Читать книгу A Knife in the Heart - William W. Johnstone - Страница 7

CHAPTER ONE

They come at him, just as they always do—at least six men, wearing the striped uniform of inmates. Harry Fallon can’t see their faces, and even if he could, it’s not like he knows these hardened lifers. He doesn’t even remember the name of the prison where he has been sentenced. Joliet? Yuma? Jefferson City? Huntsville? Detroit? Alcatraz? Cañon City? Laramie? Deer Lodge? But a bad memory is the least of his problems right now.

He stands with his back against the door of six-inch cold iron, no bars, just a slit for a peek hole so the guards can check in every now and then. Ahead of him, to his left, are the cells on the fifth floor. Hands extend between the bars and rattle tin cups against the iron. The doors remain shut. Inside, prisoners chant some dirge or hum, mixed with curses and laughter, but all that proves hard to understand with the racket the cups make against the rough iron. To his right, there’s a metal rail about waist-high, and beyond that, the emptiness for thirty yards to the other row of cell blocks. Five stories below, the stone floor of this hellhole called a prison. And just in front of him, the six men, faces masked, but intentions clear. The knives they have—fashioned from the metal shop, or the broom factory, or the farms where they work—wave in hands roughened by a life of crime, followed by life sentences.

“Hey!” Fallon shouts through the slit in iron, but dares not look through the opening. He can’t take his eyes off the six killers. By now, they are less than ten feet from him.

“Hey!”

Nothing.

The big brute in the center of the gang laughs.

Of course, there’s no guard here. Not now. Fallon has been behind the iron long enough to know that guards and prisoners have the ability to make a few deals when it comes to taking care of prisoners neither guards nor convicts like. A guard decides to head to the privy at a predetermined time, a trip that’ll take a good long while, and it just happens to coincide with other guards needing to find a cigarette, or a toilet, or happening to be escorting another inmate to see the warden.

Handy.

Right now, there’s probably not a guard anywhere in this particular house.

So six cons, armed with shivs, start to smile.

If only Fallon could recall where he is, what he’s in for, why these men want to kill him. If only Fallon could remember anything.

My God, he thinks, has he been sent to prisons so many times his brain has become addled? Has he been hit on the head, suffered . . . what is it they call that . . . amnesia? Yeah. Amnesia. All right, at least he can remember some things.

He remembers something else, too.

Because one of the faceless men before him whispers a growling, “Take him,” and the thug on Fallon’s right charges, laughing, slashing with the blade, and Fallon leaps back, against the cold stone of the wall, feeling and hearing the tearing of cloth but not of flesh. His intestines aren’t spilling out of his belly—yet.

The remaining five killers merely laugh.

The big fellow, eyes black, face pale, almost not even a face at all, pivots, cuts up with the blade, but Fallon uses his left forearm to knock hand and knife away. The man’s face, or what passes for a face, seems surprised. A moment later, Fallon is driving his right hand, flattened, hard against the killer’s throat. The crack is almost deafening. The man’s eyes bulge in shock, and the blow drives him back, back, back, till he slams against the iron railing at the corner, the end of the passageway. Fallon tries to grab the knife, but both of the man’s arms start waving as he tries to regain his balance, as he tries to remember how to breathe.

But he can’t. Spittle comes between his lips. He’s like a whirlwind now, and the other five men outside of the cells watch in fascination and amusement. Even those still inside their cells are transfixed. All they do is hold their tin cups outside the bars. Fingers grip other bars as they watch, laugh, hiss, joke, and pray.

The man moves farther over the rails. He opens his mouth as if to scream, but he can’t scream. He can’t breathe. He can’t do anything but die. Fallon has learned several things in prison, including how to crush an attacker’s larynx.

The shiv drops over the side. Damn. Fallon could have used that to defend himself against the other five killers.

The arms stop waving, and then the faceless man starts to slip over. His mouth opens as though to scream, but he cannot scream, either. A second later, and he’s suspended in the air, prison brogans pointing toward the hard ceiling, and then there is nothing.

A long silence follows, stretching toward infinity, before the sickening crunch of a body seems to shake the prison house to its very foundation.

Fallon’s heart races. He wets his lips, turns back toward the five other men. The shuddering of the passageway ends, and the man in the center, who might have a mustache and beard, although that appears to be against the prison policy—whatever house of corrections Fallon is in—walks to the edge, puts his hand on the rail, peers over. He spits saliva, which drops toward the corpse, broken and bloody, and stares sightlessly toward the impenetrable ceiling.

Fallon knows because somehow he, too, has moved to the railing, to see the man he has just killed, another kill for a onetime lawman turned killer. The man’s dead eyes seem to follow Fallon as he turns back to the five men. The leader spits again, wipes his mouth, and slowly turns to stare at Fallon.

As though on cue, the tin cups resume their metallic serenade. The grinding has now been picked up across the chasm. Prisoners there have likewise resumed raking cups against the bars. And so have the prisoners on the floors below. The noise intensifies. Surely the warden can hear this from wherever his office or house is. Fallon can hear nothing else but the grinding, pounding, insane bedlam of hell.

The noise becomes deafening. Fallon breathes in deeply, watches the five men now back to staring at him. They could rush him, should rush him, for there’s no room for Fallon to move, and he can’t take down five men when they have knives and he has nothing but . . .

He takes a chance, steps forward quickly, and as a tin cup rattles from one bar to another, Fallon strikes hard with his left hand against the wrist. The damned fool should have kept his hand and cup inside his cell. He thinks he hears a scream, but the fingers release the handle, and somehow Fallon has the cup in his own hand.

That prompts a laugh from the leader.

“You think a cup is a match for a blade?” the big faceless man asks.

The killer closest to the cell laughs. But that stops when Fallon steps forward and smashes the man in the face with the hard, cold tin cup.

Fallon quickly steps back, taking it all in, seeing the man, his nose gushing crimson, his lips flattened and bloody, spitting out teeth and saliva, and stumbling in a wild spin. An arm hits the man nearest him and pushes him against the leader, who steps back against the fourth man, who jolts the fifth killer to the railing. And now that man is screaming, screaming out for mercy from God, but God cannot hear any prayer in a prison, especially with cups grinding cell doors after cell doors, and just like that, the fifth killer has gone over the edge, plummeting like a rocket, but he can scream, and his cries overcome the drone of metal on iron, until a sickening crunch below silences him.

But not the sound of cups.

The fourth man catches the railing, looks over, and mouths, “Oh, my, God,” before turning to Fallon, and charging.

Fallon feels the blade as it cuts into his side, but his right hand rams the cup into the man’s temple, and the man falls to his knees. The knife comes up, just as Fallon jabs his kneecap into the man’s jaw. The blade sticks in up to its makeshift handle of hardened lye soap, deep in Fallon’s thigh, and then the man goes down, tries to come up, and Fallon kicks him over the railing.

“Get him!” one of the men calls.

Fallon turns, blinks, confused and angry. Three men have been hurtled to the floor five stories below. There should be only three more inmates outside of their cells, but somehow the doors must have opened, and there are dozens, maybe hundreds. It’s as though every prisoner in this whole cell block has been turned loose on the alley. Fallon rips the knife out of his leg with his left hand. Blood sprays the striped trousers of the men as they cover the few feet separating them from him. He has a short blade and a tin cup. They have knives and clubs and rocks.

He has no chance, and soon they have him, his cup and knife thrown to the floor. He smells their sweat, feeling blows against his arms, back, head, neck. Cursing them as they curse him, he tries to free his arms, his hands, his legs, but there is nothing for him to do.

A moment later, he is at the iron railing. Now he glances through the opening in the slit of the door, and he sees the faces of the guards, and the guards are laughing, too, shouting.

“Toss him overboard, boys!”

Which they do.

Fallon looks below as the stone floor rushes up to greet him. He sees the bloody, crushed, lifeless bodies of the three men he has killed on this day. Their eyes remain open, as well as their mouths, and he can hear these dead men laughing at him. One says, “Join us, Fallon . . . in hell.”

And the stones are there to greet him and send him to the fiery pit.

Where Harry Fallon knows he belongs.

He screams.