Sean Black: Deadlock

The California/Oregon Border

Ken Prager woke to blood at the back of his throat and the barrel of a shotgun pressing hard into his right eye. He opened his left: a burning wooden cross was embedded in the centre of a muddy clearing ringed by giant redwood trees.

Then, as firefly embers from the blazing cross were sucked heavenwards by a swirling wind, came the question he’d been dreading for the past six months. A question that, depending on his answer, might be the last words he ever heard. Worse still, the question came from the blonde-haired woman on the other end of the shotgun.

‘Who the hell are you?’ she asked him.

Prager cleared his throat to speak and she withdrew the gun just enough to allow him a glimpse of a lone figure flanking the burning cross. Arms folded, face obscured by a ski mask, the figure stood in silence, waiting for an answer.

‘You know who I am,’ Prager said. His voice sounded cracked and tentative to him — the voice of a liar.

He put a hand down on the muddy ground and tried to lever himself up and on to his feet.

‘What’s all this about?’

‘You tell us,’ the woman said, ratcheting a round into the chamber of the shotgun and re-sighting it in the middle of his forehead. ‘Now, why don’t you try again? And this time we’d appreciate the truth.’

Prager choked back a laugh. ‘The truth?’

The truth was, Ken Prager wasn’t sure who he was any more. Six months ago he’d been Special Agent Kenneth Prager, devoted family man, and a six-year veteran of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Then he’d been asked by his bosses at the Bureau to go undercover, to become Kenny Edwards, a marine fallen on hard times who’d found a new purpose in life: ridding the United States of America of anyone who wasn’t in possession of white skin.

But he’d quickly found there was a snag. In order to convince the others of his new identity, he’d first had to convince himself. Then, to complicate matters further, and despite the fact that Ken Prager had a wife at home, he’d fallen in love. Those six months had blurred the edges of his identity to a point where he was no longer sure he could answer the question of who he was with any certainty. Not even to himself.

He felt the woman leaning her shoulder into the stock of the shotgun, the tip of the barrel pressing painfully into his skull.

‘We need an answer, Kenny,’ she said.

Prager blinked the rain from his eyes.

Stick to your story. Wasn’t that the mantra? They wouldn’t ask you if they already knew. If they knew, you’d already be dead.

‘You know who I am,’ Prager repeated, taking his time over each syllable, trying to inject a tone of certainty into his words.

‘OK then,’ the woman said, with the slightest of nods to someone standing behind him. ‘Maybe this’ll refresh your memory.’

There was the low rumble of a diesel engine and a black van squelched its way to the centre of the clearing and stopped. A masked driver clambered out of the front cab and walked round to the side.

Prager caught the flash of a tiny shamrock tattooed on the knuckle of the man’s right hand as he clasped the handle and threw open the van’s side panel with a game-show flourish.

A dome light illuminated the van’s cargo space. Two people crouched on the floor. One a woman in her early forties, the other a boy in his mid-teens. Bar the ropes securing their hands and feet and a single strip of silver gaffer tape covering their mouths, they were both naked.

Turning his head, Prager vomited on to the muddy ground beneath him.

‘Jesus, no,’ he muttered, staring into the terrified eyes of his wife and son.

One Month Later

450 Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco, California

The package was sitting on Jalicia Jones’s desk when she arrived at her office in the Federal Building a little after seven in the morning. It was a large, padded manila envelope with her name written on it in big black capital letters. Beneath her name was her title. No return address. No stamps. Just her name and title. Jalicia Jones

Assistant U.S. Attorney

Organized Crime Strike Force

She took a final sip of the skinny latte she bought every workday morning across the street at Peats coffee shop and tossed the cup across the room. It went in off the rim of her wastepaper basket. She high-fived fresh air in celebration of the three-point coffee-cup shot, then sat down and stared at the new arrival.

It wasn’t internal mail, that was for sure: they used perforated envelopes for hard copies sent between departments. By rights she should speak to her legal assistant and try to work out who had delivered it. Maybe even have one of the US Marshals Service guys, who provided security for the building and its staff, check it out for her. But, almost immediately, she dismissed both those notions. Jalicia was a young woman who had conditioned herself over the years to suppress unease and confront fear. You didn’t get from the bullet-ridden streets of South Central Los Angeles to an Ivy League law school without that ability.

So, instead of following procedure, she picked the package up and shook it gently. Feeling faintly ridiculous, she held it up to her ear. What was she expecting to hear, she wondered, a ticking clock?

To hell with it.

She ripped open the top of the envelope, turned it upside down with a shake, and stifled a laugh of relief as a single DVD disc clattered out on to the wood. All that angst, and for what? It was probably surveillance footage, dumped on her desk by an over-eager intern who’d started work before she had.

She picked up the shiny silver disc — and that was when she noticed what looked like a strip of meat stuck to the inside of the bubble wrap. Pulling a letter opener from her desk drawer, she lifted the top of the envelope to get a better look.

What she’d taken to be a strip of meat extended all the way down into the envelope. Carefully, she prodded at it with the letter opener. Her stomach gave an involuntary lurch.

Grabbing for a tissue from her handbag, she extracted the paper-thin rectangle of what she could now see was human skin and laid it out on the desk. The edges of the ragged rectangle were charred black. At the centre of the slab of skin, rendered in dark ink, was a swastika.

The sound of the phone on her desk ringing made her jump.

‘Jalicia Jones,’ she said, her gaze still transfixed by the near-translucent scroll of skin with the charred swastika at its centre.

Silence at the other end of the line.

‘Hello?’

There was a click, and then a woman’s voice, human, but unmistakably automated. ‘You have a collect call from…’ There was a pause before the voice added, ‘Pelican Bay State Prison. Press one to accept this call.’

Jalicia pressed the number one key on the pad. There was another pause, then a man’s voice, deep and masculine: ‘Ms Jones?’ There was an emphasis on the Ms.

‘Yes?’

‘This is Frank Hays.’

She opened her mouth, took a deep breath, trying to compose herself.

‘You know who I am, right?’

She knew who he was all right. In fact, when she glanced over to the cork board on the opposite wall of her office, his face stared back at her. An old mugshot of a white male in his mid-twenties, with a square head, his hair down to his shoulders, a ratty mustache and a look of utter contempt for the rest of the world.

But the name underneath the photograph wasn’t Frank Hays. It referred to him by the nickname he’d earned in prison: Reaper.

Next to Reaper’s picture were six other mugshots. Together, these men on the wall of Jalicia’s office constituted the leadership of America’s most feared prison gang, the Aryan Brotherhood. Violent white supremacists, they’d banded together in California’s notorious San Quentin Prison in the late 1970s; what they’d lacked in numbers they’d more than made up for in their ability to terrorize everyone who crossed their path, other violent criminals included. And within their ranks, within their leadership even, Reaper had earned a fearsome reputation based on his complete disregard for human life. It was rumored that during his first week in prison, having been threatened with rape by the leader of a long-established black prison gang, Reaper had responded by beating the gangster unconscious and nailing him to the wall of his cell with a hammer and four nails purloined from a prison workshop.