Cindy Dees - Target

A few minutes later, she pulled into a parking lot and climbed out of her car. She pulled the collar of her leather coat up around her ears. The Capitol had been in the grip of an arctic cold spell for a couple of days, and the deep freeze wasn’t showing any signs of letting up today, either.

She hurried into the brown brick, three-story building and was immediately confronted by a glass security wall. She signed a stack of forms and affidavits, submitted to a body search by a female guard, was metal detected, x-rayed and thoroughly scrutinized before she was allowed to pass through the glass partition. Then there was a delay while it was determined whether or not the prisoner in question was awake yet. Frankly, she didn’t care if it was a violation of Richard Dunst’s civil rights to disturb his beauty rest or not. She needed to talk to the guy. Now. Eventually, a combination of sheer insistence and winning charm got her the final signature she needed to interview Dunst, awake or otherwise.

She carried her documents to a second, double-doored security area watched by guards sitting behind bulletproof glass. One guard buzzed her through while the second guard met her on the far side and walked her down a hallway as sterile as a hospital. The floor was linoleum, the lights bright and fluorescent behind steel mesh covers. Gray steel doors flanked her on either side, pockmarked with heavy, shiny steel rivets.

The guard stopped in front of one such unmarked door and punched a lengthy sequence into the number pad beside it. A green diode lit on the pad’s face. Putting his weight into it, the guard pulled on the door. It slid open ponderously, its soundproof rubber stripping rubbing on the floor. She stepped into the dim room and blinked in surprise as the guard flipped on the lights. The walls were blindingly pink, an intense peppermint shade that assaulted the eye.

“What’s with the wall color?” she asked the guard.

“The shrinks-from-on-high say that Pepto-Bismol pink calms down prisoners. Makes ’em less likely to be violent.”

She rolled her eyes. “Too busy puking to fight with each other?”

The guard grinned, then said more seriously, “I’ll bring the prisoner to you here.” He pointed at the pair of surveillance cameras in opposite corners of the small room. “We’ll monitor the meeting with the audio feed turned off like you asked for. Dunst knows the rules. If his hands disappear from plain sight at any time, or he makes any move that might be construed as aggressive or threatening toward you, a guard will step in immediately. If you want a guard to come in, just look up at one of the cameras and nod. You sure you want to be left alone with this guy?”

“Yes,” she answered firmly. She needed Dunst to feel as though he could talk freely. Off the record.

The guard shrugged. “Don’t offer the prisoner any item whatsoever, not even a pen or a paperclip. This guy’s a trained killer. Got it?”

She nodded.

“Okay then. I think they’ve already got Dunst out and are searching him. I’ll be back with him in a couple of minutes.”

The heavy door swung shut behind the guard as he left her alone in the vaultlike interview room. She tried to imagine living boxed up in a place like this for the rest of her life. And shuddered. She’d go crazy, pink walls or not.

She’d been sitting at the steel table for about three minutes when, without warning, the room plunged into darkness. Inky, cavelike blackness without a hint of light. She waited several seconds for the backup power to kick in, but nothing happened. The room stayed dark. What was going on? The blackness and the walls pressed in on her, heavier and heavier, until she thought she was going to suffocate. She had to get out of here.

She felt her way around the table and stretched an arm out, groping for the door. A step into the void. And another. And then her hand encountered cold metal. With both hands, she felt for the door handle. Please God, let her not be locked in here. They’d told her they would lock her in here with Dunst once he arrived. She found the latch and pushed down on the thumb lever. Putting her weight into it, she leaned on the door. It moved. Thank God. It slid open to reveal another void of total darkness. Jeez. Didn’t they have any emergency generators or something in this place? Using the wall as a guide, she turned to her right and began to make her way down the hall toward the exit.

Something brushed against her in the dark. And instantly, a powerful blow slammed into her collarbones. A human arm contracted, snakelike, whipping around her neck and yanking her off balance. Scared out of her skin, she screamed as loud as she could. The piercing noise echoed weirdly, amplified to an almost inhuman pitch by the long hallway. A sweaty hand slapped over her mouth, cutting off the sound. It yanked her down violently. She crouched awkwardly, still wrapped in the man’s powerful grip.

A voice snarled in her ear in a bare whisper, “Shut up if you don’t want the bastard to kill you.”

No sooner had the words left her assailant’s mouth than a deafening explosion cracked. The hard body against hers lurched spasmodically and the arm around her neck went slack. The guy toppled over, knocking her to the floor with him.

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” the man now sprawled half on top of her chanted under his breath. “Can you shoot, lady?” he ground out.

“Yeah,” she gasped under his crushing weight.

“I dropped my pistol. I think it fell against the far wall. Find it, will you, so the prisoner doesn’t grab it.”

Prisoner. This was one of the guards. And someone must be trying to break out of the jail. She wiggled out from under him, which was no small feat. Crawling on her hands and knees and feeling around on the floor in the dark, her hands encountered something slippery and wet. A metallic smell announced that it was blood. She jerked her hands away. Who’d shot the guard beside her? And where was that blasted gun? On this highly waxed linoleum, the darn thing could’ve slid halfway down the hall.

And then she heard a rhythmic noise above the rasping breaths of the wounded guard. Slapping. Like feet hitting the floor. Running. Toward her from the direction of the cell block. In this dark, it was impossible to tell if it was another guard charging to the rescue or the prisoner making a break for it.

She froze, crouched by the wall, straining to gauge the running person’s distance from her. To tackle or not to tackle. That was the question. A door opened at the far end of the hall and a sliver of light spilled into the narrow space. Several voices shouted. They echoed so loudly she couldn’t understand a word. But they sounded furious.

Another shot rang out from the direction of the running man, and the door slammed shut once more, plunging the hall back into blackness, made all the thicker by the brief exposure of her eyes to light.

Acting purely on instinct, she reached out as the running footsteps approached. Something hard cracked into her forearm. Felt like a shin. A grunt and a thud. She dived for the guy, but he threw her off violently. She grabbed again, coming up with nothing more than a fistful of hair as he jerked away from her grasp. She wrapped her arms around whatever she could grab. Felt like an ankle. What must have been a fist connected with her left ear. She lost her grip on the guy’s leg, and heard him scramble off in the dark. Where were the damned emergency lights?

She couldn’t go anywhere for now, so she crawled back to the injured guard. Maybe she could help him, at any rate.

“Where are you hit?” she whispered.

Nothing. The guy must’ve passed out. Not good. She prayed it was pain that had knocked the guy out and not blood loss. His breathing sounded terrible. He was shot in the chest cavity, then. She felt around on his upper body, following the wetness on his shirt to a small, round wound under his left arm. Lucky shot. It had just missed his bulletproof vest and hit him in the armpit. She couldn’t tell the angle of entry in the dark to take a guess at the damage he’d suffered. Based on the sucking noises coming from him, his left lung was collapsed at a minimum.