and part of the building was used for staff accommodation.

  It didn’t turn into a prison hospital until 1982, a complete refurbishment undertaken that year. But not everything was cleaned out during the previous changeover and one of the rooms that was left practically untouched was my laundry room. The place where I regularly fill my mop bucket had served as a small kitchenette back in the day and do you know what people hated having in their kitchenettes back then? Rats. The fury kind on four legs, not two.

  Do you know what I found sealed in an old wall crevice behind the main sink? A jar of rat poison from the 40s, back when there was no such thing as work place safety, health regulations or anything to do with toxic chemicals. The glorious rat poison from the 40s was created with a single purpose. To kill rats. And it didn’t make a difference whether they were the four-legged ot two-legged varieties. The jar was almost half full with the lethal liquid, used to pour over grains which the rodents would then ingest.

  I knew from a school project that I did back in high school, that old-style rat poison was banned because of some of the lethal chemicals they held, Thallium one such product. And do you know how nasty Thallium is? It’s bad; really bad.

  All I needed was to find a way to administer the poison into Frank and let it do all the work. The question was how? But it wasn’t a problem for long as I remembered what my job was. Not only was I the billet in this fine establishment, but I was also the contraband smuggler, the person responsible for shipping any goods back to the unit.

  Chapter 6

  1.

  I sometimes wonder whether things could have worked out another way, one that didn’t have to involve so much killing. But the answer was never far away in this place. The daily assaults continuing the prison over. I don’t talk about those much because of the sheer frequency of them. If I did, you’d still be back in the first few chapters of this story.

  Prison is a violent place, a lifestyle for those unable to live in a peaceful society, abiding by the rules and laws of the land. And the only way to survive in a place like this is to defend yourself, at whatever cost it took. Frank Crudinski was one such man, unable to live by rules. He needed to make his own and thus created a society based on misery, fear and greed.

  But Frank had a weakness, one that I was about to take full advantage of. He had a taste for red wine, the kind often sold in restaurants by the bottle, not the glass. It was his one regular delivery, a single bottle delivered to his cell once a month.

  I was no wine connoisseur but his Pinot Noir delivery looked expensive. It was always delivered inside a pillow for added protection and that is exactly how I delivered it to him, because Frank had a doctor’s certificate that entitled him to a fresh pillow each month due to a delicate neck condition. This month’s shipment was guaranteed to fix his neck problem for good.

  2.

  His latest drink arrived just as it always did, hidden amongst the weekly bedding delivery. I separated it, helped sort the rest of the packages into their respective shelves and took his pillow to the backroom, just as usual. There, I hid it until the appropriate time.

  During that day’s mopping safari, I once again spoke at length with Nick, the man looking better after his dice with the Cruds. His bad eye was slowly opening again and it didn’t feel so painful to watch him speak. I told him about my plan and he disagreed with it at first.

  “I want the rest of his crew to watch him suffer. To know that we struck him and made him scream in agony like a wounded swine.”

  “Oh, he will suffer, of that I assure you. This shit will turn his insides into an amusement park, the rollercoaster tearing him up, one organ at a time. But I can’t be seen as the assassin. I need to keep clean for the others.” He looked unconvinced at first, shaking his head as his lips pursed, turning white. But it didn’t take much for him to hop aboard.

  “I get it, Dylan. Just let me know when it’s done.” I nodded, already hearing the clip-clop of shoes walking towards us. I grabbed my mop and pushed the bucket back out into the hallway.

  3.

  As soon as I had the chance, I returned to my laundry room, left the dirty mop bucket up on the sink and went to the hidden crevice, removing the ancient poison from the darkness. The small jar felt like a true prize as I brought it out into the light.

  There was already another tool hidden beside the jar, a syringe that I had managed to steal from one of the nursing trolleys, briefly left unattended while the nurse tended to Nick himself. I’d hoped the needle was long enough for what I needed it for and as I removed it from its hiding hole, saw that it was perfect.

  I carefully opened the jar, removed the tip from the syringe and gingerly inserted the needle into the deadly fluid. Poisoning could occur from touching the stuff, so I was careful enough to keep the shit as far from me as possible. I pulled back the plunger, emptied it once to make sure no air was caught inside, then pulled back an entire load of the poison, watching with excited intrigue as the clear liquid filled the syringe.

  Footsteps suddenly interrupted my concentration, someone walking down the hall towards my location. The feet sounded light and agile and I guessed they were nurse’s shoes instead of a heavy screw. I held my breath as the steps grew closer, then almost jumped as one of the toilet doors whished open and slammed closed, the person taking a detour into the facilities instead.

  I didn’t waste time, setting the syringe down, screwing the cap back on the jar and returned it back into its hidden chamber. I honestly felt like a cold war spy, on a mission to eliminate a counter agent.

  Once the jar was back in its hole, I removed the wine bottle and peered at the top of it, the cork hidden beneath a layer of foil. There was a pattern cut into the foil, one that looked like a flower; six petals surrounding a central pistil. I ran my finger gently across and wondered whether it would work. There was nothing to do but try. The job needed to be done and worrying about it didn’t help.

  I grabbed the syringe and carefully pushed the needle through one of the gaps. It looked quite thin and I hoped the cork would return to normal once I was finished. After making sure the needle poked out from the underside of the cork, I pushed the plunger
completely down. It didn’t take a lot of Thallium to kill and I knew the dose I had just injected would do its job at least 50 times over.

  Once I removed the needle, the hole didn’t look as bad as I was expecting. It was there, but doubted it would be noticed by anyone unless they specifically looked for it. I suddenly panicked. What if he did? What if Frank suspected something and inspected the cork like a paranoid schizophrenic?

  There was nothing I could do about it and decided to let it go. No use worrying about shit I had no control over. I heard a toilet flush through the wall and returned the syringe to the wall cavity. A tap began to run and I returned the bottle back inside the pillow, wrapping the whole kit into a pillow case. The trap had been set. All that was left to do now was deliver the package to the enemy.

  4.

  “Ah, here he is,” Frank said as I stepped into his cell, package in hand. “My special pillow?” he asked as I handed the delivery to him. I nodded with a small grin. He took it and opened the pillow, staring at the bottle’s label just as the door opened behind me. Nails walked in, looking nervous for the first time.

  “Here he is. The man of the moment.” He stood and shook with the new arrival before sitting again.

  “The man of the moment?” I asked, but Nails just scowled at me. Frank interjected.

  “Now, now, lads. Maybe it’s time to end this hostility between you boys. You are brothers, after all. Maybe we should crack the cork on this now. To drink to good health and celebrate your upcoming adventure.” I didn’t follow, but felt my panic rise a little. Taking the slightest taste from the bottle could mean a death sentence. If Frank followed through, it would mean the end of my revenge act before it even began.

  “I’ll drink once it’s done,” Nails said. “Not before.”

  “Once what’s done?” I asked, again having my question ignored. Frank and Nails exchanged one of those looks I now associated with the Visit Centre incident. The bottle sat on Frank’s lap, his fingers gripping the neck tightly. He nursed it like he would a winning lottery ticket.