Ted Dekker - Sanctuary

“I know that. But there’s more to it, isn’t there?”

If he only knew. There was much more, like the fact that Danny had taken the fall for me. Like the fact that Danny wasn’t the only one with enemies. But I wasn’t free to tell Keith that.

“Like you said,” I said. “Randell’s working with someone who wants to hurt Danny using me.”

“And now that person’s demanding we cut off an innocent boy’s finger,” he said.

“We’re can’t do that.”

“And that we kill Randell’s partner to get to his money.”

“We’re not doing that either.”

“I know we aren’t. But we need to know more about the man doing all of this on the outside, and that means I need to know anything you know.”

“I told you, I don’t know Danny’s enemies.” And that was the truth. “A judge, maybe, but even if it is a judge, I don’t have a clue who.”

“Think! There has to be something Danny said. Some mention of someone. Please, Renee, you have to think!”

“I told you, the pedo—” I stopped short, realizing I’d said too much.

“The pedophile? What pedophile?”

I hesitated. “I don’t know. Just something he said. Danny has a thing against pedophiles, but who doesn’t?”

“Okay, that’s a start. He killed a pedophile?”

“I told you, I don’t know any specifics. You’d have to ask him.”

“Well, that’s not possible, is it?”

I said what at the time seemed the most obvious thing in the world to me. “So we break him out.”

Keith blinked once. “Crazy. Not a chance. Which pedophile?”

“I don’t know , assuming he even killed one.”

Keith lifted one hand shoulder-high in a sign of surrender and turned away. “All right…all right, fine. I accept that. But you do understand what kind of predicament this places us in.”

“The same one we’ve been in since the beginning.”

He glanced sideways at me, face strung with worry. For the first time, he’d been directly threatened by Sicko, and he didn’t like that.

“All right…” He was nodding again, pacing. “All right, let’s just take a deep breath and think this through. The way I see it, we have two days to figure out who’s behind this. We could start with judges. Maybe a judge connected to a pedophile. We could also run through all of Randell’s known associates on the outside, but I’ve already picked through them a dozen times.”

He stared out into the darkness and continued, talking to himself as much as to me. “If we come up with nothing, on Monday we could still go to the address we’re given. Use that as a starting point. Whoever Randell wants us to kill has to know more than where this pile of money is. With any luck, we catch a break with him. One way or another we have to start flushing out names and contacts that might lead us to Sicko.”

I walked from one headlight to the other, then back, eyes on my black boots, which were now coated with a film of dust. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was telling myself I had to polish them the second I got them off. And wash my socks. And my feet. Take a shower. Maybe two.

“Maybe we’re approaching it all wrong,” Keith said.

“How so?”

He stared off into the darkness, then shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. “Obviously Randell is only part of the equation, but he’s a piece we actually know about.”

“Okay. And?”

“And Danny’s in the equation too. He has information we need.”

I nodded slowly. “And?”

“And they’re both inside the prison.”

He was rethinking breaking in. Now that he was directly threatened, his horizons were broadening.

“I thought you said breaking in would be impossible. You could figure out how to get us in?”

“I said crazy. Illegal.” He dismissed the idea again with a wave of his hand. “It’s pointless. Even if I could get us in, we’d never make it back out.”

“And what do you call this?” I shoved a finger toward the warehouse. “If we could get to Randell, their leverage would fall apart. You’re right, everything we need’s inside Basal. Randell’s in there. Danny’s in there.”

“I don’t know what I was thinking. It’s a federal crime. Like I said, plain crazy.”

“So we do what? Cut off the boy’s finger? Not a chance. I’m sure that fits somewhere in the crazy-federal-crimes thing as well.”

“We take him home to his family,” Keith said.

“Sicko will know.”

“That’s a chance we have to take.”

“And then what? Kill this guy Randell wants us to kill?”

“No.” Keith paused, staring at me. “Not unless we have to.”

His willingness to consider it surprised me. But then it didn’t, not really. It depended on who the guy was, what he’d done, what he would do. For all we knew he was a John Gacy with a dozen bodies in his basement.

Again, what would Danny do?

Danny wouldn’t kill anyone, period. Not anymore.

“If we have to kill anyone, I vote for Randell,” I said. “He’s the man on the inside. Without him Sicko’s leverage goes away, and we can bring in the cops.”

“Randell isn’t controlling this.”

“Then we force a confession from him.”

Keith let out a long breath and began to pace again. “No…We do the only thing we can do: we play along. We buy time. We keep fishing, we keep looking, but short of any new developments, we go to the man’s house and we play Sicko’s game.”

“Fine.” My throat felt frozen.

Keith glanced up at me. “You’re sure?”

You’re sure?

Those two words sliced through my mind. Sure? Sure about what? I wasn’t sure about anything anymore except that I had to do whatever was necessary to save Danny, but even that was getting foggy.

My mind flashed back to a memory of Danny holding my hand, telling me that he’d decided to turn himself in and take the fall for me. His life of violence was over; he’d made a terrible mistake and now he had to pay his debt to society. Me too, I’d said, but he’d flatly refused.

Now I’d been sucked back into that place of desperation and violence. And I hated it.

“Like you said, what alternative do we have? We go to the cops, we’re screwed; we go to the warden, we’re screwed; we go to the media, we’re screwed; we go to the prison, we’re screwed. All that’s left is playing along.”

Keith saw the despair in my eyes. “Renee…”

I turned toward the warehouse door and took two steps, then stopped, smothered by a sense of hopelessness. A knot clogged my throat.

“Renee…” He’d walked up behind me. “I’m sorry, I know how much you care for Danny.”

Images of Danny spun through my mind. Whips and chains and knives and blood. His enemies would hurt him now, I was sure of that. What if they cut off Danny’s arm? Or his foot? What if they cut out his tongue?

Sometimes my mind seemed incapable of turning itself off. Keith put his arm around my shoulder. I know he was trying to comfort me, but I almost resented him for it because really, it should have been Danny standing next to me, not Keith.

He was a good man, the broken cop, but I wanted my broken priest.

What would Danny do?

He would lay down his life if he had to, and that was what scared me most.

I couldn’t break down. Jeremy was waiting. So I swallowed the pain in my throat, took a deep breath, breathed a prayer, and put my hope in Danny, which was the best I could do in that moment.

“Danny’s a strong man,” I finally said. “He might not be as easy to hurt as Randell thinks he is.”

And then I walked into the warehouse to save the boy.

19

MONDAY

THE INFIRMARY ATthe Basal Institute of Corrections and Rehabilitation was large, considering the size of the prison. Nothing less than a top-notch facility that met the highest standards for professional medical care, in or out of prison. Danny wasn’t a stranger to hospitals. He’d spent time healing in several during the Bosnian War and even more time visiting patients as a priest. The level of sophistication at Basal surprised him. Certainly it was a far cry from the more clinical atmosphere at Ironwood.