Black And Blue (Quentin Black Mystery #5) (36 page)

Black was already walking to the door, pulling the blue jersey off the cell’s one chair and yanking it around his shoulders over the tank top without buttoning it up.

He followed them down the hallway towards the common areas. Cowboy said he’d provide an escort, but Black hadn’t been expecting chiefs for that. Truthfully, he hadn’t known who or what to expect for that. He also had no idea how they intended to pull it off, since Black didn’t have any valid reason for being in the machine shop in the first place.

“You’re sending a message for Dixon, okay?” Frank said, even as Black thought it. He passed back a note on yellow prison paper, motioning for Black to take it. “Cowboy arranged it... Dixon’s got a daughter on the outside, and apparently they’re friendly.”

Black nodded, thoughtful. He knew who Dixon was. He was a guard who mostly worked in De-Seg. Guy was a prick, but he’d been known to do favors here and there.

“So I’m passing a message from Dixon to Cowboy?” he clarified.

“Dixon says he’ll back it. If you get stopped, tell ‘em Dixon caught you outside the showers and asked you to do it, since you’re still in limbo with the work order.”

Black nodded. “Got it.”

Easton looked at him curiously, staring at the collar. “Cowboy really think he can get that thing off you?”

Black shrugged. “No idea.”

Easton laughed, and Black gave him a sharp look. “What?”

“You’re quite the talker today,” Frank snorted.

Black didn’t answer.

Truthfully, he was still fighting like hell to control his light.
 

The idea that this might work, that he might get this fucking thing off his neck today, shot reactions through his light that were difficult to control. He’d thought long and hard about this. Even with Brick’s threats, he decided he was better off not going to that lab. It still felt safer for him and Miri both for him to try and get out of here on his own.

It all depended on getting the collar off, though.

The second the collar was off, he could call Miri... and Charles. He could get Charles to put Miri somewhere safe, get his people and Charles working together to protect her, then he could go after Brick on his own.

He knew there were a lot of risks, of course.

They’d blinded him somehow in Los Angeles; they might be able to do it again. Black was betting they couldn’t, though, not easily... not in here. They wouldn’t need the collar at all if they could do that, so he was banking on being able to get a message through before Brick and his people realized there was a problem and tried to stop him.

He’d spent the whole night pacing, thinking about this.

Hell, he’d spent most of his time in the infirmary thinking about it. Trying to decide what would risk Miri the least, without forcing him to play puppet or get himself experimented on in that lab. In the end, the answer was always the same: the collar.

If he was going to keep his wife safe, he had to get the fucking collar off his neck.

If he did that, he’d walk out the doors of this place within the hour. He’d have his people on their way here, as well as the Colonel’s people, and probably a good chunk of Lucky’s people, too. He knew Charles in some ways, how he thought. This would be war to him. The collaring, the exposure threat, the family connection––all of it would infuriate Charles, no matter what he thought of Black himself.

And Black had to get the fuck out of here. Fears about Miri made it worse, the separation pain made it worse, but he knew that wasn’t all of it. He remembered this flavor in his light, that same feeling of heaviness, of being lost... buried, somehow... so fucking angry he couldn’t think straight most of the time. He could feel the part of him wanting to slide back into that darker place––if only because it felt like he
needed
to, in order to survive.

He’d enjoyed that fight with Cowboy a little too much. He’d wanted to kill those Aryan fucks a little too much. He’d wanted to take his time doing it a little too much.

And the night before had been the worst yet.

The separation pain had been excruciating.

He’d tried meditating, masturbating, exercising, reading... masturbating again. Everything fucking hurt. His light wanted hers when he got off, and when he didn’t, the pain made him want to try again. When he meditated, that darker feeling filled his light, making him want to hurt something... anything... even himself. He remembered things he hadn’t thought about for years. Picking fights in the yard as a kid, just to kill that same feeling.

Coreq. Johan.

Everything made it worse, even doing nothing at all.

It was bad enough that he’d wondered if something might be going on with Miri. But he couldn’t let himself think about that, either. Not now. Not here––where there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.

Whatever the cause, he couldn’t sleep. It was the main reason he’d been doing push-ups on the floor of his cell at six in the morning. He’d been up most of the night pacing like a caged animal, running over the same thoughts in his mind, over and over.

As he followed Frank now, he still struggled to force his mind into straight lines.

He got some looks as they passed through the common room. He knew it would have spread around that the guards looked the other way in the yard, so no doubt they’d know something had shifted in Black’s status. Even without his sight, he felt them keeping their distance.

Just like when he was a kid.

Back then it hadn’t been his size, or even his fighting ability. Even as a kid, he’d had to rely on his mind above anything else.

So he made it clear, as early as possible, that he would cross lines none of them would. If they beat him bloody, he’d find them while they were asleep and they’d lose something. If they retaliated, he escalated.

He’d killed his first seer before he was thirteen years old.

He’d cried, but he made sure none of them saw him do that, either. The thought still filled him with shame. But he’d felt he had no choice. It was that or let them torture him for years, rape him, possibly even kill him, accidentally or not. He couldn’t beat them in a straight fight, so he decided he had to make them fear him.

And they
had
feared him after that. Not many seers would kill another seer, especially not in cold blood. It was taboo enough that they gave him a lot of space.

It also got him attention he didn’t particularly want––eventually from the rebels, but before that from Johan and some of the pricks who worked for Seer Containment. Even the human mercs found him more interesting once they traced that dead seer back to him. He knew some of that was how young he looked to the eyes of humans at that age.

They’d punished him, of course, but most of that had been for show.

Even now, he didn’t know how he felt about it.

He understood it.

His logical mind knew he’d had few choices, and that maybe it was the only way he’d survived. He and Coreq had been the youngest in there for that first year. Coreq was even smaller than him, and Black felt responsible for him, maybe because he had no one else. Seers remained the size of human children into their early twenties, so the two of them didn’t have a prayer of defending themselves in a straight-up fight, not even against the older adolescents.

Black forced the memory from his mind, clenching his jaw as they entered a corridor he’d never been down before. Cement on both sides, it had high, wire-covered windows that let in morning light. He could hear the sound of machinery ahead, knew they must be close.

Frank glanced back as he walked. “Hey,” he said. “Take this.”

He passed Black a few folded twenty dollar bills, also wrapped in a yellow piece of paper. Black opened it, and saw racing scores written on the paper in shorthand. That and the money were contraband, but fairly low-level stuff. Guards placed bets with prisoners here and there, especially the ones who had money.

“In case you get stopped,” Frank added.

Black nodded, shoving that and the note in the elastic of his pants.

They reached the end of the corridor and entered a long, high-ceilinged room that smelled primarily of oil, sawdust and sweat. It was a bigger space than he’d been expecting, filled with at least four work areas he could see, each focused on a different set of tasks and with a different crew of inmates working them.

His eyes slid up the corrugated metal walls, pausing on water pipes, air ducts and electrical cables that ran in lines across the top of the exposed ceiling. Sunlight filtered through grimy windows on each side. He wondered what it would be like to work in here, day in, day out, for the rest of his life, making twenty-three cents an hour.

He looked down only when a guard approached them.

Frank talked to the guard, motioning to Black while he murmured in a low voice, passing him a few more bills. Black pretended not to notice.

Eventually the guard motioned for Black to put his hands against the wall. Black complied, got patted down, then the guard gave him a hard look.

“Five minutes,” he said. “And no fights. Got it?”

Black nodded.

Frank pointed him to an area off to the left.

A cluster of machines stood on the floor. They looked almost like large vacuum cleaners... or maybe rideable lawnmowers. Black spotted Cowboy working towards the back and started to walk that way, then realized Frank and Easton were staying behind. He paused to look at them, lifting an eyebrow in an unspoken question.

“We have to go to the laundry,” Frank explained.

Black nodded. He knew the other big work area apart from road and agricultural crews was the industrial laundry downstairs, which supplied clean sheets and linens for most of the chain hotels in the state. Smaller work areas inside the prison included the kitchen, a prison garden just inside the second wall, and a sewing shop that did mostly uniforms, including for some fast food chains in addition to those of the prison guards.

It was from Frank that Black finally found out for certain where he was.

He was currently doing time in the fine state of Louisiana.

He still didn’t know what part of the state, but at least now he had better than a ballpark guess in terms of the part of the country. The guards talked about Lake Charles often enough that he figured out: 1) they weren’t talking about a body of water, but a city, and 2) it had to be the biggest town in the vicinity, since they seemed to do most of their socializing there.

Black didn’t know Louisiana at all, though, so had no idea where Lake Charles was. The only parts of Louisiana he’d ever visited prior to this were Shreveport and New Orleans.

Tipping a short salute in thanks to Frank, he turned on his heel and walked.

He found Cowboy sitting on a stool next to one of the lawnmower-like machines. A lit cigarette hung off the corner of his lips. He squinted down at the inside of the thing’s engine, smoke in his eyes, his rough-cut hair sweated to his head.

“Why’s it so fucking hot in here?” Black asked.

Cowboy tensed, glancing up. He took Black in with a look, then focused back on the engine. “Can’t have us too comfortable.” He smiled faintly, using a screwdriver to open a panel. “You’re a stealthy fucker for such a big guy.”

Black grunted. “Can’t be too comfortable? While you work for free, you mean?”

Cowboy took the cigarette out of his mouth, giving him a faint grin. “Some of us like machines, brother. It ain’t Christian to let us have too much fun.”

“What is that fucking thing, anyway?”

“Floor polisher,” Cowboy said at once. Standing up, he wiped the grease off his hands with a rag, nodding towards another row of inmates working on larger machines. “Or you can refurbish golf carts, if you prefer.”

“Floor polishers and golf carts.” Black grunted. “Figures.”

“Come on. I imagine you came here for something else.” Balancing the cigarette back between his lips, he motioned with his head for Black to follow him. “I got a chance to play with a few things before you got here. I’m feeling optimistic.”

“Optimistic?” Black felt another shiver of pain go through him, but kept it off his face. “Well, that sounds exciting.”

“I think so.”

Black glanced back at the door, but the guard wasn’t watching them now. He followed Cowboy as he walked deeper into the warehouse-sized room. They weaved through a few more convicts on stools working on floor polishers and golf carts, then entered a narrow, multi-station workbench set at standing height on both sides.