Lee Child - Killing Floor

He stopped and shrugged. Blew a sigh. Not a bad guy. He hadn’t set out to be some big criminal. It had crept up on the blind side. Sucked him in so gently he hadn’t noticed. Until he wanted out. If he was very lucky they wouldn’t break all his bones until after he was dead.

“How much does your wife know?” I asked him.

He glanced over. An expression of horror on his face.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all. I haven’t told her anything. Not a thing. I couldn’t. It’s all my secret. Nobody else knows a thing.”

“You’ll have to tell her something,” I said. “She’s sure to have noticed you’re not at home, vacuuming the pool or whatever you do on the weekend.”

I was just trying to lighten it up, but it didn’t work out. Hubble went quiet. Misting over again at the thought of his backyard in the early fall sunlight. His wife maybe fussing over rosebushes or whatever. His kids darting about shrieking. Maybe they had a dog. And a three-car garage with European sedans waiting to be hosed off. A basketball hoop over the middle door waiting for the nine-year-old to grow strong enough to dunk the heavy ball. A flag over the porch. Early leaves waiting to be swept. Family life on a Saturday. But not this Saturday. Not for this guy.

“Maybe she’ll think it’s all a mistake,” he said. “Maybe they’ve told her, I don’t know. We know one of the policemen, Dwight Stevenson. My brother married his wife’s sister. I don’t know what he’ll have said to her. I guess I’ll deal with that on Monday. I’ll say it was some kind of terrible mistake. She’ll believe it. Everybody knows mistakes are made.”

He was thinking out loud.

“Hubble?” I said. “What did the tall guy do to them that was liable to get himself shot in the head?”

He stood up and leaned on the wall. Rested his foot on the edge of the steel toilet pan. Looked at me. Wouldn’t answer. Now for the big question.

“What about you?” I asked him. “What have you done to them liable to get yourself shot in the head?”

He wouldn’t answer. The silence in our cell was terrible. I let it crash around for a while. Couldn’t think of anything more to say. Hubble clunked his shoe against the metal toilet pan. A rattly little rhythm. Sounded like a Bo Diddley riff.

“You ever heard of Blind Blake?” I asked him.

He stopped clunking and looked up.

“Who?” he said blankly.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m going to find a bathroom. I need to put a wet towel on my head. It hurts.”

“I’m not surprised,” he said. “I’ll come with you.”

He was anxious not to be left alone. Understandable. I was going to be his minder for the weekend. Not that I had any other plans.

WE WALKED DOWN THE CELL ROW TO A KIND OF OPEN AREA at the end. I saw the fire door Spivey had used the night before. Beyond it was a tiled opening. Over the opening was a clock. Nearly twelve noon. Clocks in prisons are bizarre. Why measure hours and minutes when people think in years and decades?

The tiled entrance was clogged with men. I pushed through and Hubble followed. It was a large tiled room, square. A strong disinfectant stink. One wall had the doorway. On the left was a row of shower stalls. Open. The back wall was a row of toilet cubicles. Open at the front, divided by waist-high partitions. The right wall was a row of washbasins. Very communal. Not a big deal if you’d been in the army all your life, but Hubble wasn’t happy. Not what he was used to at all.

All the fittings were steel. Everything that would normally be porcelain was stainless-steel. For safety. A smashed-up porcelain washbasin yields some pretty good shards. A decent-sized sharp piece would make a good weapon. For the same reason the mirrors over the basins were sheets of polished steel. A bit dull, but fit for the purpose. You could see yourself in them, but you couldn’t smash them up and stab somebody with a fragment.

I stepped over to a basin and ran cold water. Took a wad of paper towels from the dispenser and soaked them. Held them to my bruised forehead. Hubble stood around doing nothing. I kept the cold towels on for a while and then took some more. Water ran down my face. Felt good. There was no real injury. No flesh there, just skin over solid bone. Not much to injure, and impossible to break. A perfect arch, nature’s strongest structure. That’s why I avoid hitting anything with my hands. Hands are pretty fragile. All kinds of small bones and tendons in there. A punch big enough to deck that Red Boy would have smashed my hand up pretty good. I’d have joined him in the hospital. Not much point in that.

I patted my face dry and leaned up close to the steel mirror to check out the damage. Not bad. I combed my hair with my fingers. As I leaned against the sink I could feel the sunglasses in my pocket. The Red Boy’s shades. The spoils of victory. I took them out and put them on. Gazed at my dull reflection.

As I messed about in front of the steel mirror I saw the start of some kind of a commotion happening behind me. I heard a brief warning from Hubble and I turned around. The sunglasses dimmed the bright light. Five white guys were trawling across the room. Biker types. Orange suits, of course, more torn-off sleeves, but with black leather additions. Caps, belts, fingerless gloves. Big beards. All five were big, heavy men, with that hard, slabby fat which is almost muscle but not quite. All five had crude tattoos on their arms and their faces. Swastikas. On their cheeks under their eyes and on their foreheads. The Aryan Brotherhood. White trash prison gang.

As the five swept the room, the other occupants melted away. Any who didn’t get the message were seized and hustled to the door. Thrown out into the corridor. Even the soapy naked guys from the shower stalls. Within seconds the big bathroom was empty. Except for the five bikers and Hubble and me. The five big men fanned out in a loose arc around us. These were big ugly guys. The swastika tattoos on their faces were scratched in. Roughly inked.

My assumption was they’d come to recruit me. Somehow hijack the fact that I’d knocked over a Red Boy. Claim my bizarre celebrity for their cause. Turn it into a race triumph for the Brotherhood. But I was wrong. My assumption was way out. So I was left unprepared. The guy in the middle of the five was looking back and forth between Hubble and me. His eyes flicked across. They stopped on me.

“OK, he’s the one,” he said. Looking straight at me.

Two things happened. The end two bikers grabbed Hubble and ran him to the door. And the boss man swung a big fist at my face. I saw it late. Dodged left and it caught me on the shoulder. I was spun around by the blow. Grabbed from behind by the neck. Two huge hands at my throat. Strangling me. The boss man lined up for another shot at my gut. If it landed, I was a dead man. I knew that much. So I leaned back and kicked out. Smashed the boss man’s balls like I was trying to punt a football right out of the stadium. The big Oxford shoe crunched him real good. The welt hit him like a blunt ax.

My shoulders were hunched and I was pumping up my neck to resist the strangler. He was wrenching hard. I was losing it. I reached up and broke his little fingers. I heard the knuckles splinter over the roaring in my ears. Then I broke his ring fingers. More splintering. Like pulling a chicken apart. He let go.

The third guy waded in. He was a solid mountain of lard. Sheathed with heavy slabs of meat. Like armor. Nowhere to hit him. He was pounding me with short jabs to the arm and chest. I was jammed back between two sinks. The mountain of lard pressing up. Nowhere to hit him. Except his eyes. I jammed my thumb into his eye. Hooked the tips of my fingers in his ear and squeezed. My thumbnail popped his eyeball sideways. I pushed my thumb in. His eyeball was nearly out. He was screaming and pulling on my wrist. I held on.