Ted Dekker - Sanctuary

Instead, he rolled away and came up in time to deflect a second blow aimed at his head. This time he took the man’s feet out from under him.

The skinny, bald man landed on an unpadded seat. Hard.

Danny backpedaled on light feet, hands up. “You don’t need to do this. You must understand, I won’t fight, but I must defend myself. Please…”

“You call that not fighting?” Slane blurted from the ground.

“You’re alive, aren’t you?”

The warden wore a mild grin, whether truly impressed or shocked and attempting to cover it, Danny didn’t know.

“You’ve made your point,” Danny said.

“Have I?” The warden held up his hand toward Randell, who was circling in, eyes crazed. “No, I don’t think I have. The point is, we accept only deviants in this place. Bring your broken and wounded and I will make them whole, isn’t that the way it works? I will rehabilitate you. But you, Danny, don’t want to accept that you’re broken. You’re as evil as the rest of them, but you really do think you’re better. How can I help you if you don’t first show me just how broken you are?”

“I am broken!” Danny shouted.

“Then kill him!” The warden jabbed his finger at Slane. “Kill the man who broke my rules and killed young Peter. An eye for an eye. Take his life!”

“I can’t!”

Pape stopped. Stared at Danny for a moment.

“Captain?”

Bostich took one step away from the wall. “Yes, sir!”

“Kill Slane.”

A beat of silence.

“Shoot him, sir?”

“He broke a fundamental rule and killed a man, did he not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then do the same to him.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bostich lifted his rifle, aimed at Slane, who was just beginning to grasp what was happening, and shot him through the head before the first cry of protest could be heard. The loud crash of gunfire echoed through the room.

Slane dropped flat, hole in head.

“Now,” the warden said, addressing Danny. “Kill Randell.”

28

“TELL ME, ORI swear I’m pulling this trigger,” I snapped.

The judge was trembling from head to bloody feet, furious that I’d maneuvered him into baring his deepest secret. But he still wasn’t telling me.

“I swear…”

“I received a call from Basal this morning,” he breathed.

“That’s not enough. We’ll start over. Three, two,…”

“The warden called me an hour ago.” He was breathing hard. “He said there’d been an accidental death. A rape that went too far.”

A rape?

“You know the warden? Why would he call you? Who was raped?”

“I was instrumental in transferring a young man convicted of statutory rape to his prison. The boy was evidently raped.”

“What about Danny?”

He held his silence and I knew that this was the information that had him resisting all along. He could have told me about the boy earlier, but it was something about Danny that he wanted to keep from me.

“What was the name of your son?”

The muscles along his jawline bulged.

I pressed the gun in tighter. “Tell me!”

“Roman,” he said.

“He was a pedophile?”

“Yes. Now move the gun.”

So I really had been right. I stood back and lowered the gun to my side, still trying to connect the dots. Franklin Thompson had made the one confession he never imagined making, but I needed more. Danny had killed the judge’s son, and for that maybe I was sorry. But that was the past.

“What does the boy’s rape have to do with Danny?”

“The warden said there could be some trouble, and he wanted legal advice. If any of this comes out, you know I’ll deny it.”

“Tell me what I need to know and it won’t. Trouble with who? With Danny?”

The man’s eyes shifted. “He told me that the inmate behind the rape wants to kill Danny. And that he’s inclined to allow it. That’s all I know.”

“What do you mean kill Danny?” Waves of heat washed over my face. “Who’s going to kill Danny?”

“That’s all I know! I sent the boy there because the warden said he needed him to break Danny. I didn’t know he would be killed. Danny murdered my son!”

“If you could prove that you’d have gone through legal channels.” But my mind was on Basal. Randell was going to kill Danny, and the warden was in on it. “You have to help me stop it,” I said.

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you can’t? You set this up—you have to!”

“I didn’t set it up. I only got him the boy.”

“Call the warden and tell him I know everything.”

“I can’t. And you don’t.”

“Why can’t you?”

“The warden knows too much. He would turn on me. My life would be over.”

“I don’t care if your life would be over! You set Danny up, you get him out!”

Keith banged on the door. “Renee?”

“Hold on!”

Blind with rage, I walked back up to the judge and put the gun against his teeth. “Now you listen to me, Judge. I really have lost it. You hear me? I’m a neurotic, manic mess. I don’t care anymore if I live or die. You’re going to call that warden and you’re going to get Danny out of there, or I swear I’m going to blow off another body part!”

“You don’t understand. The warden would start cleaning up his mess the moment I called him! They’d all be dead—Danny, the boy, Randell—all of them. There’d be no witnesses. And then he’d come after me.”

My mind was in a dark fog, and all I could see was Danny, the gentle giant who’d taken a vow of nonviolence, turning the other cheek as the warden beat him to a bloody, dead mess.

But somewhere in that fog I knew that the judge was right. The machine that had growled to life couldn’t be stopped with a phone call. Or by the law, not quickly enough.

Danny had awakened a leviathan, and now he was in its jaws. He was in that monster factory, doing his time. Time that was grinding to a halt.

29

DANNY TOOK Astep back at the order. Kill Randell.

Slane’s body lay facedown in a pool of his own blood. The man with the broken ankle was dragging himself away from the body. Randell’s face twisted into a pitted ball of rage.

Danny took another step back.

“Kill him, or I’ll kill you and she’ll be all alone out there, twisting in the wind.”

Renee…

Panic lapped at Danny’s mind. He could not kill Randell. He could, yes he could, but in doing so he would become only another monster, and a monster could not love Renee.

Randell took the matter out of Danny’s hands, no doubt certain that if he didn’t kill Danny, Bostich would shoot him too.

He roared and rushed.

Danny’s first instinct was to take the man down. Doing so would have been a simple matter. But Randell was built like an oak and wouldn’t fall for a simple disabling maneuver again. Danny would have to use force. A lot of it.

His mind scrabbled, grasping for a way out of the warden’s impossible game. All he could think of was a fist to the man’s throat.

But no, he would crush Randell’s windpipe.

His opponent came in like a bull, fists up like hammers, and Danny skipped backward on the balls of his feet.

“Don’t do it, Bruce,” he breathed. “It’s no good!”

“Fight!” the warden shouted. “Kill him!”

“Kill him, Danny!” Kearney shouted. Other prisoners joined in, their mutters and jeers encouraged by the warden’s own order. Randell was the enemy to most of them. They all wanted to see his blood on the ground.

They, too, wanted justice.

“Kill him, Danny!” Pape shouted over the din. “Rip his head off!”